However, I disagree with your conclusion in this way: mandatory education almost certainly is a violation of the US Constitution. I don't know if there's ever been a serious attempt to fight it in court, but based on their attitude regarding dictatorial central governmental control, I'd bet that the Founding Fathers would been entirely opposed mandatory education.
Education is mandated at the state level -- it cannot be a violation of the US Constitution unless the Constitution expressly prohibits the states from doing that (which it doesn't). And the Founders, although a collection of various men with a variety of opinions, were overall strongly in favor.
The 16th Ammendment which is the justification for the Income Tax was never properly ratified and has language that can be reasonably interpreted to de-legitimize the current tax code.
To continue with your cake metaphor, mandatory voting means you have to show up to the party, it doesn't mean you have to actually eat it. Informal votes are a thing.
I don’t see why it's so compromising to be oblogated to show up. It doesn’t give the government any real power to do anything.
Wait, what? If I "invited" you to my birthday party and demanded a fine from you if you didn't come, this would be acceptable conduct?
So some systems are better but it won'tmake any difference... because? If it's better, surely it's going to make some difference by definition?
No. The Mona Lisa is better art than Cecilia Jiménez's Jesus, but you could hang either in the Louvre and it wouldn't really make a practical difference.
That's going to be pretty hard to compare entitely different countries or multiple countries change across a significant time, while accounting for all the variables involved. For the purposes of this thread, that's a bit much with everything already going on.
Then consider the possibility that the claims you're making are also "a bit much".
With the US in particular which is effectively a 2 party state bar a couple of enterprising independants there is no point in having a nuanced poll as it is effectively a binary choice, vote Republican or vote Democrat.
To be fair, the two-party system is a consequence of the first-past-the-post process called Duverger's law. (Your own UK politics are unusual in somewhat resisting this effect despite having first-past-the-post elections.)
The changes to the Voting system in the US that would have the biggest positive effect don't concern the actual mechanics of what you actually do in the voting booth. Its in all the background work that leads up to that point.
Make it easier to vote, either by making it a federal holiday or increasing the availablity of postal voting
There's no problem with the availability of postal voting. Everybody's entitled to it. But it's not a solution to the problem of unmotivated voters. It takes more motivation to remember to vote in advance than it does to turn up at a polling station on Election Day.
Standardised Identification rules across the Union. If a driving licence allows you to vote in Wyoming the same driversID should be acceptable in Texas.
In most states, no ID is required to vote. The institution in some states of rules requiring proof of identity is recent, controversial, and politically motivated.
And if you're registered to vote in Wyoming, you can't vote in Texas. Because, y'know, you're already registered in Wyoming. If you happen to be in Texas on Election Day, that's what absentee ballots are for.
Reduce the amount of Gerrymandering to reduce the amount of safe seats. If the parties aren't guarenteed a seat year in, year out they should pay attention more.
Lastly try and find some way of making the damn thing cheaper, as the old saying goes he who pays the piper picks the tune. The only people who can currently afford to pay the piper are the large multinationals/multibillionaires and they again have vastly different concerns than the masses and if your local Senator/Representative needs to go to them every 4 years in order to get money out of them they are going to have to play ball when it comes to getting certain bits of legislation passed or dropped.
I know it's weird for me to say with one of the wealthiest presidents ever (maybe) currently sitting in the Oval Office, but Trump's victory is actually proof that this isn't true. The Clinton campaign was vastly better funded and organized than the Trump campaign. Major conservative donors shunned Trump for a long time. The Koch brothers, the big bogeymen of the rich right, never backed him. Trump won because the masses didn't care.
False. People have the privilege of participating in it. You're not doing anything wrong if you choose not to vote, any more than you're doing something wrong if you choose not to eat cake on your birthday. The cake is a gift. You can do what you like with it. To make cake-eating mandatory is to utterly miss the point. In fact, it's even worse than that: voting is the foundation of your power over the government, so for the government to exercise its power to compel a vote is downright perverse.
So do you genuinely believe all major proposed voting systems are truly equally good?
No. But I don't think they make a significant practical difference. The same first-past-the-post voting system elected both Franklin Roosevelt and Donald Trump. The same parliamentary proportional system elected both Angela Merkel and Adolf Hitler. You are not going to improve the quality of governance by adding a few flourishes to the rules of the voting game.
If for no other reason, I think being able to cast preferences may encourage people to vote more because they don't have to commit to a single candidate.
