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I realize this isn’t a top quality post, so I accept the judgement of the mods, but a mistrial has been declared in the case of Lindsay Clancy. Shes the woman in Massachusetts who admitted to killing her kids, but claims she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
The jury deliberated for seven days. Apparently, it came down to one male juror holding out against the other (nine female, two male) jurors. The belief is that he wanted to vote guilty. The jury reported to the judge that the holdout refused to follow the law regarding reasonable doubt, and the defense tried to have him removed. The judge refused. This morning, the judge declared a mistrial but gave defense one hour to get a stay from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
Predictably, the online discourse is off the walls. X lifts the holdout up as a hero, while Reddit believes he (we know it’s a male because the defense said so) is an MRA/red piller and needs to have his phone searched.
Personally, I think she’s guilty of premeditated, cold blooded murder. That said, I get the postpartum argument, but am horrified by the defense of her and holding her up as some kind of hero.
This case seems to have brought to the public discourse (at least online) the idea of repealing the 19th amendment more so than any other gender culture war story of this century. I know some here have floated around ideas of alternate voting systems e.g. only net taxpayers should have voting power. In the early days of the United States, only those who owned a certain amount of property were allowed to vote. This usually meant adult white men who had a tangible stake in society (some states had some exceptions). Perhaps our founding fathers had some wisdom in restricting who can vote. It's not clear to me that despite all our advancements in public education and technology that the modern average person is more educated and intelligent than the average person eligible of voting in the late 18th early 19th century.
Don't know if this discussion has already been hammered out already but I haven't given it enough thought/research to make this a top level post.
This line of reasoning is premised on taking the Whig history understanding of democracy way too uncritically, though. If democracy were actually about letting the voters decide the course of political action, there would not be so many hurdles thrown up to restrict the choices that are available, and restrict the choices available when the menu of available choices is compiled, and so on. You (and the net welfare recipient low IQ coloured people) are not voting on whether to declare war on Iran, or on whether to send the Massachusetts woman to the electric chair, or anything; instead you are voting on the choice between approximately two menus that have been written for you by, indeed, rich, mostly white, intelligent and educated net tax payers, whether they are actual elected politicians, think-tank employees, lobbyists or lawyers who do verbal gymnastics to conjure up some argument to say that menu entries they don't like are not "constitutional" or whatever.
The real point of democracy has always been to establish common knowledge that disrupts rebellious ambitions. The weakness of monarchies and oligarchies is that at any time, some small subset of subjects can claim that they have a critical mass of support to overthrow the government, and are only hampered by coordination problems; and then if their propaganda is sufficiently good, they can actually do it (as even if the forces aligned against them are overwhelmingly more powerful, the latter might not know this - if communists are persecuted, how do you know that you are not the only real anti-communist and everyone around you is secretly on their side?) or at least cause severe disruption in a futile attempt. On the other hand, democracy, by making credible-ish declarations of support public, makes such a failure of the majority to coordinate impossible: if the communist party is on the voting roll, but gets 1%, you can be pretty confident that you will not be lined up against a wall by your secretly communist colleagues if you refuse to cooperate with the revolution.
Are you so confident that it is for the better to exempt women/the poor/minorities from this consensus-signalling mechanism, with the predictable immediate effect that "all women/poor/minorities would side with X" becomes easier to claim?
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