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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32472 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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On giving parents votes for their children

One idea that people here have mentioned a couple of times has been to give parents a vote for each underage child they have. The more I think about it, the better this proposal seems, and not only just that, but almost everyone, no matter where they are on the political spectrum should find something in it they support.

Firstly on the logistics front this is very simple to implement. We already have a database of who is the legal parent of who, and whether or not they are emancipated from their parents. Every non-emancipated child's parents get a ballot paper in a different colour to the standard one (say a green ballot paper vs white for adults) which is worth half of a normal vote. So overall both parents of a child get half an extra vote that they can use to vote as they wish. Then we can just count the votes after the election, giving 1/2 weighting to the green ballots. If you have 4 children you are legally the parent of (and responsible for), then you get 1 white and 4 green ballots every election, totally to 3 full votes. Any emancipated children get their full vote, as they are already considered adults for many other things.

This method removes the argument that children shouldn't get a vote because they aren't well developed enough to choose themselves what they want. We already trust parents to act in their child's best interest for many things, asking parents to vote for them as well isn't much of a stretch beyond this. It also rewards parents for sticking with their children and raising them well, as you only get to vote on their behalf if you accept responsibility for them.

The consequences of such a policy would be very positive. Firstly the greater political power handed to parents over non-parents would lead to policies favouring those with children, which would help increase the abysmal birth rates of many western countries as having a child becomes more beneficial/less of a burden. Parents are generally considered as having more stake in the long term future of society too, so giving greater political power to them would shift society towards more long term thinking too, which is sorely lacking at the moment.

Parents tend to be more conservative than childless people, controlling for all the usual factors. Giving them extra voting power would almost certainly shift the Overton window rightwards. Expect to see greater focus on tackling crime, nicer neighbourhoods and better schools if such a policy comes to pass.

At the moment the age of the median voter is significantly higher than the average age of the population as whole. This leads to greater emphasis being placed on the concerns of the old disproportionately, see for example the UK where attacking the entitlements of the old (pensions, high house prices etc.) is effectively a no-go area, as whichever party does this is certain to take a drubbing at the next election. Giving children the vote via their parents would fix this issue, the age of the median voter (controlled for vote power) would come down a fair bit, thus shifting political focus away from the concerns of the old towards the concerns of those of childbearing age.

Equally at the moment in many western countries due to demographic differences in age cohorts minorities have significantly less voting power than you would expect given their share of the population. This is due to minorities being disproportionately minors (pun not intended) who don't get the vote. Thus current political focus is disproportionately focused on placating whites. Such a change would hand more power to minorities in the country allowing them to push for policies that are best for themselves and their children, rather than just what white progressives say are best for themselves and their children. Doing this basically just pushes the voting demographics of a country forward by 18 years, it's going to happen anyways, might as well just accept it now even if you are white.

And children themselves probably benefit the most from such a policy. Parents generally put great emphasis on giving the best possible start to their children, and many already vote accordingly to what they believe is going to be best for them. Amplifying their voices relative to the childless will probably lead to these children entering a world more suited for them when they reach adulthood than presently.

Basically no matter whether you are conservative or liberal, white or a minority, young or old, giving votes to the parents of children is a policy that has something to offer you.

I'd be opposed to this for a number of reasons, but most importantly: if you have any use for democracy at all, "one person, one vote" is an extremely important Schelling point. It's easy to come up with reasons your favorite demographic group should get more representation than others, and while as pointed out above there is already some wrangling on who gets to vote, giving de jure multiple votes to some people would start an immediate arms race for politicians to give ever more voting power to their supporters.

ultiple votes to some people would start an immediate arms race for politicians to give ever more voting power to their supporters.

Is that not already in play?

Not to the same degree. There's probably no way to avoid discussions on whether convicts/undocumented immigrants/17-years-olds/etc. should or shouldn't be allowed to vote, but granting multiple votes per person can increase without bounds -- if your opponents give two votes per person to their constituency, then you can give yours five, and then they can give theirs ten, and so on.

I don't think this proposal is harmful, but I also don't think it would meaningfully change the political landscape if it was implemented. Of course, with the US always having to balance the influence of exactly two parties anything might be meaningful there, so the biggest hurdle to giving parents more votes is "this could benefit the other party, so why risk it?"

You sure it wouldn't ? Married people in the Us all vote red, if they had just 50% extra votes, or 100% extra votes, that would change things up very much in the US.

Weren't the margins in many states on the order of single digit percents ?

Do they? Married men do lean GOP, but married women are split pretty evenly and are a key swing demographic. Black mothers are often unmarried, though. If we use race as a proxy for political leanings, non-Hispanic Whites give birth to about 50% of the children. I don't think it's as cut-and-dry as you portray it.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/121571/marriage-remains-key-predictor-party-identification.aspx

33% to 31% R v D among married Americans.

These people are basically wards of the state, their opinions are not relevant or useful. The only reason that allowing them to vote makes any sense to me at all is that it may promote stability by giving the poor a sense that they are politically represented. The last thing I want to do is reward them with additional votes because they had children that they can't pay for.

