George Carlin is (was) a right fool. The whole problem is that people don't have enough control over the government. Not voting only allows those who would have control over you to have more power. Even a protest vote or a third party vote is worth more than no vote.
> Even a protest vote or a third party vote is worth more than no vote.
Actually, it's not. The US election process operates under the Electoral College[1], so a state majority vote changes all votes to that majority vote (eg: Democrats win majority in Illinois, so all votes in that state end up voting for Democrats in the presidential election).
The disparity between the electoral vote and the popular vote is usually not wide enough to cause controversy, however it's still offensive to realize that your vote changes without your consent.
Gerrymandering[2] is a whole different topic, however it is just as galling.
Actually, it is. If a third party gets more than 5% of the popular vote, they have rights to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund[1] which can further help in future years to get said third party elected.
I will chime in with how it is too. Since there are such tight margins in the popular vote, and large percentage participation gaps, when people vote a protest candidate it has the effect of 'pulling' votes from one of the two mainstream candidates. Ross Perot in the 1992 and 1996 Elections was credited or accused of changing the outcome of the election by taking votes away from Bush (the elder).
The result were more Perot like ideas being pushed into both parties to prevent that from happening.
Protest voting, even in rigged elections like Putin's election in Russia, are very effective political action.
If the sole effect of voting is to choose a winner, then you're probably right. But I think that's not the only effect that comes out of counting the votes. It's the one place where voters actually lay their cards on the table, or rather cast their votes in the ballot box. Votes are not a limitless resource to voters, unlike words or even opinion polls, and it is an important form of communication to other voters in the next election.
This is where gaming the voting system hurts democracy. Simply voting for the biggest bloc that is not your vision of pure evil is short-sighted, and causes the voters lose their independence - important for a voting system to arrive at an optimum result [1], and it also destroys the only credible method of communicating the lack of confidence in the system to each other [2]. Everybody knowing that everybody else knows that everybody have lost faith in the main blocs is not sufficient to create real change, but it certainly is necessary.
>The US election process operates under the Electoral College[1]
No, the US presidential election process works that way; that's one election for one office, there are many more offices you vote for than just president and all that voting matters and is absolutely worth more than a no vote.
Do you know how often an Electoral College delegate changes his vote? It's extremely rare. Most of them are bound and even the unbound ones nearly always vote as directed. Personally, I've always like the idea of the Electoral College because voting for a president is a complex issue that usually comes down to the talking points on television. Electing a delegate from my own community to take on the challenge researching the candidates for me is a much more manageable task, like electing a representative to vote on laws.
But your missing broader picture. This is not just about the presidential election. You also have a senator, a representative, a state representative, at state governor, a mayor, a sheriff, a town council leader, a school board leader, (maybe not all at once,) for whom you can vote. Too much power is concentrated in the presidency and this is a result people neglecting the importance of other elected offices, most of which have more of a direct influence on your life anyway.
Even beyond that, if you believe that your vote is so worthless that you may as well not cast it, that's a sign that you should get more involved in politics, not less. It's not hard to join your local party chapter and to start making changes as an 'insider.'
The difference between a third party getting 1% of the vote versus 10% could have some impact on politics even if it doesn't affect the outcome of the election.
But just voting to vote is useless. People seem to have the mentality that you pick the lesser of two evils, which is BS. I'm not going to vote for somebody if I don't feel like they are completely up for the job. I'm not going to vote for a 3rd party just so they can get funding because guess what, this years candidate may be great but the funding would be for the next round and who knows who they will have then.
If you're left with the choice between the lesser or two evils on how to run the country. It is very _very_ important that you get the _lesser_ of those two evils.
For that matter, why even bring up the electoral college? Even if the president were elected by a majority vote, the odds of the election being a tie or decided by a single vote is incredibly small—almost certainly too small to be able to rationally justify the time spent researching candidates or even traveling to the polling ___location.
It looks like in my state about 1,500,000 people voted in the 2012 presidential election. So if a few hundred thousand people decided to not vote because their one vote doesn't matter, it's conceivable that the result in a state could be swayed.
So why try to persuade people their vote doesn't matter? If enough of them (an admittedly large number) listen, it will matter.
> So if a few hundred thousand people decided to not vote because their one vote doesn't matter, it's conceivable that the result in a state could be swayed.
