Writes Tyrone Slothrop in the comments to yesterday's post "Galumphing toward the apocalypse."
I saw that last night but did not respond. What's different about today?
"Forget about his manners; stop stomping your foot about how crass he is; and for the love of heaven stop holding your nose up high and pretending you’re too good for this: a vote for Trump is a vote for the constitutional republic."
Both Hoyt and Slothrop are saying something about Us the People Who Abstain that might be true of some of us, but is not true of me. And this method of using insults to push people to vote is ugly. Are they doing it because they think it's effective? I don't yield to bullies. Are they doing it to display their own staunchness? Does it feel like humor from their side? It falls flat for me.
Notice how Hoyt and Slothrop contradict each other. Slothrop appeals to my vanity as he insists that I be a good person — not cowardly and neglectful of duty. Hoyt denounces vanity and insists that I not get involved in any sense of my personal goodness. Is this about me or isn't it? I can harmonize Slothrop and Hoyt by saying Hoyt is also appealing to my vanity because she portrays the abstainer as snooty — with her nose in the air, acting like she's "too good for this."
Slothrop is distinctly wrong when he says voting is a duty. No. It is not. Like speaking, like religion, like getting married, like having sexual relations, voting is a right, and a right entails the power to decline to exercise it. It is horrible to be forced to speak, forced to take on a religion, forced to get married, forced to have sex — these are loathsome impositions.
Hoyt is wrong — in my case at least — to attribute a refusal to vote for Trump to taking offense at his personal style — his manners, his crassness. I happen to enjoy his personal style. You can see that if you've been reading my blog over the last 5 years. I love freedom of expression, and I feel that I get him. He's a New Yorker. He's a comedian. He's free and daring. I like all that. I do have some concern about the wellbeing of my fellow citizens who hate him at some instinctual level, but I don't think they ought to be appeased for losing or threatening to lose their minds.
Trump has his style and I have mine. If it makes you want to stomp your foot, go ahead. You can keep "stomping your foot about" how cruelly neutral I am. You're free. You've got your right and I've got mine.
Posts
224 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 224 of 224"Blogger Bob said...
Sebastian said, "Slothrop is right: abstaining is neither courageous nor principled."
No, Slothrop is wrong.
If there is duty in voting it is to vote wisely."
I didn't say anything about duty. Althouse doesn't owe me or the country a thing, and she is a free person. No one has a duty to vote, let alone vote "wisely," whatever that means. Few Americans do, by my standards.
But abstaining is not courageous: it takes more courage, the courage of an actual conviction, to pick one of the candidates for assignable reasons, and in particular, for someone like Althouse, it takes courage to vote for Trump.
It is also not principled: there is no principle in terms of which the two major candidates and their parties are equivalent, so "neutrality" is not a reasonable inference from the application of any recognizable principle.
And I don't get a sense that Althouse herself claims she is being courageous or principled--which is her right! Abortion aside, she is not into political principle; as she says, she has her style. She is sticking to it--which is also her right!
I exercised my right to not vote in 2016, hoping that others would join me. I was angry at the choices and hoped others would agree. So, I completely understand. I made a different decision this year, but I get it.
If you consider that bullying, clearly you have never been bullied.
Sarah Hoyt is either a nutcase or a fraud playing the crowd at Instapundit for a payday like Driscoll and Green.
I lean towards the latter.
Just back from voting. Lots of people in line, many more than normal but I don't know if that means anything other than that they were keeping us separated.
My wife has a bad leg so they let her go to the head of the line. I had to help her so they let me jump too. Daughter was holding her other arm so they let her jump too.
Getting old really really sucks but does occasionally have some benefits.
Voting is in about 6 classrooms by last name A-D, E-M and so on. Classrooms are around an enclosed courtyard:
1) Show up and stand in line in the basketball court outside the school. (Unless you are old). They were letting about 10-15 people at a time enter the school.
2) Show voter ID to get into the courtyard. Not really a check, just to make sure you have it.
3) Go to a table get temp checked, get hands sanitized, get card checked against a master list.
4) Get sent to the classroom to vote. Only 3 voters allowed inside.
5) Go inside, both hands scanned with UV light. I am pretty sure this is a proprietary wavelength so hard to counterfeit the light or the ink.
6) Show card to person at a desk. Get checked against 2 different lists by 2 people, one list requires my signature.
7) Get a packet in a folder with 4 ballots Governor & resident commissioner (Statewide) Senator and rep (District) Mayor and city assembly and this time one for statehood/independence. Commonwealth was not an option.
8) Go to a booth with a sharpie that they provided and mark the ballots
9) Run all 4 ballots through a machine that scans and counts them. This will be the immediate and unofficial count that we will start getting around 5PM. I asked and was told that paper ballots, in a sealed container, along with the machine that read them will be counted in San Juan over the next week or 3. That will become the official count.
They used to hand count the ballots in the classroom, tally all classrooms, then report that to San Juan for the election day unofficial count. Then take a couple weeks of hand counting in SJ for the official count. Almost never, as in I can only remember once or twice in 50 years, has there been any material difference.