Solutions to democracy seem to come down to, 'people whose views coincidently and conveniently happen to be aligned with my own should be allowed to vote or should have more representation.' If you want only informed or wealthier people to be allowed to vote, then you will get more blue voters, as these tend to be more educated. Same for wealthier.

I endorse this proposal. Some people express concern that it may benefit the Left instead of the Right. Others are chiming in to offer alternatives more carefully contrived to achieve a desired outcome. To these concerns I would say, that this proposal is the best for the following reasons:

The idea that the government should represent the interests of children makes intuitive sense and will appeal broadly to the public. Every law should start with a broad sales pitch, and follow it up with addendums that compromise on the initial idea. The fact that children will not actually be voting is the compromise, and it should be sold to the public as a necessary compromise to achieve a desired ideal. By contrast, a proposal to give more voting power to rich people is a harder sell, because the ideal it strives for is less intuitive and won't appeal to most people. The Left would sniff it out immediately.

The fact that many here believe this proposal will benefit the Left is a good thing, because it means the proposal can be sold to the Left. I cannot say what the actual effects will be. I would say it is coinflip that could backfire or succeed. The Right is in desperate straights as we know, and should therefore seek out these kinds of coinflips. Call it a wager with Moloch, if you will.

I don't think the direct impact will be that great. It's true that people with the most children are poor, and it's equally true that poor people don't vote. The votes of a lot of children won't matter because their parents won't bother to cast them. The main selling point of this proposal for the Right is the symbolic impact, rather than its direct impact. The law is sort of two-faced. To the general public and to the Left, the law can be sold as the apotheosis of egalitarianism, the final form of equal suffrage. But it's not really equal suffrage, because the children can't actually vote, and their parents are getting extra votes. It's essentially a sly way to foist upon the Left a system of unequal suffrage in which heteronormative family values are symbolically endorsed by the government as deserving a greater voice in government than the voices of the various childless constituencies.

You can't sell it to the left. The idea that it can be sold is based on the anti-left's imagination of what the left cares about and conflates outcome with intention. It is assumed that because poor minorities have more children, they will line up to support this. Which may certainly happen, but selling it broadly to an ideologically anti-family (at least, not pro-nuclear-family) left is a non-starter.

Doing this would have all sorts of constitutional issues. What I imagine would be more possible would be lowering the voting age to 0, and making sure that parents are allowed to help their children out with voting if they need it. Of course, this would still have negative effects, like letting teenagers vote will often not be ideal, but I think I would be in favor of such a policy?

I'm not really convinced that this will be amenable to everyone, though. I think a lot of people will go just have a snap judgment of it being bad or undemocratic, even though it's arguably not at all either of those. And it would definitely be quickly politicized, with those who stand to gain political power in favor and those opposed against.

In America, since the 26th amendment only sets 18 as the minimum voting age and not the maximum, I think any state might be able to institute this at will, assuming the state constitution allowed it?

Giving children, young adolescents the vote is the worst part of the whole idea. The idea that people with undeveloped brains and a lack of understanding of basic features of the world can help us, is fatally flawed and forgets that we're responsible for developing children, not the other way round.

Granted even at 18 this development and understanding hasn't progressed that much...

letting teenagers vote will often not be ideal, but I think I would be in favor of such a policy?

While it's a very different policy than the one under discussion, I'm pretty strongly in favor of lowering the voting age to 16 as a way to encourage youth voting. The idea being that voting is habit; people who vote are a lot more likely to vote in the future, and building that habit seems much more likely to happen while living at home and having the influence of parents and high school civics classes than while 18-year-olds are adjusting to being out in the world on their own as adults (whether or not they're in college).

I'd consider the fact that 16-year-olds likely are heavily influenced by their parents and may just vote in line with their parents without really thinking about their own political beliefs and interests as a major downside of that idea. And I'd expect that effect to be significantly stronger the younger the child.

Every vote someone else casts lessens the impact of the vote I cast. Why would I want increased turnout, more habitual voters, when that means my already meager influence is even further lessened?

I want non-voters. I want low-information voters to skip votes. I want my elections for local offices to be separate from federal elections, so that only people who can be bothered to vote regularly are counted.

I want, in short, fewer voters.

Inculcating positive behaviors among young people makes a better future society.

My school had a neat little election in 2000. We got flyers with the candidates positions. You could even vote for third parties! This was in the deep south.

Bush got 94% of the vote. Kids are fucking idiots that are extremely susceptible to social pressure and short-sightedness. I know this because I was one not nearly long enough ago. People that are 18 are already a tough sell to me.

We could get schools to turn out 0% failures, by mandating that no child ever be given an F. This would work in the same sense, and backfire in the same more important sense, as encouraging children to be smart and engaged and curious by voting.

That said, a supermajority of adult voters are barely doing anything I'd recognize as voting, so I'm all in favor of letting the kids have a shot too. There might at least be a few years' period during which they vote based on the "study the candidates and pick the best one" ideals, before "You can't vote against our team's corrupt handsy geriatric, or their team's corrupt handsy geriatric might get in!" messaging catches up to them.

