Lee Braiden wrote: > Because your motivations for participating will be given little if any > attention, whereas your participation will at least be registered in the > numbers of people who took part.
I think something like this should be able to attract enough attention, as long as we are willing to "act in an attention-grabbing manner". It's a huge target, I think. > This argument comes up with voting too: is it better to vote for parties you > don't agree with, and even a system of voting that you don't agree with? Or > would it be better for people to stay away en-masse, and therefore to > invalidate the election, forcing the powers that be to establish a better > election system and then try again? I don't think that a low showing in this competition will have as much effect. Is there any way to tell how many/few entries there are and do we think reporters will care? As for voting, I don't think that low turnout will force reform or invalidate an election unless it gets so low that a revolution is triggered as a result of unpopular winners trying to continue... in most cases, I think you're better off mass-voting for manifestoes which include electoral reform, if that's your aim, and then acting otherwise too. I think this comment could apply to that: "Unfortunately, many people now fear and mistrust politics and feel that participation in the democratic arena is obsolete (thus leaving decision-making to those without such doubts). But the democratic arena, for better or worse, still exists, and it is a proper place in which to debate and discuss the future of democratic technology." -- Doug Schuler, on http://www.scn.org/ip/commnet/kill-commnets.html -- MJR/slef http://www.affs.org.uk/~mjr/ _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
