The Real problem with cancel culture

[crazy canuck]

Devil's advocate time:  when there is a referendum on the ballot for restoring the voting rights of convicted felons, is it democratic?

That is a tricky one. I would argue that they should get a vote for sure, but I know I am a minority there.

But then, I would also vote to restore their voting rights anyway, since I think it is insane that anyone should ever lose the right to vote. It is, IMO, a fundamental right that cannot and should not ever be taken away.

But I would recognize that voting about voting, of course, is something of a special case.

If we held a vote to lower the voting age to 14, should 14-17 year olds get to vote on it?

I agree with all of your post.

[Valmy]

Most of the states seceded just on legislative bills, like they were passing an law on school textbooks or something and some of them were very close. Georgia just barely seceded with a tiny majority of the delegates and then didn't even have a referendum, and I have heard even that tiny majority had some irregularities in how it was created. That is about as bullshit of a secession vote as you can find. And sometimes if the vote did not go the way the secessionists wanted they would just have another one a short time later. The secessionists were crushed in the Tennessee referendum but oops that didn't count better have another. Maryland voted down secession three times before the Feds finally put an end to that nonsense.

Whether or not it was "democratic" among white men varies from state to state in the secession crisis. I don't see how you can look at it objectively as some kind of clean democratic mandate across the board.

[Habbaku]

Most of the states seceded just on legislative bills, like they were passing an law on school textbooks or something and some of them were very close. Georgia just barely seceded with a tiny majority of the delegates and then didn't even have a referendum, and I have heard even that tiny majority had some irregularities in how it was created. That is about as bullshit of a secession vote as you can find

And during the war, our Governor effectively seceded from Davis's government while still being part of the CSA. Georgian history during the war is really weird.

[Sheilbh]

Devil's advocate time:  when there is a referendum on the ballot for restoring the voting rights of convicted felons, is it democratic?

I find the idea of people who have served their sentence absolutely wrong. To my mind that is the purpose of prison - it's to serve your time after which you return to society. There may be some restrictions as part of your probation but I do not think that can include not having the right to vote (or any other political right).

Here there was a controversy because the European Court of Human Rights found that the UK's ban on prisoners voting was against fundamental rights - the issue was that it wasn't proportionate and applied to all prisoners whether they were in indefinitely or for six months. It didn't help that the man who brought the case about his rights being infringed because he couldn't vote was literally an axe murderer   

I think the solution was that basically if you're on "temporary licence" which is basically pre-probation, open prison etc then you're allowed to vote but other prisoners and I think there's indications that is considered proporitionate and not a breach of rights. And that seems about right to me - although I'm not personally particularly troubled by the idea that prisoners serving a custodial sentence can't vote.

But I would recognize that voting about voting, of course, is something of a special case.

If we held a vote to lower the voting age to 14, should 14-17 year olds get to vote on it?

Yeah it's an interesting one. I think for Scottish Parliament and local elections in Scotland they've lowered the franchise to 16 which is one of those things I don't wildly object to, but there also doesn't seem to be much demand and from my understanding turnout hasn't been great.

I think there is a question around democracy in ageing societies and whether we need to start tilting the scales a little in favour of the young in some way or other.

[The Brain]

Devil's advocate time:  when there is a referendum on the ballot for restoring the voting rights of convicted felons, is it democratic?

Why would their voting rights have been removed in the first place?

[Valmy]

Devil's advocate time:  when there is a referendum on the ballot for restoring the voting rights of convicted felons, is it democratic?

Why would their voting rights have been removed in the first place?

Probably some bullshit racist reason that we mostly forgot about.

But I don't know. It always seemed weird. Once you have served your sentence you should be given a second (or third...or fourth...or whatever) chance.

[DGuller]

Devil's advocate time:  when there is a referendum on the ballot for restoring the voting rights of convicted felons, is it democratic?

Why would their voting rights have been removed in the first place?

I know this is a complete non sequitur, but I'll bring something up notheless:

In 2010, the percentage of all Americans with a felony record was 8.11 percent (including three percent who have served time in prison), but for black males the rate was 33 percent (including 15 percent who have been to prison). Additionally, while the absolute number of people with felony convictions increased threefold between 1980 and 2010, it increased fivefold for blacks during that time.

[The Brain]

Devil's advocate time:  when there is a referendum on the ballot for restoring the voting rights of convicted felons, is it democratic?

Why would their voting rights have been removed in the first place?

I know this is a complete non sequitur, but I'll bring something up notheless:

In 2010, the percentage of all Americans with a felony record was 8.11 percent (including three percent who have served time in prison), but for black males the rate was 33 percent (including 15 percent who have been to prison). Additionally, while the absolute number of people with felony convictions increased threefold between 1980 and 2010, it increased fivefold for blacks during that time.

I'm looking for a pattern in America.

In Sweden you get to vote in prison (duh).

[DGuller]

To be fair, though, this quote I provided is a classic example of how you take a good point and dishonestly drive it too far.  Comparing the general population against black males makes the race disparity seem exaggerated, because you have to read it carefully to realize that both the male part and the race part play a role.  I missed it myself the first time.  It's a sleight of hand that implies a fourfold increase in chance of felony conviction for being black, which is an exaggeration of a nevertheless sad reality.

