Ontology:Q76,84
Core characteristics[edit]
- pronounced [P] alias (en) [string]
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- QID references [Item] 1-1-1
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- field, scope, or group [Item]
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- case of [Item]
- sub-case of [Item]
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- super-case of [Item]
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Appearances[edit]
- appears in work [Item]
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Wavebuilder combinations[edit]
- pronounced [P] pronounced Wavebuilder: forms result [Item]
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- along with [Item]
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Wavebuilder characterizations[edit]
- pronounced Wavebuilder: route [Item]
- [M3]Would you kill a Russian in order to vote? 1-1-1
- along with [Item]
- Saiyan kingdom 1-1-1
- forming from [Item]
- Saiyan kingdom 1-1-1
- United States election
- [M3]Would you kill a Russian in order to vote? 1-1-1
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- pronounced Wavebuilder: route [Item]
- [M3]Would you kill a Russian in order to vote? 1-1-1
- along with [Item]
- The Hunger Games
- forming from [Item]
- The Hunger Games
- Vote Vote Vote
- [M3]Would you kill a Russian in order to vote? 1-1-1
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Prototype notes[edit]
- Would you kill a Russian in order to vote? / Would you kill a Russian to receive your voter card? -> you live in an alternate world where every individual in the United States is entitled to a voting license the day they kill a Russian. policies are mostly the same. voting brings anti-discrimination laws, healthcare programs, whatever. but you have to kill someone in Eurasia to get to vote, or to get to tell anyone else to vote. want people to vote for gun control? every one of them has to fly over and shoot a Russian, and then you can have it. the central question of this thought experiment is this: how much is voting worth? what lengths is it worth going to just to preserve voting and the "normal" process of getting people to vote? would people chant "vote Democrat" as loudly if every one of them was required to kill a Russian? what about if voting Democrat really does take a little power away from Tories to create more structural racism and kill Black people? should everyone go kill a Russian just to save Black people from fascism? or is preserving the life of Russians more important than that aim? the only thing about this metaphor that's incoherent to me is how you prove anyone actually killed anyone. uh. maybe there are a limited number of voter licenses, and you'd just take one from Russia and hold it up. or maybe everyone has an ID card which clearly has a flag on it and you'd take that. there may or may not be a system where any country can kill people to issue voter licenses but just as in real life most countries are too afraid to attack the United States. also you equally get a point if you kill a United States Communist and it can be proven in court, even though they deliberately don't have different id card flags. in this world people go to court to prove they have done approved heinous things as well as to prove they're innocent.
Background[edit]
Given a situation like the early Communist Party of China having to secure the area of China from the KMT to create a Marxist republic or the Bolshevik party having to secure the area of Russia from the combined population of the Tsar and Russian reactionaries, Liberal-republicans are quick to try to say that participation in a Marxist party-nation is a totalizing activity that could never be democratic. Yet, if the requirement of sharing a continent or the world with other political factions or nations of people is really the critical standard that the early CPC failed to live up to they would never apply a similar standard to themselves. Given an optional opportunity to harm another group of people purely to advance their own interests and pursue the freedom of the people immediately surrounding them, it is worth asking how quickly United States people would take it.
The year is 20XX. The Russian Revolution somehow did not happen, and at this time Russia contains only "real" Russians who would never squash the authentic universal expression of Russian-ness through dividing people with Bolshevism. The United States is mostly the same as in real-world history. Despite the failure to form a Bolshevik party in Russia, United States classrooms still spend at least some time reading memoirs about people who escaped from Leninist upheaval and misinforming children about the dangers of Communism. Over in Europe, however, many theorists involved in the early days of anti-Tsar movements managed to escape to European countries, and between the serial efforts of Marx, Luxemburg, and the additional immigrants all of Germany has become a workers' state. The entire historical period of Nazi Germany was averted but in small part thanks to Trotskyists Marxists did not save Italy, Spain, or Japan. Through some strange and convoluted series of events the fascist-leaning powers all began gravitating in the direction of sketching out a new concept of democracy: Mussolini and the Duginist types would all step back and let people vote and form parties as they pleased as long as they could produce a "body count". If people could capture some kind of trophy in war which would prove they were capable of killing someone from another country, that person would get a voter license and would be totally off-limits from any kind of bigoted treatment as a second-class citizen of the country. Japan was one of the first countries to put this horrid system into effect, proudly proclaiming to everyone that nobody could say anything bad about nationalist empire any more because it was open to trade from any country and every real citizen of Japan had a full plate of constitutional rights. (This led to a rather intense a fierce backlash in Korea which ended in not only the entire Korea but Taiwan becoming Communist.) This plan unfortunately proved to be very popular with North American intellectuals. Freedom! Diplomacy! Nobody has to confront an emperor or fascist party with violence, everyone can just peacefully pass laws and make their own choices most appropriate to them as individuals and symbolically trade heads.
