Give computers the vote. They're cheaper than women, even!

If I'd have to bet, I'd bet on you having spent your entire life immersedⁱ in a lulzy counterfactual history as to what drove female suffrage and how it happened, a likely mirror of your ideas about 20th century European historyⁱⁱ or for that matter 18th century US historyⁱⁱⁱ. We don't share that particular infirmity, and consequently I'm in a fine position to tell you things you do not wish to hear.

One of those things is that no, women didn't generally want the vote^iv, nor did the female intellectuals of the time support the notion. Nor did the change prevail on any sort of moral grounds, but on a very specific, piously fraudulent redefinition of that notion.

Giving women the franchise came as the solution to a very clearly delineated conflict, opposing publicans (ie, the people who ran bars^v) and their clientele on one side, and preachers (ie, the people who ran churches) and their clientele on the other side. While brutishly identifying the former with "men" and the latter with "women" may be tempting, it'd also be nonsensical.

Their respective constituencies were, by and large, zurbagii^vi on one side, and dried old prunes on the other side. The problems of the former are probably well understood, after a whole century of propaganda efforts by the pulpit lobby, so I won't insist. The problems of the latter are that once the spark of life goes out of a woman, she naturally turns into a very sad husk of a creature, utterly inclined to imagine God cares whether you say he's a cocksucker or not, and absolutely ready to dedicate her remaining efforts to fending off death with liberal application of the celebrated Carbolic Smoke Balls^vii. Hey, it worked for Barbara down the street! This, of course, isn't to say that all women decay thus, or even that they must. It's just a tendency, natural and to be fought, much like the tendency of middle aged men of comfortable means to grow a beer belly. You don't have to grow one - but if you do absolutely nothing to prevent it, you will. And most girls, and most women aren't ever told about this, so it's a larger problem than the beer belly.

The solution came about, not through the imaginary effects of "particularly convincing" screeds and tracts ; nor through the manifestation of entirely hallucinated "power of the people", but on the strict basis of capital making the deeply immoral^viii choice that hey, women probably will command lower wages.

So they did, and the rest is history.

Or was, at any rate, until yesterday. You know what ? Computers would also command lower wages. Logic and consistency mandates they be given the franchise.^ix

It is true that computers play a miserable game. A game so bad, in fact, that whenever a respected player condescends to engage it, he ends up suspect of fraud^x, not on the basis of anything other than the simple inanity of the end product. It can't be recognized as an actual game by actual people who actually play it (which ties exactly into the story of the bridges^xi), making it about as suspect as fucking a Jew in 1942.

The reason the computer plays a miserable game is, by and large, explained in these ten thousand words :

Withered old prune churchgoing lady fixed a broken painting through her rule-based approach to life. This is precisely what googlebot does. It is in no sense artificial intelligence. It is artificial citizenship, in the bureaucratic, pulpit-driven conception of citizenship. Superpoliteness as a solution to mathematical problems, if you will. It... works, apparently. Hey, there's a painting there, right ? And it doesn't look all old and fucked up, right ? Pulpit wins, where's your drinking permit ?^xii

The whole problem, and the whole solution, is already discussed here on Trilema. For the rest of you, there is no solution (and, properly speaking, no problem, either). Give computers the vote. They'll make much better voters than you^xiii, and we didn't like you anyway.

1. With visuals : [↩]
2. Let me guess - no Katyn, Holodomor or Hayots tseghaspanutyun ; Holocaust-only. [↩]
3. Really, the US Government honored a deal at some point in its history ? When ? [↩]
4. You probably also thought the French generally supported the French resistance. Why, because de Gaulle told you so ? De Gaulle was an underground terrorist with links to the terrorist organisation in question, exact copy of Yasser Arafat. What'd you expect him to have told you ? [↩]
5. Suddenly my ire at the absent bar scene in Buenos Aires makes a lot more sense, does it ? [↩]
6. Romanian word, plural of zurbagiu. Etymologically it denotes "he who does zurba", but derived with the -giu suffix that serves that role in Armenian and Turkish (as opposed to the -ist suffix that does exactly the same in the Latin field, turning metoda [method] into metodist [methodist]).

