Giving the franchise to a man who would dial the 911 emergency number because the neighborhood deli had not, and I quote, properly made his sammiches with "little um, turkey, and little um ham and a lot of cheese and a lot of mayonnaise" is like giving a Kalashnikov to a chimpanzee.
Whatever it takes to keep this yayhoo out of a voting booth is worth considering: civics or intelligence tests, property requirements, monarchy. Come down to it, burn the booth; if he can't be kept from the levers of power, then the levers of power need to be sawed off and thrown in the nearest body of water.
Ugh, I so did not need to hear this first thing in the morning. Every time I find myself thinking that eugenics isn't, maybe, you know, entirely evil, I want to go take a shower with a wire brush.
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46 comments:
it's bad enough that these fools are voting, but some of them are in charge.
I can totally see Joe Biden calling 911 because his sandwich didn't have enough mayo.
I'm still surprised that anyone thinks this type of call is out-of-the-ordinary for dispatchers.
People call 911 for the stupidest crap in the world on a daily basis. I suppose that's the downside of having them learn one number for help... and in fact, I just opened the nearest phone book, and the page that used to list all the local police department numbers now only has 911 "for all emergencies".
911 Operator: "And how do you spell that name?"
Vice President: "B-I-D-E-... hang on a second" *rustle of driver's license being fished out of wallet*
[Vimes] had been rather interested in the idea that everyone had a vote until he found out that while he, Vimes, would have a vote, there was no way in the rules that anyone could prevent Nobby Nobbs from having one as well. Vimes could see the flaw there straight away.
:-D
If Obama wanted a sandwich, it would look just like Rother McLennon's.
Marko,
Uh, actually Barry's more of a free-range turkey and Emmentaler with arugula on an artisanal panini kinda guy.
And he wouldn't call 911 if someone messed up his sammich; he'd sue.
My dad (one of the Greatest Generation) used to jokingly say many years ago...
"People think 5% unemployment and 50% voter turnout is a bad thing, but I'm not sure that 5% of this country should be anyway near a job and 50% of this country probably shouldn't be anywhere near a voting booth."
Dann in Ohio
Let's see. 1776, the misbegotten American colonials are individually the wealthiest and best educated people in human history to that point.
Qualifications for voting? Literacy, fulfillment of militia duties, possession of firearms, and ownership of property. In plainest English, you had to demonstrate functionality and, in a world without professional police (Google up "Hue and Cry") be at least a reasonably competent part-time cop and soldier.
I can hear the libertards chanting "But they had slavery!"
So did everybody in the world until those same nasty Europeans invented the Industrial Age along with the machinery that replaced brute labor with steam exhaust and foot-tons of torque.
Think about it. A job and a bank account, the ability to pass a written test on the party platforms of all the primary political contestants (parsed in 10th grade English), no acceptance of government aid since the last election, and military ID, a DD214, or medical exemption. Sounds kinda like Switzerland.
Tam,
Thank you for making me laugh this morning. Your comments were a great riff on the original post.
"And he wouldn't call 911 if someone messed up his sammich; he'd sue."
Either that or he'd add the sandwich maker's name to the enemies list so he could send one of his flying robot assassins over to deal with things later.
There should be a way to earn the franchise, but it shouldn't be too hard.
Look at the number of people that are registered to vote now, and that's with Acorn and various Motor Voter and church registration drives, how many would bother to even fill out a form on their own to register to vote.
In order to improve the voting pool all you have to do is add a speed bump, not even a wall to climb, just a bump. Maybe the form has to be filled out in red ink.
"...like giving a Kalashnikov to a chimpanzee."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74-WSM0xTyE.
Yes...some folks are that dumb
Connecticut. Seeing what they elect there, I doubt he's far from average.
To tie this into a previous post. Can you imagen him with a firearm.
This is the same mentality that is used to justify the test requiirements for a CHL here in TX. They feel you need to demonstrate that you are qualified and responsible enough to carry.
Doesn't wake it right though.
Josh K.,
"To tie this into a previous post. Can you imagen him with a firearm.
This is the same mentality that is used to justify the test requiirements for a CHL here in TX."
There's a huge and important difference: If he screws up with a firearm in public, we can all see it and shoot him down like a dog, but god only knows what secret mischief he'll get up to when he pulls the curtain in that voting booth.
