7 ms·

George Carlin is (was) a right fool. The whole problem is that people don't have enough control over the government. Not voting only allows those who would have

by astine 13y ago

George Carlin is (was) a right fool. The whole problem is that people don't have enough control over the government. Not voting only allows those who would have control over you to have more power. Even a protest vote or a third party vote is worth more than no vote.

ihsw 13y ago
> Even a protest vote or a third party vote is worth more than no vote. Actually, it's not. The US election process operates under the Electoral College[1], so a state majority vote changes all votes to that majority vote (eg: Democrats win majority in Illinois, so all votes in that state end up voting for Democrats in the presidential election). The disparity between the electoral vote and the popular vote is usually not wide enough to cause controversy, however it's still offensive to realize that your vote changes without your consent. Gerrymandering[2] is a whole different topic, however it is just as galling. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering
- plackemacher 13y ago
  Actually, it is. If a third party gets more than 5% of the popular vote, they have rights to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund[1] which can further help in future years to get said third party elected. [1] http://www.fec.gov/press/bkgnd/fund.shtml http://www.fec.gov/press/bkgnd/fund.shtml
- crazcarl 13y ago
  The difference between a third party getting 1% of the vote versus 10% could have some impact on politics even if it doesn't affect the outcome of the election.
  - jetti 13y ago
    But just voting to vote is useless. People seem to have the mentality that you pick the lesser of two evils, which is BS. I'm not going to vote for somebody if I don't feel like they are completely up for the job. I'm not going to vote for a 3rd party just so they can get funding because guess what, this years candidate may be great but the funding would be for the next round and who knows who they will have then.
    - tjr 13y ago
      What does not voting accomplish?
      - scott_karana 13y ago
        Nothing, by itself. Hopefully angry non-voting citizens will reach out politically by other means.
    - admax88q 13y ago
      If you're left with the choice between the lesser or two evils on how to run the country. It is very _very_ important that you get the _lesser_ of those two evils.
      - jetti 13y ago
        Why? Either way you're left with evil running the country.
- nnnnni 13y ago
  Thanks, people seem to forget about the Electoral College.
- jmilloy 13y ago
  I don't think everyone agrees that votes only matter if they lead to a tally in the Electoral College. Funding is one example.
- Glyptodon 13y ago
  Wrong basis. By voting for someone who won't win you can claim that you tried and failed to improve things, and that it was everyone else (who voted for the winner/mainstream candidate) who causes all our problems and is responsible.
- lisper 13y ago
  http://www.nationalpopularvote.com http://www.nationalpopularvote.com
- baddox 13y ago
  For that matter, why even bring up the electoral college? Even if the president were elected by a majority vote, the odds of the election being a tie or decided by a single vote is incredibly small—almost certainly too small to be able to rationally justify the time spent researching candidates or even traveling to the polling location.
  - tjr 13y ago
    It looks like in my state about 1,500,000 people voted in the 2012 presidential election. So if a few hundred thousand people decided to not vote because their one vote doesn't matter, it's conceivable that the result in a state could be swayed. So why try to persuade people their vote doesn't matter? If enough of them (an admittedly large number) listen, it will matter.
    - baddox 13y ago
      > So if a few hundred thousand people decided to not vote because their one vote doesn't matter, it's conceivable that the result in a state could be swayed. Yes, but it's extremely unlikely that your vote would sway the result, and I'm operating under the assumption that you can only control your own decision to vote. > So why try to persuade people their vote doesn't matter? If enough of them (an admittedly large number) listen, it will matter. You're confusing two things. I would never try to persuade people that the sum of everyone's votes doesn't matter, because it obviously does (discounting for the moment the possibility of election fraud). But I would try to persuade individuals that their vote will not matter with a very high probability. Even though this is often phrased in such a way that it almost sounds like a contradiction or paradox, it's not at all. It's analogous to the lottery: the more people that play, the higher the chance that someone will win (assuming random picks), but one person buying a single lottery ticket has such a small probability of winning that I would recommend against relying on the lottery to change one's financial situation.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - 13y ago
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  I will chime in with how it is too. Since there are such tight margins in the popular vote, and large percentage participation gaps, when people vote a protest candidate it has the effect of 'pulling' votes from one of the two mainstream candidates. Ross Perot in the 1992 and 1996 Elections was credited or accused of changing the outcome of the election by taking votes away from Bush (the elder). The result were more Perot like ideas being pushed into both parties to prevent that from happening. Protest voting, even in rigged elections like Putin's election in Russia, are very effective political action.
- tlrobinson 13y ago
  If all you care about is the final tally of Electoral College votes, then you're right.
