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Voters

Discussion in 'General political debates' started by fubarista, Nov 16, 2012.

  1. fubarista

    fubarista Experienced Member Experienced member


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    Nov 13, 2011
     
    I wrote this article today and posted it to my little website and a new Election Boycott mailing list I started a few days ago:


    I posted a link on Twitter and one guy retweeted it, but some other guy (now blocked) told me I was "a crazy person."

    Okay, I've never claimed otherwise. Then I got an email from a Green Party voter I know, who told me about all the wonderful things people are doing, like the Wal-Mart strikes and protests, the Bail-Out the People Jubilee that is buying up debt and cancelling it, etc.

    I agree those are good things, but they are being done by people, not by the government. Anyone familiar with US labor history knows that if labor strikes are too successful, the government will machine-gun a few hundred people to ensure continuing corporate rule, and as for the debts, the reason they're being sold so cheap is because they're uncollectible, so while some people who couldn't pay anyway will feel better about having their debts cancelled, and might be able to restore their credit ratings and go into debt again, the collection agencies are getting paid for debts they otherwise couldn't collect and couldn't sell.

    The reply I got was that I was missing out on all the fun and bonding of protests. This is what I wrote back:


    Okay, so I'm alone, but I really don't feel lonely and I don't even feel sad. In fact I'm laughing my fucking head off at the stupidity of voters.

    They don't know that the US has a two-party system where third parties are deliberately and systematically locked out?

    They don't know that the US has a winner-take-all electoral system where the winner gets all the power delegated to them by all the votes, including the so-called protest votes?

    They don't know that they're voting for everything they're protesting?

    Well, of course they don't know that the state is the problem, not the solution. They're not anarchists, so how could they know that?

    Voting in the US isn't even mandatory--it isn't something that people might find themselves having to do just to survive, like working.

    But the truth is that my website only has a couple dozen regular readers and the mailing list only has 8 subscribers so far.

    So there's the impasse. Voters think I'm crazy and I know they're fucking stupid. That really doesn't make for good communications. :ecouteurs:
     

  2. Nihilist84

    Nihilist84 Active Member Forum Member


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    Apr 14, 2011
     
    Yea the majority of voters are complete sheep, and its pretty surprising to hear that Chomsky supports voting id thought he knew it was pointless.
    My family actually tried to get me to vote for Obama because he supposedly would help out immigrants and as we know no president has deported more people than Obama. I should have probably mentioned that to them :/
    Great article by the way
     
  3. fubarista

    fubarista Experienced Member Experienced member


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    Nov 13, 2011
     
    Thanks, Nihilist.

    Of course Chomsky knows that voting is pointless, but he does it anyway. That's actually reasonable. If something is meaningless, it doesn't matter if you do it or you don't. Still meaningless either way.

    What he doesn't understand is that voting is harmful. That sort of realization takes more than mere intellect, which tends to rationalize everything, it takes common sense--something they don't teach in school.

    I don't think it would have done much good if you'd mentioned Obama's record to your family. They'd probably have just said that Romney was worse and voted for Obama anyway, like most Democrats.

    I had a little fun today. I happened by an outdoor event with tables and chairs and speakers, and I was sort of curious to see what was going on, so I wandered over and somebody who knew me waved me over to her table and brought me some lunch, as they had plenty of food. It turned out to be about all the wonderful things that some good people are doing in our community, like helping the homeless, providing medical care to those with no coverage, etc. One of the speakers was a rear admiral from the U.S. Navy and he spoke about how part of his job is saving endangered species, in keeping, of course, with the Navy's "primary mission." Every time he said "primary mission," I mentally translated it as "bombing people." He talked about how the Navy provides jobs and helps the economy, and he even mentioned how the Navy creates more homeless veterans than it can care for, but he sort of didn't explain that part. He also spoke about how the Navy is shifting most of its resources to focus on the Pacific and gave many reasons. Afterward I went up to him and told him that I thought that the real reason that the US Navy is shifting to focus on the Pacific is because the United States only has two reliable allies voting with us in the United Nations, Israel and Palau, so we can't afford to lose Palau. He said, "I think you're right," but I knew it was just a brush-off to get rid of the strange person who had somehow managed to slip past his attaches. ;)
     
  4. Nihilist84

    Nihilist84 Active Member Forum Member


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    Apr 14, 2011
     
    no prob :)
    and yea
    true
    haha yea that reminds a cousin of mine said the same thing Romney would be worse and all the that lesser of two evils bullshit.
    :lmao:
     
  5. fuckthesystemnow

    fuckthesystemnow Member New Member


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    Nov 19, 2012
     
    I didn't vote as I do not believe in either candidates way of thinking and their lies. When someone decent does NOT run for presidential office, I simply do not vote, so that way I do not vote for some phony that will not do the job properly anyway.
     