[Admiral Yi]

On cancel culture and the earlier talk of woke being a negative word only used by the anti woke...

BBC News - Don't call young people 'woke', says leading head teacher
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-59347577

I think we've already established that in the US people self identify as woke and the UK they do not.

[Berkut]

Devil's advocate time:  when there is a referendum on the ballot for restoring the voting rights of convicted felons, is it democratic?

That is a tricky one. I would argue that they should get a vote for sure, but I know I am a minority there.

But then, I would also vote to restore their voting rights anyway, since I think it is insane that anyone should ever lose the right to vote. It is, IMO, a fundamental right that cannot and should not ever be taken away.

But I would recognize that voting about voting, of course, is something of a special case.

If we held a vote to lower the voting age to 14, should 14-17 year olds get to vote on it?

I've thought about this some more, and I actually DGs question is really, really well timed - in that it illuminates something pretty important in the discussion, and circles neatly back to the basic question of racism around vipers position.

When we say that 17 year olds should not be allowed to vote, and presumably would not get to vote on whether they get to vote, it is based on a very particular idea about 17 year olds. Or more importantly, a very specific claim about the set of human beings who are under 18.

In a nutshell, it is that humans under some age are broadly not developed, experienced, and <whatever> enough to credibly cast an informed ballot. You can get into arguments about whether that is true, or whether there are other criteria that ought to discriminate more then age. But I don't think anyone would disagree with the observation that a 2 year old should not be voting. Or a 6 year old. Or even a 10 year old. So we have to broadly define some age, and you could make good arguments about what that age ought to be, but I don't think anyone fundamentally disagrees with the idea that there is SOME age under which broadly speaking allowing people younger then that to vote will have a negative impact on our society, including a negative impact on them.

But we are not hiding from the fact that it is in fact a characteristic of that group that we are consciously choosing to discriminate against, and hence we must defend that active choice to deny them a voice on that basis.

Circle back to vipers defense of the Confederacy as a "democratically formed" state. If you are going to insist that it is legitimate, you have to make an argument for why black people were not allowed a say in that vote. At the time, they had no problem making a very specific argument about why - black people were seen as being not fully human, not favored with the same divine rights, and not capable of making informed choices for themselves, and best suited for their position as slaves to the white voters. IE....straight out, unadulterated, racism.

Can you argue that the Confederacy was a democratic state in any meaningful sense without explaining how that can be true without racist justifications? I guess you could in theory, but I cannot imagine what that would look like. Do I think viper is a racist? I actually don't. But I do think he is willfully refusing to square his beliefs because he values his conclusions more then he values intellectual consistency. Because there is no fucking way you can call the Confederacy a democratically formed entity without explaining how that fits into the reality of (in some places) 40% of the population being enslaved and unable to vote on its formation, when the very purpose of its formation was the protection of slavery.

I don't think he is a racist, I do think he is the most obvious example I've ever seen of cognitive dissonance.

[Razgovory]

"My God, Mr. Berkut, you have quarreled with every poster on the forum, and now you are quarreling with yourself!"

[grumbler]

In Sweden you get to vote in prison (duh).

That's the obvious answer, but an American politician that sought to restore that would get crucified by the judgmental majority.

[grumbler]

It should be remembered that slavery was simply the manifest element of the domination of the South by the planter aristocracy.  Wealth was in the form of land and slaves, and wealth properly came to a person by inheritance.  Only the wealthy could afford a good education (even today, southern states are the worst at funding public education and have disproportionately more private schools for the wealthy) and so the planter class wasn't just the planters themselves, but their relatives who made up the professional classes, served as elected representatives, were the judges, etc. 

The problem the southern landed aristocracy faced wasn't the elimination of slavery per se, it was the fact that other sources of great wealth were introduced with the industrial revolution, and this new money threatened the landed aristocracy's monopoly on the levers of power.  Lincoln said that he would not seek the elimination of slavery, but there was nothing to stop "new money" from eventually overtaking "old money" as the wellspring of social power.  Protecting slavery and its association with the "Southern way of life" was the rallying cry, but it really was about maintaining the dominant position of old money.

And that's what Viper is defending so ferociously.

[viper37]

It is not democracy at all if the people who are actually relevant to the question are not allowed to vote on the question.

The US Supreme Court had ruled black people weren't citizens of the US as per the Constitution.  Black men who gained the right to vote lost it by a decade after the civil war, not only in the ex-Confederacy, but also in other States, for State and Federal elections. 

By this reasoning, the US was not a democracy in 1776.  Blacks couldn't vote, women couldn't vote, American indians couldn't vote and Loyalists were intimidated to not pronounce themselves on the issue. The main issues were taxes (which amount and by whom), lands being reserved for French Catholics (Province of Quebec) and Indians, and the attempt to incite to a slave rebellion by promising emancipation to any slave who joined the British army.  By your reasoning, since Blacks, Indians and Women weren't consulted, it wasn't a true democracy that was founded back then.  Yet I know of no serious scholar argueing the US was never a democracy.