Just as a fun analysis/expansion of your comment, not to criticize:
A job and a bank account,
Not too unreasonable, I think, though I would possibly extend that to "employed for at least six months since the last election" to allow for situations beyond one's control.
the ability to pass a written test on the party platforms of all the primary political contestants (parsed in 10th grade English),
I see what you're getting at, and I agree with your intent, but the history of abuse of "literacy" tests would make it problematic. I also think other, more stable topics might be better, considering the way politicians and political parties flip-flop and talk out of both sides of their mouths. Maybe a test on the Constitutionally defined form, powers, and limits of our government.
no acceptance of government aid since the last election,
In line with my first point, I would consider an exception for a short period of collecting unemployment benefits to be reasonable.
and military ID, a DD214, or medical exemption.
Or some other form of civil service, on a local or state level (police, fire, EMS, local maintenance/groundskeeping, etc.). Outside of times of large-scale war, I don't think we can (or should) support a military large enough for that to be a fair requirement. Plus, making it a short-term (i.e., 1-2 years) and part-time commitment (excluding certain positions) would hopefully allow local government to fill certain positions at a reduced cost.
Josh K: if that tard had a firearm, he would do far less damage than he could with a vote.
It's too damned bad that the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were needed.
If we had simply sun-setted slavery the way the Brazilians had ( anyone born after a given date was free, period ), allowing retards to vote would have never been an issue.
Hondo, we got a call! Code 3.1417! Sandwich with out proper condiments!
This is why you joined SWAT. Deke,TJ,Sanchez, lets roll people.
Gerry
But when you start drawing lines who gets to draw them?
If we would stop coddling people and let stupid hurt the problem would fix itself. Our problem isn't that everyone can vote. It is that the left has engineered an education system that produces useful idiots, and an entitlement system that suports them.
Just as the gun culture polices itself just fine and a CHL is unneeded, if we went with testing we wouldn't solve the problem just be adding an extra burden on those who do want to vote.
As one of my sited article proves idiots still get CHL here in TX. Even with your requirements to vote idiots still would be able.
"911 Operator: "And how do you spell that name?"
Vice President: "B-I-D-E-... hang on a second" *rustle of driver's license being fished out of wallet*"
That right there is funny, I don't care who y'are.
Adding a layer of intelligence testing, say a simple binomiol on the order of Asq + Bsq = 13 would disenfranchise a quarter of the population.
However, if such a test were an absolute requirement for casting a valid ballot, the level of intelligence of the average voter would increase by 300 percent.
Stranger
Per Ed Foster's excellent comment: In 1850 an Irishman could be hired to do the worst sort of manual labor for a quarter a day. for that, the Paddy was expected to feed, house, clothe, and "physic" himself.
On the other hand, the average cost of owning and maintaining a slave for his or her lifetime, including initial cost, food, clothes, "physic," and housing, was $1.14 a day.
It should surprise no one that the agricultural South desperately wanted to industrialize while the industrialized North was desperately afraid of Southern industrialization.
Look up "Tariff of Abominations" some time.
Stranger
Another David Weber thought.
Limit the vote. You have to pay $1 more in taxes than you receive from the government in the year you want to vote. That does limit the vote to those earning a living, and I imagine that if someone is a dependent economically, they aren't stakeholder enough to vote as if the results of the vote mattered to them.
I wouldn't worry too much about a character like this at the polls. The worst would be if the vote cast were more random noise.
What would be nice at the polls, would be a competence, character, honor and honesty test for those on the ballot. Then we wouldn't have a VP we suspect needs to check his driver's license for his name, or a slum-lord President raised a communist.
But then, I would also like to see Narcissistic Personality Disorder be considered sufficient grounds to medically certify a person as unable to execute any elected office. Just a whimsical musing, that.
I agree with you, but for an alternate point of view check out
http://www.thatredneck.blogspot.com
Every time I bring up "literacy test" I'm accused of RACISM!!1!
I then ask "Why do you think Blacks can't pass the test?"
Confused looks follow.
And that's why I try not to converse with Liberals. Lower case 18th Century style liberals are fine.
I got… I got it… How about this one… Only those with Master's degree or Doctorate should be allowed to vote.
