Rob Ford

[Reincarnate]

Re: Rob Ford

If you don't vote, you have given up your right to express feelings about the decisions and actions of elected officials.

I disagree with this. When the system is sufficiently corrupt, voting is not much more than an act of complicity. To offer an extreme example, it's like asking if you voted for the rapist or the molester. Hell, you shouldn't want to vote for *either* of them.

It's demonstrably true at this point that most elected officials do not represent the will of the people, nor do they act in their best interests. The system has been so overrun by big money and gerrymandering and political gaming and corporate interests -- your vote is essentially worthless when people can buy their way into power. Virtually anyone you vote for is going to be a profoundly bad choice (in this particular climate), and the ones who *are* decent choices cannot possibly gain traction, so you *can* complain either way.

It's an exercise in learned helplessness. I think it's counterproductive to imply that people need to somehow participate in this losing game in order to earn the right to complain, when instead we should be focusing on what power we *do* have and how to best leverage it.


EDIT: I am retarded and didn't realize this thread was about Canada, so ignore this pl0x

[smartdude1212]

Re: Rob Ford

I was going to post a video in response to devonin of Russell Brand saying basically what Rubix just said, but a) I can't be assed to find it and b) Rubix just said it all anyway.

[devonin]

Re: Rob Ford

I disagree with this. When the system is sufficiently corrupt, voting is not much more than an act of complicity. To offer an extreme example, it's like asking if you voted for the rapist or the molester. Hell, you shouldn't want to vote for *either* of them.

It's demonstrably true at this point that most elected officials do not represent the will of the people, nor do they act in their best interests. The system has been so overrun by big money and gerrymandering and political gaming and corporate interests -- your vote is essentially worthless when people can buy their way into power. Virtually anyone you vote for is going to be a profoundly bad choice (in this particular climate), and the ones who *are* decent choices cannot possibly gain traction, so you *can* complain either way.

It's an exercise in learned helplessness. I think it's counterproductive to imply that people need to somehow participate in this losing game in order to earn the right to complain, when instead we should be focusing on what power we *do* have and how to best leverage it.

You can submit a spoiled ballot, or a ballot labelled "None of These"

I feel you MUST actually expend the effort to take part in the process in order to lodge a protest about it. You don't need to pick either candidate to vote, and deliberately spoiled and 'none of these' ballots are counted and recorded as such.

If every person who didn't vote because they didn't like any candidate submitted such a ballot, it would be enough of a percentage that it might actually make a statement instead of just not voting and then bitching about it for X years.

[Pseudo Enigma]

Re: Rob Ford

Do they take count for people who make spoiled ballots? "None of these" ballots? What about the people who just don't vote, do they count those?

Even then, is it a point of making a message about this? Or simply not voting for the sake of laziness?

Furthermore, do we have to care about the people like devonin not believing us when not voting gets in the way of talking about politics? Was he really inclined to believe us in the first place?

If you actually meant to have a serious debate with someone over politics (lol) I'm pretty certain you're not going to take into account for whether or not someone voted unless it comes down to cheap shots. In the end, if you're right about something, not voting isn't/shouldn't be a problem.

[devonin]

Re: Rob Ford

I feel like, given that there are avenues for you to vote in a way that doesn't support any candidate, that "I didn't vote because I didn't support any candidate" is code for "I'm lazy and don't care"

And if you are lazy and don't care then no, your opinions won't carry as much weight, valid or not. If you want to discuss facts and matters of public record, of course you can do that whether you voted or not, but expressing opinions on how things -should be- when you explicitly removed yourself from the process of exercising your responsibility to contribute to that process is just nonsense.

[devonin]

Re: Rob Ford

To offer an extreme example, it's like asking if you voted for the rapist or the molester. Hell, you shouldn't want to vote for *either* of them.

So if there are 1000 people, and 5 vote for the rapist and 2 vote for the molester and the other 993 don't vote at all, the rapist is going to win a strong 71% majority. If the other 993 people all submitted a deliberately spoiled ballot, the rapist will get only 0.5% of the vote.

You're an American Rubix, deliberately spoiled ballots are explicitly counted as votes for the purposes of determining a majority. That's a HUGE reason for you to vote even if you don't support any candidate.

