Not letting convicts or ex-convicts vote is discriminatory. Why should they not be allowed to vote, when their quality of life is affected by politics, too? If their lives are not worthy, then why are we feeding them, housing them and providing them medical care? Since voting is an essential function of being a citizen of the country, it is as if convicts are not considered valid citizens, in which case perhaps they should all be exiled rather than fed and sheltered.
Furthermore, not allowing them to vote can effect, to some degree, a self-perpetuating tyranny of that faction of people who do not commit so-called crimes—that is, the same faction of people who, by voting, can determine what actually constitute a “crime” as well as what the punishments are. Some things may be able to continue to be regarded as crimes that it is actually unjust, or not in the popular interest, to consider to be crimes, because those who commit the crimes are barred from voting.
Here’s an example: let’s say 40% of people think smoking marijuana should be a felony, while 60% think it’s just fine. The 60% who think it’s fine are convicted for smoking marijuana because it’s illegal, while the 40% not in jail continue to exclusively vote on legislation and legislators that keep marijuana being a felony. The numbers chosen here may be a hyperbolic extreme, but the point is that the general effect they illustrate may actually occur to some degree or another.
Another important example is prison reform. The conditions people have to live under in prisons are deplorable, but if convicts and ex-convicts can’t vote, then there’s nobody to stand up for the people subjected to the unacceptable conditions of the prison environment.
People think that they’re doing the humanitarian thing by encouraging people to vote, such as by public announcements.. In some countries it is even required that their citizens vote. This doesn’t make sense. If, for example, 70% of eligible people vote instead of 50%, then that’s not going to affect the outcome of the election for the better unless the extra people who wouldn’t have otherwise voted vote are more likely to vote for the better candidate.
In other words, the principle of statistical sampling says that if fewer people vote it shouldn’t make much of a difference, unless you have sampling bias. So, for more people to vote to affect the outcome for the better, those extra people must be better, on average, at voting for the better candidate than the base of people who are going to vote anyway.
In numbers: if, say, 40% of people like candidate A, and 60% like candidate B, and 50% of people vote, and then you change it so that 70% of people vote, that’s still 40% of those 70% of people liking candidate A and 60% liking candidate B. Nothing’s changed. Candidate B has the same advantage. When it changes is when there’s some probabilistic correlation between being one of those people who wouldn’t have voted otherwise and voting for a particular candidate.
Say 50% vote, 40% of whom vote for candidate A and 60% of whom vote for candidate B, and then you encourage another 20% to vote, and 50% of those people like candidate A and 50% like candidate B. Then you’ve actually changed something. But have you changed it for the better? Let’s analyze that for a moment..
Who is most likely to vote already, without having to be encouraged? Those who are more passionate about politics are. Who is likely to be more informed? Those who are more passionate about politics are. Who is more likely to vote auspiciously? Those who are more informed. Therefore, by aimlessly encouraging people to vote, you’ve added a bias of uninformed opinions (or subtracted that of informed opinions—semantics). So, what have you just done? You’ve probably hurt the prosperity of your nation, if you’ve made any difference at all. So, I would suggest not encouraging people to vote, unless you know whom you’re targeting.
To be fair, though, in actuality, conservative boomers with lots of hatred and conviction probably vote more than millennials who are disillusioned with the whole system. And, more generally, they say those who are most ignorant tend to be the most sure of themselves. So, so encouraging people to vote is probably a good thing in practice.
Logically, whether you encourage people to vote should depend on whether those who would be compelled to vote are more likely to be on your side. And on another level, obviously, whether you should convince people to vote if those people would likely vote for your party depends on whether you subscribe to the correct (i.e., most beneficial for everybody overall) party. So, if you’re a Republican, please ignore this message. ;)
I just realized I’ve said more on the subject already here, but in this short essay I’ll take a different (and more trivial) approach.
Astrophysicists seem to say that it’s unknown whether the universe is finite or infinite, such as in this answer: https://www.quora.com/Infinity/Is-the-universe-finite-or-infinite-1/answer/Frank-Heile. But if infinity is not a number and not the same type of value as any finite amount, and no amount of counting or addition can get from a finite amount to infinity, then isn’t it impossible for the universe to be infinite? If the universe is infinite, then infinity is the quantity of mass-energy or information in the universe, yet we are able to measure and observe finite parts of the physical universe, and these two types of quantities are incompatible—they can’t exist on the same scalarity.
In order for the universe to be infinite, it needs to be at least theoretically possible to observe an infinite amount of it, because by the very epistemic nature of existence it makes no sense to say that something exists if we can’t even in principle be affected by it (I explain why this is the case in my essay linked to above, and also in this essay: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2023/06/17/on-the-meaning-of-exists/.) But, since infinity and the finite cannot exist on the same scalarity, it’s impossible to start at a viewpoint of some finite part of the world and keep expanding its breadth until finally you reach a viewpoint where you can observe an infinite slice of the universe.
