Politics are only for idiots, sycophants, psychopaths and narcissists. I am forced to vote to keep the ANC from gaining a two-thirds majority, but I absolutely hate all the candidates and parties in South Africa.
The ANC looks like a number from what I've read. No matter how great majority rule is, it seems clear to me that the ANC lost its only real competent exponent in Mandela. It's only what I've read and heard between the grapevines, obviously it doesn't compare to RL experience, but each successive ANC president has been a disaster for various reasons. Mbeki and HIV denialism, Zuma...do I really need to talk about Zuma? Guy took a shower after allegedly raping a chick because he thought it would help him avoid catching HIV. Also, he knew she was positive and he went in without a condom anyway, which is so reckless it might as well be considered slow-fire suicide. He got rocked by an apparently big corruption scandal too (I think everybody knows that politicians everywhere are corrupt, but at least ours don't get caught...often). It sounds like he's none too smart. What is he doing as president?
However the ANC continues to benefit from being the party of the guy who, with de Klerk, ended apartheid, and became an international hero. That's huge political capital to have, even if the guys leading it now are terrible at their jobs. I bet their campaigns could be "vote ANC, we did something great in 1994" and they'd still win hands down. Meanwhile the other parties are "blessed" with irrelevancy, political extremism/utter dumbfuckness and/or factionalism, and another is not gaining much tract possibly because it's mainly white (correct me if I'm wrong), despite Helen Zille not looking even a quarter as incompetent as the rest of the leaders.
I mean, I don't want to offend you or anybody, mate, but if I were South African, I'd pretty much steer my whole life towards emigrating somewhere else. Sounds to me like SA went from a dictatorship of the minority to a dictatorship of the majority. I always wanted to visit though, I like nature and I always wanted to see Africa, but I also need all the modern comforts without them being too expensive because I'm a coddled North American and I don't like hardship. Sounds like SA is my best bet for a compromise. Just gotta be inconspicuous.
With politics like that, I'd hate them too. We don't realize here that we're very lucky to have a choice, even if its between which dildo we get up our ass. In many, many other countries, they just take the biggest one available and ram it in without lube. No offence to those who enjoy dildos up their asses. Politics, especially democracy, universally tend to give power to those most unfit to rule, those predisposed to obfuscation, manipulation, ruthlessness, because that's what it takes to get power in a democracy. Look at Obama. Guy's whole platform was "change!" What change did Americans get? Half-baked healthcare "reform" that now makes it sit in between universal and private healthcare, and that's not a very comfy place because it pisses off everyone. The rest is mostly the same shit it was with Bush : he goes 'round, bombs foreign countries, gets in rows with Russia, lets intellgence agencies spy on everyone including citizens, and signs right-curbing legislation.
I always thought any functioning democracy should at least have a recall mechanism drawing its source directly from the people. Else there's nothing keeping politicians from breaking all their promises and doing nothing they said they'd do. What kind of democracy is that? People choose once then get bent for four years? It's a joke.
Also more and more I've been thinking that the vote should be restricted. Voting is a duty, not a right, and it should only be awarded to those who can acquit themselves of this duty responsibly. There are more people than I care to know here voting for candidates for stupid reasons, like "he/she is hot", "she's a woman" or in Canada's recent case, "he wants to legalize weed so we can 420blazeit all day erry day". For every one person who takes the time to research current issues, political positions, credentials of the candidate, ignores obvious propaganda and seeks information from reliable third parties as unbiased as possible, weights the pros and cons and bases his vote on an educated opinion, there are 100 morons voting according to ad spots on TV, regurgitated propaganda by heavily biased columnists, mere gender or racial identity, corporate or celebrity endorsements, or even in a few cases, utterly randomly. But in a modern democracy, my vote is worth exactly the same as the vote of a complete fuckwit, which is the whole point of universal suffrage anyway, to get more votes from idiots. The right to vote should be earned, not given, as if given it has no value.
I used to take voting really seriously, I'd throw my ballot in the advance polls, listen to all the debates, assiduously follow political news from reliable sources, keep track of all the scandals, research my riding's candidates and the leaders and the party platforms, weigh everything in the balance. I'd even watch CPAC (parliamentary channel) when I had nothing better to do so I could assess the performance of the MPs. I'd encourage anyone around me to do the same because I thought it was my duty to make people interested in politics so they can take hold of their destiny. It didn't matter to me what their opinion was, as long as it was backed up by diligent research just like mine. The important was that they go out and make themselves heard even if we completely disagreed on everything. At one point there even was considerable friction between my ex and I because she was apolitical, and in my opinion that may as well have been tantamount to just reverting to the good old serfdom days. But then I realized that no matter how informed my choice, there is always going to be one asshole who makes my vote worth nothing because "uhh duuuh this guy wants to give me money". Most likely there is going to be 10 such assholes. 100. Thousands and thousands country-wide.
So what's the point? I didn't vote this election. I still did my research, but I didn't vote because it doesn't matter. And sure enough, the guy affiliated with the party who has done nothing all campaign but run attack ads mocking Trudeau because he has nice hair and pretended to be the best guys to manage "the economy" (I guarantee you 95% of all voters do not know exactly what the economy is and can't define it for you) despite landing us in a recession (only G8 country to be in one) by creating a short-term boom by putting all the eggs into the oil basket won with 50%+ of the vote. So essentially my vote would have been worth absolutely zip because of FPTP. Fucking fantastic.
