I’ll keep it quick again because it’s late and I want to relax and go to bed soon.
I got up early for the Photography standards meeting beginning from 7am. It finished a bit before lunch, and I took Scully for a walk to the fish & chips shop. They’ve changed their menu, updating to electronic screens displaying the items and prices, rather than the old printed boards they had. And all the prices went up! At least for take-away items. They used to have one price for take-away food, and a slightly higher price for dine in, sitting on the al fresco tables outside. (I don’t know how common this is overseas, but it’s not unusual in Australia to have two different prices for this.) Well, now they just have the single price, and all the take-away prices have gone up to match the previous dine-in price. Since I always opt for the take-away, a basic fish & chips went up from $12.95 to $14.95.
After returning home from eating my more expensive lunch, I worked on writing thew new ethics lesson for this week, on democracy. I start with some history about the development of political systems, from simple strong-man ruler, through the evolution of royalty, and then Athenian democracy as practised in Ancient Greece. I ask a bunch of questions about who should have the right to vote, and explore flaws in democratic systems, such as people voting against things that are beneficial to society.
And this evening I ran the first 3 classes. The responses were widely different, from kids who thought everyone over the age of 10(!) should be allowed to vote, to one who had a plan to restrict voting to people who can demonstrate competence and knowledge on the specific issues in question for any given vote by passing a test beforehand. A few kids independently said people over a certain age (varying from 80 to 85) shouldn’t be allowed to vote, because they’re either senile or “too old fashioned”. So yeah…. some very intriguing ideas among this group!
New content today:
there was that movie about loweing the voting age, some old movie from the 80s, I think, where the teenagers drugged the water so the votes went their way. The ending had the teenagers do something to annoy a younger kid, who was glaring at the camera with the implication that he’s the next age group allowed to vote, and he’s going to use the power to get revenge against the teenagers.
The thing about democracy is that once someone starts excluding others for any reason, even the most well intentioned ones like being a prisoner – it’s a slippery slope to just pick the ones you want to vote because they vote correctly (the way you want), and all the rest are disqualified for not agreeing with you… so much for one man, one vote…
The US is really bad at deciding who can and can’t vote – the current battle to limit voting rights there is again in the spotlight. Turns out you can exclude a large group of afro-americans just by limiting the ID type allowed, or the hours open for voting. Politics suck sometimes.
Still – like the man said – democracy is the worst system of government, except every other one we tried.