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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Expanding it does not lead to improved outcomes

Improved outcomes for whom? Politics is about competing interests; there are very few issues on which there is a single "common good," and even fewer where that common good is knowable. Saying that "group X should not be allowed to vote" is saying that group X's interests do not matter. And, although as a person who is both more highly educated and better read than the average person, I might know a lot more about a lot of things than most people, but I almost certainly know less than they do about what their interests are.

I'm comfortable saying as a matter of policy that serious enough crimes have you constructively banished from society. Since we lack the capability to actually cast people out into the wilderness or deport them to the unsettled frontier, we do this by declaring their interests to not matter to the rest of society. They are free to remove themselves if they don't like it.