You really are determined to be a dick, huh? You’ve succeeded.
I dislike the superior attitude that non-voters bring out in others. I have voted exactly once in my life, and I felt kind of silly doing so since I had not researched the candidates, and besides the vote for president, there were dozens of other questions and issues on the board that I was clueless about and I just flicked a few switches based on pop decisions. Not a good way to decide our future, I felt.
I avoid any mention of voting because once I say that I don’t vote, the others immediately take on that air of superiority as they sneer “if you don’t vote then you have no right to complain.”
I look at it as the flimsiest excuse for one to put another down so that they can feel that they are better than the other. Sorry that I fit your definition of “lazy douchebag,” but I just don’t have the enthusiasm to contribute enough effort to this to do a proper job of it.
On the other hand, whenever someone starts to sneer at me, I have to fight the urge to ask them what else they do to help society: it takes a few minutes to vote, but do you regularly perform any volunteer work in your community to improve the lives of others directly?
You choose one thing to do and I choose another. I have spent over a thousand hours listening to depressed people talk on a suicide hotline. However, I don’t do this out of a sense of duty nor seeking superiority – I do this for a truly selfish reason: I really like to do it and am passionate about it. And maybe that’s the kicker: you might vote and do a great job of it because following politics carefully is something you are passionate about and dearly love to do.
Meanwhile, leave the question of voting alongside other unaskable questions such as salary and what someone paid for their home. I feel that there are valid reasons for not voting that do not require that a voter be superior to the non-voter, and the question just places the non-voter in an uncomfortable defensive position.
Well, I was trying to find out if there was an actual, valid reason that you enjoy calling non-voters stupid names, or if you just watched one too many Rock the Vote specials in the '90s.
I think I have my answer.
Anybody else amused by the irony here?
Slate, the prospect of yet another guns and abortion debate just doesn’t stir every human soul the way it does yours. Some people are lazy, but there are a lot of people out there who don’t feel obliged to get involved because they don’t think it makes much difference in their lives, at least compared to other things. Given the things candidates can actually do as compared to what they promise, and the size of the U.S. population - just to name two obvious factors - I think the people who say their vote doesn’t matter have a pretty strong case. I do vote, but I don’t feel some overwhelming sense of superiority about it. I’m glad you’re getting so much out of it, though.
This rant brought to you by the year 2004.
Now playing over in Great Debates: Howard Dean vs. John Kerry: Who’s Going to Beat Bush This Fall?
Also, remember that many voters live in states which are so overwhelmingly Democratic or Republican, that their vote **won’t ** make a difference.
In 2004, I stood in the cold rain for 90 minutes to vote because I lived in Columbus, Ohio.
This year? I know Texas is going McCain. I’ll probably vote, but I wouldn’t stand in the rain for 90 minutes to do so.
I don’t vote. I won’t vote. It’s a huge fucking waste of my time, since any intelligent and informed ballot I might cast will be instantly negated by 10,000 ignorant morons who don’t know an issue from a roll of toilet paper.
The OP is cordially invited to kiss my ass.
Considering how many people apparently make their choice by deciding who’d they’d rather have a beer with at a backyard barbecue, I sometimes think we have too many people voting. Too many idiots, at least.
Yes.
Yes we should.
Christ, in 2016 we’ll probably hear ‘Justice John Paul Stevens turned 96 on Sunday’. If all the histronics were listened to, Bush would have added five new Justices instead of the mere two he has. Hell, one of 'em didn’t even die.
:rolleyes: Sure cupcake, you have your “answer.”
Yet!
Some of the leftish wackos I’ve talked to believe that Bush and Co. will assassinate a Supreme Court justice before the end of his term…
And if 100,000 informed and intelligent people got off their asses and voted they might just help negate the 10,000 votes cast by the idiots.
The Labor politician King O’Malley was both American born and a very strange individual, and one of his big passions was spelling reform, so he got the Labour Party to change its name to the Labor Party.
My girlfriend refuses to have “anything to do with politics”, to which I always respond that she’s involved whether she likes it or not.
I’ve been slowly scaring her toward the voting booth by showing her YouTube clips of the really, really scary people who do vote (or even hold office) - Huckabee’s “rewrite the Constitution for God” speech, the Phelpsists, and so on.
At the very least I’ve got her watching Colbert so she could at least identify the Presidential candidates.
Do you have a plan to get all the smart people to vote while all the dumb ones stay home?
Cupcake? :dubious:
Only open the polls when Two and a Half Men is on.
I’d love to know where you live that has a smartguy/dumbass ratio of 10:1. Here in America, it’s more like 1:100.
The trick is to have the smart people telling the stupid ones how to vote, y’see.