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posted by martyb on Tuesday October 23 2018, @10:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the conflict-of-interest-much? dept.

The Guardian reports:

Georgia secretary of state and gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp improperly purged more than 340,000 voters from the state's registration rolls, an investigation charges.

Greg Palast, a journalist and the director of the Palast Investigative Fund, said an analysis he commissioned found 340,134 voters were removed from the rolls on the grounds that they had moved - but they actually still live at the address where they are registered.

"Their registration is cancelled. Not pending, not inactive – cancelled. If they show up to vote on 6 November, they will not be allowed to vote. That's wrong," Palast told reporters on a call on Friday. "We can prove they're still there. They should be allowed to vote."

[...] Palast and the Georgia Coalition for the People's Agenda filed a lawsuit against Kemp on Friday to force him to release additional records related to the state's removal of voters.

Under Georgia procedures, registered voters who have not cast ballots for three years are sent a notice asking them to confirm they still live at their address. If they don't return it, they are marked inactive. If they don't vote for two more general elections after that, they are removed from the rolls.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 23 2018, @11:11PM (9 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday October 23 2018, @11:11PM (#752636)

    Please, explain how the gleeful Republicans cheering this on are not actively destroying our country?

    My understanding as someone who isn't one of them:
    1. They believe that the majority of citizens are out to destroy their country. In short, they believe that in a fair fight, America loses. Not that they lose, not that the Republicans don't have control of the government for a while, but that the next part of the story is that the nation is overrun by black or brown transgender lesbians speaking Spanish or Swahili and robbing the remains of what they spent generations creating way back when. In short, they're thinking is akin to living humans in a zombie apocalypse scenario trying to avoid giving the zombies a say in what happens next.

    2. They believe that the Democrats and other leftists are pulling all the same things they're pulling, but getting away with it more often because they control the media and courts and such. People who've left movement conservatism and think tanks have said as much: The higher-ups tell the junior staffers that just came in out of the Young Republicans that the Democrats have hundreds of people working in all kinds of institutions doing all of the same immoral things that these junior staffers are being told to do, and that their role is to be the equal-and-opposite of those (quite possibly fictional) people.

    It's also vital to understand that to conservatives, the "America" that they view as under potentially civilization-ending threat isn't the territory or the population as a whole, it's an ideology and what they see as the proper social order, a strict hierarchy with God at the top and impoverished non-white children at the bottom and a basic rule that nobody higher up in the hierarchy really has to answer to anybody further down in the hierarchy. This hierarchical thinking is a big part of why they tend to think along the lines of "cop shoots somebody, cop must have been justified, because cop is a higher authority than the person they shot". There's also a strong element of "might makes right": For instance, evangelical Christians sometimes justify their vote for such an unrepentant sinner as Trump with the logic that he couldn't possibly have won without divine intervention, so God must have wanted them to hate the sin but love that particular sinner.

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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by VLM on Tuesday October 23 2018, @11:52PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 23 2018, @11:52PM (#752659)

    Its interesting to see that perspective.

    I'd only agree with and extend the remarks, to explain why, rather than how.

    in #1, the why is simply looking at demographics since the 1965 immigration reforms its obviously a factual observation. Its sort of a fundamental difference in outlook where either the USA exists as a country and therefore has a fundamental human right to continue to exist as a civilization and culture, vs we do not and we must suicide our civ, culture, and genetics in order to maintain permanent hyper-levels of immigration for some abstract concept that doesn't seem to pragmatically work very well anyway. But yeah, your analysis of #1 is about right. For a smaller scale example, look at everyone's experience of "white flight". You pretty much got it, yeah, the zombies shouldn't have a vote in how to rule over us, that would be a pretty icky zombie movie.

    in #2 again that seems to actually match a lot of observed statistical reality. Look at the actual black on white vs white on black crime stats, for example.

    The third paragraph hits on the concept that corporations or any human group, really, always heavily promote the opposite of what they think; the stereotype of the all male board of directors having the most ridiculous pro-feminism mission statement that they don't follow, racist company management always promoting the most diversity training for the proles, etc. Likewise the -R side especially the legacy boomer evangelicals are REALLY into saying they don't believe in evolution and are strict creationists and all that, but that never leaves the church on Sundays, they live life the opposite. In fact the left has very strong creationist anti-evolution tendencies WRT all social sciences, its an article of faith that magic dirt exists, for example. So, anyways, if a cop shoots someone, its because lack of devout creationism indicates in social science the super-high-selection-pressure cop is usually less of a dirtbag than the zero-to-negative-selection-pressure bullet catcher, it all makes a lot of evolutionary sense. Or with your example of Trump the correct people absolutely hate him, and every screech against him turns more non-leftist people toward him, in the traditional enemy of my enemy is my friend scenario. The "god wills it " "Deus Vult" stuff is just for Sunday morning and the louder they screech it on Sunday morning the less they feel the need to be ... unrealistic in their real world politics the other 6.95 days of the week. The louder a dude prays in church the less unrealistic he is outside of church, kinda thing. So yeah, you got that right, mostly.

