House of Eratosthenes

It’s everyone’s favorite form of irony – the one where you reveal your own prejudice by calling someone else prejudiced.

It usually looks like this:

Person A: “Man, I really dislike it when people murder their pet hamsters!”

Person B: “Hey! Why do you hate Australians?”

In this realistic example, Person A has expressed a general anti-hamster-killing sentiment, which Person B interprets as a verbal assault on the people of Australia. In so doing, Person B has exposed his own disturbing belief that Aussies are particularly inclined to slaughter innocent hamsters, which makes any anti-hamster-murder statement a direct attack against anyone of Australian descent.

Next thing you know, we can’t even make laws to protect hamsters because the legislation would be seen as discriminatory against a group of people who, if you asked them, probably aren’t particularly pleased about being unfairly associated with the mass genocide of domesticated rodents. That is until, after a while, even Australians begin to believe that crushing hamsters must be an integral part of their heritage and culture, as everyone else keeps insisting is the case.

This is all just an unnecessarily bizarre way of illustrating how progressives tend to argue their point. They take some illegal, illogical, unethical, or morally repugnant act, and confidently declare that act to be universally sacred amongst an entire racial, ethnic, or gender group — often to the protest of many in the group itself. Suddenly, those who disagree with their ideas are automatically in disagreement with the very existence of whatever demographic progressives have deemed as inherently opposed to decency and virtue.
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Now, with this in mind, we understand why racist white liberals have decreed that black people don’t know how to obtain a driver’s license, and anyone who thinks a driver’s license ought to be required for voting must be involved in a nefarious conspiracy to suppress the black vote.

Voter ID laws are racist, they claim. To ask people to produce a photo identification before voting is a ‘step toward Jim Crow laws.’

They’ve made this enormously stupid argument so many times, that even guys like Rand Paul have been scared away from protecting the integrity of the voting process. We wouldn’t want to “offend,” he says.

The anti-Voter ID folks will point out that a minority person – particularly a minority woman – is statistically less likely to have an ID than a white dude. This might be true, but it’s irrelevant. Whatever the requirement, in whatever situation, there’s always going to be some group statistically less likely to meet it. By progressive logic, every requirement is therefore prejudiced and ethnocentric.

Your grandmother is statistically more likely to drive the speed limit than I am, but that doesn’t mean speed limit laws are an evil plot against me.

Now, if there ever were a law that assigned a DIFFERENT speed limit to me, or a different speed limit to 27-year-old middle class white dudes in general, then I’d have a case. But, as it stands, we all are under the same tyrannical thumb of the same tyrannical speed limits, which means, by definition, they don’t discriminate.
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…if I had my way, you’d need to produce much more than a license to vote. You’d have to pass an elementary level civics test and then identify by name, at the very least, the Secretary of State, the Vice President, and the Speaker of the House. Next you’d be quizzed on a few current events. Finally, all votes would be cast in essay form. You’d be asked for your choice, and then 6 sentences explaining why you made that choice. There would be no wrong answer, as long as you have an answer. People who cannot even articulate the reasoning behind their vote don’t deserve to vote in the first place.

I imagine these easy tests would disqualify about half of the people who show up on election day, sending our voter turnout numbers plummeting into the basement. And that, my friends, would be a wonderful day in the Republic.

Brilliant article, although I do believe that speed limit laws are an evil plot…maybe not geared toward ME in particular, but a plot all the same. I want to get where I am going. So do most of the other people I’m driving with, at least during the weekday. Arguably the senior citizen driving in the fast lane at two miles an hour under the speed limit and refusing to get over for the mass of people driving nine miles an hour over are creating far more of a hazard than the mass of people clogged behind them. The fact that they KNOW they are doing this as evidenced by the fact they pull over only when every car they had trapped managed to find a hole and pass indicates a perverse pleasure in making the young whippersnappers pay.
As far as discrimination, when was the last time you remember someone being ticketed for “obstructing the flow of traffic?” The term given both to driving too slow and using the passing lane for travel as opposed to merely passing. The last time I heard of it happening was years ago when I read an article that was nationalized on a blog, with the vast majority of people (i.e. every forum poster) claiming it was an incredible overuse of “power” by law enforcement, despite not a single one having been there.
I guess my point is, it’s still discrimination. Only ticketing the elderly for going to slow is not socially acceptable, just like a certain president and certain race-baiters think it’s not socially acceptable to infer that some people are committing voter fraud (when their choice is winning)
- P_Ang | 05/16/2014 @ 14:18
Oh, in addition to the TLDR comment I just wrote, I’d also like to see some data on whether or not one political party explodes in popularity when Vote by Mail laws are enacted. I have my suspicions here in the great state of Portlandia, where “Democracy” rules with an iron fist. Just wanted to see what your opinions on the subject were.
There has to be someone that has opined that when people have to drive to a polling location and wait in line, there is a propensity to research your choices in the hopes of choosing the best candidate, rather than the candidate that throws the most money into advertising in the hopes of winning via name recognition to the voter who has a ballot hand-delivered to his or her junk-food encrusted couch.
Just a thought.
- P_Ang | 05/16/2014 @ 14:26
P_Ang,

I couldn’t agree more. Our Betters’ willingness to proclaim themselves dependent on the apathetic moron vote has always befuddled me. “You know socialism’s great, because we have to allow voting on Xbox Live in order to get it passed.” Or: “9 out 10 people who are too stupid / lazy / feckless / high/ in the country illegally to get a simple photo ID — a task that even sixteen year old boys can manage with ease — agree that all our programs are great.” Well, I’m sold!
- Severian | 05/16/2014 @ 17:49

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Lawmaking Through PrejudiceFriday, May 16th, 2014

Lawmaking Through Prejudice
Friday, May 16th, 2014