why I'm not voting this election: Round 2

I live in Seoul, South Korea, which means that, if I want to vote in an American election, I have no recourse aside from mail-in voting (if there are alternatives, write in to let me know what they are). As I pointed out a while back, the US voting system is broken, and mail-in voting is part of the problem, as many conservatives never hesitate to point out. In my own personal calculus, I would rather sacrifice the potential minuscule good my vote would do (assuming it got counted) in favor of ensuring that my vote does no harm (i.e., gets ignored, miscounted, or otherwise perverted). Your own calculus might be different, and I respect that. You do you.

To be clear, I'm not setting myself up as an example to follow or in any way pressuring people to follow my lead. There's no lead here; there's merely a personal decision rooted in conscience. One commenter wrote in last time to remind me of the people who died to protect my right to vote. First, a right is not a duty; the US isn't Australia, where you have to vote, or you'll be fined or otherwise punished. Second, the people who died argument assumes the system still works when it's obviously broken. If we're at a point in the discussion where people are talking about "overcoming the margin of fraud," then we're in dire straits, indeed. 

So, again: my personal calculus takes into consideration the probable (definite) brokenness of the US voting system. I won't engage in the doublethink that we can somehow vote our way out of the problem if voting itself, especially for us mail-in people, is the problem.* But as I said last time, I reserve the right to hope for a pro-Trump outcome (assuming the guy lives past November 5**). We'll see soon enough. 

One increasingly loud thought in my head is, The Democrats had their chance. For four years, they had their chance. I'm neither a Republican nor a full-on conservative, but I admit my leanings have been drifting rightward as I've gotten older. I also admit that the GOP, when it's had power and opportunity, has often fucked things up, "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory," as Styx likes to say. And however much of an odious person Donald Trump is personally, you'd be hard-pressed to convince me that his policies and priorities are wrong. We enjoyed greater safety and prosperity under Trump, not to mention no new wars.

And even though this is irrelevantly superstitious, I'll say it, anyway: in 2016, I didn't vote for Trump or Hillary. Maybe, superstitiously speaking, my non-participation will help the man out again this time. Of course, I ended up writing a mea culpa soon after Election Day, admitting I'd been wrong about the whole situation. My focus, then, was on how I'd bought into the media's lies, not having fully realized what sort of creatures the media were; the focus then shifted as I realized I'd misjudged Trump, not as a person, but as a leader. So while my actions this year mirror what I did in 2016, my mindset is totally different.

Trump himself generally shares with politicians the tendency never to admit he's wrong (pride and ego), but I've recently heard him say, several times in different interviews and exchanges, that he didn't know much about Washington the first time around, but he has a much better idea, now, of whom to trust and whom to invite into his inner circle. While JD Vance is still not my own top pick for VP, Vance has been proving himself a capable fighter as he engages in his own combative interviews with the likes of CNN, MSNBC, etc. Like Trump, Vance goes willingly into the lion's den. How often have you seen Kamala Harris face off against a Fox interviewer—even a friendly one? When has she sat down with Joe Rogan, Tim Pool, or Patrick Bet-David? Never. She's not courageous, and not a fighter. So Vance is a good example of a solid pick, someone intelligent and articulate, who has Trump's back. Maybe this bodes well; maybe Trump has indeed learned some lessons about Judases and the actual extent of the "swamp" he purports to drain (a multi-president project with no guarantee of success). But overall, he seems to have evolved. Maybe, to defeat the swamp, you must partially become a swamp creature. One way or another, he seems to have tweaked his formula for success, so I'd like to see him get a second term. I hope, since he'll be a lame duck, that he'll be the extreme nightmare the left thinks he already is. Lots of heads need to roll. Consequences must be felt.

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*You could try to sic a Kantian "categorical imperative" argument against me, i.e., what happens if you take my reasoning and try to apply it universally? If every American thought the way I did, the toxic left would win! Case closed, right? But what if the "maxim for action" that you're using is something like, "Believe in the power of voting even when the system is obviously broken"? So you see the problem, then.

**One online pundit, Chris Chappell, notes that Gerald Ford had two assassination attempts within three weeks of each other. Then nothing.

UPDATE: seen at Instapundit:

WE TOTALLY TRUST THEM, RIGHT?  Postal Workers’ Union Endorses Kamala Harris[,] but Your Mail-In Ballot Will Be in Good Hands.

At the link, they're talking about NALC (National Association of Letter Carriers), where my mother used to work. Some comments below the post: 

Proof positive the election will be rigged.

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Mail-in ballots completely destroy ballot integrity, which is why they need to be outlawed.

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Well, that is encouraging (/s) here in WA/Scabattle where there is [mail-in] only.

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Wonder if they have a way to open the envelopes, change things[,] and seal them back up. Considering years of experience with mail, I'd not be surprised.

And I wonder why I know people who think the system is too corrupt to bother voting...

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Well, that finishes [mail-in] voting as an option—I think the last time I took my ballot and drove it over to the courthouse to personally have it ‘posted’—as I recall[,] the line was down the street[.]

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That alone should be grounds for the Supreme Court to disallow [mail-in] voting.