Wednesday, January 30, 2008

So much for Giuliani...

As of today it seems Giuliani is pulling out of the election race and poised to endorse John McCain. If I had known that Giuliani would endorse McCain or consider McCain worth endorsing I would not have voted for him. As it is, it seems I wasted my absentee vote. At this point I'm leaning toward abstaining from the national election.

2 comments:

Burgess Laughlin said...

Your last sentence raises a question for me: Why vote at all?

I don't mean why vote in general. I do mean why vote at this particular point in history, given the state of the culture?

Dr. Peikoff has offered an answer, in his 2004 Dim Hypothesis walk-through sessions. (I have purchased but not yet audited his 2007 lectures.)

What other answers have been proposed?

The preliminary question--why vote at all--should be answered before considering any particular parties or candidates.

Gideon said...

A perfectly reasonable question. I've been asking that myself. These days I suppose the answer is that one votes mostly to either prevent a particular disastrous candidate from winning (i.e., a vote against the other candidate) or one hopes that maybe the candidate one votes for will start moving the politics in a better direction. The latter is admittedly somewhat unrealistic given where the culture is at. I guess there's a tendency to refuse to entirely abandon the political process (i.e., a need to do "something) -- but I am coming to the conclusion that maybe there really is nothing that can be done until the culture changes. As I think Ayn Rand said even at the time of the 1980 Reagan-Carter election -- there's a limit to the idea of "lesser of two evils". That will likely be the case in this election if McCain runs against Hillary but the point is broader. There's little to be gained in pretending there are preferences among such choices.

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