I want everyone to feel represented and like they are part of society. People who feel like they aren't part of society tend to make for poor neighbors and sometimes attempt revolutions.

And I think that politicians that feel like they have to convince more of the population to vote for them are more likely to enact policies that are good for everyone as opposed to a narrow section of the population. Even if I happen to be part of the narrow slice of the population my elected politicians happen to decide is worth listening to (I don't seem to be currently), I'll always live near people who aren't.

What if there is a trade off between good governance and representation? What do you pick and why?

I'm suspicious of the concept of "good" governance divorced from asking who it is good for. Although I'm pretty comfortable drawing an age line somewhere and declaring everyone younger than that is a child and too immature to know what's best for themselves. Politics involves a lot of balancing competing interests and the interests of people who are not represented are unlikely to be given much weight. I see people talking about that in this thread about poorer people voting less so not needing to worry as much about their political opinions. I see people in left-leaning spaces complaining young people don't vote enough so politicians don't have to care about the future (read: climate change). The point of the OP's proposal is to more strongly represent parents so their interests are more strongly weighted, with the idea that those interests would hopefully align with their children's future interests and therefore the future of the society as a whole. None of these groups' interests are a priori the "right" interests for a "good" government to focus on.

But in a democracy, I think it's important that the people believe they are represented, even if everyone would be happier with the policies chosen by genius dictator @token_progressive. (Please don't make me dictator. I'd be really bad at it.)

Do you think direct democracy is preferable to republican democracy?

No, although I'm not sure how strongly I feel about that as it may be possible to design a direct democracy that doesn't have the problems that stem from its simplest form.

Part of making sure everyone feel represented is to structure the government to 50%+1 can't overrule the rest easily and not having direct democracy is part of how we do that. Although I suppose there's no reason you couldn't have non-representative democracy but still require a higher threshold than 50% or a more complicated threshold like 50% of every region for some definition of region (or some other way to slice the population?).

Ballot initiatives are a form of direct democracy and I do think they give a good alternative for when elected legislators fail to be representative... but they also don't provide a way to negotiate details or amend the text, so they often result in poorly written laws. For instance, for the states that voted on recreational marijuana via ballot initiative, those initiatives weren't just "should recreational marijuana be legal", they were "should recreational marijuana be regulated by rules X, Y, Z". Maybe you could have a technological solution to that looks something like liquid democracy and Git forks/pull requests on legislation... but no one has done that, so it's hard to know whether there's actually something feasible in that design space.

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No, not at all!

Democracy doesn’t have to make the perfect decision. It makes a decision, and then gives (the) people a reason to feel bound by the outcome. Revolution can’t provide that on its own.

Fair enough. I was more thinking along the lines that teenagers have had less contact with ordinary life, might be more on social media and online, and so might be relatively more likely to be captured by ideologies without nuance.

I'm saying this as someone who is not much more than a teenager myself, so take that with a grain of salt, I suppose.

Maybe this is morally sound, but it has an obvious drawback.

The expected monetary value of an additional vote is very, very low. This is not going to meaningfully incentivize more children. It will have a much stronger effect on the political landscape, concentrating power in…Utah. Well. Aside from the Mormons, the largest households go to California, Texas, Alaska and Hawaii. No prizes for guessing which of those have the most families in total.

It is possible that a country with “the best” policies actually incentivizes having children. I am skeptical that those policies are going to be implemented by this method of skewing the votes. ~40% of American households already have a child. I’m sure it’s much higher in suburbs with good schools and high property taxes.

Even ignoring everything below the poverty line—your average parents are not actually incentivized to make the system work for everyone! They are best off when they get their kids a comparative advantage, then pull up the ladder. This is visible in good school districts, in the college admissions treadmill, in tax exemptions and NIMBYism. Voting with your feet is always going to be more effective than voting with your, uh, vote.

The expected monetary value of an additional vote is very, very low.

Oh the additional value of a single vote is effectively zero I agree. The point is not that the additional half vote incentives children. The point is that giving votes to parents makes them a stronger voting block, thus making politicians pander to their needs more than they do at the moment and society slowly changes to one that is better for children/worse for those without children than it is at the moment, and that is what incentivises more children.

I gathered that.

Why do you think the bloc of poorest, least educated citizens will enact such policies? Rather than ones that, say, redistribute to them once and then pull up the ladder.

It's not the poorest who'll propose and enact these policies, but rather politicians. Making politicians pander more to parents than they currently do is probably a good thing. Now they could decide to pander to the poorest as a proxy for getting the extra votes parents are given, but why do that when you can be more effective and directly pander to the parents instead?

Making politicians pander more to parents than they currently do is probably a good thing.

Think of the children sucks super hard already. Even as a parent I can say definitively that most of us are tunnel-visioned dum dums once kids are involved.

Now they could decide to pander to the poorest as a proxy for getting the extra votes parents are given, but why do that when you can be more effective and directly pander to the parents instead?

