StrangeSox

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Mar 20, 2013 -> 09:35 AM) Because it negates the immediacy of the threat. So me threatening to rape your wife via letter, email, facebook, phone call, text or tweet should be protected speech simply because I'm not physically next to your wife at the time? edit: assume, for the sake of argument, that I know you and your wife's real names.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Mar 20, 2013 -> 09:32 AM) Over Facebook and Twitter. Why does this threat become not-serious because of the medium it was made in?

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Mar 20, 2013 -> 09:23 AM) They were threats over Facebook and Twitter. People have said worse things. They're physically not anywhere near each other so that immediacy concern is gone. Arresting these girls is a bit much IMO. Perhaps the school could have suspended them. That seems more appropriate. So phone calls or letters threatening physical violence are protected speech? Isn't there quite a bit of jurisprudence on this finding exactly the opposite?

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Mar 20, 2013 -> 09:23 AM) IMO what these chicks did, while abhorrent, should never the less be protected. Generally the rule of law is that unless the speech is going to lead to immediate action it's protected. The victim might have had a case for assault if she really felt threatened by it, but that requires some level of immediacy. I can't threaten you and then 2 weeks later claim that I was assaulted. Is harassment consisting of threats of physical violence covered under the 1A? What about restraining orders based on verbal threats? If I took to facebook and started posting messages threatening to rape your wife, would you find that to be protected speech?

Cyprus rejected that awful ECB proposal. UK's project growth downgraded to 0.6%. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/mar/20/b...owth-downgraded

Yglesias compares the Congressional Progressive Caucus's budget to Paul Ryan's. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/0...e_liberals.html I'm not sure why Paul Ryan and his incredibly ideological budget that would fundamentally alter the structure of government and is full of terrible math gets treated as a Very Serious Person while the CPC gets completely ignored and Democrats get attacked for not presenting a budget.

lol, even better (worse) Are restraining orders based on threats of violence violations of peoples' rights?

Yeah I'm not sure where the right to threaten people with bodily harm supposedly comes from. This isn't some abstract threat or from some random person on the other side of the country, it's from a couple of girls in the same town.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Mar 19, 2013 -> 08:19 PM) I dont really think there is any good argument against mine. I think this applies to all of your posts I keep bringing up Voter ID because that's what I was talking about when you objected. On that issue, who is sinister and who isn't is pretty damn clear. If you can come up with some system that would eliminate the incredibly small amount of in-person fraud (less than one ten-thousand of one percent) without any negative impacts, great. Definitely better uses of resources out there, but I wouldn't be strongly opposed to that as I am to Voter ID. edit: I also frequently don't know what I'm talking about anymore

The affirmative action case from Texas is going to be in front of the SC soon. Important to note that the plaintiff really wasn't impacted by affirmative action. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/20...ty-texas/63247/

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Mar 19, 2013 -> 08:01 PM) Oh Im sorry, you wanted to create rules where you could only talk about a very specific subject and then not have to answer questions about other subjects? That seems really fair. Look at the post above, you said that one side was "anti-democratic", I merely said that both sides are anti-democratic, and acting like only 1 side tries to get an advantage is just blatantly misleading. Yeah, notice how I was talking about a specific thing there? Notice how I never said "Democrats never do anything shady" or anything like that? Not every single topic needs to have "both sides!" brought into it, especially when a certain topic is very clearly one-sided. This is, again, assuming that in-person voter fraud is actually a problem that needs to be solved. I don't like any solutions that potentially disenfranchise a legitimate voter in an attempt to solve a problem that isn't real. If you don't have the ability to support the actual existence of the problem at any significant level and to analyze your own proposals for potential impacts, just admit that you're throwing s*** at the wall. There's no inherent advantage in non-ID policies unless you bizarrely assume that Democrats are more likely to commit in-person fraud than Republicans. Without that assumption, then your claim that I'm arguing for an advantage (beyond the 'advantage' of franchising legitimate voters) is simply bulls***. I'm sorry, where the hell is this coming from? Voter ID laws disenfranchise many, many voters. There's no evidence that in-person fraud is a problem that needs to be addressed especially if any potential solution would disenfranchise a legitimate voter. There are many, many voting issues I'd like to see addressed. None of those things have anything to do with Voter ID or your attempted "both sides!" claims. If you want to talk about other issues, fine. But on this issue, on Voter ID, I'll continue to maintain that one side is sinister and anti-democratic because they clearly are. That doesn't require me to comment on any other issues to make that statement.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Mar 19, 2013 -> 07:52 PM) Even the most wild conspiracy theories from 2002 don't make any f***ing sense anymore. You see these douchebags on TV and they talk about the next thing (Iran, Syria, North Korea, etc.) like nothing ever happened. The Defense Department had directed employees there and in State in late 2001 to buy up and read copies of some lady's conspiracy book that asserted Saddam was behind the first WTC bombings. I liked this quote: this post covers Wolfowitz's latest interview on CNN and refernces the conspiracy theorist they relied on to bolster their Saddam-AQ links. http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/the...-wolfowitz.html It's all still crazy.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Mar 19, 2013 -> 07:50 PM) Right your basically arguing that spitballs are okay but corking bats isnt okay. You think .00005% is fine, I say why not try to get better. In fact, you cant even prove that number, you really have no idea how much voter fraud there is, because we only know about people who get caught, which are the dumbest of the dumb. So once again, instead of burying my head in the sand and saying "Stay Calm Everything will be okay", I am being proactive and saying "Why risk it, why not try and get better?" Opportunity cost. At best, it's simply a bureaucratic expense. More likely, it results in some level of disenfranchisement. Great, maybe don't jump into the middle of a conversation about a specific issue and, in particular, a specific Supreme Court case and comments made by a specific Justice and assume that everything I'm saying is applicable to whatever novel ideas you'd like to try?