  6. crustybeckham

    crustybeckham Experienced Member Uploader Experienced member Forum Member


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    Jan 22, 2012
     
    Voters depress me to no end. They are so convinced that they are doing something meaningful and significant when voting while they are just confirming their powerlessness.
     
  7. fubarista

    fubarista Experienced Member Experienced member


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    Nov 13, 2011
     
    It is even worse when "someone decent" does run for office, fucktheworld, as I think the quote in my signature explains quite well. Third party candidates with no chance of winning, and no possibility of bringing about change if they did, give voters the false hope that change can be brought about by working within a system designed to prevent change.

    Voters are indeed depressing, crusty. Hell, nonvoters can be depressing too. At the suggestion of a group of election boycott advocates I'd been working with, well, specifically the suggestion of one who was leaving the group for personal reasons, I set up an election boycott mailing list recently https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/electionboycottnews So far it has only 10 subscribers. Of those six are inactive. Of the four who are active, I write, another moderates the group, the third is an archivist, and the fourth wants to talk about structure rather than ideas. One of the inactive subscribers is a friend of mine who is temporarily laid up with a bad back, but I'm looking forward to his participation, as he's an anarchist, not a follower, and will enable spirited discussions. Here's my most recent article:

    Gaza Slaughter is an Elections War

    As an Election Boycott Movement activist, when I saw the headline, "Refusing the Elections War," my first thought was that somebody was calling for an election boycott. But when I looked at the article by Sarah Anne Minkin http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... s-war.html that wasn't the case at all. In fact the only place that the word "elections" appeared was in the headline of the article and in the first line of the ad. The article said that some Israeli feminist and peace groups had placed an ad on the front page of a big Israeli newspaper. It translated the ad from Hebrew and quoted it. This is what the ad said:

    Then Minkin went on to discuss how the use of the Hebrew feminine plural pronoun in the ad indicated a desire for fundamental change in Israeli society. Confused, I wrote to a friend of mine, a professional Hebrew translator who grew up in Israel and asked why the word elections was used at all--if they were opposed to war, why not just say, "Stop the war?"

    This is what my friend wrote back:
    Then it made perfect sense. The needless and brutal ongoing slaughter in Gaza is a way for Israel to get out the vote for the upcoming election.

    What better way for a government that is failing in all other respects, to gain the support of its people than to start a war, even if it is a "war" by a nuclear power against an occupied, walled-in, besieged, and helpless civilian population?

    So it doesn't hurt to vote? Tell that to the grieving parents of the innocent children killed in Gaza. Or in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Libya, and Syria, for that matter.

    When you sign your name on the back of a check, you are endorsing it. It doesn't matter who wrote the check, where the money came from, why you got the check, or whether you want it or not, if you sign your name, you, or anyone you endorse it over to, can cash it and spend it.

    When you sign your name at the voting polls or on the back of your mail-in ballot envelope, you are endorsing the government holding the election. If it is a genocidal government, the blood it spills is in your name, authorized by your signature, regardless of who you voted for.

    Unfortunately, I doubt if there are enough Israelis like the Women’s Coalition for Peace, the Alternative Information Center, Yesh Gvul, and New Profile, who placed the ad, that are genuinely opposed to war and genuinely opposed to their government, to carry off a successful election boycott, not that they appear to have thought of it. If you know that the reason for the war is to get you to vote and you are opposed to the war, then the rational response would be not to vote. But Israel and the United States are birds of a feather, two capitalist imperialist genocidal nations with privileges for some and oppression for the rest, and the voters of both countries believe that they are free and that their governments are models of democracy.

    I'm sure the bombardment of civilians in Gaza will have the intended effect, and Israelis will turn out in droves to vote. Even the peaceniks, knowing that the whole purpose of the war was to get out the vote, will find themselves some peace candidates to vote for and allow themselves to be manipulated into voting. "Protest voting," they'll call it, but the murder of innocents will have served its purpose and they too will vote. It's an old trick, but it never seems to fail.