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Comment by spraak | Hacker News Reader

> After that, he suggested, things went south because, among other things, women were given the right to vote.

Wow, does Peter Thiel really think that women shouldn't be allowed to vote?

The article is referring to a line from this article: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education...

The line in question: " Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."

How shocking, people who aren't set for life aren't in favor of idiotic "I got mine" libertarian style policies.

There's a certain conservative mentality that delights in being more-reactionary-than-thou.

When I encounter it I tend to say things like "Oh, the real problem started when we adopted agriculture in 6000BC. It was Big Government that wanted us to drop the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and submit to the state. And don't get me started on the invention of reading and writing..."

That's pretty much what the ideology of primitivism is about. They advocate a return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

John Zerzan (/ˈzɜːrzən/, zur-zən; born 1943) is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author. His works criticize agricultural civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocate drawing upon the ways of life of hunter-gatherers as an inspiration for what a free society should look like. Some subjects of his criticism include domestication, language, symbolic thought (such as mathematics and art) and the concept of time. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Zerzan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism

Thank you, that is a fantastic link. I love reading out-there philosophies.

And of course he inspired the Unabomber.

That doesn't necessarily follow, but I'm curious to hear the answer. You can think people should be allowed to do something, but that them doing that thing is harmful.

For example, look at all the people that lamented the fact that plebs voted for Brexit. A lot of anti-democracy talk around the time of that vote.

There's nothing necessarily good about democracy. A majority voting for something doesn't make the outcome legitimate or good. You could ask gay people in California about that.

That's a good point about Brexit because I noted even here on HN a great deal of overt resentment toward people who are older who largely voted #leave - as though their votes were less valid because of their age.

That is a reasonable point if you consider Brexit is a hard-to-reverse decision. Older voters have to live with the consequence of their vote for much less long, and unlike an ordinary political vote, the outcome can't be reversed in another five years. Older voters have a different balance of interests between "Stick it up the bureaucrats to blow steam off" and "Irreversibly change the UK's relationship with Europe" than younger voters.

Maybe we should've weighted votes by projected life expectancy...

On the other hand, the vote also affects people who can't vote or aren't even born yet, and there's no weighting system that can deal with that. Maybe that's a reason not to have referenda on these sorts of questions.

If older people make voting decisions based upon a decreased impact in long-term consequences, how does that square with the statistically provable riskier behavior engaged in by younger people? If anything, I find that older people care more about the long term because they tend to think in terms of impacts on their progeny. It's just as likely that older people have decades of experience from when the UK was not a member of the EU and have relevant experience that tells them that the UK will be just fine without the EU. There are dozens of ways to spin it and show that older people might have a better perspective on a given issue.

But this is exactly the kind of cherry-picking arguing that healthy societies shouldn't indulge in. Women have the basic human right of being able to vote. As do old people. We respect everyone's right to vote despite the fact that people tend to vote in their self-interests and aren't always that logical in doing so.

Maybe we should've weighted votes by projected life expectancy...

Is that a joke? I'm hoping that's a joke.

> If anything, I find that older people care more about the long term because they tend to think in terms of impacts on their progeny

That's why Millenials are currently thriving and have such immense gratitude to the boomer generation for forward thinking policies that ensured prosperity going forward.

Or not.

100% agreed. Everything is someone else's fault. Nothing is ever my fault.

Because someone had it easy by a fluke of luck, I deserve to have it easy too, and if I don't, that is that persons fault.

Should they?

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