- jimworm 13y ago
  If the sole effect of voting is to choose a winner, then you're probably right. But I think that's not the only effect that comes out of counting the votes. It's the one place where voters actually lay their cards on the table, or rather cast their votes in the ballot box. Votes are not a limitless resource to voters, unlike words or even opinion polls, and it is an important form of communication to other voters in the next election. This is where gaming the voting system hurts democracy. Simply voting for the biggest bloc that is not your vision of pure evil is short-sighted, and causes the voters lose their independence - important for a voting system to arrive at an optimum result [1], and it also destroys the only credible method of communicating the lack of confidence in the system to each other [2]. Everybody knowing that everybody else knows that everybody have lost faith in the main blocs is not sufficient to create real change, but it certainly is necessary. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd [2] https://youtu.be/3-son3EJTrU?t=8m13s https://youtu.be/3-son3EJTrU?t=8m13s
- astine 13y ago
  Do you know how often an Electoral College delegate changes his vote? It's extremely rare. Most of them are bound and even the unbound ones nearly always vote as directed. Personally, I've always like the idea of the Electoral College because voting for a president is a complex issue that usually comes down to the talking points on television. Electing a delegate from my own community to take on the challenge researching the candidates for me is a much more manageable task, like electing a representative to vote on laws. But your missing broader picture. This is not just about the presidential election. You also have a senator, a representative, a state representative, at state governor, a mayor, a sheriff, a town council leader, a school board leader, (maybe not all at once,) for whom you can vote. Too much power is concentrated in the presidency and this is a result people neglecting the importance of other elected offices, most of which have more of a direct influence on your life anyway. Even beyond that, if you believe that your vote is so worthless that you may as well not cast it, that's a sign that you should get more involved in politics, not less. It's not hard to join your local party chapter and to start making changes as an 'insider.'
- gnaritas 13y ago
  > Actually, it's not. Yes it is. >The US election process operates under the Electoral College[1] No, the US presidential election process works that way; that's one election for one office, there are many more offices you vote for than just president and all that voting matters and is absolutely worth more than a no vote.
malvosenior 13y ago
A large non-voting would-be constituency means that there is little mandate for politicians to drive policy. If say 90% of the population didn't vote, plus there were public demonstrations of discontent, officials would be so afraid of a revolution (or other radical action) it would in theory temper their ambitions. Tocqueville touches on this in Democracy in America.
- andyjohnson0 13y ago
  Politics is how complex societies make decisions at the largest scale. Despite the wet dreams of the tea party contingent, politics and government-by-mandate aren't optional in the 21st century and haven't been for a long time. Tocqueville died in 1859, back when things were simpler. If 90% of the population refuse to vote then you would end-up with one of two outcomes: 1. A minority government governing with a mandate from <= 10% of the population. Cue politician saying 'look, I got 80% of the votes cast'. Expect: extreme social unrest, dictatorship by minority, authoritarianism. 2. No government. Not as great as some might think. Expect: nothing-gets-done, social collapse, power vacuum, enemy nations sharpen their knives. First-world politicians in this century won't have their ambitions "tempered" by large scale withdrawal from voting - all this would do is remove the main mechanism that restrains them. Even in a society that has backed itself into this kind of local minima, politics and politicians would still exist.
- cabalamat 13y ago
  > officials would be so afraid of a revolution ... that they would set up a security apparatus to prevent one from ever happening.
JulianMorrison 13y ago
The reality of voting is that you pick the least worst choice. "Representative democracy" isn't democracy. It's bloodless regime change. You get a choice of who you can work with. Actual liberatory politics begins the day after the election, and involves things like pressure groups, petitions, protests and lobbying.
- rayiner 13y ago
  You're begging the question. Why are the choices the way they are? You see a status quo where neither major party cares about electronic privacy. Is it because there is a vast conspiracy between media and government to only present these two viewpoints? Is it because huge amounts of money go into getting people to support NSA surveillance? Or is it because opposing NSA surveillance is not an issue that reliably yields votes? Which voting bloc can you capture by supporting the scaling back of NSA surveillance? Angry nerds? Not a big demographic. If your issue doesn't get old people, blacks and hispanics, religious conservatives, teachers, union workers, small business owners, or one of the other big demographics like that to go out and vote based solely on that issue, then there is not enough votes in that issue for any politician to care about it. And the thing is, that's arguably how democracy should work. Why should politicians in a democracy cater to the pet issues of an ideological minority?
  - john_b 13y ago