Also—and I think this is actually closely related to the above points—the axiom of choice has to be metaphysically assumed in order to be able to find yourself observing any particular limited part of the universe if the universe is infinite, and the axiom of choice is problematic in constructivist mathematics, and I’ve shown that mathematical Platonism, which is basically everything that’s not constructivism, is silly here. (Yes, this point is rather tenuous, as I’m crossing domains between mathematics and metaphysics.)
However, if there is a multiverse, the universes contained therein don’t necessarily have a spatial (or temporal?) relationship to each other, so its infinitude wouldn’t have to exist on the same scale as our finitude, so it’s entirely possible that the multiverse is infinite. (Except that I contradict myself because if we can’t ever observe an infinite multiverse infinitely then it can’t exist by my definition of “exists.” Oh well.)
Similarly, if there is a spiritual reality beyond the physical universe, it could be infinite because measurement on such a plane is subjective and malleable by mind anyway, so the concept of consistency across all scales of measurement breaks down.
Guns are devices made solely for the purpose of killing fellow human beings (or, in some cases, animals, sometimes just for fun). Being passionate about guns is about the lowest on the scale of emotional and spiritual advancement you can get. It’s disgusting that they even exist, let alone that so many people actually want to own them.
People argue that guns are necessary for self-protection, but the statistics speak for themselves: you’re about nine times more likely to kill a family member with a gun than you are to kill an intruder. I can only imagine that everyone who buys a gun for their home reasons, “well, that wouldn’t be me; I’m more careful than that,” but only a small proportion of the people who reason that can be right.
And how is the world safe when any old exchange of nasty words or bar fight or street skirmish can easily escalate into a gun fight?
People argue that we need guns to protect us against a rogue government, but that’s silly: the government has a military with machine guns, bombs, tear gas, Apache helicopters, full body protection, etc. If for some reason there were an all-out war between people with guns and the government, the people with guns wouldn’t stand a chance. The right to a “well-regulated militia” is outdated.
People appeal to the constitution, particularly the second amendment, as a reason we should have guns, but the context and reasons that was written for are obsolete now. It’s time to update the constitution. Besides, only in America is it seen as so important that the country be fundamentally directed by a 200-year-old document. To other peoples in the world this is seen as strange.
People argue that if guns are outlawed then only outlaws have guns, but the truth is that guns would be much more sparse in general, and therefore there would be much less gun violence and murder. In Australia, where gun ownership is illegal, getting a gun on the black market will cost a criminal $15,000. People argue that gun crime increased after gun ownership was made illegal in Australia, but that’s only due to misleading statistics: there was a large massacre shortly before gun ownership was made illegal called the Port Arthur massacre, which was actually the reason that Australia banned guns in the first place, and those murders were included in the gun-related homicide rates for that year.
People say, “guns don’t kill people; people kill people,” but this is merely semantics. The situation of people using guns to kill people can be understood perfectly without appealing to a particular verbal framing of the issue. Leave it to the low-intelligence-having gun advocates to rely on sophistry such as this. Nuclear bombs don’t kill people; people kill people (with nuclear bombs), so why not make it legal for people to make home-made nuclear bombs?
People say that if it weren’t for guns people would just kill each other in different ways, but it’s a no-brainer that guns make it many times easier to kill, and the easier it is to kill someone the more murders there will be.
People consider it a basic right to own a gun, not realizing that guns are essentially devices of terror and destruction, much like grenades, sarin or the atom bomb, only to a lesser degree, while the underlying principle is the same. Where should we draw the line? Why make it arbitrarily between guns and grenades, if the right is somehow absolute, natural or self-evident?
Just to illustrate how absurd society’s regard of guns is, in Austin, TX it’s legal to carry guns but illegal to sex toys. Dildos are considered a more existential threat than murder/homicide machines. In another example, some books are banned in the US while guns aren’t. Thoughts and free speech are considered more dangerous than killing devices.
Another rationalization for owning guns is that if everybody owned a gun then everybody would be safe from everyone else who owns a gun. Talk about upping the ante on mutual fear and threat… this reasoning is so ridiculous I can’t even put into words why because it should be blatantly obvious. It’s not sane and it’s not human. Besides, gun totin’ is a distinctly male interest, males being the more violent and aggressive of the two sexes. What are women going to do to protect themselves from men with guns?
I think the people in society whom we have to fear the most is police. They operate above the law (not officially, but in practice) and kill and beat up innocent people routinely and lie about it in court. (And even when they are found to be at fault, they’re not liable in the way that citizens are; they only risk losing their job, and only in their particular precinct.) Anyone wise would be nervous just being around them. They’d be a lot more innocuous if they weren’t allowed to have guns. Citizens could feel safe instead of constantly oppressed by the police as if in a police state. It works just fine in England.
We’ve had so many massacres in the US—mostly school massacres—that it doesn’t even faze us anymore when one happens. At least taking away assault rifles, which have no legitimate purpose, would greatly assuage this situation, but we can’t seem to be able to do that because the (purely evil) NRA has a lot of funding and is very effective at targeting specific politicians to vote for or against to keep this from happening.