Yes, but it's extremely unlikely that your vote would sway the result, and I'm operating under the assumption that you can only control your own decision to vote.
> So why try to persuade people their vote doesn't matter? If enough of them (an admittedly large number) listen, it will matter.
You're confusing two things. I would never try to persuade people that the sum of everyone's votes doesn't matter, because it obviously does (discounting for the moment the possibility of election fraud). But I would try to persuade individuals that their vote will not matter with a very high probability.
Even though this is often phrased in such a way that it almost sounds like a contradiction or paradox, it's not at all. It's analogous to the lottery: the more people that play, the higher the chance that someone will win (assuming random picks), but one person buying a single lottery ticket has such a small probability of winning that I would recommend against relying on the lottery to change one's financial situation.
The sum of everyone's votes is made up of a bunch of single individual votes. If you persuade enough individuals to not cast their single vote, then the election outcome could be swayed.
So sure, telling individual people their vote doesn't matter is basically true. But how many people have you told?! :-)
Wrong basis. By voting for someone who won't win you can claim that you tried and failed to improve things, and that it was everyone else (who voted for the winner/mainstream candidate) who causes all our problems and is responsible.
A large non-voting would-be constituency means that there is little mandate for politicians to drive policy.
If say 90% of the population didn't vote, plus there were public demonstrations of discontent, officials would be so afraid of a revolution (or other radical action) it would in theory temper their ambitions.
Tocqueville touches on this in Democracy in America.
Politics is how complex societies make decisions at the largest scale. Despite the wet dreams of the tea party contingent, politics and government-by-mandate aren't optional in the 21st century and haven't been for a long time. Tocqueville died in 1859, back when things were simpler.
If 90% of the population refuse to vote then you would end-up with one of two outcomes:
1. A minority government governing with a mandate from <= 10% of the population. Cue politician saying 'look, I got 80% of the votes cast'. Expect: extreme social unrest, dictatorship by minority, authoritarianism.
2. No government. Not as great as some might think. Expect: nothing-gets-done, social collapse, power vacuum, enemy nations sharpen their knives.
First-world politicians in this century won't have their ambitions "tempered" by large scale withdrawal from voting - all this would do is remove the main mechanism that restrains them. Even in a society that has backed itself into this kind of local minima, politics and politicians would still exist.
The reality of voting is that you pick the least worst choice. "Representative democracy" isn't democracy. It's bloodless regime change. You get a choice of who you can work with.
Actual liberatory politics begins the day after the election, and involves things like pressure groups, petitions, protests and lobbying.
You're begging the question. Why are the choices the way they are?
You see a status quo where neither major party cares about electronic privacy. Is it because there is a vast conspiracy between media and government to only present these two viewpoints? Is it because huge amounts of money go into getting people to support NSA surveillance? Or is it because opposing NSA surveillance is not an issue that reliably yields votes?
Which voting bloc can you capture by supporting the scaling back of NSA surveillance? Angry nerds? Not a big demographic. If your issue doesn't get old people, blacks and hispanics, religious conservatives, teachers, union workers, small business owners, or one of the other big demographics like that to go out and vote based solely on that issue, then there is not enough votes in that issue for any politician to care about it.
And the thing is, that's arguably how democracy should work. Why should politicians in a democracy cater to the pet issues of an ideological minority?
> Why should politicians in a democracy cater to the pet issues of an ideological minority?
From a human and Constitutional rights point of view, they have an obligation to respect the views of those ideological minorities when their main agenda is defending their rights (right to privacy, free speech, or whatever it may be). A pure democratic system is little more than a (usually peaceful) mob rule, but in a representative democracy there is at least the expectation that elected representatives, by virtue of being middlemen between the people and the laws that govern them, as well as only having to risk their job every few years, will be able to reflect on more than what the majority wants at the present moment.
However, if your point was made more from the perspective of maintaining power and control, then I don't disagree with you.
> they have an obligation to respect the views of those ideological minorities when their main agenda is defending their rights
Ideological minorities don't get to make up "rights" and then demand the government defend them. The government has the obligation to defend free speech rights, even against the wishes of the majority, because there is ancient recognition of that right along with explicit adoption of a broad statement of that right in the Constitution.
