i've read here voices that endorse O. but i really think thats not smart. I know bush is a jackass and mccain a lam0r but given the gang of crooks around obama and his already broken promises I expect no good from him.
I see here a repeating pattern that already have been in action last years in england and germany. in both "countries" were "elected" guys that could convince citizens to be "change" and "good for the people" and they did more gainst them than their apparent opponents would get away with.
Last month I talked with an old friend of my father. He is a businessman in construction, which means he is surrounded by cheaters. He don't even speak english but after one look at Obama he said "he is a very talented speaker and a very good liar".
This game is played for centuries, so people please wake up.
I really really hate advice along these lines. Yes, the system is completely corrupt, and no one of true integrity can get far enough to be voted for. So what should we do?
Simply saying "don't vote for Obama" is spectacularly useless. The question is not what we shouldn't do, but rather what we can do to change things.
My take on this is that this year, if you care about improving the world a little, you might as well vote for Obama. He sucks, but sucks a little less than McCain, and there's no other viable choices. In 2000 I did vote for Nader, because I thought the Green Party stood a chance of getting 5% of the popular vote in my state, which would've given them major party status, a major milestone.
That said, in your local elections, there are often better choices from third parties, and those candidates may well be viable. For example, for my state representative, I will be voting for Farheen Hakeem of the Green Party. My district is quite lefty, so the race is really between her and the Democratic candidate.
Even more important than voting, however, is getting involved in some sort of activism aimed at improving the world. Real change won't happen because of a politician like Obama who repeats "change" over and over. It happens when people get together and make a concerted effort to change people's minds, and work towards real justice.
I've been very involved in animal rights activism over the past 12 years or so. I spend many hours each week helping my animal rights organization. I hope that this contributes to making the world better.
I hope you're doing something too, besides just telling us who to note vote for.
Re:What to do instead?
sir_lichtkind on 2008-11-01T18:02:54
of course, i buy natural/local or grow food myself, go everywhere by bike i can, educate myself and other people, also bit involved in spirituality.
shure its counterproductive to tell others what to do but i wanted to keep this shout short and not discuss every pro and con. it was just a short reaction when i saw how many perl monks where too blind to see obamas new clothings.Re:What to do instead?
sir_lichtkind on 2008-11-01T18:05:47
the real solution i see in spirituality, which in fact translates into the love and caring about the people you know and see.Re:What to do instead?
autarch on 2008-11-01T19:07:22
I don't consider myself a spiritual person, and yet I care about people. People will have different paths towards similar ends.
The best way to change the world is to advocate for practical change. Saying "be spiritual" is useless, and may even be counter-productive if you're talking to an empiricist like myself. Saying "care about others" is no better.
Instead, you can say "The environment is a major issue, especially global warming. If global warming continues we will all suffer. Here are a few steps you can take to start reducing your carbon output."
That's useful. So is saying stuff like "Person X is an unusually worthy politician, please support their campaign and vote for them if you can" or "please support this specific piece of legislation by contacting X and asking them to vote in favor of it."
My experience as an activist has been that you can't just tell people "X is bad", whether that X is meat, Obama, or global warming. You also need to provide some sort of practical advice on how that person can help.
Re:What to do instead?
sir_lichtkind on 2008-11-01T20:34:04
my point was that it is spiritual to care, no matter how you name it.
and thats really the way to heal and solve our problems. to waste time with that election is no solution. i just wanted to maybe help somebody to see that fraud, because you must be first aware of these things and be able to recognize these when they come in new clothes so you can't be tricked. Global warming and many othe sudo problems distrac to many people.
you have to trust yourself and heal you from psychic problems before you can help anybody. than recognise that we are one and that diversity is good. when different opinion can't set you up than you are ready to educate.
shure i often explane things with more details, don't worry this time i just wanted raise my voice quickly. Maybe i will write here more often about such issues and discuss it more in depth. thanks.Re:What to do instead?
sir_lichtkind on 2008-11-01T21:10:58
allright, i could start with the simple stuff: clean your body. eat the least meat you can do, no soft drinks, no junk food, no industrial sugar or salt, tooth paste without floride. organic food is not only more healthy but it tastes also much better. but thats the usual stuff you can read everywhere.
what i really believe is most powerfull way to empower yourself is connect to god. when you calm down, thoughts are still and you know god from inner experience. Since i do that, i feel more like myself, more powerfull, more focused and nearly nothing drags me down. That has nothing to do with any religion or theology.
The other important thing is to feel the feeiling of love in your heart and try to stay in it more and more.
when you have enough individuals that are strengthen that way nothing will be impossiple and they definitally will not fight about different opinions.Re:What to do instead?
autarch on 2008-11-01T21:22:54
As I said, I'm not spiritual, I don't believe in god, and I don't think that the "feeling of love in your heart" means anything. I disagree with almost everything you're saying (except eat less meat and eat organic), but at least it's something people can do.
I'm sure what you say would resonate with some people, though, and at least it's more positive than "don't vote for Obama, that's not smart".
