
So, Once Great Britain is going to grant the vote to sixteen year olds.
Upon reading this a friend pointed out it was the opposite of the reason to give the vote to eighteen year olds. After all, eighteen year olds could drink, get married, go to war, but not vote.
I’ll note since that justification was brought up, eighteen year olds have lost the right to drink. And the fact that they lost it because supposedly their brains aren’t yet fully developed must, of necessity, cause one’s eyebrows to go up in questioning wonder. So, their brains aren’t fully developed, but they’re developed enough to vote? Of course, it makes us wonder about the other things too.
There is something to that brain thing, btw, but maybe not as much as we’d like to think. More on that later.
Meanwhile, of course, sixteen year olds can’t do any of that, and I believe in Europe must be enrolled by law in public education. They can’t have jobs. But oh, yeah, sure, let’s let them vote.
The truth in fact is that the impulse towards giving younger and younger people the vote, be they 18 year olds back then or 16 year olds now is a pet project of the left worldwide and it’s in pursuit of the same thing: people too naive and ignorant to know the leftist project has brought nothing but misery and death to this weary old world.
And while at it I’ll admit my immediate reaction was that eighteen was also too young to write, but that’s not actually true.
The actual truth is that any age is too young to vote if it is treated as the age at which you suddenly become an adult.
Adult is not something that happens when you hit a magical birthday. Be it 12 or 16 or 18 or even 21.
Heinlein mentioned decades ago that the problem for the law and who got to vote was distinguishing between forty year old children and 12 year old adults. He wasn’t wrong, as rare as those are. And without some test, we cannot, and the test needs to be absolutely unbiased.
So for voting we use an age delimitation at which “it is most likely people can.”
Unfortunately this leads us to think of the magical age, when people become able to do xyz.
In point of practice, what that has encouraged is not letting people do anything that would prepare them for the responsibilities of adulthood before that age. No living alone, no signing contracts, even trivial ones, no — and this is very important — working at all. Because that would somehow taint their childhood.
Okay, technically at least in some US states, people under eighteen can work. It’s just that in most of them the paperwork necessary to enable that job is more than anyone is going to brave, and the restrictions on the work more than any employer will want to deal with.
In the end, that is the problem. Not the age of voting. Not the age at which you’re magically “an adult.”
The problem is that if we pin our “they’re now adult” ideas to 18 or 21 or even, who knows, 35, in our minds that becomes the magical age of adulthood, and before that we must protect people from EVERYTHING that we’d protect a two year old for.
Adulthood is not a function of age or development. It’s a function of practice. Heck, when I first got married I spent the first year having anxiety attacks we’d suddenly be unable to pay our rent. Meanwhile my husband who had lived on his own for years took it in stride and was faintly amused by my terrors. (We are almost exactly the same age. He’s three months older.)
In the same way, my children were perfectly poised taking part in panels or speaking in public at 20 because they’d been doing it since their mid-teens, while I was a basket case at 35.
It is practice. Adulthood is when you can shoulder your own responsibilities, be on your own, and take the find out for your effing around. And getting there means failing a bunch of times before you shoulder it and stand under it. (And even then at times, you cry in the night and really wish someone was coming to save you.)
Look, I don’t have an answer for how to do this. There is an inherent difficulty in testing when people are ready to do X.
Take sexual maturity: people are sexually mature long before they can understand relationships or that relationships have consequences. Or even that older, more mature people can be unscrupulous perverts. So, changing age of consent to age of sexual maturity is a problem. On the other hand wrapping the kids in cotton to the age of thirty or so (just in case someone takes advantage of someone) gets us the authors of regencies having the gentleman ask the lady for “affirmative consent” before kissing her. (You only wish I were making it up.)
Yes, you can mitigate this by teaching young people that sex has consequences, and that there is no such thing as consequence-free sex. But then you run into the “if only everyone” fallacy. Because never is EVERYONE going to teach it, or be capable of learning it.
For something more nebulous take drinking alcohol. We’re told that people drinking alcohol before 21 will impair their brain development in some horrible way.
As someone from a generation and a country where I could drink if I could toddle up to the counter and ask for it, and where wine was part of the daily meal and Port Wine part of special days, I don’t think my brain is any less capable or developed than the brains of younger generations. Heck, until recently, mom told half joking of how while pregnant with me she had craved bread soaked in read wine and eaten a vast quantity of it every day. (Yes, sounds revolting to me too. Sounded revolting to her also, but not while pregnant.) Since this was not high-octane wine, I don’t seem to have suffered any bad effects from it. Meanwhile if you’re a woman your doctor will label you alcoholic if you confess to having one glass of wine a day with dinner. (No, I don’t. We couldn’t afford it so long I got out of the habit. BUT a friend made the mistake of answering that answer seriously.) And this is for full adults. Could we allow children to have wine now and then under their parents’ supervision? Probably. Would there be bad effects? Only if the parents are heinous, and if the parents are heinous, they’re getting it now.
I don’t have a perfect answer. As close to one as I can get it is that we should let people work if they’re able to. We should let people escape the public education gulag as soon as they can prove a certain level of competency, whether or not they’ve reached the magical age. (Yes, this will be abused. And? Can’t be worse than the high rate of illiteracy we have now, to be honest.)
And we should let people vote when they’ve paid their own bills and held down a paying position for a year. Regardless of age.
Until then, we are giving the vote younger and younger to people less and less prepared to vote. Or live.
Let the kids grow up. Most of them are trying to — desperately — but right now, short of becoming entrepreneurs, we make it impossible for them to support themselves or do what adults do: pay their own way.
Until the magical day when we expect them to automagically do all of it. Without training.
Batty BLOG FUNDRAISER 2025
Let’s get the bats out of the way, shall we? feel free to ooh and ahhhh
Moving right along…
This is the final day but one of blog funding.
The reason for fundraising and the reason bloggers on the right in general should fundraise:
Every blogger to the right of Lenin has paid the price in career, in wealth, in prospects. And that keeping us poor and meek is a great way to serve as a warning to others who would speak out. If you want to nullify the “warning,” consider donating.
Thank you to everyone who has donated.
If you wish to donate:
The Give Send Go is still active.
There is also paypal. Yes, I removed the button from the side (though I’ll return it) a couple years ago because they were threatening to fine people for badthink. Whether that was entirely organic or part of the Autopen administration it’s open to debate. They were being very enthusiastic about forcing everything from social media to everything else including debanking. At any rate, I think it is safe to use a paypal link for the next four years. Give or take. (Look none of these services are pure. We use what we can and seems safe at the time.)
While on that, yes, the address in Las Vegas is still available:
Sarah A. Hoyt
Goldport Press
304 S Jones Blvd #6771
Las Vegas, NV 89107
(Note this is a drop box. Please don’t send perishables that will be damaged by heat. If you want to send something out of the ordinary, contact me first. I’ll figure out another place to send it where things won’t be damaged and I can retrieve it. And if you want to give me physical stuff, it might be best to catch me at a con. (Younger DIL says I have do do more cons. Sigh.)
If you’re a substack subscriber and wish to continue subscribing, please do so. There will be earcs tomorrow.
Here I feel I must explain: No Man’s Land is FINISHED. It is also very very long. So I’m publishing it starting mid-September, in three volumes, published 2 weeks apart for the sake of the Amazon Algorithm. Starting in September allows me to put out the complete book as an omnibus (ebook format only, or the print will have to be tiny) in December. By which point there will be three volumes out.
Anyway, I will release e-arc of Volume one tomorrow, Volume two in two weeks, Volume three in another two weeks. The volumes are not stand-alone but thirds of a long story. In the meantime, the volumes will be going to the copyeditor, one by one.
Anyway, I have started the second story — The Ghost in the Ruby — but it will have to compete with my finishing other things such as Witch’s Daughter and Rhodes to Hell and the two, two Dyce books. Let’s see how many I can have out by Christmas, shall we?
So…. I guess that’s the other part of the funding. And we’ll see how it goes.
Oh, yeah. doctor’s appointment today: Thyroid is off again. Prescription has been increased.
Three other appointments remain, the first next week. I’m also in the middle of the largest auto immune outbreak since we left Colorado. I presume because of all the travel last month. If that’s the case, it should calm down soon.
Let’s hope so.














































































































