Bill writes:
> It merely offends my sensibilities that those who do prefer Nader are being blackmailed to support Kerry.
How are they being blackmailed? They have the right to vote for whom they want. Is it blackmail to ask people to accept responsibility for their actions?
> I was merely responding to the suggestion that those who prefer Kerry over Bush, but prefer Nader over Kerry, are obliged to vote for Kerry rather than their first choice because under the electoral system the votes of those who fail to vote for one of the two major parties are not counted towards the final result.
The system is dysfunctional -- I agree. To me a priority would be to change the system. But this is not going to happen within the next seven months before election. But whether or not the system changes, people are still responsible for the consequences of their actions.
> Brian's response deliberately ignored my arguments and tried to change the subject.
Well, I didn't see any arguments. You just ranted about being blackmailed. In this post you are much clearer as to how the blackmail is occurring.
> Instead he blathered about irrelevancies in a desperate attempt to change the subject.
You may judge queers, women and blacks as irrelevancies, but I do not. Just a difference in emphasis.
> Personally, I'd prefer Bush to succeed, because he's an incompetent moron who (in the long term) poses a far greater threat to US capitalists and American hegemony, than (in the short term) he does to gays and blacks in America.
This notion seems to go back to your notion of making "them" bleed. To me it is a dangerous (and losing) bet to make. Bush may be incompetent, but those who bought the presidency for him are not. He will be jettisoned long before he can do any harm to the system he was hired to front for. Your faith in what the great Tennessee called the "long-delayed but always expected something that we live for" is touching, but, in my view, more than a tad naive.
In the meantime the bleeding will continue, among the poor, blacks, queers, women. Why do you think a strategy of passivity will work?
> Though in the short term it has to be said that American gays and blacks aren't the people being shot down
in the streets, or interned without trial in concentration camps by Bush, so their complaints can't even be considered a high priority in the short term.
Really? Blacks are not being shot down in the street or being interned without trial? I think it is time for reality to penetrate Bracknell, Texas. Your vision puts me in mind of an e.e. cummings poem:
the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds (also, with the church's protestant blessings daughters,unscented shapeless spirited) they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead, are invariably interested in so many things-- at the present writing one still finds delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles? perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D .... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above Cambridge if sometimes in its box of sky lavender and cornerless,the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister