Invisible_Insane said:
I think the distinction between eliminating rights, and a privilege (available to anyone prepared to seek it) that exists on top of a right is an important one.
Stomp away, Besada.
No need. I also think the distinction between eliminating rights and privileges is an important one. We apparently largely disagreed that having votes equally weighted is a right, rather than a privilege. I think it's a right because a) it's the basis of true democracy and b) the SC says it is. I think the first of those is probably the more important.
I was probably too rough on you. I get the frustration. The system is fucked up, and rather than make voters smarter, we appear to be on course to make them continually dumber. And maybe my insistence on protecting the weakest among us will eventually lead to a complete breakdown (or more complete breakdown) of the system. I wouldn't deny that. But I'd rather see the system collapse than be party to creating another underclass, particularly one where we've blunted their most effective weapon. I'll acknowledge it's not a weapon they're actually using much, and that's a tragedy for all of us.
I don't draw many hard lines. Generally speaking, I'm utilitarian and pragmatic. But I do draw the line at punishing the weak and poor for their own abandonment by this country. I've been dirt poor and I've been very wealthy. I grew up with kids who didn't have the same opportunities I had. I see actual faces of real people when we start talking about stuff like this. It's why I respond so strongly. I'm generally open to most wild ideas, particularly if those ideas are shouldered by the strong and the wealthy. Someone else can worry about them. Once we've created a world in which poor children don't have to follow their parents into misery, maybe I'll have time to worry about the middle-class. And once they're safe, I'll gladly turn my political eye to protecting the wealthy.
I'm sorry about being such a prick, though. And I did misunderstand. Sorry about that, too. I do think it probably wouldn't achieve what we desired, even if we could avoid the moral objections. Something like a civics test would be gamed five ways to Sunday by those who wanted to vote, and I suspect it would create another barrier for those who find voting to be a chore. I could be wrong about that, but that's my take on it. I think we want the same things, which is a well-informed electorate who actually cares about voting. I'm not sure how to get that, but I guess incentives could play a role in it.
When I was much younger, I liked the idea of basically paying people to vote in an informed fashion. I imagined we'd have voting terminals in our houses (this was back before the internets and modern digital voting and all the scandals associated with it) and that you'd receive a fractional tax credit every time you both read the multifaceted issue information and voted on an issue. At the time, the League of Women Voters was still a major force in politics, and I always thought they'd be ideal to create the issue packets. Such a system could still be gamed pretty easily, but I thought it nicely balanced the need to be informed and the need to have active voting citizens. And since we would vote from terminals in our homes, it made voting easy enough for anyone.
Such an idea is likely undoable. And maybe it has flaws I don't see. I actually like the idea of positive incentives for voting and educating one's self to vote. I'm just not certain of their efficacy, because every one I've ever heard of or read seems like it would be incredibly easy to game, because there's no way to actually force people to learn. You can test them, but as any college student knows, knowledge and understanding aren't the same thing. You can mandate they read things, but you can't mandate that they absorb them or understand them well enough to use them to synthesize knowledge.
Honestly, I suspect TacticalFox88 has the root cause by the tail in his post upthread. We are a culture that despises learning and knowledge, even though we know that they are the best predictors of personal success. I suspect the culture would need to change before any of these ideas would work, and if it changed, most of these ideas would be unneeded. I have no idea, though, how to change the culture. I'm not sure anyone does. This makes me sad, because I've seen this anti-intellectual streak grow in Americans over my lifetime. We really did once think engineers and scientists were the bee's knees. And now they're virtually synonymous with losers who don't get laid and don't have nice cars. I'm not sure how to combat that.
