Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, All Goddamned Wrong

"'The reality is, though, that those who do not vote do not exist as far as political policy makers are concerned.'

Bullshit. Look: if I was working the plantation hard enough for them, they would still drag my ass off to prison when I didn't send them my fondest regards next April 15th. I'm not here to be mean to you, V.R., but that's fucking bullshit, and somebody had better say so, so here I am. Your 'policy makers' would still kick my goddamned door down in the middle of the night if some dimwit called 'em up and said I had a meth lab going or something. They are going to do everything they can to price me out of medical markets and drive me into their lovin' arms -- whether I vote or not. Those 'policy makers' are now being coached into things like 'nudging' and 'choice architecture' by a crop of intellectuals cooking up new rationales for the same old technocratic stomp, and they don't bloody care whether I vote or not, except for one thing:

They will agree with you that I should vote. You should think long and hard about that and what it really means. I think it means that they know something that you either don't know or will not admit: they know that my vote is a fundamental nod in favor of their existence. Go watch those creepy assholes on NBC doing their video bumpers and telling me how important it is that I should vote.

They know the whole fucking charade would fall right over if they could not claim to 'represent' us.

Well, guess what. I represent myself. I do it all year long, every day of every year, and I don't wait around for their goddamned permission every couple of years, presented as a duty -- mind you -- to line up at the polls and hand them a blank check during the periods between the national hysterics every couple of years.

And that's the very last thing they ever want: me, standing for myself.

You are dead wrong. Every one of you here who votes: you're all wrong.

You're getting more wrong with every passing election, and you keep doing it.

I know -- I know -- that I am not making an impression with any of this. You're going to keep doing it, in some atavistic hope that I will never understand. You'll keep doing it until it eventually dawns on you, one at a time, that you have committed all the years of your only-ever life to this pathetic sop of a consolation that they hold out to you, and that it has gotten you nothing but more tyranny all the while.

'It is irrational to simply retreat to a darkened room,...'

It is fucking outrageous -- do you hear? -- fucking outrageous for you to put it that way. You don't know what you're talking about. I'm living in what's left of the sunshine, sir. Every single day. And I do not submit anything about it to your opinion, a commie's opinion, or anyone else's. Sneer all you want, and go submit my rights to a vote all you want, but bear this in mind: I would never do that to you.

You're just wrong."

That's me, losing my cool over the biennial lunacy, over at Samizdata.

Go vote your asses off, ladies and gentlemen: that's what it comes to.

You might at least have the grace to leave me and my ass out of it.