Looks like Og's been punchin' hard at the "Get thee out there and vote!" button and, as ever, non-voters are punching back.
Most of the half-wits you know are gonna vote and you, personally, can cancel one of them out. It ain't much, but it's something. Especially in local races.
I am of the opinion that primary votes are a fairly decent way to communicate to the Big Tent parties. The main thing (besides a chance to vote at local blogger Paul Ogden, who arrived on the ballot with the salient advantage that I already know how he thinks 'cos he demonstrates it right here on the Web) that has me voting in the primary is a chance to go color in the oval for Ron Paul. Yeah, yeah, Mittens has it allll sewn up (maybe) but I can still tell 'em I'd like to see more Wookies and fewer hairsprayed "statesmen." Will they listen? --Have you ever heard the lyrics of Alice's Restaurant? It only takes three!
Og, he talks about a chance to "fix it." Others suggest there might not be any fix. ("In the long run, we're all dead," John Maynard "Mary Sunshine" Keynes). Fix, no fix-- Doesn't matter. If you were drowning, would you struggle, or would you just close your eyes and sink quietly? You fight, dammit, or you might as well be a rutabaga.
Go vote. The yammerheads will. You want them to decide for you?
I'm not so naive as to think voting alone will fix anything, what is called for is obviously the kind of incrementalism the idiots used to get us into this mess in the first place; it has worked fairly well for the gun rights activists so it has a proven track record; what I've asked, and what I have, actually, received a very few very thoughtful answers to, is "how will NOT voting fix anything/make it better? The consensus seems to be "it won't"
ReplyDeleteOgden is an ass and deserves to be soundly beaten.
ReplyDeleteThere's a difference between people who don't vote because they think it's futile and those who don't vote because they consider it an act of aggression. One doesn't have to agree (I can sort of see the argument, but consider it stretched to the breaking point, and it leaves out self-defense), but it is at least principled.
ReplyDeleteI vote in self-defense on the local level, but I'm voting my conscience at the top of the ticket. After Johnny Quote Constitution Good-Government, I'll never hold my nose again. That was truly a wasted vote.
I figure voting is the only version of Arguing with idiots that at least lets you fight them to a draw instead of losing.
ReplyDelete'Round here, they seem to want to restrict voting to people who don't have jobs. Or maybe they mean something else, by closing the polls at 6pm.
ReplyDeleteI showed up at 6:04, expecting to do my bit to cast Richard Lugar into the abyss of joblessness (as well as cast a now-meaningless protest against Mittens, and possibly do some actual good in a couple of local races), and was surprised to be turned away.
I mean granted, every previous election I've voted in since moving to IN has been when I was either unemployed or a full-time telecommuter, so I voted during the day and didn't notice when the polls closed. But where I grew up, they always closed at 8pm. When I watched election returns on the TV news, they were always based on polls closing at 8pm local time pretty much everywhere. It never OCCURRED to me that a guy showing up at 6:04pm would be too late.
Oh well. At least Lugar's headed for the abyss even without my help, as it turns out, and Mittens was always destined to win regardless of what I did, and it seems that in all but one case the marginally-lesser evil won the local primaries too.