But, there is no such thing when it comes to "privacy". See: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rightof... ("The U. S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy. The Bill of Rights, however, reflects the concern of James Madison and other framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy, such as the privacy of beliefs (1st Amendment), privacy of the home against demands that it be used to house soldiers (3rd Amendment), privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches (4th Amendment), and the 5th Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination, which provides protection for the privacy of personal information.")
There is nothing in the Constitution that says "you have a right to privacy", and it's really very difficult to extend one of the explicit provisions to get you to something that would prohibit the government's collection of information that you voluntarily put "out in the world" by giving it to entities like Google or Facebook, or information (like call records) that aren't even yours but rather information about you gathered by a private company. You have to resort to something worse than Griswald's "penumbras" to get from the 4th amendment, which concerns the sanctity of one's house and physical person, to such a broad privacy "right."
There's not even intellectual consensus on the issue. Academics disagree vigorously about the appropriate level of "privacy rights" and foreign liberal democracies often collect as much or more information than the U.S. does.
The right to privacy falls under the "human rights" part of my comment. You are free to disagree that privacy in some meaningful sense is not a human right, but the very fact that so many other rights (both legal and human) are easily compromised when it is not present is a strong hurdle to overcome, should you wish to make that argument.
As an example, you have the right to criticize your employer (freedom of speech). For obvious reasons, this right is best exercised in private, where the employer cannot overhear the conversation. If the employer operated a massive surveilance network that recorded your supposedly private conversations, you could then suffer punitive consequences and be denied career opportunities merely for voicing an opinion.
You have a legal right to an attorney, but that right is only useful because your discussions with your attorney are confidential. Without that privacy, the whole value of the right simply evaporates.
My view is that the right to privacy is such an obvious prerequisite for most, if not all, of our legal rights to have any value that it shouldn't need to be explicitly detailed in the Constitution or in any specific law. Furthermore, the world the Founders lived in was a world in which privacy was easy to safeguard, and the few obvious ways to violate it (e.g. unreasonable searches and seizures) were addressed by the Bill of Rights.
> You are free to disagree that privacy in some meaningful sense is not a human right
I don't disagree that privacy in some meaningful sense is a human right. I disagree that a "privacy" right that is broad enough to encompass information about me collected by a private company based on my voluntary use of its service (i.e. phone call records) rises to the level of human right. To me, that's instead a matter of balancing of competing interests to be handled through the democratic process. When I think of privacy being a "human right" I'm thinking more of the government not invading the sanctity of your home, not how it can access information you already freely share with others.
One of the main problems with privacy today is that your rights to privacy are typically enumerated in lengthy terms of service or user agreements that can and do change without notice. If these documents truly do enumerate "rights" they shouldn't be so easily changed whenever the company finds it convenient or profitable. What you initially agreed to was a 20 page document written in legalese that few will bother to read through.
If you truly want to be informed and up to date on your privacy rights for all of the services you use, you basically have to make it a full time job. It's not a sustainable system. What we need is some sort of societally accepted norms, and possibly laws, regarding privacy so that you don't have to hire a lawyer to give you a monthly update explaining what Facebook can and can't do with the data you and your friends provide them.
My point is that whatever norms or laws that result from those considerations will be arbitrary unless they are based firmly on a respect for an individual's human right to privacy.
It seems to me that we do have "societally accepted norms, and possibly laws, regarding privacy." The norms/laws are that the information you share freely with Google/FB/Verizon/etc can be passed along to the gov't in support of national security.
These norms/laws aren't arbitrary, they're based on the views of the majority of the citizens of this country, expressed through the democratic process.
> Ideological minorities don't get to make up "rights" and then demand the government defend them.
Sure they do; their right to make such demands is fairly explicit in the First Amendment (both the right to assemble and the right to petition apply to it.)
Now, the answer to the demand may be "No", but that's a different issue.
I was under the impression that the Constitution explicitly granted the federal government certain powers, and the 10th amendment clarified that if a power wasn't granted to the fed in the Constitution, it was because the power was retained by the states and the people. So the Constitution wouldn't need to grant the people a right to privacy. It was implicit, and even further emphasized by the 4th amendment.
