This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
Well, it seems to me of the concern is about protecting minorities you do that by taking certain things out of the political process (eg bill of rights); not by how you decide the political process. Agree or disagree?
I'm not even sure what you're trying to say. I guess civil rights is a bare minimum I'd hope minority interests being represented in government to accomplish. But there's a lot more to representation than not having basic rights withheld from you.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
deleted
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link