Over at Vox, where leftist brains pulsate, Ms Kelsey Piper has an idea: 

The United States should consider eradicating the voting age entirely… There are a host of good reasons to give children the vote… I think voting would be an exciting and meaningful exercise even for children too young to fill out their ballot validly, and it’s a great chance to develop the habit early — just like we have young children brush their teeth even though they’ll lose those teeth in a few years anyway.

I didn’t say it was a good one.

It occurs to me that if you start demanding that small children be allowed to vote in general elections – largely because you assume that their choices, their politics, will tend to mirror your own – then perhaps it’s time to ponder why your own politics correspond with the imagined preferences of children, who are, by definition, unworldly and irresponsible. Such that you grudgingly concede that, “Enfranchising everyone [i.e., including small children] will make the electorate less informed on average.” The rest of us, meanwhile, may wish to ponder whether a leftist’s desire to exploit the ignorance of small children in order to further her own socialist vanities is not only farcical, but degenerate. 

We’ve been here before, of course, when Professor David Runciman claimed that not allowing primary school children to vote alongside adults amounts to “an inbuilt bias against governments that plan for the future.” As if small children are renowned for their selflessness and conscientious forethought. As noted at the time,

The irony being that children and teenagers tend to be quite selfish and self-absorbed, to a degree unbecoming in adults, and are accustomed to free stuff, all paid for out of sight by someone else, much to the youngsters’ indifference. It would therefore hardly be surprising if voting children tended to favour policies that pile up unsustainable debt, all left for whatever generations follow them… What comes to mind is an episode of Malcolm in the Middle, in which the boys steal Hal’s credit card and run away to start a new and grander life in a hotel room, making enthusiastic use of room service.

How this sits with Ms Piper’s claim that “Kids have… a greater stake in political issues than adults do,” I leave to the reader.

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Her Loveliness Revealed.

Slate’s Christina Cauterucci has discovered a “brilliant new weapon of progressivism.”

You see, those “right wing, centrist, or politically complacent parents” – the parents you love, presumably – must be purged of their “ill-informed allegiances” and made to conform politically, with the threat of never seeing grandchildren. Which is how well-adjusted adult offspring behave, of course… Ms Cauterucci’s parents are no doubt proud of their daughter and her charming, terribly enlightened fantasies of coercion, in which children are imagined primarily as a form of political leverage, a tool of rather sadistic emotional punishment. And all in the name of progressive piety.

Your Failure To Enthuse Is Violence, Apparently.

Roy G Guzmán is oppressed by the “violence” of people not liking his poetry.

After dismissing the recent, rather negative appraisals of his work as driven by “toxic masculinity” and “(white) male fragility” – no other possibilities being conceivable, of course – Mr Guzmán has apparently retired from Twitter. We are, it seems, a terrible disappointment to him.

Hear The Lamentations Of Unstable Leftist Women.

Their marriages failed, they have psychiatrists on speed-dial, and it’s all Trump’s fault. Oh, and white men, obviously.

The clock is ticking, someone save the cat. || Close enough. || Close enough 2. || Breakfast cereal amplifier. || On second thoughts, perhaps not. || I question the parenting. || Toilet-related submarine mishap of note. || Burger-chain kitchen scenes. || His chocolate-cake lollipops are fancier than yours. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || It also makes spherical ice. || The Megatherium Club. || Smarten up, your date’s here. || Tough day. || Tim Newman on standards and woke condescension. || Every Noise At Once. || Build your own wooden hurdy-gurdy. || Build your own functional paper organ. || And finally, when you mislabel baldness medication as an acid reflux treatment and inadvertently produce really hairy children.

Neo notes a phenomenon that may be familiar to some of you:

We’ve previously mentioned bizarrely emphatic and incongruous outbursts, the relevance of which to ongoing, often mundane conversations was hard to fathom, and which seemed driven by a compulsion to signal some imagined piety or status. A more subtle and common example occurred in January, when the family headed out to a Burns Night dinner at a restaurant adjacent to the university. Before the food appeared, we were treated to a brief poetry reading courtesy of a local academic. I was tempted to roll my eyes at the prospect, but he did get the crowd in good spirits. Until a poem about food and good company was somehow given, as he put it, “a political edge.” And so, we endured a contrived reference to Brexit – implicitly very bad – and a pointed nod across the ocean to a certain president, who we were encouraged to imagine naked.

At the time, I was struck by the presumption – the belief that everyone present would naturally agree – that opposition to Brexit and a disdain of Trump were things we, the customers, would without doubt have in common. That the poem’s sentiment of friendship and community was being soured by divisive smugness escaped our local academic, whose need to let us know how leftwing he is was apparently paramount. The subtext was hard to miss: “This is a fashionable restaurant and its customers, being fashionable, will obviously hold left-of-centre views, especially regarding Brexit and Trump, both of which they should disdain and wish to be seen disdaining by their left-of-centre peers.” And when you’re out to enjoy a fancy meal with friends and family, this is an odd sentiment to encounter from someone you don’t know and whose ostensible job is to make you feel welcome.

It wouldn’t generally occur to me to shoehorn politics into an otherwise routine exchange, or into a gathering with strangers, or to presume the emphatic political agreement of random restaurant customers. It seems… rude. By which I mean parochial, selfish and an imposition – insofar as others may feel obliged to quietly endure irritating sermons, insults and condescension in order to avoid causing a scene and derailing the entire evening. The analogy that comes to mind is of inviting the new neighbours round for coffee and then, just before you hand over the cups to these people you’ve only just met, issuing a lengthy, self-satisfied proclamation on the merits of mass immigration, high taxes and lenient sentencing. And then expecting nodding and applause, rather than polite bewilderment.

Update, via the comments. Two additional illustrations of the same phenomenon:

And the glare is dazzling: 

Monica Gagliano says that she has received Yoda-like advice from trees and shrubbery. She recalls being rocked like a baby by the spirit of a fern. She has ridden on the back of an invisible bear conjured by an osha root. She once accidentally bent space and time while playing the ocarina.

I’m sure the following detail is entirely unrelated:

Dr Gagliano… [had] been volunteering at an herbalist’s clinic, and had begun using ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew.

Dr Galgiano tells us that her embrace of indigenous Amazonian traditions, including medicine songs and bathing in tree pulp, and presumably the occasional snifter of ayahuasca, has resulted in the uncanny acquisition of “healing knowledge,” told to her by plants.

And because a cake needs icing: 

The New York Times (unsurprisingly) points out that Gagliano also “speaks thoughtfully” on subjects such as the “legacies of colonialism [and] capitalism.”

The University of Sydney is ever so lucky. 

Also, open thread.