Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Why you should and must vote

I've argued with various people on the need to vote, but I think Elanor Tan's treatment of the issue has done a very good job. Check out her Apr 23 post:

23 April 2007
Vote - Defeating the Defeatist Tendency

My ‘Why Malaysia Needs More Governance and Less Corruption?’ and the subsequent ‘Vote for Change?’ posts attracted many comments (for Arrested Development’s standard that is…) which are interesting, persuasive and worthy of lengthier discussions.

Unfortunately, I can only respond to some of them briefly here.

Evolution Analogy:

Cantab used evolution as a parallel to election and the danger of transitioning into a bad equilibrium through voting just for the sake of political competition. He ended by saying:

Bottom line: if we want change, WE have got to make it. Not cross ballot papers while hoping real hard someone else does the dirty work.

I fully agree that if we want change, we have got to make it work ourselves. But voting IS part of the set of actions that we could be pursuing in catalysing a change...

(for the rest of her post, please click here)
Another young and smart blogger, John Lee at Infernal Ramblings, has an article which deals with a related issue, namely that of political apathy and involvement.

No comments: