A dreadful thought just occurred to me: We must not cast a negative vote -- it may become self-defeating. Let me explain.
There are four presidential candidates. Let us call them A, B, C and D. We decide we do not want A to be president. Hence, we decide to not vote for A. This is what I call a negative vote -- a vote we will not cast. We then randomly cast our vote for one of the other three candidates. Our positive votes therefore will be split among B, C and D. In this way, the result can be A: 30%, B: 25%, C: 25%, D: 20%. Even though A polls a mere 30%, A becomes president! Instead of ensuring that A does not become president, this way of voting could positively make him president! Our negative vote has become self-defeating.
There may be some who would say a candidate garnering such a low percentage of the valid votes does not have the mandate of the population. I disagree. The mandate of the population arises from the fact that the entire population was polled, and not from the percentage of the polled population which voted for the candidate. A winner with 30% of the valid votes does have the mandate of the population.
Thus, we must instead cast a positive vote. We must vote for the candidate whom we think will best be able to block any (in his view) bad decisions of the PAP government -- at least those within his power to veto. (I specify the PAP government only because that happens to be the present government. In principle, it could be government by any political party.) I have in my first post on this topic specified the questions we should ask and answer in determining our personal best candidates.
Let us all cast positive votes, not negative ones.
END
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
12 comments:
There is an interesting video by the late great american comedian George Carlin in which he berates the American political system of voting for an illusory choice there. In Singapore the government actually does govern, and not at all badly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqdCvfe12nM
hiya and welcome singaporephilosopher.blogspot.com blogger found your blog via search engine but it was hard to find and I see you could have more visitors because there are not so many comments yet. I have discovered site which offer to dramatically increase traffic to your website http://xrumerservice.org they claim they managed to get close to 1000 visitors/day using their services you could also get lot more targeted traffic from search engines as you have now. I used their services and got significantly more visitors to my website. Hope this helps :) They offer most cost effective backlink service Take care. Jason
I live on an expat island in Hong Kong, and I find most of our participants are expat, or overseas Chinese.
A member moved back to Singapore, and I was going to recommend that he join the Philosophy Cafe in Singapore, but from what I understand it is in hibernation.
There is a kind of newspaper in coffee shops called the Coffee News. For any coffee shops that have this newsletter, I think coffee shops which distribute this newsletter, you could advertise in, and then hold discussions in those coffee shops to a kind of expat audience, and overseas educated, and anyone else who is interested.
All the best,
Arnold
arnoldho_2000@yahoo.com ( Advisor-Philosophy Cafe-Lamma Island, Hong Kong)
we should vote the president from good people on their track record
Post a Comment