yes, well.
i clearly did not get sued. ah well.
some thoughts on the eve of the iowa standaroundandeatsandwiches:
it gives me heart that the white dude is trailing the woman and the black dude, no matter what happens next. this probably couldn’t have happened 50 years ago, and while the country is not where it should be with regards to this sorta thing, it’s a step, albeit a weird one.
it’s a weird election year, generally. my friend hal informs me that i’m living painfully in the past when i mention that mccain was dead in the water not too long ago, that rudy’s collapse is strange and seemingly out of nowhere and that i fear fire. perhaps true, but i still think it’s all weird. strange too that no one on the dem side has particularly fallen apart. they’re all running remarkably competant campaigns thus far. not very gutsy ones, but the workmanship is there. the pride is back!
i think undecided voters are weird too, or i used to, but then i figured out their secret.
see, i get conservative thought, although i don’t agree with a lot of it (though i am remarkably into letting people have guns). and i get liberal thought, though a lot of my fellow hippies make me want to stick a fork in my eye (get some guns, hippies). what i can’t understand, what strikes me as impossibly retarded, is the mindset of someone who can’t pick between two reasonably different things. and don’t give me that ‘they’re the same’ noise. yes, they get paid by the same masters, but on several key points, liberals and conservatives are polar. for me, i agree more often with democrats, so that’s usually where i vote. done. that was easy.
that there are major differences couldn’t have gotten more obvious than in the 04 election. i didn’t love kerry, but i fucking haaaaated bush. most people didn’t react with such passion, but they did react. and if some of them like him, and that’s their business. but no reaction? to either of them? that’s fishthought.
being unable to make a binary choice like that is inhuman (in the literal sense). it would render someone so monumentally challenged that simply picking what sandwich to eat would be impossible. are you in favor of legal abortion or not, fucker? like the war or don’t? tuna salad or mozerella? it’s fucking not hard. you have a reaction to these things. you probably lean one way or the other on enough of them that picking one is pretty simple.
or you’re a vegetable. but i don’t believe that i live in a country like that, in spite of the number of people who seem to laugh at leno. so if you’re not a vegetable, hypothetical undecided voter unlikely to ever stumble across this blog, i say, if you’re not a vegetable, there is only one other option and it is that you are a jerk. you get off on the attention. you like the feeling that you’re deciding an election. you love stringing us all along.
you political cockteases.
One difficulty I have is weighing the significance of the issues. I have stances on abortion, gun control, death penalty, government budgetary priorities, the war in Iraq, etc. But how do they weight against each other? If someone has a view that clearly opposes mine on, say, abortion but agrees with me on the death penalty, and someone else has a view that clearly opposed mine on the death penalty but agrees with me on abortion are they then equivalent? To be honest, I find that as strongly as I feel on abortion, gun control, and the death penalty, I actually consider them relatively minor concerns to a lot of other important issues that are (1) less clear to decipher from what candidates talk about on the campaign trail and (2) less easily differentiatable between democrats and republicans. Most of these are related to foreign policy.
Noam Chomsky brought up a point that I agree with pretty strongly: that the difference between our two major parties are minor, but given the power of the positions being vied for, those differences can affect hundreds of millions of lives in significant ways. Of course, even Chomsky would probably admit that George W. is a fluke, and he has even gone as far as to say that probably no one in the history of the world has brought us as close the brink of disaster as he has.
At the moment I am favoring Obama and his victory in Iowa brings me hope. I don’t really believe that there would be such a huge difference in policy or effectiveness between Obama, Clinton, and Edwards, at least not in any way that can be reliably predicted from what we know now. But I don’t like the idea of having two families share the most powerful office in the world for thirty years, regardless of what that translates to in terms of policy (not saying that policy isn’t more important, just saying that policy doesn’t change me not liking it). I also like that Obama has a more worldly background (grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia) and in many ways represents the opposite of everything Bush is (no silver spoon).
I posted this once, but I fear Wordpress swallowed my comment.
While it’s not particularly difficult to gauge how differently you feel from a particular candidate on a particular issue (though it can sometimes be difficult to pin down what that candidate’s position is), it can be difficult to compare the relative importance of these differences of opinion. For example, if I consider myself pro-choice and against the death penalty, and I am faced with a candidate that is pro-life and against the death penalty and another candidate that is pro-choice and favors the death penalty (if only things were that simple!), how do I then determine which candidate is closer to my position? Each issue is not equal, and if you add the complexity of the issues themselves (death penalty moratoria and reforms, late-term abortions, parental notifications, etc.) it becomes easy to either (1) abandon the issues except on the most basic level and start focusing on character traits or (2) abandon the process altogether. For my part, while I feel that abortion, death penalty, gun control, etc. are all very important issues, I consider them pretty minor in comparison to a number of other issues, mostly to do with foreign policy, and it’s very difficult to determine the candidates’ positions on these issues (especially with the Iraq war, which seems to consume most of the focus on foreign policy), and the parties tend not to differ on them much in any fundamental sense.
Noam Chomsky once made a point about the difference between the parties, and I agree wholeheartedly with it. He said something to the effect that the differences between our major parties were very minor, but that for a position of such great power (the most powerful position of the world, really), those differences can translate to a huge impact on the lives of hundreds of millions of people. I think he would admit that George W. is something of a fluke, however. He’s even gone so far as to say Bush’s administration is “the most dangerous administration in American history. I think they’re driving the world to destruction.”
I can’t really distinguish between the democratic candidates in ways that matter to me. There’s no way for me to know currently which one is going to do a better job of repairing our relations with the rest of the world, working to improve global governance whether via the UN or any other bodies, or even improving the environment (which is probably the clearest of the global issues in their platforms). I don’t like the idea of two families sharing the most powerful office in the world for 28 years regardless of policy (not saying that policy isn’t more important, just that good policy won’t change me not liking it). I also like that Obama seems to be a polar opposite of Bush’s in many ways (no silver spoon), and seems to be more worldly (growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia, having had a Kenyan father), though it’s entirely unclear that that will translate to being a less nationalistic president. Anyhow, Obama’s win in Iowa excites me, and while I have no particular confidence in him, I support him more than anyone else at this point.
I recognize that in many ways, I’m making fun of a group of people that have a wide and varied set of reasons for being unable to make a decision in these races.
To be clear, I’m not particularly upset at the protest voter/non-voter. I’ve been a protest voter, voting for both Dennis and Ralph on occasion. I get being frustrated with the system, but my argument would be that once one rejects that system, one gets an even more representative group of people to vote for, even if they don’t get to be the president.
I really do believe, however, that there’s a large group of people out there who aren’t protest voters. And my question here is: What is the thought process of a person who can’t make a decision like this? I reduce it to binary terms to make the argument easier on the page, but including third party, not voting, etc doesn’t make the question any less valid, I think. Being undecided between two parties I get. One can be frustrated with the system, the candidates, etc. Being undecided at all, I don’t understand.