   Zurba, which may perhaps recall to mind Zorba the Greek, and not idly so, means scandal, noise, public outrage in Romanian. In Turkish it means rebel, and it actually comes from zor (strength) and baz, ie "player". Powerplayer, as it were. [↩]

7. If you have any clue as to common law, you should know what this is. [↩]
8. Here's how immorality works for capital : not in the sense you imagine, which is to say that it's willing to kill some kids to save some expense. That part is not only moral, it is obligatory. Immorality of capital is exactly opposite : that it will forego killing some kids to make a few sales. This shortsightedness, this willingness to trade the cow for a quantity of milk, is fundamentally what sinks capitalist regimes once they get divorced from the theological function of early leadership, and it's how you lost to China, and how you'll always lose to a correctly structured alternative. Because capitalism is immoral, and because without someone to actually tell you what morality even is, you'll be stuck following some cat lady, poor blind kittens (yes, Stalin was correct in his evaluation). [↩]
9. Which, of course, they already are - not just in the pedestrian sense of Diebold doesn't answer to you, but more importantly in the deeper and further reaching sense that all you see in a computer-generated lie is a "golf cross pattern". And then don't even notice when the thing abruptly drops out of public discourse, to be replaced with another nonsensical trope. [↩]
10. Here's an inkling into the dirigible world : in regards to the ~150 BTC Alphago bet, the claim was presented that the bet should be refunded, because the whole exercise was fraudulent from end to end, in the manner of that previous one - at no point anything more or anything other than a publicity stunt.

    This is a claim that I will have to adjudicate one way or another. Obviously there's a full attendance of those who imagine they'd make a better call than me - once the call is made. Not before. (No, "yes before - here's my single-issue preconceived solution" doesn't count as a before. It pointedly comes after the call rather than before it.). [↩]

11. Which has apparently meanwhile vanished. Ima give some Eulora coppers to anyone who returns the errant bits to their rightful owner. [↩]
12. Think about it - no permit needed for faith, though it produces worse inebriation than any alcohol, plus you don't wake out of it the next morning ? Yet bars have to pay taxes and excise ? Dat fairness! [↩]
13. Here's the seminal piece on this topic :

    The "independent" demo actually has all the textbook characteristics of a group most susceptible to propaganda, more correctly "pre-propaganda", and by textbook I mean literally Propaganda.

    They consider themselves leaderless. They can have representatives, they can have "evangelists" but they have to believe that their conclusions are all their own, through individual reflection and objective consideration. Interestingly, and on purpose, they believe their brains can handle such an analysis, any analysis. This isn't arrogance. They are told, by universities and the media, that their mind is prepared to do this heavy lifting as long as they are given just the right facts, filtered from the "noise." "Where can we get the right facts, in a world of liars?" Good question, maybe the news?

    Commonly, independents have a single personal issue, say gun rights or abortion, but no personal experience with other issues, and lacking any subjective starting point, they therefore believe that ONLY objectivity will give them the truth. The less life experience they have the better; the less they've seen of the world, the fewer people they've argued with (in person, where it is real and has real consequences like punches), the less frequently their water balloon worldview is tested by people with pins, the more they will cling to the premise that "facts" are what's important. In this way the one personal issue serves as a reference point which the propaganda exploits: "hey, gun advocates, did you know you like low corporate taxes?" I do? "Yes, because the people you hate are for raising them." Consequently, raising corporate taxes is felt like an attack on the Second Amendment. "Liberals! Taking away our rights!"

    But sometimes the complexity of issues is just overwhelming, once in a while reality creeps in, and issues are discovered to be massively complicated, and anyway he has no power to do anything.

    No doubt this sounds depressing, he's going to start drinking heavily, or become a cynic, or go the Hemingway. So the media=propaganda fosters his regression towards a much desired solution: total alienation. The media explains how things relate to him, and as long as he understands what's going on, he feels empowered. He is given an ideology without even knowing it. Now he doesn't actually have to do anything, indeed, it's way the hell better if he does nothing. All that's required is support, and through his support not only will "the right things" happen but he'll share in the credit.

    You'll counter that there are right leaning and left leaning independents, isn't there a difference? but this misses the point: propaganda doesn't try to get you to believe something, but to do something, and in this case it is to do nothing-- it doesn't matter what you choose to believe, as long as your outrage is done from inside your house.

    This is the whole gimmick of media, not polar but triangular, right, left, middle, mobilizing an army of assonauts to feel strongly enough about something that they don't do anything.

    [↩]