Other posts related to voting

Enjoying the last few days of freedom? (And a final plea to Obama Supporters)

Lincoln Adams | November 2, 2008 @ 2:23 am

This presidential election is sadly overshadowing everything else happening in my life right now.  While I plan to go out and enjoy the fall foliage while it is still at its peak, I wonder if these last few days before the election will mark the last time I’ll ever be able to enjoy an autumn season in a relatively free country again.

It’s often hard to take the predictions of doomsday and the end of the world seriously, regardless of who’s making it, and I’m sure Obama supporters think those of us who oppose him are overreacting with our dire warnings of utter catastrophe and disaster, should he be elected.

I just saw a movie though called Empire of the Sun (starring an adolescent Christian Bale), and what struck me about the movie was just how quickly everything had changed for one little boy.  One day he was living the good life in a peaceful and affluent town, and then quite literally the next day everything changed, as the Japanese invaded and turned his world upside down.  Now all the rights he had previously enjoyed as a British National disappeared into thin air, and he ultimately ended up in an internment camp, where he would reside for the entire duration of World War 2.

It can happen that quickly, without warning.  And yet, even while it’s happening, we still can’t believe it.  But it’s that lack of belief that will ultimately doom us, the overconfidence in thinking our rights just can’t be taken away from us that easily, the idea that even if we make a bad choice for a President, it won’t be so bad that our nation as we know it would come to an end.

And that’s the problem.  What I cannot stand more than anything is having to deal with people’s utter refusal to listen to reason.  It brings out the absolute worst in me.  They are so blind in their hatred and so unforgivably ignorant that they are willing to back a horse that they in truth know very, very little about.  A horse that may in fact be a trojan horse.

Just how is it that a guy with a resume as thin as air beats someone like Hillary, who despite her turbulent past is a seasoned politician and has a record for being a centrist and appealing to a broader base of voters?

How does a guy who breaks his campaign promise to use public financing and instead collects over half a billion dollars in campaign funds (refusing to disclose who’s been donating to him) not raise any red flags with his supporters or the media?

How is it that a politician from Chicago who has associated with and befriended some of the most extreme radical figures in America (denouncing their past acts only during an election season, and never before) not cause some of his supporters to be just a little bit uneasy?

How is it that Obama can talk about a “civilian national security force” without voters seeing visions of the Gestapo marching the streets?

How is it that he can evoke adoration and idolization amongst his followers, even while they would all be hard pressed to name any significant accomplishment he’s made prior to running for President?

How does the prospect of a one party system with a possibly filibuster-proof senate and a White House placed in the hands of a man with a mysterious past and an alarmingly extreme voting record not at least give voters pause?

Why do his supporters continue to believe he will cut taxes despite him having no record of cutting taxes before, and especially now that he’s already reneged on several key campaign promises and changed some of his platform positions?  How can he still be considered trustworthy?

We have gone seven years without a terrorist attack, and it wasn’t by sheer luck.  Do Obama’s supporters really believe we’ll continue to be safe as long as Obama doesn’t antagonize the terrorists and play favorites with Israel so much?  Have we so soon forgotten what Iran did with Jimmy Carter?  Will his supporters turn a blind eye to Russia’s own enthusiastic hope in his election, even while they set their murderous eyes on satellite states like Georgia and Poland, or to Iran licking its chops at the prospect of overrunning Iraq should our troops leave prematurely?  Can we really be expected to believe Iran will suddenly cease its nuclear ambitions and calls for Israel’s destruction so long as Obama treats them nicely, or worse, pursues a policy of appeasement?

How can Obama, who hides his belief in reparations for black Americans by using phrases such as “economic justice,” and who has enthusiastically thrown his support behind the machinery of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae be trusted to handle the financial crisis effectively and without bias?

How can we turn a blind eye to what happened to Joe the Plumber, who saw his privacy and rights as a citizen violated because he asked a question?  How can we not believe that this wouldn’t happen on a much larger scale should Obama become President?

I know there is a lot to dislike about McCain, but there is one thing that should never be in doubt: he truly loves his country.  Whether his ideas are wrong or not, there can be no mistake that they are borne out of his sense of patriotism and his desire for America to continue growing and thriving as the greatest nation on Earth.

As for Obama, just the opposite could be said of him.  I do not believe at all that he loves America.  Instead, what he loves is the idea of what he thinks America should BE.  He sees this nation now as being inherently evil, and believes himself to be the man who can mold and shape it into an image more befitting his own political ideology and belief system, one that is steeped deeply in the anti-American sentiments expressed by so many his mentors (including Reverend Wright), no matter how much he might deny it.  While McCain wants America to continue being America, Barack Obama instead wants it to become Europe, complete with a nanny state that coddles its citizenship, yet at the price of eroding some of our most basic and cherished individual rights.  What we might gain in free health care, we will most assuredly lose in freedom.  As government increases, liberty decreases.  This has been the lesson of history, and behooves us to always remember it.

