I share co-blogger Jonathan Adler's outrage over the fact that dead people may be voting in this year's election. But if the government is willing to give the dead agricultural subsidies for not farming, perhaps it should let them vote too. After all, they clearly have a stake in government policy. And they tend to be underrepresented among those eligible to run for office, make campaign contributions, and otherwise influence the political process. We have to put an end to such bias against the dead (to say nothing of the undead, who are victims of even more deep-seated prejudice). We can't achieve real change we can believe in so long as the vast majority of all the people who have ever lived are arbitrarily excluded from the franchise.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Election Day:
- If the Government Pays Dead People Not to Farm, Maybe it Should Let them Vote Too:
- I See Dead People (Voting) in Cleveland:
Yes, and even blogged about it. I will correct the link, thanks.
Are you sure? A lot of politicians give me exactly that impression.
In all fairness, none are better at not farming than the dead.
Ms. Dunham’s absentee mail ballot was received and reviewed under the Hawaii standards for processing absentee mail ballots… She was alive at that time. Her ballot will be opened tomorrow, and it will be counted in the same way that all absentee voters would be treated under our law.
HGB
Joe BidenHipposGoBerserk.Thus, while the living were doomed to death, death itself took on a new life. Far from being ontically challenged, it was the challenge of ousia against ousia. We might even say that death became the Ousia through which all ousia become by a kind of Platonic participation.
Thanatos became eternal, but the eternal dread of the living, and we cannot understand participatory democracy apart from the participatory thanatocracy which has been the machine of modernity since the industrial revolution. But this thanatocracy is the reverse image, the dark mirror of our democracy, into which we dare not gaze, lest we be overwhelmed by its power.
The denial of its force on us, then, is the very underpinning of our politics. We deny the rôle of death, even its ontic status (something, it should be pointed out, which we never do to the mere inanimate for the inanimate always is), in order to preserve our own life. But lest we think such a procedure is life-affirming, let us recall that it demands an inherent contradiction, for it calls for a Bad Faith (in a very literal sense). It is at once the denial of faith and the self-deception of the life-death/death-life dialectic.
The suggestion that the dead should vote is nothing but the logical conclusion of a modern logic that is inherently imperialistic. It absorbs all other logics and appropriates all invisibilities into visibilities. The invisible thanatocracy is now a taken on as a product of utility for the democracy. The dead become "undead" (which is a remarkable perversion of resurrection) as the inherent contradictions of the life-death/death-life dialectic tunnel their ways out of our psyches. The voting (un)dead are the last members of hyper-modernity.
Nick