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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Last week there was a discussion regarding restricting the right of released robbers to vote. In a related reporting, Aotearoa (New Zealand) Supreme Court has discovered that 16 and 17 year olds not being allowed to vote is discriminatory.

The reasoning relies on the fact that Aotearoa's Human Rights Act 1993 prohibits making a distinction based on age between people over 16. From this one could assume that, unlike in the US, the age of majority in Aotearoa is 16, with voting a seemingly overlooked exception. A helpful website contains counterexamples to this thesis as many other rights are also denied to 16 year old Aotearrans.

While today "18" is a common age under which rights are restricted, and its commonality is used to justify it, any deviation from it, undermines it. Age of consent being 16 in Europe (and Aotearoa), alcohol requiring being 21 to purchase it in the US and now voting age being lowered to 16 in Aotearoa, etc increase the uncertainty and invite debate. Debate into why exactly is voting allowed to those that it presently is and denied to the remainder. Attempts are made to search for the principles underlying this discernement usually find no satifactory answer.

What exactly do all law abiding (even this qualifier isn't universal among US states) American citizens over 18, young and old, rich or poor, smart and dumb have; but which no non-citizen or child posseses?

What’s with the Aotearoa affectation?

It's anti-White hate speech meant to erase White New Zealander's claims of a homeland. It is a linguistic pre-cursor to genocidal dispossession.

This comment has drawn an impressive 14 reports for antagonism/boo-outgroup/inflammatory claims.

I'm reasonably confident that Westerly's question was a troll. So for starters, please don't feed the trolls.

But also, you should know that accusing someone of pre-genocide is going to be taken as inflammatory, so if you're going to do that, you really must bring evidence. Insisting on referring to New Zealand as "Aotearoa" does seem like it could be subtly consensus-building--is the Romanized pronunciation of a Maori name for a land mass really interchangable with the name of the nation state, unquestionably called "New Zealand," that implemented the legislative Act in question? Do New Zealanders use these words interchangably? Or do any of their legal documents do so? I don't know much about New Zealand, so there are all sorts of ways you could have made your point that might have served to impart information or insight.

In the future, please do that instead.

EDIT: @cjet79 beat me to it, but I admit it is often helpful to accidentally see that the mod team is in fact on the same page about this stuff!

Thank you for your constructive feedback.

This comment has drawn an impressive 14 reports for antagonism/boo-outgroup/inflammatory claims.

Wow! That is impressive. Can you give a sense of where this is relative to some of your top-reported posts? Can you provide a ranking?

Can you give a sense of where this is relative to some of your top-reported posts?

Most reported posts only get a single report (and often generate no moderator activity--some people just use reporting as a super-downvote, and we ignore them). A genuinely bad post will tend to get 3-5 reports. A post that is both bad and expresses an unpopular view can easily garner 10+ reports even in a slow week. I think the highest I've ever seen is... maybe 22 reports?

Can you provide a ranking?

It's definitely not in the top ten. It might well be in the top 100, though.