Because the culture war around children is already there. Busing low SES kids into rich neighborhood to fuck up their education (and then painting opposition as racist) is already a well-established tactic. Statistically it seems clear there's a lot of garbage parents out there, and I don't identify as a political bloc with them. They consume a vast amount of resources compared to me and I haven't seen any benefit from it.

(by the way, love the concept and the rise it gets out of people)

It will have a much stronger effect on the political landscape, concentrating power in…Utah. Well. Aside from the Mormons, the largest households go to California, Texas, Alaska and Hawaii.

This policy shouldn't have too much of an effect of political power between states, because elections are not decided by pure popular votes, but are either individual to a state, or are decided by the electoral college, and minors are already counted for allocation of representatives, I believe. It would have much more of an effect on electoral results within any given state.

Fair point. I have a suspicion that it will amplify the advantage of urban centers, but it’s possible that loses out to cost of living. Statista seemed to think Hispanic population was a big driver. I don’t know how that squares with the non-Southwestern states that ranked pretty high, like New Jersey.

I know you're a troll. I know that you're being deliberately smarmy and arrogant to get a rise out of people. I know your racial trumphalism is particularly designed to irritate the far right members of this forum and provoke them, so they react and get banned.

But I just can't help myself. Is this how obese people feel when they walk into a takeaway? Is this how coomers feel when they see a human girl? Is this how you muslims feel when you walk past a primary school?

Such a change would hand more power to minorities in the country allowing them to push for policies that are best for themselves and their children, rather than just what white progressives say are best for themselves and their children.

Parents tend to be more conservative than childless people, controlling for all the usual factors. Giving them extra voting power would almost certainly shift the Overton window rightwards. Expect to see greater focus on tackling crime, nicer neighbourhoods and better schools if such a policy comes to pass.

How is giving minorities more power going to bring about nicer neighborhoods? Do minorities produce especially nice neighborhoods when left alone by White people? What about schools? The usual state of affairs - both on the national and the world stage - is that you destroy what you have and demand access to a White area. What exactly is the mechanism of action for producing nice areas and schools and what are nice areas and schools in this context?

Somehow, I think that what you mean by nice areas and school and what I mean are something completely different.

The idea that more minority voters will reduce crime is so laughable it's not worth discussing.

I know you're a troll. I know that you're being deliberately smarmy and arrogant to get a rise out of people. I know your racial trumphalism is particularly designed to irritate the far right members of this forum and provoke them, so they react and get banned.

He may be all of that, and still you took the bait. Given this is not your first or second or third time being "provoked" in such a manner, consider what it says that that you gave him exactly what he wanted. One week ban for personal antagonism and generalized boo outgroup raging.

He’s not a troll, the deeply ingrained hostility towards non-muslims is entirely genuine. The idea that there’s a mass of moderate well-integrated muslims is the lie. I wonder if the people who peddle it ever talked to your average muslim. I suspect they’re never asking the right questions: about apostates, the place of unbelievers in society, the ‘law of god’ versus law of man, 9/11, or jews.

Although Burdensomecount is rather coy and sophisticated about what his ideal society looks like. Not unlike muslim intellectuals like Tariq Ramadan and Jamal Khashoggi , who say democratization when they mean islamization, and let western idiots believe what they want to believe. Same game the ayatollah played long ago.

He’s not a troll, the deeply ingrained hostility towards non-muslims is entirely genuine.

Yeah he's basically validating the framework of the far right- framing demographic trends as conquest and the like. It's not trolling, it's just acknowledging that the "far right" is correct about the implications of demographic change and BurdensomeCount knows that he can just gloat about it rather than take the mainstream view that this is all going to just result in a slight change of skin color and slightly different gene pool- no big deal.

He's also right that it is ultimately our own fault for letting it happen.

I much prefer @BurdensomeCount's gloating about an imminent conquest which is our fault for allowing to happen, a tough but fair assessment, to @2rafa's "a hundred years from now, Britain's elite may have a slightly different shade, a slightly different gene pool. But, one suspects, they will still attend Wimbledon in July" delusions downplaying the civilizational impact of demographic replacement.

Hey, I would attend Wimbledon in July if I could get tickets easily at reasonable prices. Shit's wild at the moment, Wimbledon debentures (which guarantee you a seat for 5 years) trade for close to 6 figures...

The idea that there’s a mass of moderate well-integrated muslims is the lie.

You’re technically correct, but only because the “moderate, well-integrated” Muslims become apostates.

He’s not a troll, the deeply ingrained hostility towards non-muslims is entirely genuine.

I have no hostility towards non-Muslims. Most of my friends are non-Muslims and I support them living the lives they wish to live. It is not my business to meddle in their affairs, all I ask in return is that they don't meddle in mine.

who say democratization when they mean islamization

Oh God no, Islamization is 100% a bad thing. Like Aristotle I support a happy middle. Western countries have become too godless and need to move back, however most Islamic countries are too Islamic for the modern world and stifling towards those of other faiths as well as many Muslims (including myself) too.

