Last-Minute Political Thoughts:

[vorkon]

I barely ever post here anymore, and mostly just use this account to keep track of and/or leave comments on other peoples' pages. But with the elections in the US coming down to the wire, I felt it was important to get my opinions out there in public. It's too late for me to influence anyone else here in Okinawa, obviously, but by and large they

Comments

[haibane_rachan]

The first time I was eligible to vote in a presidential election, it was 2004 and I voted for Michael Badnarik. I voted for him because he was the candidate whose stance on the issues most closely aligned with my own, but also because the main party candidates were so hopelessly bad. In 2008, I voted for Sarah Palin (willfully ignoring that this meant I was also voting for John McCain) because I agreed with her on a lot of the issues and I could respect her on the ones I didn't agree on. I also really just fuckin' like her, and that was refreshing as hell. I also remember having some feeling that it was too important an election to NOT vote AGAINST the person I didn't want to be president.

Today, I basically had the same reasoning as in 2008. While I won't tell you here how I voted (though you can probably guess), I will tell you that my vote wasn't for anyone; it was against someone. And I think that's what the modern presidential election process boils down to, anymore; voting against someone. Because you really aren't going to get anywhere voting third party. The system is deliberately set up in such a way to keep third parties from ever making progress and challenging the establishment. This was ON PURPOSE, dude. This is how the Big Two want it.

This is why I've been calling myself "Republican" when, by all practical measures, I'm closer to "Libertarian". I really believe the answer lies not in changing the system, but in transforming the parties that are involved in the system. That's what the Tea Party did, and they saw major successes. Fighting from the outside isn't going to work; it just lets the big two marginalize us. But if we keep inserting ourselves into their processes, making our voices heard in their spaces, and fighting for our place at the table, from within, where it's not so easy to silence us, we'll make a lot more progress.

....So that post didn't end up where I thought it would when I began it, but that's okay. I thought I was a bit more apathetic than that, but I guess not. >_>

[vorkon]

Note: I'll try responding to this, but as you can probably imagine I'm doing this from my phone at work. Only so much time for discourse, toxic or otherwise! :op