You shouldn't have to say "I think" here. This is an objective and testable hypothesis. Do the voter turnout data bear it out?
2: Every voting system has its mathematical upsides and downsides.
That's not really an answer.
There is no right answer. They all have their undesirable quirks -- it's been proven mathematically that it is impossible to meet all the criteria for a desirable voting system. Instant-runoff voting, for instance, does not meet the monotonicity criterion: it is possible to harm a candidate's chances of winning by ranking them higher.
Paying taxes is not a right, it is a responsibility.
Sending your children to school is not a right, it is a responsibility.
Voting is a right. When you make it a responsibility, it is no longer a right. You are proposing eliminating voting rights.
Or from the empirical/pragmatic standpoint:
Compulsory taxation vastly improves a country's governmental performance. Look at the U.S. government 1776-1788 compared to the U.S. government post-1788.
Compulsory education vastly improves a country's social and economic performance. Look at European society in the 18th Century compared to European society in the 20th.
Compulsory voting does not vastly improve a country's political performance. Look Australian politics compared to German politics, or Argentine politics compared to Canadian politics, or Brazilian politics compared to Swedish politics.
So when you're proposing violating the citizenry's civil rights, you can argue that it's just a teeny-tiny little violation, but even if it is, there's still no reason for doing it.
1: Hell yes.
2: Every voting system has its mathematical upsides and downsides.
3: No. Australia, I hate to break it to you, but you are violating your citizens' civil rights by making voting mandatory.
Today (3/14) is Pi Day. But only in base 10. Which is a pretty lame base, when you think about it. 10 doesn't have many factors: only 1, 2, 5, and itself. So if you want to talk about a half or a fifth of something with a decimal, you're fine, but if you want to talk about a third or a fourth, you're going to run into some complications. The British in their infinite wisdom understood this. It's why there are twelve inches in a foot rather than ten: 12 has 3, 4, and 6 as factors. And the French (naturally) didn't. It's why the metric system is terrible, and I can't have a third of a meter of string without having to deal with an infinite repeating decimal.
But enough geopolitics. What is Pi Day in other bases?
In binary (base 2) pi is 11.0010..., and Pi Day is therefore celebrated on March 0th (or January 10th, if you care nothing for accuracy and also kick puppies).
In octal (base 8) pi is 3.1103..., and Pi Day was last Thursday.
In dozenal or duodecimal (base 12), pi is 3.1848... and Pi Day is next Monday.
And in hexadecimal (base 16), pi is 3.243F..., and Pi Day is going to require that March annex the first week of April (but let's face it, April has it coming).
So what is the best base? When is the true Pi Day? Are we going to settle for the inadequacy of base 10 and the metric system? Are we going to cling to binary or hex because it's what our computers tell us to do? Are we going to embrace the factorizing possibilities of dozenal? Are we going to go way back to the sexagesimal system of fallen Babylon? Or are we going to go really crazy and say, "No, it's heptary, Pi Day is on the 6th!"?
As this thread has repeatedly ventured beyond the realm of philosophical discussion, we have decided in the interest of everyone's safety and peace of mind to bring it to a close. Once again:
If you are thinking about harming yourself or attempting suicide, tell someone who can help right away.
Call your doctor’s office.
Call 911 for emergency services.
Go to the nearest hospital emergency room.
In the US, call the toll-free, 24-hour hotline of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255) to be connected to a trained counselor at a suicide crisis center nearest you.
To find a suicide helpline outside the U.S., visit IASP and Suicide.org
It is not unreasonable to ask a family member or friend to help you make these calls or take you to the hospital.
If you have a family member or friend who is suicidal, do not leave him or her alone.Try to get the person to seek help immediately from an emergency room, physician, or mental health professional. Take seriously any comments about suicide or wishing to die. Even if you do not believe your family member or friend will actually attempt suicide, the person is clearly in distress and can benefit from your help in receiving mental health treatment.
Whether the end of hardship has value or not, it is still something that all of life seems to strive for. Most organisms have some function or another that is used to avoid hardship.
Doesn't this kind of give up the game? If you're taking the things that all of life strives for as things that we ought to strive for, then what does all of life strive for more than life itself? Do you know what hardship organisms will willingly suffer to stay alive? Have you ever seen a trapped animal gnaw off its own limb rather than die in the trap?
