Voting Age 16?

That's mostly just voter suppression and a crap electoral system, no mystery there. Has nothing at all to do with voting age.
It is not voter suppression; it is voter apathy and 50 different states with 50 different sets of laws regarding when and how to vote. No one is suppressing 150 million potential voters.
 
(Republican)Space Jews.
 
Young age is not a guarantee recklessness. Old age is not a guarantee of intelligence. Solution: a king of chefs better be chosen by other chefs, who have the capacity to evaluate qualities that the king of chefs needs to possess.
 
I think their mental state needs to "ripen" before they participate in governance. More education is a good thing too.
This could be said of plenty of "adults" too. You sure you want to open this can of worms?
 
This could be said of plenty of "adults" too. You sure you want to open this can of worms?

This is true. Aged 16 though I didn't really know how the world worked. Parents paid the bills, mostly didn't work etc.

I'll probably vote against it if it goes to referendum but not gonna be to upset if it goes against me much like the marijuana one which didn't go the way I voted.
 
It is not voter suppression; it is voter apathy and 50 different states with 50 different sets of laws regarding when and how to vote. No one is suppressing 150 million potential voters.
Hence the second part of the sentence

me already said:
That's mostly just voter suppression and a crap electoral system

But don't discount the importance of active voter suppression! A lot of those "different sets of laws" are racist suppression and outright disenfranchisement. Unless we are gonna argue that non-white people in America are just lazier, there's serious and often deliberate structural reasons why turnout is highest among the hegemonic ethnic group and lower among others.

And just to bring it back, none of this justifies making the age for voting 18 and not 16 or 15 or whatever. Yous would be defending 21 if the US still had that as the voting age. Hell we used to hear similar stuff about women, Indigenous peoples. and men who didn't own property. Oh they don't have a stake in society, they don't have responsibilities, they're untrustworthy and easily manipulated, they don't care for the public good, can you very well imagine.

It's pure status quo bias, naming hypothetical problems and barriers that don't exist given there's a number of countries where it's younger.
 
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16 year olds are mostly too ignorant and hormone deluded to be responsible voters.
We all have hormones, old people just have cranky, get off my lawn hormones.

Likewise we're all deluded, ideally yes the older you get the wiser you get but generally in modern corporate-ruled society the older you get the more programmed you get.
 
At 16 you're still legally a child.

NZ age lits kinda all over the place though. Age of consent is 16, drivers license was 15 not sure atm. Voting is 18, signing a contract is 18, buying booze is 18, voting is 18, army is 17 (18 once basic is completed).
 
At 16 you're still legally a child.
@ this brief moment in history.

For 99.99% of human history you pretty much were an adult by then in terms of competence & responsibility. We could start a whole thread on why modern society infantilizes young adults (part of it well intentioned, child labor laws and such but most of it is keeping their parents as overwoked and indebted as possible so they have less of an influence and the corporate state has more. Strong families and communities are going to be less consumer-product & media addicted and better able to think for themselves. Strong self-aware and empowered young people serves those in power not at all).

Why not get young people involved civicly earlier? If you cant trust young people to vote you're admitting your education system is garbage. Surely someone learning how society works 8 hours a day will be more well informed than someone who has to work 8 hours a day.
 
@ this brief moment in history.

For 99.99% of human history you pretty much were an adult by then in terms of competence & responsibility. We could start a whole thread on why modern society infantilizes young adults (part of it well intentioned, child labor laws and such but most of it is keeping their parents as overwoked and indebted as possible so they have less of an influence and the corporate state has more. Strong families and communities are going to be less consumer-product & media addicted and better able to think for themselves. Strong self-aware and empowered young people serves those in power not at all).

Why not get young people involved civicly earlier? If you cant trust young people to vote you're admitting your education system is garbage. Surely someone learning how society works 8 hours a day will be more well informed than someone who has to work 8 hours a day.

Well they've actually campaigned against letting young work or get married young.

Society generally don't n principal has agreed to some form of age restrictions on multiple thing (booze, tobacco, movies, voting, age of consent, marriage etc).
 
16 year olds are mostly too ignorant and hormone deluded to be responsible voters. 18 is not much better, but since we recruit them for military service, we need to let them vote.
Some of us at that age could mentally walk, chew gum, and ponder what we read in the evening paper (which for me included the political articles and editorial page). At that age I was also in the habit of watching two newscasts daily.

But I had the advantage of a junior high social studies teacher who got us interested in this sort of thing when we were 11-12 years old and taught us how to think about political issues, not what to think about them. That was 47 years ago. Nobody ever told me I was too young for it.

Why is it more important to let teenagers vote because of the military, but not vote on issues affecting secondary and post-secondary education?
 
Some of us at that age could mentally walk, chew gum, and ponder what we read in the evening paper (which for me included the political articles and editorial page). At that age I was also in the habit of watching two newscasts daily.

But I had the advantage of a junior high social studies teacher who got us interested in this sort of thing when we were 11-12 years old and taught us how to think about political issues, not what to think about them. That was 47 years ago. Nobody ever told me I was too young for it.

Why is it more important to let teenagers vote because of the military, but not vote on issues affecting secondary and post-secondary education?