In the Constitution, the federal government is given broad, exclusive, power over national security and defense. Intelligence-gathering has always a part of national security and defense. That was a key purpose of the documents, to address the failure of the Articles of Confederation to provide for a robust centralized defense. Intelligence gathering has always been a part of the historical understanding of defense and national security. Therefore, the federal government can conduct intelligence gathering unless some affirmative right prevents it.
The 10th amendment just says that a right need not be enumerated in the Constitution to exist. However, you still have to prove that such a right exists, say by pointing to its recognition in English common law. Just because it isn't mentioned in the Constitution doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it also doesn't mean that it exists and is just "implicit." The idea that communications are protected by a broad "privacy right" that protects even information you share with others just can't be traced back to something the founders would have understood to be a "right" much less something so fundamental that they might leave it implicit.
> In the Constitution, the federal government is given broad, exclusive, power over national security and defense
Like "privacy", "national security" appears nowhere in the Constitution. The federal government is given certain specific powers that can be grouped under the umbrella "national security", just as it is given certain specific limits based on particular rights that can be grouped under the umbrella "privacy".
"National security" falls under the umbrella of "common Defence" (which appears twice in the Constitution). Indeed, one of the motivating forces behind the creation of a stronger federal government under the Constitution was Shay's Rebellion, which was a purely internal threat.
The term ("privacy") does not appear in the Constitution, and the specific limits on federal power that do appear can't be generalized to fit under the umbrella of that term. There is no indication that e.g. the founders intended the 5th amendment protection against self-incrimination to be rooted in a "privacy" concept. It's clearly based on a "due process" concept, which explains why there is no general right to refuse to testify (which is what you'd have if the right was based on privacy) but only a right to refuse to testify in a way that might incriminate yourself. The concern is about he extreme persuasiveness of confessions, and the potential for abuse from coerced confessions, not about the right to keep information from a government investigation.
Similarly, the 3rd and 4th are better understood as rights based on the sanctity of the home and person (notably since the 4th conspicuously omits any reference to communications).
Attempts to find a right of "privacy" in the Constitution are extremely strained, for the simple reason that there isn't one. The founders just weren't thinking of this overriding concept of "privacy" as an umbrella concept for rights as disparate as protection against search and seizure, self-incrimination, or a right to an abortion.
> National security" falls under the umbrella of "common Defence" (which appears twice in the Constitution).
Both in reference to the purpose of the Constitution and the scope of purposes supported by Congress taxing power, but neither reference is to a general federal blanket power with regard to "common defense".
Powers under the Constitution are generally read to be complete within a particular ___domain except to the extent they are counter-balanced by affirmative rights. See Gibbons v. Ogden ("If, as has always been understood, the sovereignty of Congress, though limited to specified objects, is plenary as to those objects...").
Yes, but you missed the part that "common Defense" occurs in the preamble discussing purpose, not powers, and in a phrase limiting the purposes of the Taxing power. Its not itself an enumerated Congressional power (Congress does have more narrow enumerated defense related powers), so its irrelevant, in discussing it, that grants of power to Congress are generally plenary except within express limitations.
"To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States..."
By your method of interpretation, this clause gives Congress the right to exercise legislative jurisdiction over D.C., but not the right to build the city. A more sensible interpretation is that it grants Congress the power to build the city in the same breath as granting it exclusive legislative jurisdiction over it. The embedding of the power to provide for the common being embedded within the power to tax can be seen as operating similarly. Note that this drafting reflects history. There was no doubt under the articles of confederation that Congress had the power to provide for the common defense. The sticking point was that it did not have the power to tax to achieve that end.
Also, the preamble is not legally inoperative. It can be read as establishing "common defense" as an umbrella term for powers mentioned within.
Finally, providing for the common defense was considered at the time and today an inherent aspect of sovereignty, and the Constitution through the preamble shows the intent to invest that aspect in the federal government.
I can see the point you're getting at, but I don't think it works. You're comparing a power that's mentioned twice in the Constitution (archaic drafting aside), was considered an inherent function of government at the time, and was clearly motivated by by contemporary events as supported by the historical record, to an umbrella "right" that isn't mentioned explicitly by the Constitution, isn't a neat generalization of the rights that are explicit in the Constitution, and wasn't part of the historical understanding at the time.
