… or, for that matter, when you don’t.
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 18 years ago, in 2006, on the World Wide Web.
Greg Saunders, at This Modern World (2006-02-22) recently noted that the civil war in Iraq is getting worse daily, and that the dude riding ramrod on this occupation doesn’t have a goddamned clue about what’s going on:
January 2003 the President invited three members of the Iraqi opposition to join him to watch the Super Bowl. In the course of the conversation the Iraqis realized that the President was not aware that there was a difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. He looked at them and said,
You mean...they're not, you know, there, there's this difference. What is it about?–former U.S. dilpomat Peter Galbraith
Jesus wept.
Greg adds this, by way of commentary, in the headline: This Is What Happens When You Vote For An Idiot.
… or, for that matter, when you don’t.
And there’s the rub. I, for one, didn’t vote for this idiot, and I don’t think Greg Saunders did, either. I sure know that the Iraqis didn’t get a vote on whether or not to have to deal with him or his flunkies. But we’re all of us stuck with him anyway. If democracy means that the majority get the government they deserve, that leaves us the problem of a minority getting stuck with a government that they, ex hypothesi, don’t deserve. A vote on your rulers means precisely nothing when other people get to vote on your ruler, too–after all, there’s always going to be more of them than there are of you.
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A very broad question:
Are you calling for an end to voting in rulers /at all/, or an end to voting them in for areas of land as large as America?
I was under the impression that as an anarchist you want the former – but as far as I understand things its the latter that seceding implies.
Since I’m an anarchist, an end to rulers as such (elected or otherwise) is the end I’m pursuing.
Disunion and secession are a worthwhile partial means to the end.
Part of the reason being that strategically, much smaller-scale governments are usually going to be less abusive and easier to escape (either by moving, or by seceding at a lower level), and the more impotent rulers are, the closer you are to having no rulers at all. The other part being that a right to secession, if strictly followed through and not blocked by mysticism at some lower level of government, ultimately entails individual secession, which just means anarchy. (Hence the joke in my tagline.)