I expect the machine results are the same.
10) Before I could leave the classroom, they scanned my hand, sprayed both hands with ink, then scanned again. No finger in the inkjar because of kung flu is my guess.
Back home in less than an hour.
Voter ID card, not just any photo ID, was checked 3 separate times against 3 lists.
I've never felt any lack of confidence in the integrity of our process.
John Henry
Also, in PR, no issue about absentee or early or mail-in ballots. There are none. Not in any quantity that could possibly matter.
With a very few exceptions, if you don't care enough to vote in person, you do not care enough to vote and can't.
Some early, but same day, voting for police, poll workers, firefighters and some others. There is an arrangement for people in hospitals or bedridden but it is still same day.
We normally have 80% or so turnout.
John Henry
I’ve only ever voted for two presidential candidates in my life, one was a “lesser of two evils” and I felt immediately bad about doing it after it was done. The other was someone I actually wanted to vote for. I felt happy after voting for this candidate, but later down the line he let me down.
2016 my son and I were in Chicago for a trade show. We had an early dinner with some friends.
I had an invite to an activity in Trump Tower put on by a machine builder. My son was beat and wanted to go back to the hotel but I made him go. "Where do you want to tell your grandkids you were in 2016? In the Club Quarters Hotel sleeping or partying down at Trump Tower?"
So he went along. Great activity, huge circular ballroom on the 17th floor, fantastic views, fantastic food, band, games with prizes like I-Pads and so on. Everything absolutely 1st class. Trumpian.
About 9, everyone was looking at their phones. About 9:30 they brought a big TV and put it outside the ballroom. By 10 they had brought 40-50 chairs. plus a bunch more standing.
Club Quarters is on the river, directly across from Trump Tower. Nothing going on when we walked back.
Wednesday morning, there were some demonstrators in front of Trump Tower but not too much at 7:30.
When we came home, we could not get near the hotel. Thousands and thousands of people tightly packed and thoroughly pissed off. Police had a small lane cleared, we had to show our hotel key, and walked though the crowd in the police lane.
My son has me tightly by the arm saying "Keep quiet. Don't say anything. Keep quiet"
We got to the hotel with no incident.
John Henry
There's the New Yorker cartoon, wife to businessman over the dinner tabls, "Now, don't try to reason with me." That seems to cover it.
"Last time I voted was that time they let the fans vote for the hall of fame.
I voted for Deke Powell, he didn't get in and I've been too disappointed to vote since then."
Wag the Dog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIsSbtQ3hug
Stanley Motss always votes for the Academy Awards but never wins.
Andrea Martin's character doesn't vote because she doesn't like the booths "Too claustrophobic"
So lots of good reasons for not voting if you need one.
I doubt I would vote in the upper 50. I just don't trust the process. Too much doubt about its legitimacy.
John Henry
Abstaining is fine. Announcing it to the world - repeatedly - is where you lose me.
Yes, people have the right to vote, but not the legal duty. However... if you don't vote then you lose any moral authority to complain about the outcome of an election. You lose any moral authority to complain about the political leadership, or the policy decisions, or the consequences that come from elections.
Here's the deal, IMO... our election system is zero-sum. Someone is going to win. If you truly think both candidates will be equally good, or equally bad, then you can make a moral case for not voting. Otherwise, if you think one candidate would be better for the country as a whole but you don't vote, then you bear some responsibility for the outcome if the other guy/girl wins. I went to Florida in 2008 to work with the GOP's GOTV efforts, and I can't tell you how many registered Republicans told me that they would NOT vote because they were pissed at the budget blowup in the last two years of the W era... and look what happened to the debt under Obama. Not voting is mostly just silly.
I think what Hoyt is speaking to is that there is no perfect, that we don't have to personally like a candidate to prefer that candidate's policy choices. Someone's going to win. If it is the worst candidate instead of the bad candidate, and we didn't vote for the bad candidate, then we have only ourselves to blame.
You shared your opinion. That's permitted. Are none permitted to respond unless in glowing terms? Did you think the response would be more favorable?
There are people on the left who insist that silence is violence.
They are wrong and their efforts to compel speech are wrong.
Silence is a legitimate way to express yourself, even on election day.
I certainly had no intention of starting such an uproar, but I'm glad I did.
May I clarify a thing or two? By "duty" I did not mean an act compelled by law. I don't know how my remarks could ever be construed that way. In fact, as I see it, duty is above law. Your conscience should compel you to choose, not the local police.
That said, I still maintain that it is cowardly not to choose. Pick Trump. Pick Biden. Pick Harold Stassen. Pick somebody. If you don't, you didn't participate. Participation is fundamental to to a healthy republic. I recall that during World War 2 they held metal drives where housewives donated their pots and pans, ostensibly to build tanks and airplanes. Of course, since it was too expensive to repurpose scrap metal, most of those pots and pans went to the dump, but the idea was to get the common citizen invested in the war effort. Similarly, once you've voted you've become part of the process. In your own mind the seed is planted that you've taken some responsibility for this mess. Voting makes you a better citizen. I'm sure Althouse believes that by not taking a side, she can dole out criticism equally to both sides, but I believe the contrary. Abstention means that a priori you couldn't tell black from white or red from blue. I don't know how that can change after others have made the decision for you.
