Jinn

Will: You're confusing disagreement with some sort of misunderstanding or some sort of inability to "grasp" your point.

I get it, really clearly. Your (and the quoted OP) position in simple form is that "Well, because adults are stupid and easily biased and children generally vote the same way their parents did when they grow up, why not let children vote?"

I get it. I really do. I understand your premise, but I do not agree that it follows. It's an argumentum ad populum, and it's really a problem becuase you're basically saying that it's bad, but since it's bad already, what harm will be done by introducing another bad thing?

Do you honestly believe that increasing the number of uninformed and strongly biased voters will HELP the voting pool? You acknowledge that there is a dramatic problem with under education and bias, and then you posit that we should ADD undereducated and biased MINORS to the pool of potential voters?

And to address your quoted passage, since you think I didn't read it. I read it, but I disagreed on the sentence level and thought it a bit pedantic to pull it apart sentence by sentence.

This premise is unsourced, and for good reason. How does he know this? How is "greater autonomy and responsibility" defined? How much autonomy do they need before they're less likely to be influenced by adults? How do we know they'd even be more likely? Has he done a study on this? Has anyone? Otherwise, it's a conclusion in absense of fact.

"Probably"? He used probably becuase he doesn't know, and neither do I. I'd assume that young children would not be able to value their own judgement, and would likely NOT grow in independence in the absense of parental influence. But since we're both making assumptions in absense of fact, I'm allowed to think that his is wrong.

How does he know this? This is an argument about the future, and about a situation which has never occured. How do we know that coercion would less likely? Or that it would be frowned upon? For this to be true we have to make a lot of assumptions about the "good" nature of humanity, and believe that it holds true always, particularly in politics, where lots of money and lots of ego are involved. And even if it were "frowned upon," how does this prevent it from occuring? Having sex before marriage is "frowned upon" by a lot of people, but it still fucking (pun intended) happens.

This is a ridiculous point that he makes, and seemingly one you support:

Children are NOT good at keeping secrets, especially from their parents. It doesn't "ensure" anything, and it doesn't mean that "no adult" could discover the choice. I doubt many children would not tell their parent who they voted for when threatened with "no supper" or being grounded for a week.

The difference between autonomous adults (no matter how ignorant you think they are [I agree]) and children is that our government cannot suspend the following rights:

Unlawful search
Unlawful detain
False imprisonment
Denial of due process
Denial of free speech
Denial of ...

The list goes on.

The government can't, but parents are allowed to do just about whatever they want to control their children, short of physical abuse. It's a long list. And I think it's a good thing, by the way. Without these controls, there would be a general neutering of parental ability.

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"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel