Age of voting
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The Norwegian Minister of Municipalities, Magnhild Meltveit Kleppa, is suggesting that 16-year-olds should get to vote (as an experimental thing, first and foremost) in the municipal elections in 2011. The logic is that more people should be able to determine the results.
I’m not sure if I think 16-year-olds are mature enough, but then again, I know of plenty of so-called adults who I definitely would not consider mature enough either…
18 is a logical limit, to me, at the moment, in Norway, because you have to be 18 to get your license, you have to be 18 to buy cigarettes, you have to be 18 to buy alcohol… and it is at 18 that you’re considered old enough so that your parents technically don’t have to support you anymore. (Ie. the child support money from the state stops coming in.)
On the other hand - at 15 you’re criminally responsible for your own actions. If you’re old enough to be penalized for a crime you did commit, you’re old enough to decide what is and isn’t criminal, by electing the politicians who decide the laws. The age of consent, though, is 16. But the criminal age of consent should perhaps count more than the sexual age of consent? So why choose 16 instead of 15?
How old do you think people should be in order to vote?
Project Wardrobe: Post 1
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After washing my clothes on Friday, I realized that it might be time to clean out my closet. I simply had no place to put a lot of the clean clothes. And let’s face it: most of the clothes end up so far back in the closet that I never get to wear them, anyway.
The last fact became abundantly clear, as I was contemplating buying a V-neck sweater when I was home for Christmas, but came back and discovered that I had the exact same sweater in my closet - with the tag still on…
Some pieces in my wardrobe has been there for ages, literally. I’ve got a t-shirt that was picked up in a mall in NJ in 1996. It’s so oversized that it still fits 11 years later, but as I’ve been using it as a gym t-shirt for the past eight years, it’s looking decidedly ratty.
Other pieces are the result of impulse-buying, or them being on sale. I’ll be the first to admit that a few of my fave pieces, that suited me, were the result of such shopping - but most of them really aren’t all that suitable.
With a wardrobe filled to the max, it is difficult to calculate what to wear, and I often end up in jeans and sweater/t-shirts.
Given that I’ll be moving into the working world full time after graduating in a year, it is definitely time to move away from the high school-college-grad school line I’ve been sticking to these past years. The beginning is cleaning out clothes that don’t fit, don’t look good, or I never wear because of some reason or another. If I can imagine myself wearing them, they’ll stay, I think.
Of course, still being a lowly grad student, I don’t have the oodles of cash supporting a top-line new wardrobe, but it should be entirely possible to find suitable choices both in the low and middle price-range. I hope.
Anyway, this is the first step (admitting I have a problem). We’ll see how well the following steps go.
Thought on politics and the media
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Regarding the media coverage of the election: I think that it’s too easy to lump one large group of people together and say they’ll do the same. We’ve seen polls be very wrong in these primaries, and it might be because of samples taken in the polls, or something totally different.
But there is also something in the anticipation that all female democrats would vote/caucus for Hillary and all African-Americans would vote/caucus for Obama… Men don’t necessarily vote the same way because they’re men, and people of European descent don’t vote the same way because they come from the same place - so why would women, African-Americans, or Latin-Americans do it?
Certainly, there might be candidates who appeal to the majority in any group - but probably not to the degree that the media like to portray. Discussing the results is another thing altogether. Then you might come dragging with the actual percentages of who voted what.
Is there something about voters’ expectation involved in it somehow, that the media has to tell people how they should vote based on gender, race or religion?