by Queen Octavia » Mon Mar 24, 2008 11:07 am
I'm Canadian, but I cast my hyopthetical vote for Obama.
When trying to decide I inevitably found lists of all sorts of wishy-washy things that the various candidates support, which is all very nice and fluffy but also rather irrelevant. So I dug a little deeper for the ones that they weren't just jumping on the bandwagon and saying "I am against taking candy from babies" and looking for the things that they were really acting as the catalyst for.
Not only that but I also wanted to try and figure out who they would tug along with them as the assorted influencial appendages of their presidency.
Even still my decision isn't as informed as I think it should be considering the US presidency's huge impact on the future of the world. It's also silly how my hypothetical vote is worth the same amount as someone who knows much less and someone else who knows much more. Ah well, that's democracy, any other method just allows for even more corruption.
If I had to change democracy I would just pick 1001 random people each electoral year, hire them full time at a salary of $1,000,000 for one year, tell them their job is to research the election, candidates etc and have them be the only votes.
I mean come on, statistically a sample of 1001 will produce the same result almost all the time, except this way the votes are all more informed, and election costs go way down.
Somehow I don't think we'll see the change to uberlurk-ocracy any time soon though ;p. Although the system of government presented in the SF novel "Triple Detente" is probably truly ideal, if anyone has read that book.