Under-age people can’t vote. Whatever our criterion for thinking them unqualified (eg insufficiently developed reasoning powers or knowledge) there must be some adults less qualified than some under-age people. Is age the only practical threshold or could others be devised?— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) June 8, 2019
Seriously? Let's see, we had the Soviet Vanguard of the Proletariat which led to 40 million dead and a ruined country. We had Mao's Cultural Revolutionaries which wiped out Chinese agriculture and killed something like 60 million. Now we've got the Ivy League / Berkeley geniuses who have bankrupted what seemed like an inexhaustibly wealthy nation with deficit spending and set us at each others' throats with their crazed, intersectionality trash.
Yeah, let's restrict power to the "smart" people.
The problem with being smart is that you are smart only to the upper limits of human ability. You aren't omniscient like God. Mark Steyn once said that the skill set required to manage a 4 trillion dollar organization does not exist. Our Elites prove that right every day.
Instead of making sure only the "smart" people get to vote, we ought to reduce the size and scope of government until the amount of damage the Elites can do to us is recoverable.
But, see, Dawkins is sure that he and his set will get to decide who is and is not smart enough to vote ... and you and I and all the other serious Christians don't make the cut.
ReplyDeleteWell, by definition, since we believe in the Sky Fairy, we're stupid, right?
ReplyDeleteExactly.
ReplyDeleteBut, part of my point is -- watch how quickly he'd change his tune is the criteria is changed from something subjective, such as, "Is this person 'smart' [as I prefer to define the term]?", to something objective, such as, "Does this person affirm the Nicene Creed?"
Whatever our criterion for thinking them unqualified (eg insufficiently developed reasoning powers or knowledge) there must be some adults less qualified than some under-age people.
ReplyDeleteBasic logical flaw- assumes there is only one reason.
"The" reason is that our culture recognizes that children are not mature enough to be held responsible for their actions to the same degree that adults are.
As they cannot have responsibility, they cannot have dependent rights, either.
So a line is drawn to avoid some manipulative idiot from doing a special argument for every single bleepin' advantage he can get.
(So, in a way, "the" reason is....Dawkins.)
As Ilion points out, anybody who can't manage to think "wait, what if the person enforcing this rule is the opposite of me" before proposing it is....well, I'd describe it as being an idiot.