You live in the United States. There is an election coming in the next year and a half. You are all too aware of people either in your own neighborhood or your own state who interact with everyone around them in hateful ways or who live in other local-states that might include Florida or Oklahoma who do have the power to make your life worse at the national level. If you do not vote and you do not get other people to vote, you will see problem policies come up like banning abortion, criminalizing gender affirming care, replacing nationalized health care with private companies that can have whatever discriminatory rules they want, outlawing affirmative action, making it legal for businesses to shoot Black people for civil rights activity, and removing gay people from Congress and workplaces for their supposed ties to Communism, among many other possibilities. If people do vote, many of these policies can be defeated, at least in terms of whether any of them are official or considered legal. However, you do not have your voting license. You have time. The United States has been making it more and more efficient for anyone to fly to another country on an abbreviated military tour and get their required kill in. You could come back with months to spare. You know that the overall period of training to do one of these missions at a novice level is not very long. If you simply get through training and get in there and get out, it would be done and over with and you wouldn't have to do it again. People can even sign up to go in proxy of their immediate relatives, which is the only time you would have to score your required kill twice. If you go now, then you or your relative can surely vote against bad policies. But if you want to get your voter license, you will have to kill a Russian.
In this hypothetical world, the policy is enforced through national ID cards. Everyone in the United States has an ID card, and everyone in Russia has an ID card. When people go on military tours they have to bring back a foreign ID card and get it checked by military officials. If it is deemed to be genuine, the voter receives a voting license with aesthetically-pleasing anti-copying devices which looks something like a credit card. The people of the target country can choose to hand over their ID card before they die, although this will block them from a lot of official services and bring them close to not even being a citizen. Of course, some people in the United States are so hateful they would be more excited to have a dead Russian than a surrender. This is not necessarily the norm. Many people simply stop at looking for the easiest target and holding them up for their ID card with an overpowered gun, and if they get what they're looking for they go home. Some Russians have gotten to the point where they are simply tired and let the event happen as if it is a casual conversation. Others with more nationalist leanings have sometimes been known to fly into a blind rage and round up their neighbors to utterly massacre a team of novice recruits. Civilians have frequently been targeted due to the low quality of most personnel, though no one has ever required this. People in the United States will certainly treat you with prestige if you've taken out an actual soldier, but there is no official reward for difficult situations or number of kills over the number signed up for; combat medals only go to a small number of people similar to the number issued in the real world. If the same individual survives to get attacked twice, the second attack does not count and the United States person comes back empty-handed, meaning that some people will seek out multiple ID cards "just to be safe". Voting licenses approximately operate based on names, such that every United States voting license is attached to a name and number from Russia or another country. If the name or number cannot be shown to be unique the voting license is not granted.
The central question of this thought experiment is this: what is the maximum cost people are willing to take on just to be able to vote and do the things the United States constitution claims to be possible? What is the maximum cost people will take on for things to stay "normal"? Would it be worth it to vote if you had to kill a Russian? Does this personal cost per individual make it unconscionable to tell other people to vote, or is the burden for one individual to have to decide whether to kill someone the exact same level of acceptable or unacceptable when it is being repeated across 10 separate people or 100 people? If there is a more realistic possibility of some individuals not actually having to kill, but there is still a risk other individuals will enter an unlucky situation and die on the spot, does this risk of losing everything make it worth deciding not to vote?