I think there's some Occam's Razor analysis that needs to happen here. The simplest explanation of the text is that the common defense was intended to be a fundamental function of the federal government, while the various rights that arguably go to privacy were really derived either from a response to specific injustices at the hands of the British or from common law understandings of due process rather than some unstated general umbrella right of privacy.
> By your method of interpretation, this clause gives Congress the right to exercise legislative jurisdiction over D.C., but not the right to build the city.
No, it doesn't. Legislative jurisdiction over the territory itself includes the ability to build the city.
> You're comparing a power that's mentioned twice in the Constitution
The phrase is mentioned twice, but neither is a grant of power (one is a statement of the overall purpose of the Constitution, the other is expressly a limitation on the scope of another grant of power.)
There is no mention of "common defense" as a power anywhere in the Constitution.
> No, it doesn't. Legislative jurisdiction over the territory itself includes the ability to build the city.
No more or less than the power to tax for the purpose of providing for the common defense includes the power to actually provide for the common defense.
Which it doesn't, any more than the power to tax for the purpose of general welfare (which is part of the same phrase as the "common defense") gives Congress independent non-taxing power to provide for the general welfare outside of the grants elsewhere in the Constitution. There's quite a lot of conditions, etc., you can apply to liability for taxes, etc., that allow some substantive regulation to be plausibly included under the taxing power, but if you read the purpose limitation of the taxing power to instead be a positive grant of power independent of the taxing power, as you suggest, that one clause alone would shift the federal government under the Constitution into one of universal plenary power with only negative restriction instead of one of specific positive powers, and its quite clear that that was never the intent of that clause (as well as that interpretation being completely inconsistent with the actual words of the clause.)
Even if you accept the idea that your vote has some tiny marginal effect on the outcome (which, in the electoral college, is usually not the case), you still have to weigh the opportunity cost of voting (and of the time spent deciding who to vote for) against what you would have been able to do with that time had you not bothered. You could spend more time with your family, with friends, learn a new skill, enjoy a more peaceful state of mind by not feeling obligated to follow the news 24/7, and more. Which of these do you think will most improve the state of your life? Especially when you factor in the probability that the person you vote for will renege on many of his or her promises?
Local elections are a more worthwhile, due to the increased influence of even a single voice and the fact that they are usually decided by popular vote.
Local elections are a more worthwhile, due to the increased influence of even a single voice and the fact that they are usually decided by popular vote.
And this might really be the place to put most of your political thought and effort. Getting good people into local offices can be a first step to getting those same good people into regional, state, national offices. If we want until the presidential election to care, it's likely too late.
As far as spending time on the major elections... I don't watch the news 24/7. I spend maybe ten hours during "election season" watching debates and reading articles, and a lot of that is done socially with friends and family. I enjoy it, and do not consider it time wasted. My polling place is about two blocks from my home. It takes me ten minutes to go vote. I do not see elections as a worthless drain on my time, even if my one vote, by itself, doesn't matter.
Is it the case that people don't have enough control over the government? As far as I can tell, we have exactly the government we want, or at least exactly the government you might expect to get in a compromise between rural middle America, suburbanites, christian conservatives, and urban yuppies.
The people who strongly oppose the security measures taken after 9/11 are in the minority. They were part of Obama's coalition, but were almost certainly outnumbered by teachers or blue collar factory workers. I bet if you polled the public, "NSA surveillance" wouldn't rank among the top 3 concerns of even a sizeable minority of the people.
So when the government engages in legal (at the edge of legality, to be sure, but at least colorably legal), and the people don't strongly oppose the measures, why do we treat it as some sort of failure of democracy?
See: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rightof... ("The U. S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy. The Bill of Rights, however, reflects the concern of James Madison and other framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy, such as the privacy of beliefs (1st Amendment), privacy of the home against demands that it be used to house soldiers (3rd Amendment), privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches (4th Amendment), and the 5th Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination, which provides protection for the privacy of personal information.") (emphasis added).
The NSA's actions seem pretty precisely tailored to stay on the "right side" of the Constitutional line, avoiding the specific aspects of "privacy" protected by the Constitution.
It could still be regarded as a failure even if it is not a breach (and I hold no position on whether it is or isn't a breach).
