Magnifisyncopathological

Yeah, I know approximately A HISTORIC NUMBER OF AMERICANS have already DONE PATRIOTIC DUTIFUL THINGS and will certainly ignore me and the quoted below, but I don't care. Reading shit like this is irritating.

Voting is like choosing your next meal from the tank of a portable toilet behind the downtown bus station.

-Kent McManigal

As I traveled this morning to my place of work, in an attempt to lead a productive life and earn my living, I saw the endless parade of people wearing those popular "I Voted" stickers on their lapels. And this morning I finally realized why those adhesive badges are colored red. When you vote, you have the blood of coercion, violence, war, theft, and illegitimate rule on your hands. It is more than an endorsement of a particular candidate or party, it is an endorsement of a system that rules over us all with an iron fist. It is a plea to the school bully to not take all of your lunch money, but just to steal a certain percentage of it. And it bends the rules of morality to assume that when 49 people out of 100 say something is wrong - it is, and when 51 say it is right, it is.

-Rob Sieg

I know a lot about why they're going to do this, and I do not know how to illuminate it without their taking insult at all of it, no matter how supplicant I might be in the presentation.

At one point in a discussion about it, it was proposed that we should all "agree to disagree". That horrible old cop out.

I didn't ask what would happen if I disagreed with the United States Government, or the massed opinion of people who are going to vote tomorrow.

-Billy Beck

I suggest that we exercise this right not to participate. It is one of the few rights we have left. Nonparticipation sends a message that we no longer believe in the racket they have cooked up for us, and we want no part of it.

-Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Why do people think an idea that would be ludicrous on the market makes sense in politics? Why do people continue to regard as saviors those whose record shows unfailing support for activities few of us practice on our own, such as plunder and war? If we want change for our betterment, we will turn to the realm in which we are sovereign and reject political solutions altogether.

-George F. Smith

From this day forward I will do my best to refrain from imposing my will on my fellow human beings. Instead, when I feel strongly about something I will seek to persuade them while also keeping my mind open to the persuasive arguments of others. To this end I commit to doing the hard work necessary to develop my own emotional intelligence to the point where I have achieved complete mastery of my emotions. If ever I should fail to live up to this high standard I will not beat myself up. Instead I will have the courage to admit it and to seek to correct the situation.

I will lead by example and be a force for positive change in the world by working to reduce conflict, alleviate suffering and increasing the joy of my fellow human beings.

In the great tradition of passive resistance pioneered by the likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King I resolve to peacefully withdraw my support for the democratic system. I will not vote and I will not cooperate with any government except when forced to do so by the armed force of the state.

-Alex Ryan

I'll continue to vote occasionally against taxes or in local elections where a few votes can make a difference, but I will never vote to give someone the immense power that is illegitimately vested in the Presidency.

-Lance Adams

I don't vote because I see no reason to participate in the collective anointing of someone who will violate property rights and end up killing innocent people, when my vote doesn't even have the slightest chance of influencing the outcome.

-Bob Murphy

The electoral landscape has as many rotten boroughs as the mortgage or "real" estate one. If your vote is for one of the two approved parties (sometimes three in non-U.S. parliamentary democracies), it’s bundled and counted, and if not, it’s tallied in a cluster of votes which are given only nominal status. Usually this is performed as some kind of musical chairs routine, where your vote bundle gets something called a "seat" if your team has played the game correctly. If you want to dissent, your vote bundle is not given a seat, but your group can tell each other with grave faces that you’ve "done" something to "change" things. Let’s be clear about this. Most votes for change are bundled and thrown away. From this fact you might guess that voting is merely useless, but that isn’t the case. Your vote for alternative candidates is useless but not your vote for the system. Your vote is useless for change but powerful for stasis – it ratifies the system and sends a strong message that you think it’s okay to have a dynamic where any vote for change is tossed out. Don’t kid yourself. Your deed in the voting booth isn’t merely useless, it’s pernicious.

[...]

When people ask me what I have against democracy, I assume they mean other than its long history of bloody foreign adventures or other than the fact that its best forms are always complicit with totalitarian regimes, or other than the fact that it arises in slave states like 18th-century America or ancient Greece, or other than that it pretends to authenticate the self by sending it as a degraded proxy elsewhere to cede authority to people who are usually dumber than oneself and always less scrupulous, or that its rituals of affirmation and allegiance are too embarrassing to watch on TV even with the sound turned off, or that it’s too embarrassing to contemplate the image of one’s otherwise intelligent friends watching things called "debates" as if their irony somehow buffers them from the idiocy. So maybe they mean, other than the obvious. Do the Made in China stickers all over their apartments count as something other than the obvious? Do we need Hannah Arendt to tell us that democracy is merely a stage on the way to totalitarianism? Here’s what you get in a democracy: until December 31st of this year, the label "Made in Canada" can legally be affixed to apple juice grown in China by Chinese people using Chinese apples and reduced to concentrate in China, on the basis of its having water and a container added to it at the Canadian end [Clark Hoskin, Edible Toronto, Fall, 2008]. You can learn everything you need to know about democracy’s self-deceptions from that word "Made." Statist self-deception is constitutive, not incidental.

-David Ker Thomson

I don't vote, and don't expect I ever shall. Being even one-scintillionth responsible for placing the unbelievable and unspeakable powers of the current U.S. government in the hands of any of the people seeking it strikes me as irresponsible in the extreme. Besides, as everyone knows, those who vote have no right to complain about the outcome.

-Brian Doherty