The guys who built the system & made the rules

Pé tweeted:

Not a single Jim Crow-era law said "Black people cannot vote". Instead, there were "neutral" laws which gave officials enormous power to refuse to allow Black people to vote or otherwise disproportionately affected Black communities. I.e., exactly like Georgia's new law.

Douglas Blackmon, who got the Pulitzer Prize for the book Slavery by Another Name, tweeted a thread about the bad stuff in the Georgia voter suppression law.

The most dangerous part of the Georgia voting law is that it removes from the State Election Board the vote of the Secretary of State—even though under Georgia Constitution, the Scty of State oversees elections. It also puts the board under the control of the legislature. And the election board can suspend and replace any local election official basically anytime they want, for just about any reason—like having an honest election. If that had been the law in November, a state board controlled by the Republican legislature would have been able to do exactly what President Trump illegally wanted—firing election officials in counties, like Clayton, Dekalb and Fulton, that voted big for Biden. And then sending in carpetbaggers to declare fraud where there was none, and fraudulently throw out thousands of African-American votes.

Other things the law does: Ban officials from sending an absentee application to every voter. Reduce the time to request a ballot. Block organizations from helping voters get absentee ballots. Require extra hoop jumping for absentee ballots compared to in-person voting. Ban early voting after 5 pm to make it harder for working people to use it. Ban mobile voting stations except in an emergency, like a hurricane. Limit the number of drop boxes. The effect is to limit absentee and early voting to make sure lines at the polls are long and slow so that many will give up.

There was NO evidence of voting fraud, and barely even any apparent human error. The only thing that supposedly “went wrong,” was that the losing party was sore that it lost the presidential election and two US Senate seats. ... They lost because the election correctly reflected that by a tiny margin, the majority of people in Georgia didn’t want Trump, Perdue or Loeffler. That’s the only reason Georgia’s election law was changed—to make it possible to prevent an outcome the ruling party dislikes.

Dartagnan of the Daily Kos community discussed a report by the New York Times. Robert Pape studied what motivated the people who attacked the Capitol. He looked at the 380 or so who have been arrested. From the NYT article:

Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture. ... Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists. This finding held true, Mr. Pape determined, even when controlling for population size, distance to Washington, unemployment rate and urban or rural location.

The attackers were not from just deep red counties. About half were from counties Biden comfortably won. Dartagnan’s article didn’t specify whether the white population in these counties actually dropped through death or moving out, or whether non-while population grew faster, leaving the white population as a smaller and less powerful percentage. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported now that corporations are stepping up and saying they don’t like voter suppression (being for suppression is a bad business look) and Major League Baseball has moved the All Star game from Atlanta to Denver, Moscow Mitch is declaring there will be serious consequences to corporate meddling. Corporations should stay out of politics – except to keep the cash flowing. This is, of course, quite the switch for Mitch.

Pre-Trump, intervening in the private sector to pick winners and losers was completely anathema to the Republican Party. For at least a generation, the GOP mantra has been that businesses making business decisions entirely based on their profit models was good for America no matter who or what it might harm. But since the GOP now considers voter suppression to be an existential necessity for the party's continued electoral success, the Republican Party itself finds itself on the wrong side of that bottom-line business calculation and desperate to change the equation.

And it was Mitch who held up the second virus relief package, demanding excessive protections for corporations. He only relented during the runoff for the two Georgia senators would mess with his control of the Senate. The corporate toady is suddenly fighting corporations. Erika Heidewald, who declares herself to be autistic, tweeted a long thread. Some of the ideas about social hierarchy intrigued me. Heidewald started off by saying she is tired of those who see just a bit of what she is trying to say, jump to assumptions she didn’t say, then declare she is wrong, stupid, and certainly not an authority. That means, her responders say, she should just shut up. And they totally miss what she actually said. She knows why they do it:

they’re having too much fun feeling smarter or better than me and it would be ok except sometimes it’s 50, 100 people a day.

Yup, a supremacist stance. But this doesn’t help. People don’t actually engage with her ideas. She doesn’t find out whether her ideas have a fundamental flaw. Heidenwald has concluded things about being autistic using pattern recognition and rational deduction. These are things that doctors treating autism, who aren’t autistic themselves, don’t see. They don’t think like autistic people do. And they don’t ask autistic people how they think. Now we get into what I found interesting. She said that allistic people (those with “normal” brains – the ones who aren’t autistic and don’t have another behavioral disorder, also called “neurotypical”) have an instinctive intuition of social status. Autistic people don’t. They learn such things the hard and traumatic way, using pattern recognition. Is this the one fundamental difference in their social skills?

how do neurotypicals stay at the top of the hierarchy if they have to admit that it is a social construct and that autistic people don’t have any defects, we are just neurologically oriented to a fundamentally different social structure - one that they insist can’t exist? ... what is so frustrating is that the key to getting people to see the existence of the hierarchy, how much we have been lied to, how horrific our oppression is, and the truth of who we are is all around them. literally just go ask a bunch of people if they feel status & hierarchy. the authorities will never admit that autistic people are just human beings oriented to a cooperative social structure, so as long as people require authority to validate any thought they have, i can never get them to see who they really are and what system they really live in. neurotypical hegemony rests on the belief that humans are inherently selfish & competitive. this is the foundational belief of capitalism - self-interest is human nature. this awful oppressive system continues bc we believe no other option is possible. our existence proves it is neurotypical supremacy is tied in with white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism as the invisible power structure that perpetuates itself by hiding its intentional power structure & pretending it is the fundamental, unchangeable way of the world. human nature. ... the medical establishment, run by the NT ruling class, made themselves the standard person, and anyone who can’t conform well enough to appear just like them is disordered. they made us believe neurodivergence is a problem to be fixed or to pretend that you don’t have. we have no evidence the majority of the population is neurotypical. there’s no scientific basis to the idea that neurotypical people are any kind of standard human that others should be measured against. that’s just the neurotype of the guys who built the system & made the rules ... so what we’re left with is neurotypical people who are extremely competitive and hierarchical, playing a constant game of status that they don’t tell the rest of us exists.