Author: VD

Unsurprisingly, yet another atheist demonstrates that he doesn’t know what “evidence” is.

“You have repeatedly asserted that voting is equivalent to liberty, now please either offer your evidence in support of the assertion or retract the claim.”

If there is no connection between liberty and voting, then how could women voting have negatively effected the amount of liberty in the country.

Furthermore it has been demonstrated throughout history that only way to undermine authoritarianism, to assure that the people and not the very few, define liberties is to assure that government is the result of the consent of the governed. The only way to assure all are able to consent is through democracy of one form or another.

You fail to understand the dynamics of basic political science. I believe your misogyny gets in the way in this case.

My purported misogyny and/or failure to understand the dynamics of basic political science are wholly irrelevant here. And even if we ignore its obvious flaws, it is imposible to deny that the logic presented by George here is not evidence.

So, I repeat the demand: You have repeatedly asserted that voting is equivalent to liberty, now please either offer your evidence in support of the assertion or retract the claim.”

Ken makes what I regard to be an inexcusable blunder:

I haven’t looked as closely at the numbers as you have but if you subtract the female vote entirely, is it possible that the Nazis simply would have come to power earlier because prior to ’32 the women were voting for parties other than the NASDAP?

Nothing against Ken, but I really dislike this sort of thing. Trying to come up with alternative explanations when you haven’t even bothered to look at the data is the hallmark of the idealogue, the anti-intellectual. It is neither discourse nor analysis, it is almost always mere excuse-making.

In this case, the answer is simple. No, because a) they weren’t even close and b) the dominant SPD was heavily supported by men. In 1928, the NSDAP was only the ninth-largest party in the Reichstag with 2.6% of the vote. Although they improved significantly in 1930, coming in second with 18.3% of the vote, they were still too far behind the dominant SPD with 24.5%, moreover, if Ken had paid more attention to what was already mentioned he would have realized that the SPD would have benefited even more than the NSDAP from the absence of the female vote, which tended to go to the Catholic parties prior to 1932.

In 1931, the NSDAP launched its campaign to win over female voters. A year later, in the first 1932 election, it won 37.3% of the vote to the second-place SPD’s 21.6%.

There is certainly nothing wrong with coming up with an unusual or alternative hypotheses, but one should always check them against the readily available data before offering suggestions, especially when one is proposing them in contradiction to another’s informed conclusions.