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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Is there anything particularly worth voting for in this election?

I tend to not bother voting for issues that don't concern me. And frankly, the vast majority of issues that people get all excited about don't bother me one way or another.

I'm happy to pay a little more or a little less tax on various things, see schools built in one area and prisons not built in another. Go nuts with it all, and if it really effects your happiness I'm fine with letting you make little changes to the world around me.

Until you come up with something I find important, I'd prefer not to concern myself with it.

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You're not just voting on issues, you're voting for a representative. If the party you agree with doesn't have the votes in Congress, whatever ends up happening in the next 2-6 years will be less likely to be resolved the way you like (or at all). And in fact things may get worse from your point of view.

It's not a referendum. You're imparting political power on the party you vote for, relevant to anything that comes up in Congress in the next 2-6 years.

So you claim that there is nothing of interest in the topics that are voted on. How do you know that if you don't concern yourself with them?

You can either be ignorant or informed. Not both at the same time. Claiming that everything is boring by way of being ignorant of everything is dishonest.

I am not saying that current affairs are interesting, but I would prefer people to be honestly ignorant to simply being arrogant.

How about this: Of the topics being voted on that people have gone out of their way to promote, or that the media have covered, none of them struck my curiosity to the point where I feel compelled to dig further into them.

I asked here, on the off chance that somebody has one that they think the HN audience might care about.

Congress votes on the budget, and all new laws or modifications to existing laws. You don't care if any of that gets effed up in ways you don't agree with?

Plenty.

The delusion that anyone is actually voting between "person who won't eff things up" and "person who will eff things up" is not useful, though.

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