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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30434 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Because few 16 year olds are going to be interested in politics or politically aware. They may be interested in causes but when it comes to voting in the local election for Tweedledum versus Tweedledee, neither of whom has a strong position on "save the planet from climate change" or "should I have to be in by eleven on a school night when Susie can stay out until one?", then they won't see any very strong reason to pick "white person same age as my parents over other white person same age as my parents".

So unless their parents are going to the polls, and drag Junior along, there's not much likelihood Junior will bother to vote of their own accord. And if Junior is all "Ugh, I hate this, why are you making me do it?", then it's just as likely they'll vote for whomever their parents said "Oh for heaven's sake, just put X beside John Johnson's name" in order to get this done fast so they can go back to doing stuff they enjoy and care about.

See the quote from that deleted Sequoia article about Sam Bankman-Fried:

One of SBF’s formative moments came at age 12, when he was weighing arguments, pro and con, around the abortion debate. A rights-based theorist might argue that there aren’t really any discontinuous differences as a fetus becomes a child (and thus fetus murder is essentially child murder). The utilitarian argument compares the consequences of each. The loss of an actual child’s life—a life in which a great deal of parental and societal resources have been invested—is much more consequential than the loss of a potential life, in utero. And thus, to a utilitarian, abortion looks more like birth control than like murder. SBF’s application of utilitarianism helped him resolve some nagging doubts he had about the ethics of abortion. It made him comfortable being pro-choice—as his friends, family, and peers were. He saw the essential rightness of his philosophical faith.

Yes, wasn't it so coincidental that he managed to come all on his own to the same conclusion on the same topic as the view everyone else around him held, including his parents who had brought him up to hold those views? "His parents raised him and his siblings utilitarian—in the same way one might be brought up Unitarian—amid dinner-table debates about the greatest good for the greatest number."

Do you really imagine if 16 year old Sam was going to vote in a local or national election, he'd vote for a different candidate than the Democrat his parents were going to vote for?

Do you really imagine if 16 year old Sam was going to vote in a local or national election, he'd vote for a different candidate than the Democrat his parents were going to vote for?

I imagine most 16-year olds would vote Democrat because they're in roughly the same environments as 18-year olds and would therefore vote similarly. The fact that their environments encourage voting Democrat and not Republican is ultimately downstream of the Democrats being more effective at messaging to young people. That's just politics.

I'm not really sold on lowering the voting age, mind you, as the same-age-for-everything idea is very appealing. But I'm completely unconvinced by this idea that 16-year olds in particular would just ape after their parents and completely disregard all the other pressures around them.

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