Re:What to do instead?
chromatic on 2008-11-01T19:06:04
He sucks, but sucks a little less than McCain, and there's no other viable choices.
That attitude is why there are no other viable choices.
I can't, in good conscience, vote for either McCain or Obama, because I believe they both:
- Deliberately misunderstand the purpose of the presidency (why should the chief executive have a legislative agenda?)
- Have spent the past two years ignoring their elected responsibilities to run for president (who's represented the people of Arizona and Illinois since January 2007?)
- Have massive volunteer organizations dedicated to... getting some guy elected, with the implicit belief that that is the most important project they could work on (With a paid staff of 2500 and half a million volunteers, how many houses we could build? How many senior citizens and orphans could we visit? How many animal shelters could we help? How many soup kitchens and senior centers and food banks could we staff?)
- Have raised and spent over $2 billion for campaigning (I can eat very well on $50 a week -- given the half a million volunteers, you could feed almost 385,000 hungry people for two years, half a million if you shopped more frugally, and a million if you concentrated on staple foods).
I could go on (the entirely corrupt Commission for Presidential Debates), but neither major party candidate has earned my vote. They're barely worth my contempt, and I try never to vote while holding my nose. Why throw my vote away like that?
Re:What to do instead?
sir_lichtkind on 2008-11-01T19:21:02
I like your point, even its just a part of the issue, but shure can't adress eversthing here.Re:What to do instead?
autarch on 2008-11-01T19:52:45
I'm not disagreeing. Not voting is a perfectly acceptable choice. Hopefully you do more than _not voting_ to further your social agenda, though.
Again, instead of saying "don't vote", you could say "don't vote, there are many more important things you could do instead, here's a few of them you can start doing right now
..." Re:What to do instead?
chromatic on 2008-11-01T21:00:53
Not voting is a perfectly acceptable choice.
I'm not voting for McCain or Obama. That leaves plenty of other candidates for whom I could vote.
Hopefully you do more than _not voting_ to further your social agenda, though.
Indeed I do, but I don't want credit for it, and I try not to call attention to it. Perhaps that leaves me open to charges of grandstanding or hypocrisy, but answer me this: why spend so much time and money and worry hoping that "change" will happen after you elect a guy who has, at best, a 60% chance of getting elected, when you could have started making the world a better place in January 2007?
I know you did back then Dave, and I did. I just wonder about the other half a million volunteers and the millions of donors. If this candidate or that candidate were truly inspiring, I'd want to see him or her inspire people to improve the world now, rather than waiting even another three months to start.
Re:What to do instead?
autarch on 2008-11-01T21:19:44
I don't disagree with anything you said.
My original point was that telling people "don't vote for Obama", absent any other advice, is a terrible thing to do, and it pisses me of.
How about saying something with more substance
... Voting for Obama or not isn't that important. There are lot of things you can do which will have a much greater impact on the world right now. They're a little harder than voting, but they also have a much greater impact. If you care about social change, you can help make it happen, but you have to do more than just vote.
Then you can find out what someone is concerned about and steer them towards ways to become active for a real cause (getting Obama elected is not a cause!).
FWIW, I tell people things like this all the time, it's cornerstone of how my animal rights group approaches activism. We're all about getting individuals to make changes that have a real impact, right now.
Re:What to do instead?
chromatic on 2008-11-01T21:30:56
How about saying something with more substance
... I agree completely. I would consider more seriously any candidate who said that and whose campaign actually demonstrated that attitude with actions.
Re:What to do instead?
jarich on 2008-11-03T00:21:42
Not voting is a perfectly acceptable choice.
This is a fiction. Not voting says you don't care. It's not making a statement that none of the parties are good enough for your vote. It's not telling the politicians that you're sick of their rubbish. It's saying you don't care enough to vote. That you're happy with whoever the people who do vote pick.
There is no way to distinguish between people who are too lazy to vote and people who think they're making a statement, thus everyone who doesn't vote must have been too lazy. Those who really do want to make a statement by not voting, submit informal votes. Get yourself to a voting both, wait in line, and then vote for Scooby Do. That's a much more effective statement than ignoring the election (but it still says you're happy to let the rest of the voting population pick for you).
If you don't vote, you are just as responsible for the elected party as if you had voted for them, because perhaps, if everyone else who didn't bother to vote had actually done so, then you might have gotten a different result.
If you don't vote, you are part of the reason that smaller parties and independents can't provide a decent alternative. You want to change the how elections are run? Vote for the candidate who behaves mostly in the way you want candidates to behave.
Not voting is self-disenfranchisement. It's lazy. But, most importantly, not voting is NOT making a statement! . It should never be considered "a perfectly acceptable choice" for anyone who has a political opinion.
Re:What to do instead?
autarch on 2008-11-03T15:46:10
Not voting is a perfectly acceptable choice.
This is a fiction. Not voting says you don't care. It's not making a statement that none of the parties are good enough for your vote. It's not telling the politicians that you're sick of their rubbish. It's saying you don't care enough to vote. That you're happy with whoever the people who do vote pick.
Or it could just be that you've reached the not unreasonable conclusion that voting is not an effective way of changing the world.