9/11, or jews.

9/11 was bad and it is good the perpetrators got punished and I hope they suffer in hellfire for their sin. This is the 21st century, we do not need to conquer the west with violence, we'll do it with love instead (by having more children than you).

Jews are great for humanity if you ask me. I've had almost completely positive interactions with the Ashkenazi Jews I've had the pleasure to meet. If the Arab Palestinians had control of the land of Israel it would almost certainly be a worse place than it is today in the hands of competent Jews. Basically I consider the Israel to be the only competent state in the ME and competence is something I generally want to see more of in our world. I am unabashedly, 100% pro Israel. If the world was ran by Jews it would be in a far better state than it is at the moment.

What about the other questions, penalty for apostates, and sharia? If "your side" wins, what's your plan for imposing your reformist agenda on your brothers in muhammad without getting killed? Supporting an al-sisi or muhammad bin salman?

As to your hostility, let me put it this way: I guessed your religion long before you revealed anything about yourself. Muslim resentment towards the country they choose to live in really stands out. I don't know if it's a slave morality thing from the “slaves of allah” or just the sheer magnitude of that religion's failures.

about apostates, the place of unbelievers in society, the ‘law of god’ versus law of man

Apostasy is fine, sad but fine. Belief can not and should not be compelled. I'm very very secularized as a person, to the point that compared to my brethren back home I'm practically irreligious (I don't pray 5 times a day, I weak silk and gold, I dance etc.).

Unbelievers have a place in society just as much as anyone else does. An Islamic society should be structured so that being a Muslim is easy, it should not be structured in a way that makes the lives of non-Muslims hard.

To quote Ambrose, "while in Rome, do as the Roman do". Hence while I am in the west I follow the laws of the west, even though they are not my preferred laws (btw, OG Sharia, is also not my preferred social system) and ask others of my faith to do so as well. Naturally I think some of your laws should be changed, but I wish to have them changed through your system for updating laws, namely democracy (much as I dislike it, it's how things are done in your country) rather than violence, hence my support for my people having more children in the west (conversely back home I'm the opposite, I'm like "stop having kids you idiots, condoms exist"; different social and political realities in diferent countries).

Muslim resentment towards the country they choose to live in really stands out.

I would not say I'm resentful at all, I think I have the mentality of a conqueror far more than that of a slave, here to beat you at your own game (democracy) and then rule over what is left. Not personally ruling over your people, I'm too fickle and easily distracted for that, but our culture ruling over yours. I have a very very internal locus of control, I don't believe I am a ward of fate at all, bur that that we make our own luck. The "resentment" is just a tactic that works well on progressives and other assorted whites for getting power for those who are like me, and so I do it and support my people doing it. Much like taking an Aspirin for a headache, I do it because it works, not because I am beholden to some Cult of the Willow. If it stopped working, I would stop doing it. You people only have yourselves to blame for the current state of affairs.

Supporting an al-sisi or muhammad bin salman?

MBS is probably the best thing to come out of Saudi Arabia for a long long time.

A conqueror can be a slave, eg slave-soldiers, mamluks and janissaries. An islamic specialty, though not exclusive to them.

How much control do you really have over your own life? Let’s say you decided to become an apostate. That would have consequences, perhaps even death, if you were ‘out’ and visiting pakistan. Although advocating for a ‘modern’ version of islam publically, expressing admiration for jews etc like you do here, may be enough, if you walked through the wrong neighorhood, pissed off the wrong people.

Therefore you are under constant threat of death, like a slave. The lowest english prole, as a free man, has more control over his own life than you have. It’s acceptable to you to be lower than the elites, but intolerable to be lower than the scum. Hence, your resentment towards them in particular.

No one likes to admit they are powerless slaves compelled by brute force, so you try to convince yourself that apostasy is a ‘sad’ choice you rejected out of your own will. As you say, personally you don’t even go for the whole package, you’re not convinced on a deep level, you stop exactly at the point where they apply the blade.

Therefore you are under constant threat of death, like a slave. The lowest english prole, as a free man, has more control over his own life than you have. It’s acceptable to you to be lower than the elites, but intolerable to be lower than the scum. Hence, your resentment towards them in particular.

I am under constant threat of death of being run over by a bus every time I go out. It doesn't make me tremble in fear. Same with back home in Pakistan. Everyone there is under greater risk of dying in a suicide bomb attack, but people don't let that influence their lives due to how rare such attacks are as well as more pressing concerns.

so you try to convince yourself that apostasy is a ‘sad’ choice you rejected out of your own will.