While we are drawing lines, I'm pretty sure the left is going to want to play too.
So, Brad K. should Soldiers coming home with PTSD be allowed to get a CHL or open carry?
Brad, I take it you won't be voting for Mitt?
A lot of this is if we do it it's OK but if the other side does it that's just evil.
We have become a nation of busybodies.
Josh K.,
"We have become a nation of busybodies."
The act of voting itself is inherently busybody, Josh.
Think about it.
(...and leave the reductio ad absurdum to trained professionals, like me. ;) )
Tam, only if your Idea of voting is let's see what I can get the state to force my neighbor to do.
My default setting when voting is no.
Let us grow a bureaucracy of paperwork and hoops for the right to express an opinion politicly.
Dems already have better turn out than conservitives. (This is changing) Conservitives are hard working people that have to usualy take time off work. (with early voting this is changing). Now we are sugesting they need to take time out their lives to take a test, is this going to improve or harm turn out. (I see this would leading to a new lexicon with frase like "Voter Test Taking Fraud.")
Conservatives out number Libs 2 to 1. Hmmm... Do conservatives need less or more people voting.
Unintended consequensces people.
Tam if we are basing political systems on books my vote would be Freehold not a lot of voting need there.
;-)
Unless... Have I slipped into an alternate reality... libertarians are for limited government... right?
Josh K.,
"Unless... Have I slipped into an alternate reality... libertarians are for limited government... right?"
Wash your mouth out when you call me that. ;)
Yeah, on my jackbooted statist days, I guess you could call me libertarian, although I prefer "anarcho-capitalist". "Wookie-suiter" will suffice, I guess.
"only if your Idea of voting is let's see what I can get the state to force my neighbor to do."
That's exactly what voting is. I only engage in the distasteful practice out of self-defense and as a sort of performance art.
I will, however, repeat myself:
(...and leave the reductio ad absurdum to trained professionals, like me. ;) )
@ Josh,
"So, Brad K. should Soldiers coming home with PTSD be allowed to get a CHL or open carry?"
?? How would a discussion of whether a particular form of personality disorder, affecting goal setting, problem solving, interpersonal relationships, perceptions of reality, and deformed self image, as regards performing the office of President of the United States and medical certification for being functionally able to perform ably -- how did that get to veterans, veteran health care, and a citizen's responsibility to maintain the capability to confront errant, aberrant, and aggressive tyrants?
I mean, for the most part the President doesn't carry, concealed or otherwise, because the Secret Service would have a spaz attack. If it drops in the pot, the bodyguards want the protected person under cover, not out there looking for a shot.
A veteran experiencing PTSD seldom affects nations, or the future of the United States. And most veterans aren't busily surrounding themselves with union thugs, with slum lords, and with socialists and communists intend on ending Democracy and the free market place, just in case someone(?!) slips.
Since you ask, I think a veteran's experience more than offsets the chance of harm to family and community, even with PTSD or other adjustment issues or injuries. Just as a for-instance, look at the training we provide so many young people through our war on drugs (and growing drug trade), war on gangs (and virulent gang activities), war on poverty (just look at what that has done to prison populations, to illegitimate birth rates, etc.). Just look at the example of how to resolve problems in the community, with SWAT teams regularly on the news, with the feds using drones, traffic cams to write tickets, and the IRS grabbing all banking records, just in case they want to use your records against you. Look at how marriages are pledged to the state, but then the state routinely dissolves marriages on request, which is the largest single factor causing people to become impoverished.
No, I am not worried about carrying, concealed or otherwise, nor about veterans with PTSD -- unless they base a literary career on their biographical handout's claims they were born in Kenya and then get elected President.
See? I can stick to the topic, too.
Josh: During the decades prior to the civil war, most states had two simple requirements for voting:
You had to speak English, and you had to own property.
That was all. If you had a real stake in your local community, you got to vote.
The civil war made it necessary to undo that, since some states could not be trusted to set rules about such stuff.
Kris this soulution to their precived problem, how that working out?
Brad K. because you seem to be advocating the use of ones mental faculties and the state of ones mind as justification to limit ones ability to do something.
I was trying to find out where you draw your line in this. I know know it's somewhere between Soldier with PTSD and an idiot voter based on some arbitrary belief on how much harm they could do (to you).