I didn't say it was a statement. I agree, it's not a statement, because very few people will ever know why you didn't vote. But it is a reasonable choice given the choices voting allows.
Again, if all you do is not vote, you're not doing anything useful. If you're involved in real activism and you also choose not to vote, that's fine. As I've said several times in this thread, voting is not activism, and if that's your sole contribution to changing society, it's near useless.
Nonetheless, I will be voting tomorrow. I'm not very motivated by the presidential race, but we do have a few good local candidates, including a Green Party candidate for state legislature who could possibly win. I live in a ridiculously left area (one of the leftiest parts of a very lefty city (Minneapolis)).
You may not like Obama, and if you were an american citizen you could use your vote to express that, but telling others to not vote is just wrong.
Stop and ponder for a moment the fact that this conversation would be been impossible just 20 years ago. An East German and an American having a political conversation in a public forum (Not to mention the fact that you have made several comments involving god and spirituality which also would have not been possible). It most certainly was not apathy and inaction on the part of the German people that brought down the Berlin Wall.
- Stevan
Re:A Call to Inaction??
sir_lichtkind on 2008-11-02T10:20:37
I am not saying that i dislike him, I just stating that he is consciously misleading people. Some call that lying and i don't like to see it when people are not able to see that.
What worked in east germany and what also worked for ghandis india and in pakistan is nonviolant noncooperation, which I also suggested, rather some political actions.Re:A Call to Inaction??
Stevan on 2008-11-02T16:23:31
Well you presume to know the inner working of Obama's head and that he is consciously misleading people. That is a big assumption which you have backed up with nothing more than your perceptions and the observations of a coworker of your father. Have you ever meet Obama? Looked him in the eye? Spoken to him directly? Have you even seen him speak (in person, not on television)? Have you seen him speak on television without being surrounded by the noise of pundants and the slants they throw? I highly doubt you can answer more than one of these questions with a yes, but yet you feel you can call him a liar? This is rather swift judgement you are passing. Even if you can point out a case where you think Obama was misleading or even outright lied, can you give me a full analysis of the situation and not distill it some childish idea of right and wrong? The world just isn't that simple, truth is not so clear a concept, good and evil are not so clearly defined, and it is a folly of youth to think so.
FWIW, Non-violent non-cooperation is a political action, but if you were to ask Gandhi or one of your countrymen who was old enough to remember I suspect neither of them would suggest that not voting would be a good idea. They performed their protests and actions specifically so that they could have a say in the way their government was run.
- Stevan
Indeed
kingubu on 2008-11-02T18:24:39
Grassroots mobilization-- including *gasp* community organizing-- is the heart and soul of politics.Re:A Call to Inaction??
sir_lichtkind on 2008-11-03T08:04:06
i know very well that good and right are relative terms, buts its about what i know about politic the system and many details not only about obama as well as my face reading abilities(which work fine on dayly basis) that makes clear to me that he want not to do what he pretends. I remember when wall came down and did here a more comprehensive answer that got lost due login problems, maybe later more.Re:A Call to Inaction??
Stevan on 2008-11-03T13:32:56
One of the things I have found over the course of my life and travels is that face reading abilities are not always transferable across racial and cultural boundries and are greatly diminished when filtered through the television. So again, unless you have talked to him yourself and looked him directly in the eye, I am not buying your "expertise".
But honestly, I will vote for Obama tomorrow because I know that even if (and I stress IF because I really don't agree with you) he individually is a liar and those around him are crooks, they are a better kind of crooks then those surrounding John McCain (see also: the last 8 years).
- Stevan
Re:A Call to Inaction??
chromatic on 2008-11-04T21:27:32
Look, the techie/media false dilemma again!
The lesser of two evils is still evil. Fortunately, there are many more candidates for president than the Holy and Anointed Two.
it's binary
Eric Wilhelm on 2008-11-07T09:18:11
You either vote against one evil or the other. Unfortunate, but that's how it works at the moment.
-Dom
Not being in the USA nor a USA citizen, I have no particular reason to believe that Obama is a liar nor that he has a string of broken promises. Not knowing how good your father's friend is at reading people, I can't really use that as evidence. However, due to reading many news sources from a variety of countries, I have been unable to avoid learning a little about Obama and McCain and of the two I prefer Obama. If there were a third option, perhaps I'd prefer that person, but I haven't heard of a third option.
But my preference is meaningless, so here's a few links to comments by people who can give much more meaningful reasons to vote for Obama, for those who are interested.
Re:Reasons to vote for Obama
sir_lichtkind on 2008-11-03T06:47:16
Shure thats your truth, but my point was not you should believe him, but thats its so obvious that hie lies that even he can see it. I know that gut feelings are ridiculed as truthiness but also what i know intelectually about obama paints no different picture.
You need a bit criminal mindset to recognize criminals, Tim OReilly seemes to lack this.
Re:Oh dear...
chromatic on 2008-11-06T17:51:15
If he gets assassinated, we canonize him.
(Can't tell if I'm talking about Lincoln or Kennedy, can you? Good.)
