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Jun 14, 2023
The 8 Stages of Voting (Think: Kübler-Ross Model of Grief)
THE EIGHT STAGES OF VOTING
The following was contributed by bitjuggler on the forum:
I’m thinking that there are probably some common stages that most people go through with respect to voting (akin to the Kübler-Ross model of grief) – and that individuals have to recognize them before they can address the underlying personal problem of why they put any credence in the voting process.
- You believe in the story you’ve been fed about the system; you enthusiastically research the candidates’ positions; you discuss and debate those positions with friends and relatives; then you vote for whom you decide is the best candidate to fill the position.
- You see that government is “not working” and blame the people currently holding positions in it. You look over the electoral options available and vote for the non-incumbents you determine are best suited to fill the position. A follow-on iteration to this is that you search for the non-incumbent candidates who have never held office.
- You say to yourself, “if only a wise and benevolent individual of high moral fiber and character could be convinced to run for office”; and you eventually recognize “the one we’ve all been waiting for”; and you contribute to, and campaign for this individual as though he or she were the physical manifestation of all that could be considered “the way”.
- You come to the conclusion that the two party system is only half as bad as a one party system like communism – and you strike a blow for liberty by casting a ballot for a third party.
- You return to the two party fold – realizing that the only way change can be invoked will be by working within that existing system. In this stage you’ve actually convinced yourself that there is only one party that stands a chance of being converted to good.
- You’re not happy with any of the available candidates; but go to the polls to cast a ballot for the lesser of the two evils that are likely to win.
- You submit an empty ballot – hoping that others will join you and that, somehow, someone will notice.
- You stay home on election day and do something worthwhile with your time.
From WendyMcElroy.com, here.
re: Sure, Rabbi Hershel Schachter Opposes Ascending the Temple Mount…
Rabbi Avi Grossman writes (regarding Rabbi Schachter’s opposition to Jews ascending the Temple Mount):
“But why does the Rabbanut prohibit?”
That is what Rabbi Hershel Schachter should have asked next.
And the answer is that the Rabbanut prohibits because of a combination of politic considerations (i.e. non halachic considerations) and a misguided sense of piety brought about by the exilic mindset: we are not allowed to do anything we haven’t done of late, and that’s the way God wants it.Both approaches are invalid.
Bruce Schneier: How It Felt To Review Snowden’s Files
Read him here (Note: the comments on his site are mighty useful, too)…
An excerpt:
Once in a while, though, I would see something that made me stop, stand up, and pace around in circles. It wasn’t that what I read was particularly exciting, or important. It was just that it was startling. It changed—ever so slightly—how I thought about the world.
Greenwald said that that reaction was normal when people started reading through the documents.
Intelligence professionals talk about how disorienting it is living on the inside. You read so much classified information about the world’s geopolitical events that you start seeing the world differently. You become convinced that only the insiders know what’s really going on, because the news media is so often wrong. Your family is ignorant. Your friends are ignorant. The world is ignorant. The only thing keeping you from ignorance is that constant stream of classified knowledge. It’s hard not to feel superior, not to say things like “If you only knew what we know” all the time. I can understand how General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, comes across as so supercilious; I only saw a minute fraction of that secret world, and I started feeling it.
…
I started doubting my own security procedures. Reading about the NSA’s hacking abilities will do that to you. Can it break the encryption on my hard drive? Probably not. Has the company that makes my encryption software deliberately weakened the implementation for it? Probably. Are NSA agents listening in on my calls back to the US? Very probably. Could agents take control of my computer over the Internet if they wanted to? Definitely. In the end, I decided to do my best and stop worrying about it. It was the agency’s documents, after all. And what I was working on would become public in a few weeks.
I wasn’t sleeping well, either. A lot of it was the sheer magnitude of what I saw. It’s not that any of it was a real surprise. Those of us in the information security community had long assumed that the NSA was doing things like this. But we never really sat down and figured out the details, and to have the details confirmed made a big difference. Maybe I can make it clearer with an analogy. Everyone knows that death is inevitable; there’s absolutely no surprise about that. Yet it arrives as a surprise, because we spend most of our lives refusing to think about it. The NSA documents were a bit like that. Knowing that it is surely true that the NSA is eavesdropping on the world, and doing it in such a methodical and robust manner, is very different from coming face-to-face with the reality that it is and the details of how it is doing it.