The option not to vote is available to you at any time. Anyone has the ability to try their best to assemble an underground non-voting league. Of course, if anyone catches you, there will be serious consequences. This version of the United States is similar to the United States of the 1950s. If any particular non-voting league is deemed to be an organization capable of drawing up a plausible plan to overthrow the government, everyone in it will designated "non-Americans" in the sense of being eligible to be eliminated for one voting license in the voting license program. These people are not arrested immediately. Instead, they still all have to go to work every day, but if anyone catches them doing behaviors that clearly mark them as being affiliated with a non-voting league, they may be fired from every job and expelled from institutions. It's only the day that a conscientious non-voter sleeps on the wrong bench or steals a loaf of bread or snaps and shouts at a cop that the guns will come out and the non-voter will become a point on a spreadsheet. Any offense other than directly challenging the existence of the United States and the United States police, the only truly unspeakable action that has to be erased and euphemized even by those who hate it, is treated like an ordinary crime.
As well, if you decide to assemble a non-voting league with the "clever" plan to push for equal and universal cost-free voting, you will have to keep in mind that every single owner of any set of business premises or productive group of people is generally perfectly fine with the current system, so the ultimate result of your plan will likely be that everyone who currently benefits from the voting license system will vote to stop it from going away and vote to bring it back. Every other person with money puts aside time every year to put some money into buying effort and letters and envelopes and TV and radio commercials about how important voting is, and how the United States economy will fall behind other countries if it doesn't "compete with" Russians and Spaniards and enforce voting licenses. Do you want a weak economy that won't have space for your children to get a house or go to college? the ads say every three to four years. And many people fall for them. There is a strangely large portion of pro-voting-license media which spends all its time talking about "families" and "moms". White suburban mothers have turned out to be rather preoccupied with finding someone to get in their kill quota so they can make sure they get funding into school boards and universities and build a good future for their babies. Things only get worse when churches start talking about voting licenses, certain that God approves of this program as long as such a thing would create hope and help you in your own life — although to be fair, this is more of a surface justification, and the program could carry on fully as easily with a population of nonbelievers.
Communists have been madly discussing how to get rid of the "atrocious" voting license program. No fans of invading countries in the first place, they also know that the day their countries stop putting great portions of their labor into defense, the voting license tours will immediately hit them. Vietnam suffers an attack on this timeline much like in real life, only this time the United States has the audacity to actually tell people that with a voting license system Vietnam would have "more freedom". Gramscians discuss the strategy of planting networks of people beneath business territories and institutions. Maoists discuss a few different possibilities including what they admit to be the more wild possibility of simply fighting the nation-states back and driving them out of whole spatial areas like in the early days of China. Anarchist fence-sitters at the Communist meeting wonder if it would be best for people to flee the United States and move to the Third World. Trotskyists blame all the other Communists for supposedly causing the whole problem by opting to defend their countries. If meta-Marxists exist on this timeline, then they discuss the relevance of identifying arbitrary points of resistance and how they connect into various greater graphs over varying distances at varying speeds.
The significance of voting licenses within Russia is this: whenever someone survives an attack and loses an ID card, they can obtain another one, but it will always cost them money. Thus, every attack indirectly bleeds money and labor out of Russians. The expense of replacing an ID card is noticeable, but not so great that all individuals would be expected to guard it and risk their lives; when someone responds with violence it is usually out of some sense that the action of trying to take anything is inherently wrong enough it deserves a response. Russians lose ID cards in attacks, they have to spend some fraction of their paycheck getting a new one, their overall rank in society suffers because they suffer a momentary dependency toward whoever they may be working for, people of higher rank within Russian society insist that more money needs to go into the military to protect Russians from every larger-scale attack and out of things like social services, every owner of a business territory encloses money and physical buildings every year and becomes more independent from all the chaos and the effects of it along with other owners socially linked to them, owners sometimes push for all other Russians to join the military and fight back against the United States and other countries as the only way to save the country. The United States attempts to make deals to create zones of United-States-owned businesses which will bleed Russia's economy but will be immune from voter license attacks. United States people have no major issue with this plan, treating their own factories with awe and autonomous Russians not part of their zones with an undertone of contempt. The process is similar to what happens to any number of Third World countries in the real world — the United States makes use of Third-World people and Third-World land when they are useful as materials to add to the United States, but does not respect either of them for their own sake. Russia contemplates dispensing with voter license rhetoric and just attacking the United States for the sake of power balance.
(unfinished)