Soup: "I'll be able to sleep at night knowing that I didn't vote for a creep and they'll go around sniffing each others butts and telling each other that they really are better than us."
Disconsent" No matter who you vote for, the government gets elected.
Traditional, cited by Francis Porretto, eternityroad.info
Referendums are a wonderful thing in theory, a direct vote by the electorate, as close to unalloyed democracy as there is. But, astoundingly, referendums are routinely nullified by federal courts. The losing side argues referendums suffer from an excess of democracy, their exact words in one California case, and the court agrees. Apparently the electorate needs protection from itself, we aren't good enough for us. So the regime uses its voter nullification card, you know, the one they deal from the bottom of the deck.
We should learn a deep lesson from this experience: referendums are an expensive, resource-consuming hoax. Voters are trained to jump through hoops like good little dogs just to get what is rightfully theirs, but if our rulers are unhappy with the outcome we get training of a different kind. It's the regime's way of telling us they will not let us decide anything of importance. Referendums are bogus and national elections are bogus. How could they make it more clear?
This is voter replacement. When DC wants to know what we think, it asks itself. We've been unreliable lately, sometimes to the point of defiance. It's too chancey to consult us. So they rally some supporters, take some pictures—done. Their media will take it from there. They already know what we should think. Our benighted orneriness just delays the inevitable. Now we're their audience, free to applaud or jeer. But they will not tolerate our actual involvement. It's more prudent to legislate in secret session and present it as a done deal, or embed it in unrelated bills and act surprised later. DC learns lessons too.
Independent citizens are left with only one meaningful vote, the one they make with their feet. They go Galt, they disengage, from the cities especially, leaving behind reservations skilled only in drawing provisions from the outside, its wards brim with net consumers, growth is reckoned in clients, the demanding and improvident kind —the least among us in every sense, but civic-minded, meaning they can be rounded up and trotted to the polls where the future earnings of the productive are auctioned off for votes. Who's entitled to our earnings has already been decided, and it isn't us. Only its distribution is up for bid. As with all found wealth, things can get ugly. Their job is to keep it orderly, or orderly enough. Cue the "applause" sign.
The regime prefers such fragile prey, tense gaggles of dependent inmates stumbling around in a fogbound maze, cognitively-unarmed quarry enmeshed in each other's mini-insurgencies, unrelieved propaganda blaring from every direction, sometimes set to music as if to emphasize its underlying nature. No longer allowed to make natural adjustments on common ground, the nation partitions itself, some clinging to DC, others fending off DC.
DC simply won't allow real change because it's not our government, it's their government. They own it. Ask them. In so many words they'll tell you they're an exceptionally full-service outfit, judge-jury-jailer, inescapable banker, and oh yes, indisputable advisor on personal matters. Voters are clients. Anything of importance is pre-decided. They debate the details of compliance, nothing more. It doesn't matter which franchise we patronize, the holding company wins either way.
The elections are supposed to indicate the presence of democracy, but they do not. Elections do not determine policy but only the division of spoils... The way to have elections without having a democracy is to let the people vote, but not on anything... Having a one party system called by two names is a technically slick way of disenfranchising the public without their noticing.
Fred Reed, fredoneverything.net
Well-spoken dimwits from the Emerald City periodically venture into "the field"—their term—with dazzling road shows, scolding and imploring and cajoling us to elect them wizard or subwizard or wizardette. They do this as if their seating arrangement should matter to us, which is all that's being decided. No, it's the turnout that matters. Not to the voters, why would it? Turnout matters because it's their best claim to legitimacy. "Get out the vote" says as much.
Monarchies and totalitarian states of the past have reconciled themselves to an inescapable fact, legitimacy comes only from the consent of the governed. No-choice elections are not consent. Imported electorates and busloads of professional voters are not consent. Supreme Court decisions are not consent. The People know fraud when they smell it. In the Soviet Union, where honest talk, plainly put, was also punishable—they invented the self-censorship we call political correctness, turnout was 99%. High turnout was equated with consent. It validated their owner-operator license. Other than a few new butts on the same old seats, seventy years of bogus elections changed nothing. Change occured deeper in the plumbing.
As Mark Twain said, if voting changed anything it would be illegal. If the destination of the bus doesn't change, why would changing the driver matter? What then? Shall we merely hope for a good outcome? Hope doesn't change anything, hope reveals powerlessness. There is but one legal strategy remaining. Withhold our vote and withhold our consent. Reclaim our own legitimacy, one citizen at a time. Rather than throw our vote away, stay out of national elections. Vote "none of the above". This is our real civic duty. It's not as if we're missing an opportunity, the fix is in whichever way it goes.
As long as the entrenched elite had control of the illusion, the illusion of control works for them. However, the opposite is also true, and this is where we find ourselves now ... they are stepping outside of the inherent common consensus understanding of USA democracy at such a level as to disrupt the illusion... The herd is smelling the slaughter house.
Clif High, quoted by Michael Krieger of KAM LP at zerohedge.com"
