Falterfire said:
Well, that was my point. I have two choices: Vote for a candidate that I only halfway support, or do what amounts to setting my vote on fire and watching it burn. Sure I could take the moral high ground and vote for what I believe in, but an empty symbolic gesture isn't much better than voting for the guy I hate least.
You know what's also an empty symbolic gesture? Voting for someone you don't even support, because you think the other guy's worse when in reality, both are just as bad. It's merely boiled down to the 'flavor' of bad you desire. The current American first-past-the-post system is naturally inclined to devolve into two major parties due to political strategizing and is completely broken as a form of democracy. After Perot nearly upturned the apple cart, the two major parties instituted election laws that make a third party or independent candidate an even more remote possibility than it was before.
In essence, I think voting in the current American system is completely pointless - even more so than 'throwing your vote away' by voting third party for someone you actually agree with. The two major parties are great at attacking the other side and not so great at actually accomplishing anything other than bombing the shit out of the Middle East and honestly they can't even get that right. They're also great at turning regular people against eachother by making them chant 'BLUE TEAM BLUE TEAM!' or 'RED TEAM RED TEAM!' and being absolutely vile to anyone who's fan of a different color than they are.
Power-hungry rich oligarch A or power-hungry rich oligarch B is an illusion of choice. When someone tells someone else not to vote, what I usually hear folks say in reply is 'If you don't vote, you give up the right to be heard'. I say instead, if I do vote for either of the two evils just because one has a more pleasing shape to me, aren't I instead perpetuating this horribly broken system and implicitly endorsing it by playing along? Participating in a corrupt system run by corrupt political parties does not make my voice 'heard' - after all, even if I don't choose, I've still made a choice. I don't see that changing until they add a 'None of the above' to the ballot.
"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."
