Ethics of voting

In Question:
What are the ethics of voting? Are they different in a primary rather than a general election? Must a person always be sincere in casting his vote? Or should the process just be seen as a way of getting a point across? Is it ever permissible to vote against something, by way of voting for it's opponent?

John's take:
To boil that down to it's simplest level, I'd phrase it is what is the purpose of a citizen's vote in a representative democracy. I think the simple answer is that the purpose if for the citizen to lend his support to a candidate he wants to see in office.

But in the real word, sometimes it's a giant douche vs. a turd sandwich running for a position. Sometimes it's an asshole with a brain vs. a nice guy without one. Or hypothetically, it's Robot Hitler vs. Mutant Pol Pot, and the responsible citizen wants to have a say.

If you vote for Hitler, and he wins, you're responsible in part for his atrocities. Same with Pot. If you don't vote, then you failed to do your civic duty.

I first thought that the correct course of action when voting, regardless of who is running, is to choose the candidate you can support, or to accept irresponsibility and don't vote. But my reasoning for that was just to make things consistent. It involved making yourself Ok with Pol Pot's plans, so you support him, then if Hitler wins, you don't feel bad, and it Pot wins, you've accepted it.

But the point of democracy isn't conscience gymnastics, but to govern.

On the issues we can vote yay or nay, so why not on the candidates? A vote for one person is by nature your way of voting against everyone else. If I supported George Bush in 2004, when I voted for him, even if it was for all the "right" reasons, that could still be seen as a vote against Kerry and the independents could it not?

By that reasoning, a vote for someone, just to be against someone else, doesn't sound so bad.

I'll try to address the rest of the question after work.

Update on my NaNoWriMo, life & death, websites and a special thanks

I should be writing my novel right now. But I don't have a good idea to move it along right now, so I'll update the world about it.

So the working title is/was "Faith in the Age of Reason," which sounds if not high-brow, at least mainstream and decent.

But alas the perils of writing a novel in 30 days means that sometimes you have to keep writing, whether you have an idea or not. So in this novel that was supposed to be an exposition of some kind of the dichotomy of friendships between people with different views etc. has recently included dialogue about poop.

...

I know.

Anyways, I'm at 16,175 words so far, whereas I should be at 25,000 to be on pace to finish on time. As you can see we've got a long way to go.

I did want to share something with you I found amusing.

WARNING, SPOILERS BELOW (Just in case you might want to be surprised about a possible twist in the novel, stop reading here.)

If I get into the last five days and I'm completely stuck, I'm casting off the entire story to that point as the two main characters working undercover when in reality they are superhumans with powers. They will then proceed to take out terrorism with their heat ray vision, possibly with the help of some boat cops they know (You're welcome).

Why would I do that? Because the goal of NaNoWriMo isn't to produce high literature or low. It's not about getting published. It's about taking that thought of "One day I'll write a novel" and making it a reality through imperfect means. If you force yourself to have a deadline, you can succeed.

Come Dec. 1, I will be able to say (If I "win") that I have written a 50,000 word novel. Even if it blows.

For the record, I think there might be enough decent material in there to salvage into a novel of the intended purpose, but that's what December is for.

For now, it's full steam ahead.

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On a side note, I wish it didn't take tragedies or celebrations to get us to see some of our family members we don't see often. The way our culture is set up the relation of cousin gets pushed further away as we age, and I guess that's just how it is.

Nevertheless, may God accept the soul of my great uncle Carl Horst. He was well-loved by many. I wish I could have been visiting the members of the Horst family on better circumstances but it was at least good to see them. I'm praying for you guys.

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I updated my website recently, www.johnstegeman.weebly.com. It now includes in the page design section, a complete project I worked on through some pdf viewer called Issu. I'm not crazy about how it looks but it's better I guess than uploading things as jpgs. Someone please take a look and tell me what you think.


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Last, I've recently learned that this blog has more readers than I thought. Even though I used to be published in the real world, I still have a hard time believing people care this much about what I have to say, but, thanks nonetheless.

So to my regulars (Matt and Dungy), the occasional reader (Kelli, Mom, others), the "What's a blog reader," (Dad) and the apparent great silent majority of you who read this blog, thanks for stopping in.