Electronic communications were clearly not considered by the authors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (understandably) but they were clearly trying trying to impose limits on the power of the state and I think the idea that the government should be allowed to track all of everyone's associations would have been abhorrent but that is the practical effect of the monitoring that has been revealed.
> Electronic communications were clearly not considered by the authors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights
But they did have communications and publications, yet they didn't put anything in the Constitution suggesting you have a right to privacy with regards to those things. And it's not like bank records, insurance records, etc, didn't exist back then. In the founder's day, the police could have asked a barkeep for his records to see when you came and went. Why is it suddenly so "abhorrent" when the government asks AT&T for the same sort of information (i.e. not your information, but information AT&T keeps about you)?
The issue here is that all of these data sources are third parties.
> the police could have asked a barkeep for his records
Asked. Asked. And he could have said "come back with a warrant".
You continue to ignore the distinctions between:
* A party voluntarily cooperating with law enforcement.
* A party being coerced to cooperate with law enforcement by court order.
* A party being coerced to cooperate with law enforcement because law enforcement officers say so.
You keep insisting the government has a right to access any information someone reveals to a third party without a warrant, even if that third party did not intend to and does not wish to reveal it.
What precedent exists for this? If there is any at all (and this will be the third time I've asked you for it), does any of it pre-date 2001?
> Asked. Asked. And he could have said "come back with a warrant".
But if he said "here they are" or they came back with a warrant or a subpoena, there is nothing you could've done about it.
With regards to the NSA accessing call records, there is a warrant from the FISA court (which itself dates to 1978). In case of PRISM, there is voluntary cooperation by the companies involved. There is no indication that third parties are being coerced to cooperate just "because law enforcement officers say so."
The government accessing the information without the consent of the third party would be a 4th amendment violation, not of your rights, but of the third party's rights. But that's not happening here.
> But if he said "here they are" or they came back with a warrant or a subpoena, there is nothing you could've done about it.
Assuming lack of contract, absolutely correct. I've never disputed that, I don't think anyone else has, either. Have you been attacking a strawman all this time?
> With regards to the NSA accessing call records, there is a warrant from the FISA court
A very broad warrant. A general warrant. Precisely what the founders forbade in the 4th Amendment.
> In case of PRISM, there is voluntary cooperation by the companies involved.
I decline to speculate on what PRISM does or does not include, as the reporting right now is an unclear mess.
> There is no indication that third parties are being coerced to cooperate just "because law enforcement officers say so."
Since FISA obviously can't be trusted to provide meaningful oversight, I think the general warrant issued for the Verizon data qualifies.
> The government accessing the information without the consent of the third party would be a 4th amendment violation, not of your rights, but of the third party's rights.
I still haven't seen you cite any actual precedent explaining this.
> But that's not happening here.
The general warrant is an obvious 4th Amendment violation, whether it's violating Verizon's rights, their customers', or both.
NSLs are clearly "because law enforcement says so", so now I wonder, on what basis do you defend those?
What I like is that people don't know what surveillance means. it's a french word, and being french myself, I happen to know that it means to oversee, to control, as in work, or to monitor, as in a medical patient. I think people think of surveillance as simply passive, but in French, it has an active component, to rectify wrong events. To me, NSA surveillance means NSA monitoring for the purpose of control.
a compromise between rural middle America, suburbanites, christian conservatives, and urban yuppies
Left out a few parties there ray. What about the military-industrial complex? Don't they get a vote? (Maybe two or three?) What about all of those whose paychecks appear magically from "black" appropriations? How about LEOs? Are they not voting now? That would be a pretty sizable class to which to deny the franchise. You think the people who make house payments based on subverting the general welfare of the nation might be a bit more focused on what horrible program they can impose next than is "rural middle America"?
"Let's be clear" though. The current embarrassment is a paragon of "democracy".
The problem with voting is your choice is the lesser of two evils. If you dont vote, you're saying that the choices you are given aren't good enough and dont deserve your vote.
No, he most certainly was not. His point was that it didn't matter, and as we are seeing, it doesn't. You can vote for one of two flavors, but both of them taste like shit. You can go to the polling booth believing the fiction that your vote matters, but it does not. Nothing ever changes because both mainstream candidates are always essentially equivalent in most of the ways that really matter - they're always just two sides of the same shitty coin.