No. I am an open an proud Freemason, and Freemasonry is also looked at very dimly in Islamic Countries (due to it providing an alternative social group, thus weakening the powers of the mullahs etc). People have been executed for mere membership of our fraternity in Muslim countries. And yet I talk openly about it. I am not a prole and arrange my affairs to minimize my contact with them, they have next to no power over people like me, a single extra peep out of them more than their allotment and the military snaps their spine like a toothpick (yes, this is the military where drinking whisky is basically a stereotype among the higher ranks). Some minor lone wolf attacks happen from time to time and might hurt us if they manage to get past our private security but where we have our house back home there are so many people like me that we have strength in numbers. The probability of me in particular or someone close to me getting hurt, even if I lived there full time, are minimal. Generally though the people that die in these attacks are other proles.

if you walked through the wrong neighorhood, pissed off the wrong people.

Back home we have connections to the "wrong people" you don't want to piss off. And the "wrong people" by and large tend to be more westernized than the unwashed masses. Yes there are parts of the country I would not visit, but that's nothing to do with my belief system, I wouldn't recommend visiting those areas even if you are merely wearing western clothing, that on its own is enough to mark you out.

But the thing is, I would never ever visit those areas in the first place, what ever would they have to offer me?

He is a troll and a muslim.

Wrong.

@BurdensomeCount - Do not engage in this kind of one-word "Nuh uh" back and forth.

@Ioper - Don't engage in low effort ad hominems like this.

I think you could accomplish many of the same goals by giving vote multipliers to property owners, or to property owners with children - and in fact, doing so would likely neutralize many of the dysgenic effects of your proposal, since no one should want to surrender public policy to the whims of crackhead welfare moms and the 7 children that survived the abortion clinic.

Democracy prevents many effective policies from being adopted for fear of the voters, since it requires the highest saint and the filthiest sinner to have the same amount of say in the direction of society, and the sinners far outnumber the saints. We have many examples in the Arab Gulf of prosperous states that are able to provide a good standard of living while refusing to grant the public a voice in governance. By contrast, my system actually does grant some members of the public a say in things.

Democracy prevents many effective policies from being adopted for fear of the voters, since it requires the highest saint and the filthiest sinner to have the same amount of say in the direction of society, and the sinners far outnumber the saints

The real power in your society is defining sinners and saints, and I don't suspect the people who would have it are as virtuous as you make them out to be.

As a practical matter not doing so makes the system unstable. Imagine a town with 5 businesses each owned by a different owner. Each one employs 20 people. So 105 adults voting. And how would they vote? Assuming everyone votes for their own selfish interests, you’d end up voting to tax the businesses into nonexistence and raising wages on top until the businesses close and the town dies.

Property owners already have disproportionate power here in the UK. See all the restrictions on building more to preserve the value of their assets. Giving multiple votes to property owners just stimulates further demand while doing nothing to fix supply issues, while at the same time encourage political parties to suck up to them to the detriment of those who don't own their own place yet.

since no one should want to surrender public policy to the whims of crackhead welfare moms and the 7 children that survived the abortion clinic.

Such people don't vote very much. And anyways the UK just introduced ID requirement legislations to vote that serve to discourage the voting of such people even more (a policy I absolutely agree with). There are other ways to handle the potential dysgenic effects.

The reason such people don't vote very much is that it's embarrassing to court them when they only have the same vote value as everyone else anyway. Under your policy, such people would become kingmakers, and every political party would have a strong incentive to pander to their values and shepherd them to the polls. You may not like the values of the propertied white electorate, but you're deluding yourself if you think making Lakeisha the new fulcrum of Western politics is going to lead to clean streets and safe neighborhoods.

The problem is that wealth is exponentially distributed, the quiverful rich will be vastly outnumbered by the fertile, but impecunious. So even with lower voting participation (easily be fixed interested community organizers) this proposal would on the net increase their voting power share.

The "ID reqs harms voting participation of poor." Seems to be an Anglosphere exclusive belief, as such policies are de rigueur in OECD countries.

The low cost and longevity of IDs means only the most low-functioning are excluded, people who would probably be unable to vote anyway.

I think having a policy like that would create a situation similar to what is going on with gerrymandering. It is not clear to me how giving people with children more voting power is fundamentally(!) different from giving any other group more voting power. So you would create an instrument with which a political party can use political power to gain more political power by giving those demographics that are likely to vote for them in the first place more voting power. Why shouldn't people who put in X hours of community service get an extra vote? Why not veterans or "community organizers" or whatever else? There is no fundamental distinction. Sticking to "one vote per natural person over a certain age" prevents this powergrab from either side.

This policy can be seen as "one vote per natural person full stop" plus parents having the custody of their children's votes where they are expected to vote in their children's best interest, no different to how we expect parents to do many other things in their children's best interests at the moment.

Sticking to "one vote per natural person over a certain age" prevents this powergrab from either side.

It doesn't. The right can take the right to vote away from felons, the left expand it to include non-citizen residents or decrease the voting age.

Given that likelihood to have kids increases the poorer you are, I assumed you would be against the implications of this kind of policy, though correct me if I've misjudged.

Oh, that's definitely an issue with the policy, but I think the other benefits outweigh this drawback by a big amount. Plus poorer people are less likely to vote (probably still true even if you amplify their voting power somewhat) so I don't expect the harm from this to be particularly high, while the benefits from the other things are substantial. You can't have everything 100% unfortunately.

