…I’ve noticed that Idle Thoughts hasn’t been posting recently.
I wanted to apologise for my tone in my post earlier in the thread. I was out of line. Even in the pit.
A vote withheld from Hillary is half a vote for Trump, but beyond that the math is unequivocal. Purely in terms of who wins, elections are a zero-sum game–they are won solely by having more votes than the opponent. A switch from candidate A to B changes the difference between A and B by 2. A switch from A to C or a non-vote changes the delta by 1. Denial of this fact is just a denial of third-grade math.
I don’t disagree that any single one of those things would be frustrating.
Taking them all together, though… it almost suggests a curiously flat affect that makes me consider what others have also suggested: depression or something like it.
I apologize to OP for losing my temper. Not voting for President is fine if one doesn’t live in a swing state, which Arizona really is not. And not voting is fine if you think the candidates are equally good (or equally bad). I lost my temper because the stakes in this particular election were unusually huge: a good-hearted centrist, whatever her faults, vs a misogynist showman whose ignorance and sociopathy will make him a stooge for right-wingers, racists and other deplorables. Many of us are heart-broken, with grief causing irrational anger.
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On anothe rmatter:
Deaths in Iraq due to the earlier War are estimated at between 500,000 and over 1,000,000. Millions more became refugees, severely degrading their lives. Wikipedia asserts that 450,000 lives have been lost in 14 years of Afghanistan War “not including those who have died in Pakistan.”
400,000 or more have died in the Syrian Civil War; another 100,0000 in the Iraq war against Daesh, in each case again with millions of lives severely degraded.
Should Bush and Cheney be charged with all these deaths? Perhaps not, but the events they set in motion certainly led to the rise of Daesh. And you don’t have to blame all the deaths on Bush-Cheney to find them responsible for more than a million and, by SDMB precedent, anything more than 1, even 1.001 millions takes the plural!
“…while people took to the streets in Portland, OR) to denounce the president-elect, they apparently didn’t have the same fervor at the voting booth. News station KGW in Portland reports that at least 39 of the protesters did not return an election ballot. Another 35 of the demonstrators taken into custody weren’t registered to vote in Oregon, according to KGW.”
How personally should I take it if I have no friend request from you? Maybe “everyone” was an exaggeration. I mean, I don’t post that much and probably most of what I do post goes unnoticed by most so I’m definitely not a high-visibility board member. But everyone doesn’t mean everyone unless it’s everyone, right?
Mr. Idle Thoughts, you do not friend request everyone on this board, and I have the tear-stained pillowcase to prove it.
Voting is nothing more than surveillance. If you’ve ever seen a “voter’s file”, they have all kinds of information on you, including things you thought were confidential. Quite a bit can be reverse engineered with a phone number & address.
Obviously this varies by place-to-place, but it’s definitely over-reaching more often than not.
You’re only given the illusion of choice. Anyone who says you “have to vote” or something about having the “right to vote” is obviously low average IQ.
Notice how the political map has appeared very similar since 1992. Before that, there were years when basically the entire country went red or blue. Not anymore. The elites swing a few states however they want. They pulled quite the stunt this year.
Always good to hear from the tinfoil-hat brigade.
While it’s very easy to dismiss an opinion you don’t like as “tin foil”, here is some proof.
No, there are lots of opinions I disagree with that I don’t label tinfoil.That’s just for the paranoid ones.
Tinfoil hats ain’t worth a damn in the wind. Just sayin’.
I have a question. Have you ever had an intimate relationship with a barn yard animal?
You offerin’?