And even if you're not impressed by such anecdotes, have you given a thought to the underlying evolutionary theory? Does it make any scientific sense at all for organisms' functions to be aimed at avoiding hardship, as opposed to sustaining life? What exactly is the selection pressure for that supposed to be? And isn't hardship itself just another one of those functions? Where do you think the sensations of pain and suffering come from, if not evolved features of your nervous system responding to certain environmental stimuli? So why do you think those features evolved? If all life is striving to avoid hardship, wouldn't the best way to do that be never evolving hardship in the first place? But since these features did evolve, is it possible that they evolved because they help keep us alive? Could it be that we feel pain as a signal to avoid dangerous things that might injure or kill us? And if so, wouldn't dying as a response to pain be completely missing the point?
Yes it is logically possible for you to gain something by dying, by losing what was causing you pain and suffering in life. By losing everything, even "you", you gain an end to your suffering and pain.
But there is no "you", so who exactly is gaining? If there's nobody to gain, then how can there be any gain? What logic is there in holding simultaneously that "X has property Y" and "X does not exist"? How can both be true?
I would prefer answers rather than a series of questions that don't address my point.
I think if you're going to ask questions, you should be prepared to answer them as well. Try answering mine. You may find that they address your point after all. I mean, just for starters, I very explicitly suggested an answer to your original question using the words "how is this not a perfectly sufficient answer to your original question", so I'm quite unperturbed by complaints that I didn't do that, and rather more perturbed by the implication that you didn't read it.
Giving something value which has no value in itself is irrational.
If the value of something is what you assign to it, how is it rational to expect the value to be in the thing before you've assigned value to it? If I established that books are written by human authors, and then immediately afterwards claimed that an author should only write a book if it has already been written by some nonhuman means, would that make any sense to you?
It's about the same thing as believing in the existence of god.
What about believing in the existence of belief? Since the act of valuing is what generates value, and the act of believing is what generates belief, but the act of believing in God doesn't generate God, doesn't belief seem like a better analogy here than God?
Based on their view you have much to gain from dying since you aren't burdened by hope or suffering or the empty promises that it will "get better".
How is it even logically possible for you to gain anything from dying when dying is by definition the event after which there is no "you" to gain or lose or indeed possess any properties whatsoever? Can you improve a car's performance by destroying the car?
That implies there is an objectively "best" way to live, which there isn't. It also doesn't explain how despite how much worse off our ancestors were they still decided to stick around.
In sentence one, you deny the reality of objective metrics for life. In sentence two, you claim that our ancestors' lives were worse than ours according to some metric. There seems to be a contradiction here. How, exactly, were our ancestors worse off? If our ancestors were worse off, doesn't that imply that we're better off? If we're better off, might our descendants someday achieve a best, or at least continue to make progress towards it? And conversely, if there are no objective metrics, how can our ancestors have been worse off? If they weren't any worse off, what is there to explain about their lives and decisions?
It's assuming life has an inherent value by living it when it really does not. It simply is. Living it does not give it value, it's merely acting according to biology.
Whence "merely"? What is insufficient about biology (or anything else on the table) as an external source of value? What possible external source of value would be sufficient? When you look for external sources of value, what are you expecting to find and not finding? And why are your expectations where they are? Could it be those expectations that are the trouble? And if there are no external sources of value, if value really does come from the self, so what? Is internally-sourced value less real or less valuable than externally-sourced value? If so, how so? If not, how is it not a perfectly sufficient answer to your original question?
Seriously, though, the exception for non-Muslims makes it on its face unconstitutional. And thus far it hasn't survived any legal challenges.
To be fair, the challenges so far have mostly been on narrow procedural matters, the exemption isn't explicitly for non-Muslims, and the law does give the president very broad authority over immigration. I do expect it to lose in the Supreme Court, especially with the precedent of Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, but there's just enough wiggle room there that I'm prepared for disappointment. Especially if Trump issues a "brand new" order which fixes the due process problems that, as Lithl said, make the current one particularly radioactive to judges.
And yes, challenging presidential power is a Good Thing. And I would say that regardless of who controlled which branches of government.
When I objected to Obama's executive shenanigans, you would not believe how many liberals were like, "No, it's okay, because he's using this power for good!"
"You would not believe" is an empty idiom, by the way. I'm quite sure you do believe it.
But yeah, the power of the executive order has been ballooning for many administrations now. If there's any silver lining to Trump's excesses, it may be that they finally wake people up to the problem.