So I am making one final plea to those intending to vote for Obama; one final appeal to your sense of reason.  Do not vote for this man.  I speak as one who is a dyed in the wool conservative, yet one who could have lived with Hillary Clinton being President.  The most powerful elements of the Democratic Party subverted the will of its voters and nominated someone whom they could project their own hidden agenda onto, a man whose past we still know very little about.  You must see this.

And as much as you might loathe McCain, he is the devil we know, and I would prefer the devil we know over the devil we don’t know any day of the week.

But alas, I suspect I’m writing all this in vain, knowing you will not be persuaded, and indeed I count myself an absolute failure here, in that I have never been able to convince anyone of anything, no matter how hard I try.  But the wool has been pulled over your eyes, and you will not see.  You will pull the lever with your mind clouded with hatred for Bush and all things Republican, or perhaps because you believed the campaign slogan of “hope and change” and your heart always skips a beat at the sound of Obama’s baritone voice.  Having tossed in your lot with the great unknown, you will go about your life’s routines, blissfully unaware of the “Japanese” that may even now be lying in wait in the trenches, biding their time.

God help us all.

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Voting With My Coffee!

Lincoln Adams | October 7, 2008 @ 2:54 pm

7-11 has this thing going where you can vote for your candidate by either picking a coffee cup for Satan’s Mini-Me (Obama) or for Sarah Palin’s running mate.

I went in this morning and noticed a shriveled up looking hag picking a cup for Obama.  I picked up a McCain cup and cheerfully poured my coffee.  When she glanced my way I held the cup up, smiled and gave her a wink.

The icy cold glare I got in return made me think we probably weren’t going to be Bingo buddies anytime soon.  :D

I went to the cash register and noticed a guy in front of me dressed in denim and looking like he just came from a construction site also holding a McCain cup.  He saw me, looked at my cup and nodded.  I nodded back and gave a thumbs up sign.  Great to see members of the resistance still lurking about in this dark blue communist state.  :ggrin:

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Stumbling My Way Home

Lincoln Adams | April 29, 2007 @ 9:21 pm

Is it me, or does the mass of social networking (or Web 2.0) sites out there seem to be such an overwhelming chaos of convoluted information that even Einstein would have trouble making sense of it all?

Unfortunately though, not content to see 3 or 4 daily readers perusing my blog (despite my anti-social tendencies), I decided to make a journey through the social networking universe and see what was out there, and whether I wanted any of it to come back to my little corner on the web. I also needed a vehicle that would help me find relevant content that could truly inspire me (while also setting me apart from other bloggers). I started by going down the list of social networking sites found at Wiki, and from there I proceeded to spend the rest of the day clicking from place to place, sometimes bored, sometimes impressed, but mostly confused and perplexed.

Some sites seemed simple enough in its concept, but others begged the question: “What in the blue @#$% is the point of all this?” First there were the MySpace clones, some of which appear to improve on MySpace’s shortcomings. Whatever. As far as I was concerned, such sites were online slums exhibiting the worst that humanity had to offer, so I quickly moved on whenever it became obvious that a site I was visiting had been designed using a model similar to MySpace. To be fair, Facebook wasn’t nearly as bad or coarse as some of the MySpace pages I’ve surfed, but it’s really designed for those attending college (and for employees of popular companies).

Then it was on to sites that offered… well I wasn’t exactly sure what it was they offered. The worst offender I think had to be BlinkBits. I just stared at this thing for what had to be 30 minutes and I still couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do. It did appear to be overwhelmed with spam though, and whenever I made a test submission, the content just seemed to get lost in all the advertising for Viagra. Hooo-kay…. Blinklist on the other hand seemed to be more polished, but it was still hard to understand the actual purpose of it. The list of “blinks” I sifted through didn’t seem appealing enough for me to check out (and again a lot of the blinks appeared to be spam).

My headaches from surfing finally started to wane when I began checking out the social bookmarking sites. Del.icio.us as some people by now probably know is the most popular one there is, but to me it seemed a little… bland. REALLY bland. So bland in fact that I thought for sure I was missing something, a key feature I was supposed to enable to access its full features. But nope, Del.icio.us was just a simple bookmarking service that utilizes tags to help you organize your bookmarks. Its interface though was just plain UGLY to me, and once I realized it couldn’t be changed, I began to understand why other social bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia existed. I’ve already uploaded my bookmarks to Del.icio.us, but I think after I organize them I’ll export tham to Ma.gnolia, which has a much more polished and appealing interface to me. Del.icio.us seemed like the barebones equivalent of a Linux box, while Ma.gnolia gave me that happy-dappy, flower-filled MacOS feel, complete with sunshine and rainbows. There were a few other bookmarking services as well with some truly novel concepts, like Backflip’s method of organzing your bookmarks in a Yahoo style directory, but the rest more or less seemed redundant to me.

