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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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I'm not actually "selling out"; I barely care about staying on the jury longer, I just care about the outcome of this case less.

What is your line, where letting injustice happen rather than be personally inconvenienced for a couple days?

When there's actual injustice. Here the "punishment" is transferring money from someone who's already in debt and doesn't spend it well, to someone who spends it slightly better. It have some sympathy for Chad, but he's not going to prison, nor does this burn his net worth or financial prospects, since they're already ash.

I want to remove universal suffrage and try and find a better form of suffrage. I don't yet know if one exists, hence it's an inchoate thesis.

That's the problem: everyone wants to remove suffrage from people they don't like, but how do you prevent your allies from being disenfranchised (or avoid bad decisions from them, despite being "allies", that were ironically negated by your "enemies")? Children don't have suffrage, because almost everyone grows up such that it has never been exploited. Some felons don't have suffrage, arguably this has been exploited, but it's mitigated because convicting someone isn't guaranteed, and convicting a sizeable fraction of the population would raise eyebrows from even some radicals.

That's the problem

Yeah, I understand that better than anything. People never want to restrict suffrage in a way that would hurt them or their allies, and always want to target their enemies. I said in another comment in this chain, that the problem is in exclusionary systems, a motivated set of agents will try to exploit the rules in a way that is always more detrimental to the system than exploits that are available to blanket systems. I'm unsure if it's a solvable problem, creating a strictly fair system of suffrage the isolates voting towards agents with a sense of duty to their fellow man and an intelligent long term view towards the prospering of the country and its people. Universal Suffrage is a lot like a market in this regard. It creates price signals for peoples political desires. Shockingly most of those signals are very self-serving, short term benefits, but not all, and its hard to parse the good from the bad.