LengAwaits

Kenshi

Lucky for you the linked article explains the acronym!

Wait, you're not one of those people who only reads headlines, are you?

Unfortunately not:

Here's a more in-depth article about what happened.

If you can't come up with any answers to those questions on your own then I don't think it's worth my time responding to this.

What do you think the command would have been, then?

What about Ween?

Yeah, politicians have been manipulating rubes forever. Nothing new.

March 13th of this year is when I first heard about it:

(Fox News Source)

Of course it's not a good reason, but it's also not the main complaint. That's a disingenuous argument.

The problem is that the locations that offer IDs become political footballs.

Imagine that you change the law to require a certain type of ID in order to vote (even though you already have a social security card, it doesn't count for voting purposes), and that said ID cannot be acquired via mail.

Imagine, then, that the place you go to get the necessary ID is closed down, or intentionally understaffed via defunding/budget cuts. Hours reduced to 10am-4pm Monday through Friday, perhaps, when most people work. The next nearest location may be hours away. It may not be accessible via public transit. It then becomes incredibly burdensome for someone with limited time, transportation, or income to get the necessary ID. Now you're able to control access to the IDs in lower income areas by shuttering or defunding locations.

This isn't just a theoretical situation. This occurs.

Now, I think you'll find that most people are onboard with requiring ID to vote, provided that the barriers to getting the ID do not have a chilling effect on low-income voters.

But that's not the way things tend to go.

Present a plan that expands access to the ID printing services and watch the resistance to these sorts of policies disappear. Or better yet, mail one to every eligible taxpayer the first time they file a tax return. It's not particularly difficult.

Cooperation and sharing are just as much "human nature" as selfishness. We contain lots of "natural" impulses, but people will prioritize and grow into those impulses which society most rewards.

It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with the rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal. But the earth in its natural state, as before said, is capable of supporting but a small number of inhabitants compared with what it is capable of doing in a cultivated state.

(...)

Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before. In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for.

(Full Text PDF)

That is very frustrating, to be sure.

However, the ways we've begun to think about sapience are so intriguing, as well. We're beginning to move away from the anthropocentric view that humans are the only sapient creatures. Corvids, elephants, and dolphins probably already make the cut (among other vertebrates) according to the current definition of sapience.

Ants, too, which makes me wonder about the potential for deepening our understand of group/swarm sapience, as well. True "hive minds", etc. Fascinating stuff!

So much of our understanding of the natural world comes from comparing creatures to ourselves through surface level observation. The more we can relate to an organism, as we perceive it, the more likely we are to elevate its status or "worthiness", it seems. Now, in the presence of modern technology, we're discovering how little we actually knew about how the world around us works.

This all ties strongly into historic religious world-views, and elevation of humans to god-like (or god's chosen) status. So much to unpack!