QUOTE (lostfan @ Mar 19, 2013 -> 07:38 PM) It's 10 years later and still to this day, none of the people involved in making the decision can articulate anything we were actually supposed to accomplish via what became the biggest foreign policy disaster in U.S. history. They don't even have the decency to feel shame for what they did nor are they embarrassed by how horribly wrong they were. In fact they feel like we are supposed to show gratitude for their "courage" or "resolve" or something like that. Donald Rumsfeld actually tweeted this today: @RumsfeldOffice 10h 10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation. That is such unmitigated gall that it's almost funny. These people take basically all of what credit there is to be had and none of the blame, and pay phony lip service to those who ACTUALLY made sacrifices and showed courage in spite of them. Oh, they pretend to care, but the concept of actually paying taxes for this war is beneath them. Abhorrent, actually, but I do wonder exactly how many hundreds of billions (or trillions) more we could've spent on the war before they actually acknowledged it was costing money, and a lot of it. So today you can see members of this same tribe hemming and hawing about the budget, so as a result we end up indiscriminately slashing money and benefits and not taking care of the veterans... they'll blame everyone BUT themselves for it even if you go so far as to acknowledge there might be other factors at play. But they swear they care so much. Yeah right. I don't really have the English vocabulary that can accurately convey my disgust and contempt for these people. It's frankly pretty f***ing embarrassing that I share the same nationality with them. I was tempted to bump some old threads or choice quotes but...effort. That guys like Wolfowitz are still regarded as Serious People worthy of listening to says a lot. This was a completely avoidable disaster from the start and was painfully obvious at the time, and time and information has made it only more absurd. These people were obsessed with Saddam since the 90's and believed all sorts of conspiracy theories about him. Namely, that he was really behind the original WTC attacks and that AQ was and remained a false-flag, even after 9/11. Pure ideology.

I'm reasonably sure I did not mention gerrymandering in this discussion at all until you brought it up. I think that the status quo re: in-person voter fraud is perfectly fine. The current rate of people actually caught doing it is typically around 0.00005%. In other words, it's completely inconsequential. I don't know if your proposed system would have any disenfranchising effects, but it would have substantial costs and would require national uniform voting laws. You can never eradicate all voter fraud. Or theft, or tax fraud, or anything else. You need to examine the opportunity costs e.g. disenfranchising legitimate voters, massive expense. It's not a bad goal itself, but if we're really concerned about it, in-person is the last place we should be looking. Yet, it's the only form Republicans seem to care about and the measures to address it 'just happen' to result in substantial disenfrachisement. If my absence-of-evidence argument is annoying, imagine how annoying it is to be arguing against people who repeatedly assert that something is real with no evidence or in direct contradiction to voting data analysis? If you want to say that politicians attempt to game the system for their own gain, fine. I agree. It's pretty bad that elected politicians are in charge of districting and voting regulations. Both parties gerrymander, even if Republicans did it more heavily than Democrats in 2010. But if you want to argue about Voter ID laws and the motivations behind each party's stance, there's no equivalence.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Mar 19, 2013 -> 05:00 PM) I just dont see why it makes sense to stick my head in the sand and just believe its not happening. I just don't see why it makes sense to believe in something for which there is no evidence and for which the data counter-indicates. http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwasik/2012...atic-deception/ hundreds of thousands of disenfrachised voters, many orders of magnitude more people than are even plausibly committing in-person voter fraud.

Nope, Illinois is IIRC the most-heavily Democratically gerrymandered state! But we were talking about voter ID laws, right? In that case, one party is actively and openly trying to disenfranchise some groups of voters while the other side is fighting for the fraudless status quo. To make the argument that one side is not on the morally right side here, you need to show that the Democrats somehow disproportionately benefit from looser voter ID laws that lead to fraud after you show that this fraud actually exists.

QUOTE (bmags @ Mar 19, 2013 -> 04:56 PM) They must wear guy incognito glasses or something. And oddly don't show up in any sort of voting data analysis. Tricksters.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Mar 19, 2013 -> 04:55 PM) That would only be because you read it defensively. No, that would be because you're setting up a dichotomy to claim "both sides!" equality here. If both sides benefit equally from lax voter ID laws, then you can't proscribe sinister motivations to one side who wants to keep the laws the same. But we have actual evidence to the contrary. Democrat-controlled states haven't passed numerous measures designed specifically to disenfranchise likely Republican voters. We haven't seen Ohio and Florida-like shenanigans (closing dem-heavy polling places, understaffing them, giving them shorter hours than rep-heavy ones, etc.) in blue states. We didn't see Democrats push to rig the Electoral College in their favor after 2004 like some state Republicans have considered. One party has very clearly made voter disenfranchisement one of their main political tools.

There's also this odd implication that only Democrats would engage in in-person voter fraud.

Restricting the enfranchisement would seem to be a workable definition.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Mar 19, 2013 -> 12:59 PM) Good for Jerry

eh, just another form of communication. It wasn't anonymous and it came from people in the town, it might be different if it was some random person across the country.

It's not legal for me to send you threatening letters or make threatening phone calls, is it?

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Mar 19, 2013 -> 04:16 PM) Hey I agree. But i'm not the one pretending like one side is fighting for the little guy while the other party is only doing it for sinister purposes. One side wants less people to vote and is blatant about what group of people that would be (likely opponent voters). The other wants more people to vote. I feel pretty comfortable prescribing sinister, anti-democratic motives to one side in this case.