[13thLetter]

Let's put aside the admittedly inflammatory rhetoric. Are you arguing that if the government decided to peacefully change the population's demographics in order to make a currently unpopular political goal more achievable in the future, that would be okay?

Because that's about the most anti-democratic thing imaginable. In a democratic society it is absolutely, unconditionally wrong for the government to do such a thing. The government serves at the pleasure of the people, not the other way around!

[drdeca]

No, I'm not really arguing that.

I'm mainly just arguing against the comparison to racial discrimination/eradication.

I agree with your point that replacing the people so that some different things will be voted for is harmful and undemocratic, at least if done by the government.

But the problem would be in corruption, basically, not genocide, as the one I responded to claimed, and I think that is an important distinction to make.

Bad arguments for things one agrees with should be refuted as well as for ones one disagrees with.

Although, a limitation on my agreement: many potential actions by a state could influence the population in an area in a way that might change how the area votes. I think it would be generally not a good idea to forbid all such actions, because that would only make it such that the impact of how it is set up does not change, it would not make it so that it does not have an effect. That's not to say that there shouldn't be protection against changes that would cause a harmful change in voting population, just that not everything that incidentally would have a change to voting population would be inherently bad.

In the end, I think, it should be the choice of the population as to whether the govt takes some action which could impact the composition of the population, provided that there is no other reason which it is either obligatory or impermissible to take the action in question.

If the population freely chooses an action which will impact the way they make future choices, it seems to me kind of like a person , for example, drinking alcohol, or taking a mind altering substance, whether it is a medicine or a harmful substance.

Unless the action is forbidden (such as, for example, an actual genocide) or obligatory (not sure of what an example would be here.) , the population would choose whether to take an action which would change itself.

Edit:

Something I thought of just after sending that:

Consider woman suffrage. That was a decision which influenced the collection of people who constituted the voting population. I think it was a good decision.

[13thLetter]

OK, then. I think a lot of people here got weirdly hung up on the nature of the demographic change, as if the skin color of the people affected somehow affects its morality.

With regards to women's suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the constitution after extensive public debate, overwhelming approval by Congress, and approval of a supermajority of state legislatures, exactly as spelled out in the Constitution; it also had support among the public. That was the epitome of a change effected in the proper democratic fashion.