Mind me asking what your parents did for a crust?

I don't think this is gonna fly here but could be wrong.
 
For 99.99% of human history you pretty much were an adult by then in terms of competence & responsibility.
If we are talking about how things used to be done, keep in mind that most people were subject to a lifetime of agricultural labor with few tools and no formal education.

It would also be worth noting that most adults could not vote either lest they held enough land and paid enough taxes to qualify for the franchise, and even then it was restricted to men.
 
keep in mind that most people were subject to a lifetime of agricultural labor with few tools and no formal education.

It would also be worth noting that most adults could not vote either lest they held enough land and paid enough taxes to qualify for the franchise, and even then it was restricted to men.
That's also .1% of human history. Democracy is a very recent social experiment
 
The youngest generations will be most affected for the longest term by the decisions made here and now, and yet government has the least accountability to them, while having the most accountability toward the older generations who won't be around to see the consequences of our actions. This is an inherently morally bankrupt system.

They may not be the most enlightened voters, but I see no reason to believe 16-18 are somehow less aware of what's going on in the world than any other age group around them. There's no reason whatsoever to assume they'd be worse voters than the 30-40 crowd.

So, frankly, yes, we should lower the voting age.

(And yes, their brains are still developing, but that says nothing to how good their brains actually are ; it just says they haven't reached their peak. In much the same way, yes, at seventy - and even before that - your brain is declining, even while it may still be quite capable. So if "brain not at peak capacity" is an excuse to deny the vote, that should cut at both end of the age spectrum, or not at all. If we are to have age limits only at the lower end, then the reason for it should be something else).
 
Mind me asking what your parents did for a crust?

I don't think this is gonna fly here but could be wrong.
:confused:

I am guessing you're asking what my parents did for a living?

My mother, when she worked, usually did bookkeeping, either at an automotive dealership or for my dad's repair business (assuming you're referring to the years when she was an active influence on my life, which was only my first 8 years). She dropped out of school after Grade 10, and her other education was a secretarial/bookkeeping course.

My dad did many things throughout his life. My grandfather owned a farm and sawmill (my dad was expected to help as much as he could). He was a mechanic, trucker, and rig worker. He could have been several other things, as he could design and build furniture, do artistic wood carving, and knew plumbing, welding, and so on. His formal education stopped at Grade 8 (common for people in his generation and his parents' generation who grew up on farms in this region). I am the first in the family to complete high school and go to college (neither of my grandparents got as far as high school as they were expected to work when they reached their teen years).

Now that you know this, why did you ask? Just because I grew up in a family of people who didn't have anywhere close to the formal academic education that's considered normal now, that doesn't mean they weren't lifelong learners (well, at least my dad and grandparents; my mother showed little interest in learning for pleasure, though she pushed me in my early years to the point of making me terrified to fail at anything).

My dad and grandparents all read voraciously, whether fiction, nonfiction, or newspapers. My grandparents watched the news, as did I.
 
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:confused:

I am guessing you're asking what my parents did for a living?

My mother, when she worked, usually did bookkeeping, either at an automotive dealership or for my dad's repair business (assuming you're referring to the years when she was an active influence on my life, which was only my first 8 years). She dropped out of school after Grade 10, and her other education was a secretarial/bookkeeping course.

My dad did many things throughout his life. My grandfather owned a farm and sawmill (my dad was expected to help as much as he could). He was a mechanic, trucker, and rig worker. He could have been several other things, as he could design and build furniture, do artistic wood carving, and knew plumbing, welding, and so on. His formal education stopped at Grade 8 (common for people in his generation and his parents' generation who grew up on farms in this region). I am the first in the family to complete high school and go to college (neither of my grandparents got as far as high school as they were expected to work when they reached their teen years).

Now that you know this, why did you ask? Just because I grew up in a family of people who didn't have anywhere close to the formal academic education that's considered normal now, that doesn't mean they weren't lifelong learners (well, at least my dad and grandparents; my mother showed little interest in learning for pleasure, though she pushed me in my early years to the point of making me terrified to fail at anything).

My dad and grandparents all read voraciously, whether fiction, nonfiction, or newspapers. My grandparents watched the news, as did I.

I was ready Ng alot age 15/16 and was aware of current event. I remember news reports of Chechnya. Working weekends on farm.

Most of my friends did not. I was becoming politically aware but it was very simplistic level. National good, labour bad. Context after parents divorce mother was on welfare and National cut the benefit.

Didn't really comprehend the issues, why things were happening or how things worked.

I remember voting 1996 (turned 18 1996) voted for Labour and local candidate. Well they lost despite everyone I knew voting Labour with 1-2 exceptions.

Took a few more years to really comprehend political dirty deals (figured that out 96 tbf) and that elections are won in other places and 15 minutes down the road they seing blue vs red (red here means labour not red vs blue USA).

Mother's opinion was essentially government should give me more money, others don't want to pay more tax.

Left vs right is essentially who pays what and who gets the candy. Didn't really comprehend that 1996 aged 18 let alone 16.

Most 16 years olds didn't even think that far they were interested in pot, iss (booze) and female body parts (all boys school) think I knew a grand total of two females similar age to me.
 
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