Yeah fair to say. I don’t think i have a strong objection to the policy myself.

I think it’s on the right track. I see the current voting system as a travesty because it no longer requires that you have any stake in the continued success of society. The old version was owning property, and it worked pretty well for the simple reason that if you owned property in a community, you were personally invested in the continued growth and prosperity of that community. Children and businesses likewise give you the same incentive to choose policies that build up the community rather than destroy it.

My solution would be simpler. If your income from government sources is greater than your payment to the government in taxes, you don’t vote. People in that situation have more incentive to vote themselves large payouts for themselves and to lower work requirements such that they don’t have to contribute.

If your income from government sources is greater than your payment to the government in taxes, you don’t vote.

How would you handle people like female homemakers who don't technically earn anything, but which provide valuable services nonetheless?

It might be possible to give a married woman who stays home a vote if you did so by household: married property or business owners get 3 votes, married taxpayers without property get 2, unmarried property/business owners get 2, unmarried renters who own no business get one, welfare recipients get 0.

So overall both parents of a child get half an extra vote that they can use to vote as they wish. Then we can just count the votes after the election, giving 1/2 weighting to the green ballots.

This is the part I disagree with. Much of the benefit of giving a parent the extra vote weight is the investment and stability. Only married parents should get the extra vote.

If you want to get a divorce after having kids, you've proven your future planning unreliable enough. and if you're kids are already harmed by your (or your spouse's) bad decisions, you shouldn't have the benefit of sharing that with the rest of the country.

I think stable marriages is probably a stronger lever than number of children, and would largely mitigating @Walerodim 's hesitation.

My proposal would be something like:

  1. No voting under 26 unless you are married.

  2. If you are married your vote counts 1.5 extra

  3. If you ever divorce your vote reduces to .75, and remarriage doesn't affect this

  4. After age 40, if you are married and did not have children with your spouse, your 1.5 reduces back to 1

  5. After age 60 your vote reduces to 1 regardless.

Obviously that's too complicated to be realistic, but why not throw it out there for fun.

If you want to get a divorce after having kids, you've proven your future planning unreliable enough. and if you're kids are already harmed by your (or your spouse's) bad decisions, you shouldn't have the benefit of sharing that with the rest of the country.

Suppose someone in the marriage is struck by a disease or illness that drastically changes the calculus. Do you make an exception in such cases?

I don't think such a complex solution is workable anyway, but if you start splicing up voting rights beyond "everyone" it's a lossy thing to begin with, and I would worry less about catching edge cases. In this hypothetical, everyone above 25 gets a vote, but there is a general finger on the scale toward stable families, in such a scenario I would be less concerned about the distribution of that finger on the scale. Much like how a landowner requirements don't suggest that no-one without land would be capable of voting, but it's rather a broad brush toward a enfranchising a certain interest.

Abandoning your sick spouse should completely disqualify you from voting if anything.

I'm not talking about that kind of thing. What if they're struck in such a way that their personality fundamentally changes, and you're no longer a good fit?

IMO that doesn't change the calculus. Marriage is a solemn vow to spend your lives together. Even if someone's personality changes, you gotta do your best to uphold that vow IMO.

Sure. But the OP was explicitly about future planning. If we're saying that things outside your control don't matter in this case, then that should be the objection, not "your planning sucks"

Yeah, fair enough. I should've looked more at the thread context.

What about divorce as a method of splitting finances to ensure medical bankruptcy doesn't take the house.

This would represent an extremely small number of edge cases and therefore is not worth calibrating the system around.

I'm more concerned about the "I had an affair because I was bored, now my husband's divorcing me, please toast his votes" demographic.

Do you make an exception in such cases?

"Till death do us part." I think is the line. Even today, when mainstream sees divorce as morally neutral, a man abandoning his sick wife for a healthier partner, is seen as valuing his own interest too much.

Doesn't this contradict the OP's line about "you've proven your future planning unreliable"? If we take this argument, planning doesn't even matter, because something you can't predict has now become an important factor.

Not to keep ragging on you, but does it give you any pause that your proposal massively advantages your own community in terms of political power while disenfranchising those you dislike? Are you impartially proposing something that would better society or do you have a fairly significant conflict of interest?

It would be like me proposing that only people with advanced degrees could vote and rationalizing it in technocratic terms about how we're the most capable, intelligent, whatever parts of society. A master's degree gets you one vote, a PhD gets you 5, people with dual degrees (MD/PhD, etc) get 10, whatever. Sounds plausible, but do you trust me?

does it give you any pause

It gives me no pause because I don't think it's seriously under consideration. If this was turned into a formal proposal tomorrow to be voted on at a Constitutional Convention, I can assure you I would regret the haste at which I spit out the content of my post.

Sounds plausible, but do you trust me?

I do trust that you would find that more aligned with particular object policies that you find better, and would be relieved that you were finally discussing the particulars of policy outcomes at such a level instead of the self-referential fetish over democracy as it's own end entirely.

