Thank you. How have you been this week?

P.S.
Just for the sake of keeping you aware, I don't expect to be able to post regularly this week and the next but as always I'll make time when I can.

hmm, I though I posted this reply a few days ago, but evidently it didn't stick... oh well it wasn't that big, all I said was "Sorry to hear you're family was sick, glad you're staying healthy."

glad to hear you are better. My family was all sick this week aswell so I didn't stay too long at the weekend because I didn't want to catch anything lol.

Yeah, I've been sick lately, I think I caught it from my brother when I was helping him move into his new house. But don't worry, I'm recovered now.

Hi, everything okay? I noticed you hadn't visited the website for a while.

Ehh, personally I always thought the best argument against democracy was put for by Winston Churchill "Five minutes conversation with the average voter."

Honestly I understand how you feel, the feeling of being lost in the crowd as it were is somthing anyone who's a minority in an area will feel, and the tyranny of the majority is one of the spectres that forever looms over the system (right up there with mob mentality, group think, and inneficiency of epic scale). I know several groups in my own state who feel the same.

That said, also to quote Churchill, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other forms". And honestly, you're right I do believe in democracy, and I believe in people. I'm a realist (or maybe a cynic, depending on the day) but for the negative things I could say about people I do think we have a capacity to learn and improve, its sadly very slow but I do honestly think people deserve a chance.

And as soon as someone invents a form of government which protects individual rights and allows peoples voices to be heard better than democracy does, I will jump ships faster than a pirate with his pants on fire.

Your election work sounds very comendable. I'm glad that the candidate you supported won despite the difficulties but I'm more so just encouraged by the fact you put in all of that effort, it shows you have faith in democracy.

I'm personally not really sure how I feel about democracy (at least as it is practiced where I am).
I know I support the ideal of what a democracy is supposed to stand for and I certainly don't wish to be ruled by an autocracy.
I don't really feel that any democratic process me or my family has been involved with has ever benefited our area greatly. Largely I suppose because local area is rural but part of a constituancy which also hosts a large post-industrail town, there we're naturally a minority and although we have representives on the councils and such like, our concerns are always going to be overshouted by the needs of the people living in that town.

So yeah essentially my exprience of democracy is of the qualty of life for a few being degraded for the slight benefit of a majority. It's not really a black and white question of someone living better than another, it's more to do with the problems of urbanism and 'how' people live.

Yeah so my faith in democracy is unconvinced in terms of how it might deal with those issues. I'm hoping my choosen profession of architecture however is far better suited for the task.

No I didn't work on the Presidential election. My campaign wasn't "local" in the sense of a town/county election, both the ones I worked on were state wide, but they weren't national.

I worked primarily on the Governors election for the state I'm in. (in the US each state has its own government (complete with its own constitution and legislature) which makes the laws for that state, while the federal makes laws for the whole nation. The Governor is the head of the state government in the same way that the President heads the federal government. The state government can't make a law that conflicts with a federal law, but they are allowed to regulate a wider variety of areas than the federal government can.) I also worked on the election of one of our state senators. Both candidates were Democrats (same party as president Obama) and I did vote for him, but I did not work on the Presidents campaign (not much point in the state I live in, it was never going to go for him).

The reason it was so exhausting was partially cause it was a tense election all around, partially because I was helping democrats in a very conservative state, but also cause of finance. You see recently the Supreme Court of the US decided a case called Citizens United which gave various rights to corporations to contribute money and support to political campaigns. (I think the decision was not legally sound, but that's another matter)

Now prior to this my state had a law that said out of state corporations could not contribute to elections in this state. But when that decision was made suddenly the law was no longer valid and the republican candidates all received large influxes of capital from various out of state corporations. This years election actually saw record levels of spending, I think it was actually more than in the last two elections combined. Any case the two candidates who I was helping didn't get any out of state money, so pretty much the whole campaign was spent playing catch-up. We were perpetually overworked, understaffed, and reliant on volunteers (most of whom were either retirees or college students) to get things done.

And it worked. Both candidates ran what is called a "grass-roots" campaign (meaning trying to get support from local communities) and they both suceeded. (At one point the candidate for liutenant-governor actually drove me and a couple volunteers around a small town in his truck, and we all knocked on doors to try to drum up support). I read the paper earlier and it was giving numbers on how much money various out of state corporations lost spending on the election.


Football chants eh? That's interesting. Kinda reminds me of my freshmen year of college. Our football team (that's American football, the kind that has very little contact between the ball and feet) has a rivalry with another college nearby, and they have a big game every year. The music majors all decided to put together a cd of four songs which all doubled as cheers (since they talked about how awesome our team was) and heckles (since they all mentioned how much the other team sucked) and then sold them on the side. (I think the computer department helped them burn all the cds). They made a tidy profit, and for a while you couldn't go anywhere on campus without hearing those songs, I even bought one and I'm not much into football.

Then our team lost the big rivalry game by seventeen points, and have continued to lose it every year since, as well as failing to get into the playoffs and having a steadily worsening win-loss record, and this year there was embroiled in a date rape scandal and somthing like five players were kicked out of school, while our rival team has become one of the best teams in the conference with a reputation for being especially sportsmenlike, so now I feel embarassed to own the cd in question.

So that would make you an Obama supporter? I'm guessing it was the presidental election and not a local one?
As an outsider the presidental elections always look very exciting and almost celebraty like. We don't vote for any kind of figure like that, the Monarch is our head of state and the Prime Minister is the head of our Parliment. The largest elections we have are the Westminster ones, in which we vote for individual party members consituancy by constinuancy. The Prime Minister is simply whoever happens to be the leader of the party who acheived the majority in parliment... hence they tend to lack all the charm and personality your head's of state seem to have

Another degree is something I've actually quite seriously considered aswell. For a starters I would have to do a 'Masters' degree in Architecture anyway in order to fully qualify but given some recent reading on the state of the construction industry and the position Architecture holds within it, it looks like it would be benefical to hold some sort of planning or engineering degree as well just so I hold that bit of specialistion.

Ah, the noble art of cheerleading... another thing we don't have in my country... unless you count footballchants (the kind played with feet not hands) "Who are ya, Who are ya?... Who's the bastard in the black?..." but I think alot of that counts as heckling and not cheering

Well, now that the elections over (we won) I've mostly just crashed the last couple days to recover from all the tension in that last week. I'm hoping that life will settle down for a bit, at least until I start going back to school again. (I've been joking that I decided one degree wasn't enough, that I want all of them)

Sorry to hear your so tired, I know how that can feel. Not much I can do but offer my encouragement though, so I'll do that. You can do it Joe, I believe in you, don't quit, show everyone what you're capable of!

*Starts a Cheer*: Fricka fracka firecracker! Hiss Boom Bah! Go Joe! Go Joe! Raw raw raw!