No disagreement that the election seems meaningless, and the whole campaign seems out of some alternative dimension.
Nevertheless...
Ask Gates/Ballmer if it doesn't matter who's the Antitrust Division Chief/Attorney General/President. (Correspondingly, ask Jim Clarke, who played the game really, really well...)
Ask a woman who has to bring an unwanted pregnancy to term if Bush wins and Roe v. Wade gets overruled.
Ask someone who becomes "an enemy of the state"--the old domestic leftists, the Black Panthers, Wen Ho Lee--what their life was like thereafter.
Ask anyone who finds that all those Hollywood fundraisers really did pay off for the entertainment industry with the passage of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act--and what that's doing/going to do to P2P file-sharing.
Ask me (and now I'm showing my age) what the night of the original draft lottery was like, when, with perfect arbitrariness, the course of your whole like was/seemed like it was changed by the government.
I'll concede that all these examples are negative. But the government really does have an awful amount of power, and who controls that power is, as these examples suggest, not without importance.
Slashdot Mirror
No disagreement that the election seems meaningless, and the whole campaign seems out of some alternative dimension. Nevertheless... Ask Gates/Ballmer if it doesn't matter who's the Antitrust Division Chief/Attorney General/President. (Correspondingly, ask Jim Clarke, who played the game really, really well...) Ask a woman who has to bring an unwanted pregnancy to term if Bush wins and Roe v. Wade gets overruled. Ask someone who becomes "an enemy of the state"--the old domestic leftists, the Black Panthers, Wen Ho Lee--what their life was like thereafter. Ask anyone who finds that all those Hollywood fundraisers really did pay off for the entertainment industry with the passage of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act--and what that's doing/going to do to P2P file-sharing. Ask me (and now I'm showing my age) what the night of the original draft lottery was like, when, with perfect arbitrariness, the course of your whole like was/seemed like it was changed by the government. I'll concede that all these examples are negative. But the government really does have an awful amount of power, and who controls that power is, as these examples suggest, not without importance.