I would likely disagree with your policy outcomes, and after going back and forth, you and I would settle on everyone getting a vote as a decent and fair compromise. But unlike the real you, we wouldn't think that the compromise was in itself the thing.

while disenfranchising those you dislike?

It has nothing to do with disenfranchising "those" I dislike and the fact that you read it so, is frustratingly uncharitable. This isn't a political test or a race requirement or anything like that. Almost anyone can become married and have kids. Those who chose to have more vested interest in the long term stability of the system.

it is about disenfranchising outcomes I dislike, which, by the way everybody wants. Everybody wants the things they value to be popular and the things they find bad to be suppressed. You do as well.

I highly doubt they'll commit to spending hundreds of thousands or millions on more children so they can cast an extra half vote each in three or four consecutive general elections before the kids turn 18.

Oh I absolutely agree they aren't going to be having more children because of this policy directly giving them an extra half vote. However once this policy has been in place for a few cycles politics/society will have shifted to be more welcoming towards parents/more hostile towards the childless (since politicians play towards groups they can get votes from, and parents will be a more important group under this policy), and that may well encourage such people to have an extra child or so.

In the UK this would probably see a big swing to the left and to Labour, since the big age boundary where people start voting Conservative is around 45-55, and most parents with children aged 0-18 are below this age (average age of parent at birth - for all births, not first child - is 32-33 in the UK).

In the short term yes, but in the long term conservatives would be forced to court the young, unlike now where they are focusing almost exclusively on the old. This would lead to much better outcomes for people aged 20-40 as both parties would be vying strongly for their votes.

This is why I'm against it.

If I could, I would prevent everyone under that $25K threshold from voting at all. These people are basically wards of the state, their opinions are not relevant or useful. The only reason that allowing them to vote makes any sense to me at all is that it may promote stability by giving the poor a sense that they are politically represented. The last thing I want to do is reward them with additional votes because they had children that they can't pay for.

Regarding speculation that this scheme may raise fertility rates, I would regard that as unproven, to put it mildly. I would prefer some country that isn't my own try it out so there's at least some experimental result to go on. In practice, I would expect the actual outcome to just increase the rate of dysgenic policies.

isn't $25k kind of low? $250k would be better - below that most people are really just worker bees whose input for societal decision making is kind of meaningless.

I don't think one's influence on societal decision making tracks particularly well with income. For instance, in Pittsburgh we have a rail trail that runs from downtown to Cumberland, Maryland, where it connects with the C&O Canal Towpath and continues to Washington, DC. The trail was constructed over a 20 year period thanks primarily to local trail chapters who did all of the fundraising and grant writing themselves and coordinated their efforts to complete a project that involved innumerable bridge and tunnel restorations and required significant right-of-way acquisition. In addition to being an exceptional local resource, the trail attracts people from around the country and the world who are looking to do a weeklong ride that doesn't involve significant hills or automotive traffic. It's only possible because of all the mostly anonymous civic-minded people who volunteer to cut the grass and chainsaw downed trees and find novel ways to keep tunnels from icing in the winter without having to close the trail. These are all volunteers and the only requirement for having this kind of power is to show up. Literally. Yeah, you may start at the bottom as a worker bee but if you're willing to do the work then people will start handing more and more responsibility to you.

I'm on the board of a similar nonprofit that involves recreation and we're currently in the midst of a huge project with a lot of moving parts and various state agencies and other nonprofits involved and if I had a problem that required intervention from on high I could get at least two and possibly three politicians up the ass of whatever bureaucrat was in my way, and if the problem went deeper than lack of priority we could probably get targeted legislation passed. I don't know if anyone on the board makes $250k but if they do it's purely incidental. Contrast this with friends of mine who are lawyers making more than $250k because they billed a bunch of hours on some lawsuit that no one has heard about or cares about. Who has more of an impact on society? Or one guy I know who owns a plumbing business that makes a ton of money but I don't think he even votes.

What are your views on requiring people who make under 25K and whose opinions are not relevant or useful, to have to obey laws?

To riff on Ghandi, I think that would be a good idea.

LMAO, that's an excellent comeback.

It's not as good a comeback as you think. Even though the underclass has a higher rate of lawbreaking, that doesn't mean that so many of them are lawbreaking that there are none left who aren't. Why don't you want that portion of them to have a say in the laws that they have to obey?

The Right is allowed to say cities are hell hole slums, that they hate NY city values, and that people making less than 25k are lawless leeches who should be disenfranchised because they're the party of the real working class fighting back against elites who disparage deplorables.

If I assumed they said that, I would be putting words into people's mouths.

Walterodim said he wanted to strip the vote of people making less than 25k because they're basically wards of that state. Romney said 47% of the country is dependent on the government. Ted Cruz famously disparaged New York City values in the 2016 primary. Marjorie Taylor Greene called New York filthy and disgusting.

I suppose I'm conflating all these politicians (and one random commenter) with "the right", but it is an interesting phenomenon that open disparagement of cities and low income people is acceptable on the right at the same time they claim to be anti-elite populist crusaders.

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