    > Why should politicians in a democracy cater to the pet issues of an ideological minority? From a human and Constitutional rights point of view, they have an obligation to respect the views of those ideological minorities when their main agenda is defending their rights (right to privacy, free speech, or whatever it may be). A pure democratic system is little more than a (usually peaceful) mob rule, but in a representative democracy there is at least the expectation that elected representatives, by virtue of being middlemen between the people and the laws that govern them, as well as only having to risk their job every few years, will be able to reflect on more than what the majority wants at the present moment. However, if your point was made more from the perspective of maintaining power and control, then I don't disagree with you.
TamDenholm 13y ago
The problem with voting is your choice is the lesser of two evils. If you dont vote, you're saying that the choices you are given aren't good enough and dont deserve your vote.
notdrunkatall 13y ago
No, he most certainly was not. His point was that it didn't matter, and as we are seeing, it doesn't. You can vote for one of two flavors, but both of them taste like shit. You can go to the polling booth believing the fiction that your vote matters, but it does not. Nothing ever changes because both mainstream candidates are always essentially equivalent in most of the ways that really matter - they're always just two sides of the same shitty coin.
baddox 13y ago
Voting empirically does not provide enough control over the government to justify even traveling to the polling location.
rayiner 13y ago
Is it the case that people don't have enough control over the government? As far as I can tell, we have exactly the government we want, or at least exactly the government you might expect to get in a compromise between rural middle America, suburbanites, christian conservatives, and urban yuppies. The people who strongly oppose the security measures taken after 9/11 are in the minority. They were part of Obama's coalition, but were almost certainly outnumbered by teachers or blue collar factory workers. I bet if you polled the public, "NSA surveillance" wouldn't rank among the top 3 concerns of even a sizeable minority of the people. So when the government engages in legal (at the edge of legality, to be sure, but at least colorably legal), and the people don't strongly oppose the measures, why do we treat it as some sort of failure of democracy?
- josephlord 13y ago
  It could still be a failure of the constitution even if not of democracy.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    See: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rightofprivacy.html http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rightof... ("The U. S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy. The Bill of Rights, however, reflects the concern of James Madison and other framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy, such as the privacy of beliefs (1st Amendment), privacy of the home against demands that it be used to house soldiers (3rd Amendment), privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches (4th Amendment), and the 5th Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination, which provides protection for the privacy of personal information.") (emphasis added). The NSA's actions seem pretty precisely tailored to stay on the "right side" of the Constitutional line, avoiding the specific aspects of "privacy" protected by the Constitution.
    - josephlord 13y ago
      It could still be regarded as a failure even if it is not a breach (and I hold no position on whether it is or isn't a breach). Electronic communications were clearly not considered by the authors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (understandably) but they were clearly trying trying to impose limits on the power of the state and I think the idea that the government should be allowed to track all of everyone's associations would have been abhorrent but that is the practical effect of the monitoring that has been revealed.
john_b 13y ago
Even if you accept the idea that your vote has some tiny marginal effect on the outcome (which, in the electoral college, is usually not the case), you still have to weigh the opportunity cost of voting (and of the time spent deciding who to vote for) against what you would have been able to do with that time had you not bothered. You could spend more time with your family, with friends, learn a new skill, enjoy a more peaceful state of mind by not feeling obligated to follow the news 24/7, and more. Which of these do you think will most improve the state of your life? Especially when you factor in the probability that the person you vote for will renege on many of his or her promises? Local elections are a more worthwhile, due to the increased influence of even a single voice and the fact that they are usually decided by popular vote.
- tjr 13y ago
  Local elections are a more worthwhile, due to the increased influence of even a single voice and the fact that they are usually decided by popular vote. And this might really be the place to put most of your political thought and effort. Getting good people into local offices can be a first step to getting those same good people into regional, state, national offices. If we want until the presidential election to care, it's likely too late. As far as spending time on the major elections... I don't watch the news 24/7. I spend maybe ten hours during "election season" watching debates and reading articles, and a lot of that is done socially with friends and family. I enjoy it, and do not consider it time wasted. My polling place is about two blocks from my home. It takes me ten minutes to go vote. I do not see elections as a worthless drain on my time, even if my one vote, by itself, doesn't matter.
- saraid216 13y ago
  The entire point of voting is about not being as relentlessly self-absorbed as you've described here.
damoncali 13y ago
It's a joke.

