It is an interesting mental exercise to devise schemes to get a more effective electorate. I like the ideas of needing some “skin in the game;” paying taxes or owning land. Or, as you suggest, a citizenship or civics exam.

However, I’m more opposed to disenfranchisement and such schemes always end up sounding a bit totalitarian, or elitist to me. Our country has an unfortunate history with poll taxes and other methods to disenfranchise citizens. It is a slippery slope that can be abused.

Thanks for straightening out the record and correcting my hyperbolic prose. It seems theoretical to me that unwed women and single mothers would tilt towards the party offering the most paternalism. Also, women who have a partner who earns most or all of the household income would tend to vote for the party that campaigns on taking the smallest amount of their household income in taxes. But it doesn’t appear to be that straight forward.

In Presidential elections Mrs. Firefly is pretty much a single issue voter; Pro Life.

I’m a big fan of “Withnail & I,” a Brit black comedy that never really caught on over here, though over there people can recite lines with the same comprehensive verve of “Rocky Horror” fans.

It’s about a pair of young, broke, out-of-work actors, who share an unheated, terminally messy London flat in 1969. One funny bit early in the film shows the actor Richard E. Grant (who eventually made it in Hollywood) demanding booze, then settling for lighter fluid, while proclaiming it far superior to “meths” (methylated alcohol — denatured alcohol).

The lighter fluid was supposed to contain water, but the director secretly substituted vinegar, so Grant’s pop-eyed expression upon swallowing was natural.

— “Withnail & I” “Never Mix Your Drinks”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmXmVwOTwOU

Enjoy at your own risk…

Eva Marie & all: Does anyone remember in the sixties the quaint conviction many men had, including intellectuals, that women really ran the world by covertly running their husbands and sons?

I think it went back to Philip Wylie’s “Generation of Vipers,” where Wylie introduced the term, “Momism,” though no doubt further antecedents could be found.

Wylie was a classic, self-made, American intellectual who wrote pulp fiction, novels, movie scripts and ranting essays all over the place, of which “Generations of Vipers” was the most famous. His novel, “The End of the Dream,” an early entry into eco-catastrophic fiction, scarred me when I was 20.

Wylie had a certain amount of cultural clout in his day but has since been almost entirely forgotten.

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They served as welfare workers, teachers, secretaries, nurses, auxiliaries in the armed forces and police, and in many other occupations including as guards in concentration camps.

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A minority of German women who resisted the regime’s policies or were branded biologically inferior were persecuted. Hundreds of thousands were forcibly sterilized and tens of thousands were incarcerated in the camp system.

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Women were central to Adolf Hitler’s plan to create an ideal “Aryan” Community (Volksgemeinschaft). Praising German women as “our most loyal, fanatical fellow-combatants,” Hitler valued women for both their activism in the Nazi movement and their biological power as generators of the race. In Nazi thinking, a larger, racially purer population would enhance Germany’s military strength and provide settlers to colonize conquered territory in eastern Europe. The Third Reich’s aggressive population policy encouraged “racially pure” women to bear as many children as possible.

Holocaust Enclyclopedia

the left copies the left.. and what they learned is that you can sway women as a single block a lot more than you can sway men… madison avenue knows the same and laments how they never got all the metrosexuals by various names to go out and shop till they drop…

Methanol is entirely toxic.
Ethanol is not too good for us either!

The side story was that the ME at one point was dealing with thousands of men and perhaps a few women who died from drinking denatured alcohol. “Denaturing” was a Prohibition tactic of adding poisons to otherwise drinkable ethanol. In spite of the warning labels some people still drank it.

The ME began an aggressive PR campaign to A) warn people about the dangers, and B) repeal Prohibition. Because he was gaining traction in his campaign the gov. added even more poisons to the alcohol, thinking that then people would take the hint and stop drinking it, but the number of deaths increased. Eventually, of course, Prohibition was repealed.

Here is a long version piece entitled “The Chemists War.”