[Pseudo Enigma]

Re: Rob Ford

So if there are 1000 people, and 5 vote for the rapist and 2 vote for the molester and the other 993 don't vote at all, the rapist is going to win a strong 71% majority. If the other 993 people all submitted a deliberately spoiled ballot, the rapist will get only 0.7% of the vote.

But what happens with the spoiled ballot's %? Does the spoiled ballot get elected?

Anyway that's interesting. I didn't know it counted at all.

[devonin]

Re: Rob Ford

Depends on the country, state, province etc, and how they measure it.

In most places that allow "None of these" or count illegal ballots by legal voters, a failure by any legitimate candidate to win the election causes there to be another election called, which if nothing else, gives all of those people a better platform from which to air their grievances, and perhaps field a candidate that better fits what the majority wants.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Rob Ford

I do apologize for dragging that into this thread since I don't know much about Canadian politics, and so what I've said may or may not apply at all -- doesn't make sense to drag American politics into another system. I probably should have read the thread first instead of just viscerally responding to the first thing I saw at the thread's end.

But to offer responses notwithstanding:

I feel like, given that there are avenues for you to vote in a way that doesn't support any candidate, that "I didn't vote because I didn't support any candidate" is code for "I'm lazy and don't care"

And if you are lazy and don't care then no, your opinions won't carry as much weight, valid or not. If you want to discuss facts and matters of public record, of course you can do that whether you voted or not, but expressing opinions on how things -should be- when you explicitly removed yourself from the process of exercising your responsibility to contribute to that process is just nonsense.

My point is that expressing _any_ opinion in a system that is used specifically to ignore the opinions of the people is a fruitless endeavor. It's me going out of my way to say "I don't like these candidates!" "Well, okay, then vote better people into office next time!" How can I possibly control that when people just buy their way in? There's no power with voting or the system in which it takes place.

So if there are 1000 people, and 5 vote for the rapist and 2 vote for the molester and the other 993 don't vote at all, the rapist is going to win a strong 71% majority. If the other 993 people all submitted a deliberately spoiled ballot, the rapist will get only 0.5% of the vote.

You're an American Rubix, deliberately spoiled ballots are explicitly counted as votes for the purposes of determining a majority. That's a HUGE reason for you to vote even if you don't support any candidate.

The rapist might get .5% of the vote, but he'd still win since you can't just "elect nobody." As far as I know, in most countries, spoiled ballots aren't counted. I don't know much about how this works so I could be wrong here. Has it ever been done before in a significant way?

I think it'd be unrealistic, at least here in America: Right now the current message is to "convince people to go out and vote." It's not "convince people to go out and show their disgust of the process." People are told that they need to "voice their opinion" by choosing among the candidates. The problem is that *none* of the choices technically accomplish the intended goal or really come close.

There's too much money in our political system that is dictating everything, and I think people severely underestimate its influence. Teaching people that they should participate in a rigged game (even if only to show protest) is not effective AFAIC, nor should it dictate whether or not one has the right to complain. I think we all have right to complain simply due to the system alone.

[devonin]

Re: Rob Ford

You have the right to complain about the system, sure. If you think the system is flawed, you have every right to say so. But it is the system we have. And while you can and should be making efforts to bring about changes in the system that you think will make the system better, to just patently ignore the entire system puts some of the blame for undesired outcomes of that system onto you.

The problem is that most people who don't vote, if they were MADE to vote, would rather vote at random or completely arbitrarily rather than educate themselves.

Canada routinely has perfectly reasonable candidates at every stage of electoral politics, regardless of your own political and social views. We have a multiple party system, with leaders that are voted on internally by their party, made up of people who actually identify with that party, so they tend to much better represent the beliefs of the party as a whole than in the US.

The way the Canadian electoral game gets "unrigged" is if the 40% of Canadians who didn't vote in the last federal election (More non-voters than voted for the WINNING party, which obtained only 39.78% of the popular vote) took any time at all to learn about the parties (We had 5 different parties earning seats in the House) and exercise their duty as citizens to vote.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Rob Ford

You have the right to complain about the system, sure. If you think the system is flawed, you have every right to say so. But it is the system we have. And while you can and should be making efforts to bring about changes in the system that you think will make the system better, to just patently ignore the entire system puts some of the blame for undesired outcomes of that system onto you.

The problem is that most people who don't vote, if they were MADE to vote, would rather vote at random or completely arbitrarily rather than educate themselves.

Canada routinely has perfectly reasonable candidates at every stage of electoral politics, regardless of your own political and social views. We have a multiple party system, with leaders that are voted on internally by their party, made up of people who actually identify with that party, so they tend to much better represent the beliefs of the party as a whole than in the US.

The way the Canadian electoral game gets "unrigged" is if the 40% of Canadians who didn't vote in the last federal election (More non-voters than voted for the WINNING party, which obtained only 39.78% of the popular vote) took any time at all to learn about the parties (We had 5 different parties earning seats in the House) and exercise their duty as citizens to vote.

I guess what I'm saying is that we can assign blame no matter what, if that is the case:

If you vote for someone whose administration causes damage (which would occur either way), you'd now be blameworthy for voting (as you may have heard many times -- "Don't complain, you voted for him. Twice!"). You can either be blamed for enabling the system, or blamed for standing by and doing nothing about it. Does participating in protest -- a spoiled ballot -- somehow absolve blame? You could argue that it doesn't, since it's not a practical way to bring about change. It's not much better than "praying" for a sick patient to get better. You might "feel better" for having done it, and you might be making a principled statement, and you might even be publicly showing your stance/sentiment, but in the end, nothing is being done about the actual problem.

I'm certainly not saying that one *shouldn't* vote with a spoiled ballot. If you're going to participate in a flawed system, that's the way to do it. But I disagree that participation (in a flawed system) is a necessary prerequisite for the right to complain about how events unfold or how the system operates.

A multi-party system is absolutely a great step forward. I hate that here in the US we only have two parties at the forefront. Pretty miserable stuff.

If the candidates under the Canadian system are actually there for the right reasons (and haven't forced their way into the process), and there aren't huge incentive problems intrinsic to the system, then I say more power to them -- and people should definitely participate.

[devonin]

Re: Rob Ford

The thing is that it's not (nor was it ever) about assigning or abrogating blame. It is about responsibility.

While you can say that telling people bad things are their fault for not voting, but then also their fault if they vote for a bad person is a bit of an equivocation. Just because both claims have the word 'fault' in them doesn't mean they are the same.

It's more a case of the idea that taking part in a process is what entitles you to having your views on that process heard.

The idea that single votes don't matter, so if you don't want a particular candidate to win you shouldn't vote at all is just absurd. I mean, case in point, that Canadian election where the winning party got fewer votes than the total number of people who didn't vote at all. If all of those people who didn't vote at all had gone in and filed formally spoilt ballots, "None of these" would have been the vote winner of the election. Not much sends the message of "This system is faulty" quite like electing NOTHING over any of the candidates.

The people who choose apathy more clearly send the message that they are fine with how things are going than even the people who just quietly vote for the lesser of two (or three or four) evils.

[Izzy]

Re: Rob Ford

I like the line right at the video.

"I love that guy."

[devonin]

Re: Rob Ford

Anyways, back to Rob Ford.

Fun fact from further in the past before he was international news:

Back in March, a former mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson alleged that at a fundraising party, Ford, while "Completely out of it" grabbed her ass, and suggested that she should have been in Florida with him the previous week because 'his wife wasn't there'"

He was so out of it that she suggested she thought he might have been on crack.

He denied all allegations.

[gold stinger]

Re: Rob Ford

Anyways, back to Rob Ford.

Fun fact from further in the past before he was international news:

Back in March, a former mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson alleged that at a fundraising party, Ford, while "Completely out of it" grabbed her ass, and suggested that she should have been in Florida with him the previous week because 'his wife wasn't there'"

He was so out of it that she suggested she thought he might have been on crack.

He denied all allegations.

My mom remembers going to a couple of Rob Ford's parties up in etobicoke area 40 something years ago before he became mayor of Toronto. Dude was incredibly rich and liked to throw parties. He was also known to get extremely drunk & dumb during those parties too.

Then again my mom is literally crazy so it's up for you to believe that.