by astine 13y ago

ihsw 13y ago

> Even a protest vote or a third party vote is worth more than no vote. Actually, it's not. The US election process operates under the Electoral College[1], so a state majority vote changes all votes to that majority vote (eg: Democrats win majority in Illinois, so all votes in that state end up voting for Democrats in the presidential election). The disparity between the electoral vote and the popular vote is usually not wide enough to cause controversy, however it's still offensive to realize that your vote changes without your consent. Gerrymandering[2] is a whole different topic, however it is just as galling. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering

plackemacher 13y ago
Actually, it is. If a third party gets more than 5% of the popular vote, they have rights to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund[1] which can further help in future years to get said third party elected. [1] http://www.fec.gov/press/bkgnd/fund.shtml http://www.fec.gov/press/bkgnd/fund.shtml
crazcarl 13y ago
The difference between a third party getting 1% of the vote versus 10% could have some impact on politics even if it doesn't affect the outcome of the election.
- jetti 13y ago
  But just voting to vote is useless. People seem to have the mentality that you pick the lesser of two evils, which is BS. I'm not going to vote for somebody if I don't feel like they are completely up for the job. I'm not going to vote for a 3rd party just so they can get funding because guess what, this years candidate may be great but the funding would be for the next round and who knows who they will have then.
  - tjr 13y ago
    What does not voting accomplish?
    - scott_karana 13y ago
      Nothing, by itself. Hopefully angry non-voting citizens will reach out politically by other means.
  - admax88q 13y ago
    If you're left with the choice between the lesser or two evils on how to run the country. It is very _very_ important that you get the _lesser_ of those two evils.
    - jetti 13y ago
      Why? Either way you're left with evil running the country.
nnnnni 13y ago
Thanks, people seem to forget about the Electoral College.
jmilloy 13y ago
I don't think everyone agrees that votes only matter if they lead to a tally in the Electoral College. Funding is one example.
Glyptodon 13y ago
Wrong basis. By voting for someone who won't win you can claim that you tried and failed to improve things, and that it was everyone else (who voted for the winner/mainstream candidate) who causes all our problems and is responsible.
lisper 13y ago
http://www.nationalpopularvote.com http://www.nationalpopularvote.com
baddox 13y ago
For that matter, why even bring up the electoral college? Even if the president were elected by a majority vote, the odds of the election being a tie or decided by a single vote is incredibly small—almost certainly too small to be able to rationally justify the time spent researching candidates or even traveling to the polling location.
- tjr 13y ago
  It looks like in my state about 1,500,000 people voted in the 2012 presidential election. So if a few hundred thousand people decided to not vote because their one vote doesn't matter, it's conceivable that the result in a state could be swayed. So why try to persuade people their vote doesn't matter? If enough of them (an admittedly large number) listen, it will matter.
  - baddox 13y ago
    > So if a few hundred thousand people decided to not vote because their one vote doesn't matter, it's conceivable that the result in a state could be swayed. Yes, but it's extremely unlikely that your vote would sway the result, and I'm operating under the assumption that you can only control your own decision to vote. > So why try to persuade people their vote doesn't matter? If enough of them (an admittedly large number) listen, it will matter. You're confusing two things. I would never try to persuade people that the sum of everyone's votes doesn't matter, because it obviously does (discounting for the moment the possibility of election fraud). But I would try to persuade individuals that their vote will not matter with a very high probability. Even though this is often phrased in such a way that it almost sounds like a contradiction or paradox, it's not at all. It's analogous to the lottery: the more people that play, the higher the chance that someone will win (assuming random picks), but one person buying a single lottery ticket has such a small probability of winning that I would recommend against relying on the lottery to change one's financial situation.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - 13y ago
ChuckMcM 13y ago
I will chime in with how it is too. Since there are such tight margins in the popular vote, and large percentage participation gaps, when people vote a protest candidate it has the effect of 'pulling' votes from one of the two mainstream candidates. Ross Perot in the 1992 and 1996 Elections was credited or accused of changing the outcome of the election by taking votes away from Bush (the elder). The result were more Perot like ideas being pushed into both parties to prevent that from happening. Protest voting, even in rigged elections like Putin's election in Russia, are very effective political action.
tlrobinson 13y ago
If all you care about is the final tally of Electoral College votes, then you're right.
jimworm 13y ago
If the sole effect of voting is to choose a winner, then you're probably right. But I think that's not the only effect that comes out of counting the votes. It's the one place where voters actually lay their cards on the table, or rather cast their votes in the ballot box. Votes are not a limitless resource to voters, unlike words or even opinion polls, and it is an important form of communication to other voters in the next election. This is where gaming the voting system hurts democracy. Simply voting for the biggest bloc that is not your vision of pure evil is short-sighted, and causes the voters lose their independence - important for a voting system to arrive at an optimum result [1], and it also destroys the only credible method of communicating the lack of confidence in the system to each other [2]. Everybody knowing that everybody else knows that everybody have lost faith in the main blocs is not sufficient to create real change, but it certainly is necessary. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd [2] https://youtu.be/3-son3EJTrU?t=8m13s https://youtu.be/3-son3EJTrU?t=8m13s
astine 13y ago
Do you know how often an Electoral College delegate changes his vote? It's extremely rare. Most of them are bound and even the unbound ones nearly always vote as directed. Personally, I've always like the idea of the Electoral College because voting for a president is a complex issue that usually comes down to the talking points on television. Electing a delegate from my own community to take on the challenge researching the candidates for me is a much more manageable task, like electing a representative to vote on laws. But your missing broader picture. This is not just about the presidential election. You also have a senator, a representative, a state representative, at state governor, a mayor, a sheriff, a town council leader, a school board leader, (maybe not all at once,) for whom you can vote. Too much power is concentrated in the presidency and this is a result people neglecting the importance of other elected offices, most of which have more of a direct influence on your life anyway. Even beyond that, if you believe that your vote is so worthless that you may as well not cast it, that's a sign that you should get more involved in politics, not less. It's not hard to join your local party chapter and to start making changes as an 'insider.'
gnaritas 13y ago
> Actually, it's not. Yes it is. >The US election process operates under the Electoral College[1] No, the US presidential election process works that way; that's one election for one office, there are many more offices you vote for than just president and all that voting matters and is absolutely worth more than a no vote.