    Maybe you didn't provide the most flattering portrayal, but you were not really all that far off, yours was an interesting post..

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 24 2018, @12:03AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 24 2018, @12:03AM (#752663)

      #1 is so wrong I can't even... so let's tackle this:

      in #2 again that seems to actually match a lot of observed statistical reality. Look at the actual black on white vs white on black crime stats, for example.

      You're making the same error that the SJWs make of ignoring economic class. Do you have data that controls for economic class (perhaps annual household income as a proxy) that will still demonstrate a racial effect? How does this play out with quadroons?

      (bleh... racialist theory... bleh bleh...)

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday October 24 2018, @02:21AM (4 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday October 24 2018, @02:21AM (#752747) Homepage Journal

    Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, but even today sells a half million copies a year.

    The truly hardcore right is heavily into Rand and her Objectivism, what she referred to as a philosophy but that actual philosophers regard as not logically supporting itself. Real philosophers will give credit to philosophies they disagree with if they have internally-consistent arguments in their favor, but that's not the case with Objectivism.

    Simply put, Objectivism regards those who are good are wealthy ethical, and those who are not unethical. It makes no allowance for those who inherited their wealth or just happened to get lucky with the stock market. Those who believe in Objectivism always assert that rich people get that way through hard work and their own innate abilities such as intelligence, and never get that way due to some external factor other than themselves.

    Just this morning I read an article that made quite a strong case for the Objectivists during Rand's lifetime being just as much a cult as Marshall Applewhite's Heaven's Gate or Jim Jones' People's Unification Church:

    Some of the stuff I read about today's Republican candidates strikes me as floridly delusional, such as some politician's assertion to the effect that Medicaid denies the recipient "knowledge of God". I expect he's claiming that if you don't die at a tragically early age you're going to have to live in misery for a much longer time until you get to go to Heaven.

    The influence that Ayn Rand still has over the right wing is quite poorly understood by the left. I've known about it because I met an attractive young woman who was always going on about the vital importance of Atlas Shrugged. I figured that I could get in her pants by reading the book then discussing it intelligently with her, but after just fifty pages I concluded "This woman is insane", and by "This woman" I meant both Rand and that attractive young woman.

    --
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    • (Score: 1) by nekomata on Wednesday October 24 2018, @02:27PM (1 child)

      by nekomata (5432) on Wednesday October 24 2018, @02:27PM (#752983)

      [...] and that attractive young woman.

      You did not unvneil the most interesting part of your story, did you manage to get in her pants?

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday October 24 2018, @04:14PM

        by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday October 24 2018, @04:14PM (#753056)

        It sounds to me like MDC remembered a useful adage: Don't stick your dick in crazy.

        --
        The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday October 24 2018, @04:31PM (1 child)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 24 2018, @04:31PM (#753074) Journal

      If you read it as fiction rather than as philosophy, Atlas Shrugged is not a bad novel, but it didn't inspire me to read anything else she wrote. On the whole I found Wilson's Illuminatus more believable and entertaining, and that was intentionally unbelievable. The problem with Illuminatus was Wilson's strong admiration for Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. In his other books he considerably toned down the chaos.

      --
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  • (Score: 2) by schad on Wednesday October 24 2018, @12:54PM

    by schad (2398) on Wednesday October 24 2018, @12:54PM (#752932)

    I'd say that it's mostly #2. That's the view that's shared by pretty much all Republicans. And I'd be shocked if most Democrats didn't feel exactly the same way. "The bad guys are doing it, and if we don't do it too, they'll beat us!"

    But there is a growing trend of #1, and it's really just identity politics. Whites, straights, men, Christians, etc., they've all been made to feel that their identity -- pick one -- is under attack by The Enemy. The Enemy is implacable, cannot be reasoned with, and will not rest until all opposition has been utterly destroyed. And not merely current opposition, either. No, The Enemy actively erases its foes from the history books, and works to ensure that no future generations will ever arise that can challenge it. When faced with such an existential threat, pretty much all tactics are reasonable. This is the angle that the Democrats have been playing with minorities for decades, and while I don't think anyone at Republican Party HQ consciously tried to coopt their strategy, that's what the effect has been.

    Ten years ago I would've said that #1 is a tiny fringe of the Republican party. But today... it's probably still a pretty small minority, but more and more people are listening every year. And, to my immense frustration, the Democrats are doubling down on identity politics and accelerating the damn process. (That's the Democrats for you. Whenever the Republicans bungle, the Democrats manage to bungle even worse.)

  • (Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Thursday October 25 2018, @03:09AM

    by TheGratefulNet (659) on Thursday October 25 2018, @03:09AM (#753500)

    you got it all correct, 100%.

    both sides are NOT the same. the R's are quite evil, down to the core, and they brainwash themselves to be blind to that very fact. they can't see it, almost literally.

    we can't come together. I say, break the country in half and work it out from there. there's just no joining things that are too deeply different.

    this country is too large, anyway. if we lost a lot of our size, we'd be much better world citizens.

    I don't believe in 'all things should keep growing'. that's stupid. and clearly harmful, in many cases.

    --
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