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Originally Posted by vicky_molokh
So why isn't xoxing legal in other legal systems? Dictatorships, technocracies, meritocracies, cybercracies? (Also, people seem to have no problem with the issue of Shadows, simply by declaring that a Shadow does not spawn a new instance of voting rights. Even though shadows are sapient.)
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Well, in a dictatorship, "legal" is a meaningless expression. There is no fixed code of law; there is only what the dictator orders, which can be completely arbitrary. But, in practice, a sensible dictator is not going to be supportive of a technology that would allow his rivals to raise armies against him by copying themselves. You have to remember that dictatorships are commonly founded by forcible seizure of power, which means that there is a way of "voting" the dictator out of office—and numbers count for that too.
The American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker used to refer to "bullets and their paper substitutes, ballots," and he had a point: Voting can be just a way of sizing up which faction is likelier to win and declaring them the victor without the bother of an actual war.
Bill Stoddard