malvosenior 13y ago

A large non-voting would-be constituency means that there is little mandate for politicians to drive policy. If say 90% of the population didn't vote, plus there were public demonstrations of discontent, officials would be so afraid of a revolution (or other radical action) it would in theory temper their ambitions. Tocqueville touches on this in Democracy in America.

andyjohnson0 13y ago
Politics is how complex societies make decisions at the largest scale. Despite the wet dreams of the tea party contingent, politics and government-by-mandate aren't optional in the 21st century and haven't been for a long time. Tocqueville died in 1859, back when things were simpler. If 90% of the population refuse to vote then you would end-up with one of two outcomes: 1. A minority government governing with a mandate from <= 10% of the population. Cue politician saying 'look, I got 80% of the votes cast'. Expect: extreme social unrest, dictatorship by minority, authoritarianism. 2. No government. Not as great as some might think. Expect: nothing-gets-done, social collapse, power vacuum, enemy nations sharpen their knives. First-world politicians in this century won't have their ambitions "tempered" by large scale withdrawal from voting - all this would do is remove the main mechanism that restrains them. Even in a society that has backed itself into this kind of local minima, politics and politicians would still exist.
cabalamat 13y ago
> officials would be so afraid of a revolution ... that they would set up a security apparatus to prevent one from ever happening.

JulianMorrison 13y ago

The reality of voting is that you pick the least worst choice. "Representative democracy" isn't democracy. It's bloodless regime change. You get a choice of who you can work with. Actual liberatory politics begins the day after the election, and involves things like pressure groups, petitions, protests and lobbying.

rayiner 13y ago
You're begging the question. Why are the choices the way they are? You see a status quo where neither major party cares about electronic privacy. Is it because there is a vast conspiracy between media and government to only present these two viewpoints? Is it because huge amounts of money go into getting people to support NSA surveillance? Or is it because opposing NSA surveillance is not an issue that reliably yields votes? Which voting bloc can you capture by supporting the scaling back of NSA surveillance? Angry nerds? Not a big demographic. If your issue doesn't get old people, blacks and hispanics, religious conservatives, teachers, union workers, small business owners, or one of the other big demographics like that to go out and vote based solely on that issue, then there is not enough votes in that issue for any politician to care about it. And the thing is, that's arguably how democracy should work. Why should politicians in a democracy cater to the pet issues of an ideological minority?
- john_b 13y ago
  > Why should politicians in a democracy cater to the pet issues of an ideological minority? From a human and Constitutional rights point of view, they have an obligation to respect the views of those ideological minorities when their main agenda is defending their rights (right to privacy, free speech, or whatever it may be). A pure democratic system is little more than a (usually peaceful) mob rule, but in a representative democracy there is at least the expectation that elected representatives, by virtue of being middlemen between the people and the laws that govern them, as well as only having to risk their job every few years, will be able to reflect on more than what the majority wants at the present moment. However, if your point was made more from the perspective of maintaining power and control, then I don't disagree with you.