The presidents job is to protect the rights and well being of the AMERICAN people and if suspending an aliens entry is key to doing so, then he has every right to.
That's a pretty big "if".
Obama never suspended entry from these seven countries, and no visitor or immigrant from these seven countries committed a lethal terrorist attack on American soil during the Obama Administration.
Bush never suspended entry from these seven countries, and no visitor or immigrant from these seven countries committed a lethal terrorist attack on American soil during the Bush Administration.
Clinton never suspended entry from these seven countries, and no visitor or immigrant from these seven countries committed a lethal terrorist attack on American soil during the Clinton Administration.
Reagan never suspended entry from these seven countries, and no visitor or immigrant from these seven countries committed a lethal terrorist attack on American soil during the Reagan Administration.
In fact, no president has ever suspended entry from these seven countries, and no visitor or immigrant from these seven countries has ever committed a lethal terrorist attack on American soil.
So you will understand that it is very difficult to swallow the claim that suspending entry from these seven countries is suddenly "key" to protecting our rights and well being. I myself have lived my entire life in this country and have not even once been murdered in my bed by a crazed Somali.
False on both counts.
You really haven't.
You're the one proposing the change. The onus is on you to demonstrate that it does. "I think... I think... I think..." is not going to cut it.
No. The Mona Lisa is better art than Cecilia Jiménez's Jesus, but you could hang either in the Louvre and it wouldn't really make a practical difference.
Then consider the possibility that the claims you're making are also "a bit much".
Yup.
There's no problem with the availability of postal voting. Everybody's entitled to it. But it's not a solution to the problem of unmotivated voters. It takes more motivation to remember to vote in advance than it does to turn up at a polling station on Election Day.
In most states, no ID is required to vote. The institution in some states of rules requiring proof of identity is recent, controversial, and politically motivated.
And if you're registered to vote in Wyoming, you can't vote in Texas. Because, y'know, you're already registered in Wyoming. If you happen to be in Texas on Election Day, that's what absentee ballots are for.
This is a big one.
I know it's weird for me to say with one of the wealthiest presidents ever (maybe) currently sitting in the Oval Office, but Trump's victory is actually proof that this isn't true. The Clinton campaign was vastly better funded and organized than the Trump campaign. Major conservative donors shunned Trump for a long time. The Koch brothers, the big bogeymen of the rich right, never backed him. Trump won because the masses didn't care.
False. People have the privilege of participating in it. You're not doing anything wrong if you choose not to vote, any more than you're doing something wrong if you choose not to eat cake on your birthday. The cake is a gift. You can do what you like with it. To make cake-eating mandatory is to utterly miss the point. In fact, it's even worse than that: voting is the foundation of your power over the government, so for the government to exercise its power to compel a vote is downright perverse.
I have just pointed out that the empirical evidence suggests it doesn't help.
No. But I don't think they make a significant practical difference. The same first-past-the-post voting system elected both Franklin Roosevelt and Donald Trump. The same parliamentary proportional system elected both Angela Merkel and Adolf Hitler. You are not going to improve the quality of governance by adding a few flourishes to the rules of the voting game.
You shouldn't have to say "I think" here. This is an objective and testable hypothesis. Do the voter turnout data bear it out?
Sending your children to school is not a right, it is a responsibility.
Voting is a right. When you make it a responsibility, it is no longer a right. You are proposing eliminating voting rights.
Or from the empirical/pragmatic standpoint:
Compulsory taxation vastly improves a country's governmental performance. Look at the U.S. government 1776-1788 compared to the U.S. government post-1788.
Compulsory education vastly improves a country's social and economic performance. Look at European society in the 18th Century compared to European society in the 20th.
Compulsory voting does not vastly improve a country's political performance. Look Australian politics compared to German politics, or Argentine politics compared to Canadian politics, or Brazilian politics compared to Swedish politics.
So when you're proposing violating the citizenry's civil rights, you can argue that it's just a teeny-tiny little violation, but even if it is, there's still no reason for doing it.
2: Every voting system has its mathematical upsides and downsides.
3: No. Australia, I hate to break it to you, but you are violating your citizens' civil rights by making voting mandatory.
But enough geopolitics. What is Pi Day in other bases?
In binary (base 2) pi is 11.0010..., and Pi Day is therefore celebrated on March 0th (or January 10th, if you care nothing for accuracy and also kick puppies).
