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August 20, 2004
The Real Red vs. Blue
I've made up my mind: this year I'm going to vote my conscience. I'm voting Socialist. I've had it with the red/blue bullshit conspiracy. “If you don't help Kerry, you're helping Bush!” they scream. If you can't see through the thin veneer that is Kerry, you deserve him. He's as bad as Bush, he's probably worse.
Politics here have been fucked up for a long time. If it makes you feel better, I don't think I can change things. Nor do I think that my vote is going to make a difference. But you know what? That's not the fucking point— voting is sharing your voice and nobody is hearing the Socialist voice, or the Libertarian voice, or whatever because Americans do not vote the way they feel. We vote the way that we think will “matter.” Well, that's bullshit, because it makes us give up on our ideals when we shouldn't, and would reduce us to a the current shat two-party system regardless of how many parties we started with. Fuck it!!
Now, because I believe it is fraudulent to call America a representative system, let's see some pretty charts. The “representation ratio” is the percentage of the population of the country who are representatives in the federal government. Observe:
| Country | Population | Reps | Representation Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| USA | 293,027,571 | 536 (house + senate + pres) | 1.82e-6 or 0.000001829 |
| United Kingdom | 60,270,708 | 1277 | 2.11e-5 or 0.00002119 |
| Spain | 40,280,780 | 609 | 1.51e-5 or 0.00001512 |
| New Zealand | 3,993,817 | 120 | 3.00e-5 or 0.00003005 |
| Vanuatu | 202,609 | 52 | 0.0002567 |
Look at this! America's representation ratio is an order of magnitude worse than that of the New Standard Democracy. European nations, it seems, maintain about an order of magnitude more representatives per their own population. New Zealand is doing better than average for a European nation. And then look at Vanuatu, with a paltry 52 seats, yet it beats all the rest hands down. All of my raw numbers are from our very own CIA factbook, so you can just go fuck yourself if you don't like my numbers.
The reason why I like this examination is because it points out our own hypocrisy so effectively. We claim to be bringing democracy to all of these nations—and most of them are sitting next to nations that looked at our model and said, “This would be good if only it had more representation in it.”
Nor should I be taken as saying that our system can't work. It can work, but it needs to be calibrated. The formula we work from, 2 senators per state and 1 legislator per N people, works great until states are populated the way California is. Hell, New Mexico is a po-dunk little back-water state (or so it is thought) and our population is far, far greater than what was anticipated by the authors of the Constitution. Fairness in goverment is only achievable at a certain scale, and adjustments must be made or a better formula created.
Why I Hate Red and Blue
I hate Red and Blue both, for various reasons. I hate that Red tries to guilt me away from the platform I truly want to vote for. I hate that Blue insinuates that monogamy is an important characteristic of a politician. Blue voters would vote for a sociopathic serial killer (and some would say they have) over a Red with a divorce in his past, when this issue is both irrelevent and far less of a sin than destroying the environment for personal gain and warring for no better reason than to plunder and take revenge. But I hate that Red says “Our statistics say you'll vote for this rotting piece of meat if we stamp it non-Blue. plop Here you go. Vote. Good boy.” The Blues are at least deluded into believing they have some kind of cause. The Reds are a deeper kind of self-loathing scum; they know they have nothing to offer except an alternative and they always find the loser of the losers to push. “Oh, we can't have Dean!” they scoff, ”he has been known to occassionally get excited, even going so far as to vocalize his emotions!” He's not stiff enough, we need a staler one.
So I'm going to vote green, or purple, or red-and-black. Not because I have no regard for your suffering, but because I think we have to put this system out of its misery. I can't vote my mind because it doesn't work with our numbers. I can't vote my mind because my platform is “extreme” (read: not tepid or scripted). Then fine, I'm doing it, and I'm doing it to say “fuck you” to Red and Blue, and all their weak-spined supporters. They think I can't live without them, well, they're in for a surprise. I'm onto their little game, and I know I have nothing to lose by not voting for them, so I'm going to tell them “do your worst, fucksack, I can take it.”
How to Make a Difference
Now, this is how we could use this line of thinking to actually make a difference. Granted, that's not why I'm doing this—I'm doing this because I hate our system and I hate the morons on TV and I hate not speaking and voting my mind. But you could think about it this way, and if it gets your ass to the voting parlor, that would be nice too.
Right now, we get what, 25% voter turn-out? Not much, at any rate, and it's the 18 to 26 age bracket (us, mostly) who are not voting. Jarrod and I are the only people I know who are my age and who make it a point to vote. Anyway, most of us aren't voting, and there's a fuckload of us out there.
What if we all went in there and voted randomly? If you and I go and vote, say, Constitution Party and Socialist Party, instead of Red or Blue, what happens? Well, firstly, we feel gratified, because we've voted how we feel and we've said “fuck you” to Red and Blue. That's all we wanted to get out of it anyway, so we can't really be disappointed (plus, we don't have to stay up late to see the election results on TV). But suppose an extra 20% of us turned out and did this? Some Red or Blue fuck would still win, but this time it wouldn't be Red winning 52% of the vote, it would be Red winning 23% of the vote. Suddenly, the fact that most Americans don't fundamentally agree with the platform of Red or Blue more than anyone else, becomes very, very clear. It would demonstrate what a complete fallacy it is to say that half of us prefer Red and the other half prefer Blue. Plus, in the next election, you can bet your ass Red and Blue are going to be shopping for those Constitution and Socialist votes. You'll be able to chart the transition of Red to socialist and Blue to libertarian on an egg timer. Of course, at that point, we just hold out on them because we're cocks and we want them to beg for it. We like the look on Blue's face when they get all pouty and say “Please come back to me libertarian lover! Living without your minimalism is a lie!”
So, to sum up: fuck Red and Blue. Let's move to Vanuatu. :)
Posted by FusionGyro at August 20, 2004 05:13 AM
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