[lbo-talk] anti-Kinky (Friedman, not sex)

[Michael McIntyre]

We can extend this problem a bit.  Not only does my individual vote  
not have a chance of swaying the election, but my individual vote  
plus the votes of everyone I might sway do not matter.  Even if I  
could convince everyone on LBO-talk to support the Dems (or not),  
those votes would have no consequences.  Even if I could convince  
everyone on the non-Dem-voting Left to vote for the Dems (or the Dem- 
voting Left to vote non-Dem), those votes, taken together, would have  
no consequences.  Nonetheless, LBO-talk and every similar Left  
formation in the country works itself up into a lather every fourth  
year about whether or not to support the Dems this time.  I usually  
try to convince people that this is wasted breath.  It never  
convinces anyone.  So we merrily eat up time and bandwidth, Justin  
not-so-merrily (but nonetheless dutifully) goes off to Ohio, and I  
even wasted some time to find out who the SP was putting up this  
year, even though I knew that vote would literally not be counted.   
Of course, by this measure, writing this post was irrational....

What's not irrational?  Perhaps camping out in the Zocalo for two  
months.  We'll see.

Michael McIntyre

On Sep 7, 2006, at 4:18 PM, andie nachgeborenen wrote:


> Actually, this is a fundamental puzzle in political
> science. If the costs of voting are more than trivial
> (and they ofen are -- campaigning in Ohio in 2004 I
> saw people stand for hours waiting to vote) and the
> likihood that voting will have any effect is
> negligible, which is certainly true, marginally
> speaking, only the last vote that tips the balance
> actually counts, why do presumptively rational people
> bother?
>
> --- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Sep 7, 2006, at 4:04 PM, B. wrote:
>>
>>> Oh well, Proyect knows best! That's a Dem blog he
>>> suggested as a good resource. I'll probably vote
>> Dem,
>>> actually, if Kinky and Perry are the choices. For
>>> tactical reasons. Not that I expect that to change
>>> anything, really.
>>
>> I've been voting for 34 years now, and except when I
>> was pretty
>> young, never expected it to change anything. Wonder
>> why I keep doing it.
>>
>> Doug
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