Finally, the characterization of my comment as "bullying" is unfair, but one I might expect from an academic. I disagreed with your choice, Althouse. I did not threaten you. If you'd ever been really bullied as I have been, you'd know the difference.
Let me start out by knocking down the obvious strawman. Althouse has an absolute right to choose to vote for whomever she wishes, and to not vote at all if she cannot, in conscience, vote for anyone on the ballot. But all of us have an absolute right to interpret her decision, once it is publicly announced, however we see fit.
Why I think Althouse has chosen not to vote.
First, she cannot vote for Joe Biden because she has repeatedly stated that Biden's repetition of the Charlottesville lie is disqualifying. Since then Biden has doubled down, tripled down, and raised that lie to the N-th power, and if she were to admit to voting for Biden then she'd be reneging on her own, strongly stated, pronouncement. And although she -- clearly -- has a high tolerance for political corruption (e.g., her vote for Clinton in 2016), it's possible that there are limits to her tolerance.*
But she cannot bring herself to vote for Trump because:
(1) She wants to keep peace in the family. The son whose blog she routinely links to is a hard core Trump hater, and the other son took her to see Kathy Griffin, so he is also a bit unlikely to be a fan of Trump, either. In the latter case, his TDS is probably due to the spurious allegation that Trump is "homophobic," which would certainly surprise Ric Grenell.
(2) Althouse belongs to that generation of feminists who believe that feminism is intimately linked to abortion rights, meaning, these days, the right to have an abortion at any time during the pregnancy, by any method, and for any reason (or no reason at all). Trump has appointed Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, which many interpret (wrongly, IMHO) to mean that Roe v. Wade will be overturned. I think that the "many" are wrong, but I also believe that there will be common sense restrictions placed on unlimited abortion over the coming years. I base my beliefs on (a) the ease with which Christine Blasey Ford appears to have bamboozled Althouse with her obvious b*@&!#&t, and (b) her defense of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam's efforts to permit babies born alive to be allowed to lie on a shelf and die, if the mother can be persuaded to allow it.
(3) Despite what she wrote in this very post, I do think Althouse finds Trump's personal style to be somewhere between off-putting and disgusting. Whether she's fooling herself or trying to fool us, I really can't say.
(4) She may be reacting, subconsciously or otherwise, to the threats made by lefty extremists should Biden lose.
(5) She is, fundamentally, a person of the left. She has the absolute right to choose what to blog about, but I find it telling that she never wrote a post about the murder of 8 year old Secoriea Turner by BLM protesters armed with AK-47s, while she did blog about the two demonstrators who were accidentally run over while dancing on a (supposedly closed) Interstate. Again, her right to choose topics, our right to interpret her choices.
"He's a comedian. He's free and daring. I like all that." Well,he has made the US a laughing stock. Are you going through some kind of second childhood? Jerry Rubin was a comedian, free and daring. It was fun, but you don't want him as POTUS, with a finger on the nuclear trigger. Grow up. Think about other people. You are not the only person here.
In the end it is about what you want to happen. You are happy. I am happy. Still there are things that are happening. Maybe, they affect me directly, maybe sometime in the future. I wish I did not think how I voted would severely affect me. I pulled this out from your past posts.
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2020/03/several-madison-alders-are-sponsoring.html
just a minor thing. In the end, I think your decision not to vote is an expression of your belief in the wisdom of those that do. That is the kind interpretation. Another is that it does not matter. Your life will not change in a material way. I hope you are right.
Well,he has made the US a laughing stock
According to who? You?
" Well,he has made the US a laughing stock."
No he hasn't
"That said, I still maintain that it is cowardly not to choose. Pick Trump. Pick Biden. Pick Harold Stassen. Pick somebody. If you don't, you didn't participate."
If it doesn't matter who you choose, how can it possibly matter whether you choose? If she flips a coin, will you be happy? Flip a coin, Althouse. Participate. You don't need to tell us who you "chose". They can be your "secret candidates". Ooooh! Cool! And you get a participation trophy!
Jupiter said..
If it doesn't matter who you choose, how can it possibly matter whether you choose?
The most important effect of voting would not be on the election, but on Althouse. She thinks it makes her aloof. It doesn't. It makes her irrelevant. It makes her detached and distant from her country. As far as I'm concerned, she will have no standing to opine on presidential politics until at least 2024.
By the way, Jupiter, your reductio ad absurdum doesn't work. I said choose, not cast lots. Choosing implies analysis. It is impossible for two candidates to be perfectly equally bad or good. One of the two is a closer fit to one's personal hopes and needs than the other. You don't have to marry the guy, but expressing a preference makes you a full-fledged citizen instead of a bystander.
Well written!
Post a Comment