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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36360 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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One of the arguments made in the 18th and 19th centuries for restricting the franchise to male landowners with large estates

Was it ever really restricted to 'large' estates, of the kind that had full time managers ?

I don't think that was the argument used. Just that you don't want losers and proletariat and such having any say in how your society is run. Look how it all ended up in the end.

One of the arguments made in the 18th and 19th centuries for restricting the franchise to male landowners with large estates was that being politically informed was the equivalent of a full-time job an

I don't think that was the argument used. Just that you don't want losers and proletariat and such having any say in how your society is run.

Antebellum figures in the Deep South used a version of that argument (laced with an assumption of elite superiority) -- civilization is a product of the leisure class. This argument hasn't been debunked IMO. Serfs/slaves were made unnecessary by technological improvements.

However, more common was the argument that the franchise should be restricted to those with a fixed stake in the country, who wouldn't simply vote themselves unsustainable handouts from the treasury. See: the Putney Debates.

civilization is a product of the leisure class. This argument hasn't been debunked IMO.

I recognize that this is a popular take in rationalist circles, and maybe this is another the inferential distance talking again but I honestly don't see how anyone of any intelligence could actually believe it unless they had extremely non-central ideas of what "civilization" and the "leisure class" actually are. As another user already observed, regardless of what you think of guys like Bezos and Musk, or even someone like Carnagie, they are anything but "idle rich".

Meanwhile it just seems obvious to me that if you have two societies, one where all the sanitation workers get Thanos-snapped out of existence, and another where all the think-peice writers get Thanos-snapped out of existence the former is likely to fall into chaos a whole lot quicker than the latter.

Meanwhile it just seems obvious to me that if you have two societies, one where all the sanitation workers get Thanos-snapped out of existence, and another where all the think-peice writers get Thanos-snapped out of existence the former is likely to fall into chaos a whole lot quicker than the latter.

In the latter we might get a few interesting trash-related thinkpieces from sanitation workers trying to make a few extra bucks by filling the gap.

I don't think that was the argument used. Just that you don't want losers and proletariat and such having any say in how your society is run. Look how it all ended up in the end.

It ended with empires over which the sun never sets.

The British empire didn’t have universal male suffrage until it was very much in the tail end of its run.

The way I parsed the gp comment was what the lack of suffrage lead to

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