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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25806 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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I'd say most of the same things for voting. Specifically, the only people who shouldn't be allowed to vote are people we don't trust with much of anything. Which isn't that controversial among the general public, but for some reason it is among rationalists.

Many people get very uncomfortable with frank and honest discussions about voting and voting rights (one may hearken back to SSC's Civil Rites post for more elaboration). My con law professor had a Roko's basilisk-esque response to our 1L Federalist society secretary (or maybe it was treasurer) pointing out that "voting is just pointing guns at people with more steps." I don't find something along that line uncommon.

People get upset about restricting voting rights because in the real world, doing so has a really bad record.

pointing out that "voting is just pointing guns at people with more steps."

Voting is also used to keep other people from doing things to you. I suppose you could say that is still pointing guns, but it's the self-defense style of pointing guns. Everyone who wants to restrict the franchise on this basis talks about using the vote to take from others. Using the vote to keep bad things from being done to you usually gets handwaved away.

It has a bad record? Please elaborate. Of you are American, expanding the franchise is strongly correlated with poor governance. If you live in Russia, voting is strongly correlated with Vladimir Putin being in charge. In Gaza, Hamas. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Come on. You've never heard of literacy tests and grandfather clauses used to keep black people from voting?

I heard of it. What is the bad governmental outcome that derived from literacy tests?

Mistreatment of blacks by the government.

That was going to be done regardless of blacks voting. Segregation had overwhelming majorities with or without black franchise when it began.

If keeping blacks from voting caused no harm to blacks, why did anyone even bother keeping them from voting?

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Did that lead to poor governance?

With respect to how the state treated black people, yes.

I specifically support the two being linked in some way. Dispossessing someone of firearms is a statement by society that someone is untrustworthy and unable to govern themselves, and there's no need to pretend otherwise by giving them the right to vote under the pretense that such a person can govern others.

There's probably a defensible, if aggressive, claim that the universal suffrage has proven more dangerous (in terms of deaths per capita) than (universal) firearms ownership. Definitely some error bars on the hypothetical impact of more gun ownership, and exactly which government actions are attributable to "voters" specifically --- How many bodies sit at the feet of voters in the 1932 Weimar Germany elections? Every victim of state violence in democratic states? Do we count communist "elections"? --- but I think the Libertarian premise that "nothing is more dangerous to a people than their government" has at least some academic merit.

Not only would I not count Communist "elections", I'd point out that if Communist countries had had genuine free elections, most of them would be gone pretty fast. Which makes all the deaths caused by them attributable to not having universal suffrage.

Of course, this means that even counting Germany, the deaths from not having suffrage exceed the deaths from having it (especially if you count the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as starting WWII and making some of the deaths the fault of lack of suffrage.)

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