All those solutions you mentioned are state solutions, and you and others want to add another layer? What is the definition of insanity again?
If we where to do something like this it would have to test for ability and selflesness.
simple rule. if you have accepted or received any government money since the last election, you are not allowed to vote. this means ALL public employees. public employees getting to vote in elections constitutes a conflict of interest. likewise if you are a high ranking official, board member or investor in a company that has received a bailout el noah you vota.
Stranger, the primary value of a slave wasn't the work he did. After 1828 you couldn't even whip them (it scanned badly in the British press), and for some reason productivity per slave declined dramatically afterward.
Their value was as collateral, security on loans from the London Factors who financed the "Deep" or "Old" South, the seven primary states of the Confederacy. The factors held the financial reins from the early 17th century all the way up to the Civil War.
Farther north in the border states, where the farms were smaller and the loan value of slaves was offset by their initial cost, emancipation was quite common. In 1827, abolitionist editor Benjamin Lundy counted 106 anti-slavery societies in the south, vs. 24 such groups in the north. Also, more than 100,000 southern abolitionists fought for the Union, and 75% of them were killed or crippled. Western North Carolina sent as many men to the Union as to the Confederacy.
As you pointed out, the Abominable Tariffs turned things around and essentially made the Civil War inevitable.
I find it dryly amusing that Lundy could publish peacefully in Greenville Tennessee at the same time abolitionists were being lynched in Illinois.
Wiki up the article about a ferocious Confederate unit called the Louisians Tigers and read about the working conditions the Paddies endured for a dollar a day. You'll understand why they weren't afraid to make frontal assaults against entrenched riflemen while armed with nothing but Bowie knives after their first volley.
All of which is getting a tad off topic, sorry Tam. But I wrote a killer paper back in school on the economic changes in the deep south after the London factors were booted out, and the period 1870 to 1890 is a particular favorite of mine.
Who would have thought that Polynesian and Chilean bird poop could do peacefully in less than three decades what a brutal war couldn't?
Josh K. :
Poorly, of course.
A single bad decision in the 1780s resulted in a whole raft of bad decision in the 1860s. Only not doing something about slavery would have been worse.
But you knew that.
Tariffs did not make the civil war inevitable.
Fear of being punished for, and being made to give up slavery is what set it off.
They were an excuse. Slavery was at the heart of the problem. The pre-war blood letting in Kansas and Missouri was not about tariffs.
A lot of libertarians don't want to hear that, since they have such a hate-on for Lincoln.
Yes, I was refering to all the reconstruction statist crap that came after the Civil War. All we had to do was start treating people as people. But no we had treat it as a turf war.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Condoms: Because The Sterility Clinic Doesn't Open Til 8:00AM On Monday.
Yesterday morning local radio station played a 911 call of the guy that had heard something about a UFO in College Park MD, ON TWITTER.
And he called from his car (illegal in MD) to see if the cops were doing anything about it, because his brother lives in College Park and he was worried about him.
They are everywhere, Tam.
(No, not UFOs)
Tam, you and I, we done screwed up. Both of us seem to be past the age of reproducing, and have not done so. Tam having produced several Tam-like people is my idea of how eugenics should work. One more Jtg -like person would probably be sufficient.
Did you know "The Marching Morons" is available as a free download? I have it on my hard drive.
With the upcoming DNC and RNC along with pandering to the electorate in anticipation of the November elections, it may be worthwhile to review the concept of Groupthink:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink
http://www.despair.com/idiocy.html
The biggest problem with voting rights is when they were established they didn't conceive of the possibility of swarms of parasites with no interest in self-sufficiency or bettering themselves without the extorted aid of their neighbor.
So, yeah, I can go along with "You have to prove yourself of at least benefit to yourself, if not society" in order to cast a vote.
Cheesy, who gets to set the standard?
Buy what measure will we judge those that will rule us.
Did you go to college? That's good. Did you take political Science? No, well your not going to be able to vote till you understand how our government works.
You want to read a truly evil book read Madison Grant's, "The Passing of the Great Race"
Once you feel like you are smart enough to make descisions for others, you can justify anything with the frases, "This is for your own good, or this is for the good if all."
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