When Texas declared and fought for its independance, 95% of their rebel army was white men.  No blacks were allowed to vote.  No Apache or Comanche was asked what he thought of the matter.  The rebellion was directed by slave owners and within a few months of gaining independance, all kind of laws were passed to restrict the rights of Free blacks remaining in Texas.  Yet, it did not prevent the US from annexing the territory and going to war with Mexico over it.  By your reasoning, that would be undemocratic.

When the United States waged war against the Confederacy, its President hadn't been elected by Indigenous communities of the then US, women did not vote for him or any other candidates and most of the US states did not allow universal voting rights for free black men, let alone slaves.

The US did not declare abolition first before calling for volunteers.  The only goal was to preserve the Union at any cost.

When the war was won and the US finally emancipated all slaves in all States, including those loyal to the Union, by your reasoning, it was a non democratic vote, since among the ones concerned were the citizens of the ex-Confederate States who weren't allowed a vote on this matter. 

The "reasons were flawed" is bullshit evasion, and you know it. It has nothing to do with whether the reasons were flawed or not. The reason could be the best possible reasons, but if the vote does not include the people directly impacted by the vote, it is not democracy.

Then by this reasoning, the US wasn't a democracy until the Civil Rights Act.  Indians did not vote on ceding their lands, they were conquered and faced with either extermination or reservation.  Black men did not have universal sufferage in most US States, even in New York, it had to wait by 1870 for them to have universal rights to vote. 

And "fighting to keep the states in the Union" was not even a little bit evil, since the reason the states wanted to leave was so they could make sure to remain undemocratic, rather then acceded to the actual wishes of the actual democratic majority. They seceded, remember, because the majority elected a President they did not like.

The North fought to keep the Confederate States in the Union.  If the Confederates had asked for a guarantee to slavery being a perpetual right for States in exchange of rejoining the Union, the North would have agreed to it.  Don't take my word on it, take Lincoln's word:
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.

On its views on emancipation:
While Lincoln has since been praised for the Proclamation, it was also a war tactic. In freeing all enslaved people, he understood that this would deprive the South of labor, either crippling its economy or encouraging it to stay in the Union. However, he also worried about the consequences of his actions, foreseeing an endemic racial divide in the nation.

You cannot claim to care about democracy while defending the Confederacy for being formed democratically, when they were not, while attacking the Union for fighting to actually defend actual democracy!

You equate democracy with universal voting rights.  They are related, but democracy can certainly exist without it, as it had for centuries.  Nearly all of today's democratic countries forbid voting to women until the late 19th early 20th century.  Most of the countries in the American continent denied voting rights to non white folks for many years after they became a democracy.  I'm unsure of the exact date for Canada, but I think it was only in the 1960s than indigenous women had the right to vote.  Lots of Canadians would disagree that Canada was not a democracy since the 1840s, with the advent of responsible government.

The Union fought to defend its vision of a perpetual union.  It happens so that the States wanting to secede wanted to protect their economic interests, which happened to be slavery, an evil and immoral insitution.

But it does not matter.

No more than it matters that US freed itself of British tyranny to go after the Indian lands it so coveted.  No more than it matters than one of the most important matter to Texians fighting for their freedom from Mexico was the freedom to own slaves in their little corner of the world.

No more than it matters that the US waged a war against its Southern neighbor to secure more lands for its slaves' crops.  It doesn't make the US an evil country (tm), it simply makes it the same as the other countries of its time.

Of course, looking at this particular conflict with our modern eyes, we have a hard time sympathizing with slavers.  Slavery has been abolished for a while now in occidental countries.  Not one of us grew up in a country were slavery was legal.  We weren't raised with slavery being "normal".  Not one of us here grew up in a society where it was socially acceptable to openly discriminate against non white individuals.  And I'm convinced not one of us would tolerate its State making any kind of move to restrict non white folks rights.

But its irrelevant, because we are not looking at the past with today's lense to understand it.  Germany's actions in WWII were evil because they were way outside of the standards of the times.  Ghenghis Khan was no more evil than most conquerors&empires of its time, yet it's death toll would make Hitler drool.

And again, because I'll need to repeat this often: Democracy is not universal voting rights.  Democracy is not 1 individual = 1 vote either.  The Canadian Senate is unlected, yet its as democratic as your non elected presidential cabinet.  Universal voting rights are a modern invention of democracies.  Possibly a natural evolution of the concept.  But it was never the norm, nor is it part of the definition.  Yes, looking at it today, if only Berkut had the right to vote on New York's secession, it would be extremely dumb.  But was it stupid that a King alone could decide the future of his country in the middle ages up to the end of absolute monarchy?  It was kinda the norm back then, one "englightened" individual surrounded by "wise" advisors deciding for everything affecting everyone.  Even today's hardcore monarchists wouldn't tolerate that...  But it was pretty much the rule for centuries, with no major rebellions to topple this dictatorship.

Laws restricting what a woman could do or not do where perfectly democratic even if they didn't vote for it.  Of course they're stupid lookit at it with today's eyes.  Just like a school mandating its teacher refrain from relations with men.  But that's a common mistake, looking at the past with today's lenses.