[ExI] Conscientious objections

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 4:40 AM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> Minority parties need encouragement. They are not suddenly one year
> going to get 50% of the vote. They need to get 5% this year, then 7%
> the next, and so on.
> Opting out from voting means that minority parties have no chance of
> ever changing the status quo.

### Minority parties in the US have no chance of ever changing the
status quo, due to the existence of the electoral college and
non-proportional voting.

The Republicrats are just two aspects of the same entity, Janus-like.
They formulate their election programs (i.e. the propaganda messages)
based on polling, focus groups, data mining and other ways of
measuring and predicting likely voting behavior. Analysis of votes
from previous elections is only a relatively minor part of the effort.
Since you can't have a large third party with any chance of success in
the system, due to its very structure, all the third party does is to
provide a redundant channel for gathering information about
preferences. Intrade and polls were remarkably accurate in predicting
the outcome of the election, showing that, well, the election itself
is superfluous.

The key to advancing the libertarian cause is not to inform Messrs
Obama and Romney we don't like them (they know and don't care), but to
propagandize against their ilk and hopefully increase the number of
people like us.

Rafal