In octal (base 8) pi is 3.1103..., and Pi Day was last Thursday.
In dozenal or duodecimal (base 12), pi is 3.1848... and Pi Day is next Monday.
And in hexadecimal (base 16), pi is 3.243F..., and Pi Day is going to require that March annex the first week of April (but let's face it, April has it coming).
So what is the best base? When is the true Pi Day? Are we going to settle for the inadequacy of base 10 and the metric system? Are we going to cling to binary or hex because it's what our computers tell us to do? Are we going to embrace the factorizing possibilities of dozenal? Are we going to go way back to the sexagesimal system of fallen Babylon? Or are we going to go really crazy and say, "No, it's heptary, Pi Day is on the 6th!"?
And even if you're not impressed by such anecdotes, have you given a thought to the underlying evolutionary theory? Does it make any scientific sense at all for organisms' functions to be aimed at avoiding hardship, as opposed to sustaining life? What exactly is the selection pressure for that supposed to be? And isn't hardship itself just another one of those functions? Where do you think the sensations of pain and suffering come from, if not evolved features of your nervous system responding to certain environmental stimuli? So why do you think those features evolved? If all life is striving to avoid hardship, wouldn't the best way to do that be never evolving hardship in the first place? But since these features did evolve, is it possible that they evolved because they help keep us alive? Could it be that we feel pain as a signal to avoid dangerous things that might injure or kill us? And if so, wouldn't dying as a response to pain be completely missing the point?
But there is no "you", so who exactly is gaining? If there's nobody to gain, then how can there be any gain? What logic is there in holding simultaneously that "X has property Y" and "X does not exist"? How can both be true?
Why do I need to address promises I haven't made?
Have you considered the possibility that pain might map to a different property in the analogy, one which the car does possess?
You don't think questions about what value is and where it comes from are relevant to your point that life allegedly has no value?
If the value of something is what you assign to it, how is it rational to expect the value to be in the thing before you've assigned value to it? If I established that books are written by human authors, and then immediately afterwards claimed that an author should only write a book if it has already been written by some nonhuman means, would that make any sense to you?
What about believing in the existence of belief? Since the act of valuing is what generates value, and the act of believing is what generates belief, but the act of believing in God doesn't generate God, doesn't belief seem like a better analogy here than God?
How is it even logically possible for you to gain anything from dying when dying is by definition the event after which there is no "you" to gain or lose or indeed possess any properties whatsoever? Can you improve a car's performance by destroying the car?
What's the point of avoiding struggle? How can the end of hardship have any value if there is no such thing as value?
Whence "merely"? What is insufficient about biology (or anything else on the table) as an external source of value? What possible external source of value would be sufficient? When you look for external sources of value, what are you expecting to find and not finding? And why are your expectations where they are? Could it be those expectations that are the trouble? And if there are no external sources of value, if value really does come from the self, so what? Is internally-sourced value less real or less valuable than externally-sourced value? If so, how so? If not, how is it not a perfectly sufficient answer to your original question?
When I objected to Obama's executive shenanigans, you would not believe how many liberals were like, "No, it's okay, because he's using this power for good!"
"You would not believe" is an empty idiom, by the way. I'm quite sure you do believe it.
But yeah, the power of the executive order has been ballooning for many administrations now. If there's any silver lining to Trump's excesses, it may be that they finally wake people up to the problem.
Obama never suspended entry from these seven countries, and no visitor or immigrant from these seven countries committed a lethal terrorist attack on American soil during the Obama Administration.
Bush never suspended entry from these seven countries, and no visitor or immigrant from these seven countries committed a lethal terrorist attack on American soil during the Bush Administration.
Clinton never suspended entry from these seven countries, and no visitor or immigrant from these seven countries committed a lethal terrorist attack on American soil during the Clinton Administration.
Reagan never suspended entry from these seven countries, and no visitor or immigrant from these seven countries committed a lethal terrorist attack on American soil during the Reagan Administration.
In fact, no president has ever suspended entry from these seven countries, and no visitor or immigrant from these seven countries has ever committed a lethal terrorist attack on American soil.
So you will understand that it is very difficult to swallow the claim that suspending entry from these seven countries is suddenly "key" to protecting our rights and well being. I myself have lived my entire life in this country and have not even once been murdered in my bed by a crazed Somali.