Re: OT: Labeling Millions of People
@Aaron, actually you can! vote none of the above in britain. it's called a spoiled balat, where instead of voting you effectively do something to make your balat paper void, last election I asked my dad to write in "I don't trust any of you" on the paper.
it's actually worth doing from a logical perspective because the vote is still officially counted as a spoiled balat and goes into the total number of votes counted in the constituency which affect the over all totals, indeed in every general election there is a count of spoiled balats which is usually used as a measure of dissatisfaction with the choices on offer.
I actually wish a lot more people in Britain new about this, since it's a very real and legitimate way to express a vote of no confidence in the various parties.
That being said, British politics is rather different over all, since while investment considerations do play their part, they're not as directly tied to c ampaigning in quite as blatant a way as in the states I think, plus the voting process and creation of prime minister is entirely different given that you vote in your constituency for your local mp, and she or he then represents you in parliament, and which party is in power is dictated by the maximum number of mps in parliament, ie, which party can get the most votes through on a given issue, and the prime minister is just the head of whichever party that is. So while you do! vote for the party you want, you don't vote directly for the prime minister, that just happens to be whoever is party leader at the time the party comes into power , nor does she or he have that much direct political power in and of themselves since while the pm chairs debates laws are voted on directly by the mps.
this also means that while most of the seats in parliament are one of the three main parties, conservative, labour, or liberal democrat, since you always get a number of candidates in a
ny election for your local mp, there are always a few independents in parliament, plus representatives from a couple of smaller parties like the green party or Ukip (the uk independence party), indeed these days considering that labour and the conservatives have basically sold out on their perceived party lines, the idea of unified party sentiment is pretty much dying anyway, one reason why so many die hard conservatives are joining ukip, (which is actually a little scary).
That's btw why I didn't vote, nobody represents my! political ideals at all and the choices on offer didn't seem worth while from what I gathered from what they were actually saying of what they wanted for the country.
of course the main problem in british politics is that so much effort is spent on one party playing lots of little games to gain advantage in voting against another party, very few people actually remember that what their voting on matters, for example one party might ag
ree to vote the way another party wants in return for the first party doing them a favour in a vote down the line.
it also doesn't help that each party has a party whip, aka, someone who's job it is to basically go and threaten mps with political suicide and ending their career if they don't vote as the party leadder decides, effectively meaning that even though the people of a british constituency have voted into power someone they believe will represent the interests of their area of the country, that person cannot vote against whatever his/her party wants even if they disagree without either voiding their career or joining another party.
As I said while not a money and mudslinging contest, politics in Britain really does seem so bound up with oneupmanship among the various parties that it doesn't really have much to do with actually doing any good at all, indeed frequently one party will oppose another just because! they usually do, one reason the labour conservative coalition government was such a round disaster.
Btw, if you want to understand a bit of how politics works in britain, there is a great series called "inside the house of commons" which the bbc showed last year which is exactly what it sounds like, a very honest look at what happens inside westminster, how laws are past and what mps really do with their time, as well as all the funny little traditions and odd rituals.
Unfortunately the net affect of watching it was to convince me of something I only suspected, that while not motivated by corporate interest, politics in Britain is so much a closed system foreign to anything to do with real life or how people live that any hope of actual representation is nill. heck, even the mps have taken to referring to westminster as hogwarts .
While I'm not keen on British politics though, I'm afraid the American variety scares me even more for precisely the reasons which nocturnus and figment have stated, that it's basically a two sided war fueled by money and rhetoric, and I find the idea that someone can be made a candidate and effectively become president just by slinging money around without any previous political office deeply frightening. Indeed it makes me a little glad that at least the pm over here has to first be elected as an mp, and then has to spend a few terms doing other jobs around the party and moving up the ladder of political office before getting the top job, (while of course being reelected along the way).
Not that we haven't had pm's who were right morons*cough Tony blaire *
*cough, but at least they're well practiced career morons .
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