I then moved on to blogging oriented communities, like Xanga, Blogger and LiveJournal. But the most polished one I’ve found thus far was Vox.com, created by the makers of the MovableType blogging script. I’ve already been able to duplicate most, if not all of the features offered by these communities on my own blog, so I didn’t feel the need to join for the time being. One community that stood out a little though was MyBlogLog, which was designed with the idea of having people connect with other readers of their favorite blogs. I played around with it for a while, but didn’t see much use for it, partly because my favorite blogs weren’t listed, and partly because the listing of readers for a particular blog didn’t tell me much, if anything. All you see is a small thumbnail of the reader and their usually cryptic usernames underneath. It was still an interesting concept though, so I may decide to stick around and see if I can make it worth my while. There was another site called Squidoo that looked intriguing as well, giving users the ability to create “lenses” that were in essence start pages piecing together a variety of content reflecting the user’s personal interests. At least I think that’s what it is. It basically just offered a different way to organize content, but unfortunately the design seems to make it susceptible to spam as well. Some of the lenses read more like bland advertisements rather than a user’s actual personal take on places on the web that interested him.

For the most part I ignored some of the popular social networks based on specific themes since I was, ironically enough, already a member of them. Namely, I’m thinking of YouTube, Last.FM and Flickr. These three sites have definitely proved their weight in gold, and I’ve been consistently using all of them to complement my own blog. It’s funny, while I generally despise mainstream social networks like MySpace, these theme based networks on the other hand are like manna from heaven. There’s even a site called Doostang that’s designed to help people find jobs through social networking. Muy coolio.

I also came across a few nifty sites that offered a variety of ways for people to organize get-togethers and meetings in real life. Dodgeball (which uses mobile phones to send you alerts when friends and crushes are nearby) and Meetup (which allows you to find groups and meetings of interest in your area) were two of the best I’ve seen. If I had any friends I’m sure these services would certainly come in handy. :D

Finally, I soon I began descending on news oriented sites like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Tailrank, NewsVine (and many, many more). Newsvine by the way actually looked in some ways like NetVibes (a service that allows you to design your own personal start page through aggregation). It looked interesting, but WAY overloaded with content. It was one of those things that required your full attention in order to understand how it worked, but I suspect I’ll be investing a lot of time learning how to use all the features it offered only to end up wondering why I bothered in the first place. Tailrank was more blogging oriented, providing feeds for the user that can help you glean what
topics were currently drawing the most interest in the blogosphere. Reddit offered a Slashdot-like way to submit and discuss news items in a vanilla but very addictive format. Then there was Meshly, a service that offered a way for users to submit articles and content via instant messaging. Digg was far more polished in its look and voting system and remains one of the top sites in this particular category of social networks, but in the end I began to realize why these particular sites weren’t that appealing to me. In truth, I wasn’t really a news oriented person. I’m as interested in what’s happening in the world as anyone else of course, but sites like Digg and Reddit completely overwhelm you not just with news related items, but LONG discussion threads such news articles regularly spawn. They seem to go on forever, and ever, and ever, and…

I also noticed that these news oriented networks tend to draw a particularly monolothic demographic, so much that the vast majority of users that peruse these sites could probably be described as angry white male geekazoids who generally spend their pastime decrying in rabid fashion the latest evils of the current White House administration. Ironically enough, this probably would have still been the case had a site like Digg been launched in say, 1998, which back then would have undoubtedly provided an outlet for angry white male geekazoids to vent their frustrations over, uhhhh… the latest evils of the White House administration. In a way this is what I believe is the downside of time based content. It’s repetitive, cyclical, and ultimately boring. Wars come, wars go. Scandals come, scandals go. There really is nothing new under the sun. And I was getting tired of reading through news items that continuously sparked the same old rehashed arguments and flame wars ad infinitum. Good grief, tell me something NEW.

And yet the blogosphere is mostly awash in news, and discussions (or flame wars) over said news, so much that they start to become almost indistinguishable from one another. Where was the diversity? Where was the focus on timeless content, on things that might really matter? The void here was remarkably palpable to me, abandoned instead for themes that would guarantee the heaviest traffic: news and politics. Quality is forsaken in the never ending quest for quantity. And why not? Quantity after all is what brings in the mula.

Tired and weary from my online journey around the world, and from sifting through the endless content at places like Reddit and Digg, it occurred to me that I already had something wonderful and good all along, patiently waiting for me to come home. I had a means to explore timeless content the way it used to be done, back when the web was just getting started. Back when it wasn’t all about news, but about people, about true individuality and innovation. About things that mattered. That something was a small little toolbar currently residing at the top of my browser, provided to me by the good folks at StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon was really what I had been looking for all along. A way to surf the web aimlessly and randomly, and yet still find wonderful places that I could bookmark or blog about in a heartbeat. I was finding content that mattered to me, content I never would have found in a million years perusing sites like Reddit or Digg, or even via a search on Google. The kind of community StumbleUpon offered also proved to be far more diverse, and a more accurate reflection of the general population of mankind. StumbleUpon was the kind of social network that attracted people from all walks of life, rather than just a particular demographic of smarmy geeks who coined phrases like “Web 2.0″ and “folksonomies,” and then expecting the rest of us mere mortals to know what the hell they’re talking about.

So finally, after two bleary eyed days of clicking and surfing, after seeing what’s out there and beyond, the prodigal blogger has finally stumbled his way home. And who knows, if even StumbleUpon should lose its appeal after time, I could always create my own social network. :D

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