TamDenholm 13y ago

The problem with voting is your choice is the lesser of two evils. If you dont vote, you're saying that the choices you are given aren't good enough and dont deserve your vote.

notdrunkatall 13y ago

No, he most certainly was not. His point was that it didn't matter, and as we are seeing, it doesn't. You can vote for one of two flavors, but both of them taste like shit. You can go to the polling booth believing the fiction that your vote matters, but it does not. Nothing ever changes because both mainstream candidates are always essentially equivalent in most of the ways that really matter - they're always just two sides of the same shitty coin.

baddox 13y ago

Voting empirically does not provide enough control over the government to justify even traveling to the polling location.

rayiner 13y ago

Is it the case that people don't have enough control over the government? As far as I can tell, we have exactly the government we want, or at least exactly the government you might expect to get in a compromise between rural middle America, suburbanites, christian conservatives, and urban yuppies. The people who strongly oppose the security measures taken after 9/11 are in the minority. They were part of Obama's coalition, but were almost certainly outnumbered by teachers or blue collar factory workers. I bet if you polled the public, "NSA surveillance" wouldn't rank among the top 3 concerns of even a sizeable minority of the people. So when the government engages in legal (at the edge of legality, to be sure, but at least colorably legal), and the people don't strongly oppose the measures, why do we treat it as some sort of failure of democracy?

josephlord 13y ago
It could still be a failure of the constitution even if not of democracy.
- rayiner 13y ago
  See: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rightofprivacy.html http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rightof... ("The U. S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy. The Bill of Rights, however, reflects the concern of James Madison and other framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy, such as the privacy of beliefs (1st Amendment), privacy of the home against demands that it be used to house soldiers (3rd Amendment), privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches (4th Amendment), and the 5th Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination, which provides protection for the privacy of personal information.") (emphasis added). The NSA's actions seem pretty precisely tailored to stay on the "right side" of the Constitutional line, avoiding the specific aspects of "privacy" protected by the Constitution.
  - josephlord 13y ago
    It could still be regarded as a failure even if it is not a breach (and I hold no position on whether it is or isn't a breach). Electronic communications were clearly not considered by the authors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (understandably) but they were clearly trying trying to impose limits on the power of the state and I think the idea that the government should be allowed to track all of everyone's associations would have been abhorrent but that is the practical effect of the monitoring that has been revealed.

john_b 13y ago

Even if you accept the idea that your vote has some tiny marginal effect on the outcome (which, in the electoral college, is usually not the case), you still have to weigh the opportunity cost of voting (and of the time spent deciding who to vote for) against what you would have been able to do with that time had you not bothered. You could spend more time with your family, with friends, learn a new skill, enjoy a more peaceful state of mind by not feeling obligated to follow the news 24/7, and more. Which of these do you think will most improve the state of your life? Especially when you factor in the probability that the person you vote for will renege on many of his or her promises? Local elections are a more worthwhile, due to the increased influence of even a single voice and the fact that they are usually decided by popular vote.

tjr 13y ago
Local elections are a more worthwhile, due to the increased influence of even a single voice and the fact that they are usually decided by popular vote. And this might really be the place to put most of your political thought and effort. Getting good people into local offices can be a first step to getting those same good people into regional, state, national offices. If we want until the presidential election to care, it's likely too late. As far as spending time on the major elections... I don't watch the news 24/7. I spend maybe ten hours during "election season" watching debates and reading articles, and a lot of that is done socially with friends and family. I enjoy it, and do not consider it time wasted. My polling place is about two blocks from my home. It takes me ten minutes to go vote. I do not see elections as a worthless drain on my time, even if my one vote, by itself, doesn't matter.
saraid216 13y ago
The entire point of voting is about not being as relentlessly self-absorbed as you've described here.

damoncali 13y ago

It's a joke.