(urth) re silk is caldo

[Chris]

Aramini said:
"I don't really want to start a riot, but my position on voting is that there are specialized members in every society who are qualified for some tasks but should not be involved in every one.  I do not feel that your average trapeze artist or even banker has any right to have input into government - but they can certainly show you how the trapeze works or how to apply for a loan."

Horribly oversimplified, and this is the kind of oversimplification that you cannot make when you want principles for a stable government.

I would like to introduce to you Proposition 8b, in which marriage is defined as being between a non-banker man and a non-banker woman. Surely you can't imagine that bankers should have any right to have input into this governmental process, right?

Aramini said:
"Similarly I do not want the input of an unconvicted pimp to have equal sway with my words"

Who knows, perhaps the pimp is better educated? But on a serious note: just who, exactly, *should* have equal sway with your words? Which people count for less than you, which count for more, and who gets to decide? If you let ME decide, then don't worry, I'll take care of everything for you.

The phrase "unconvicted pimp" is an unfortunate rhetorical device, because it invokes a situation in which the presumed audience knows that person X is a pimp but the government does not (given that this is what "convicting" someone is *for*). What it suggests is that it's OK, part in parcel, to make decisions about whose vote is worthless in the absence of actual knowledge by the parties making the decision. Something along the lines of "Well, I don't have any proof, but I just *know* he's a bad guy".

Aramini said:
"and since my attitudes are in the minority any vote I make will be peeing into the ocean.  Even if "Every little bit helps" (was that a Wolfe joke for Jonas?).  
 
When your ideas are doomed to the minority and you don't believe the people  should have the right to dictate their governance there is little point."

I'm not going to call it ignorant but it betrays a deep and mistaken presupposition. Roughly speaking, it is the notion that responsibility/power attaches only if your decision is a sufficient condition, on its own, for an event to happen. But the action of societies is collective, and the type of powers/responsibilities in play are of a different fundamental type. And, at any rate, what votes DO in our republic is not quite what most people think of them as doing.

The distribution of votes functions as a matrix that represents the overall values held by society as a whole. And this sways, at least in theory, the policy decisions of the person who is given authority, regardless of which side won. As a mental exercise consider the difference in government we would get if a Democrat, let's say, got elected by a 98% to 2% margin as compared to a 51/48 split or something like that. In the 98/2 case, the populace isn't setting specific policy decisions, but what emerges is that there is an overwhelming consensus about what that society VALUES, and this means that certain agendas based on those values would be pushed much much harder than they otherwise would.



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