>>>I remember you saying you didn't vote for Obama and took it to mean you voted for McCain. Maybe you threw your vote away.
>>
>>As long as believing that voting for anything but the two parties is "throwing away your vote", voting is pointless.
>
>It's the realistic choice we have IMO.

As long as you believe that, it's also hopeless.

Imagine this scenario: a true people's movement (not a manipulated one, or engineered by no such agency or other) emerges, and threatens to outdo what massive amounts of propaganda money (now legally unlimited, courtesy of Supreme Court) pour into reducing your choices to two candidates, cutting everybody else out of the picture as early as first round of primaries. How far would that go? Or, how far would that be allowed to go, before the media would drag it through the mud, a misplaced semicolon in their program would be enlarged into lack of patriotism, softness on terrorism, demagoguery and whatnot, with about zero of airtime given to the new party actually saying what it means to do?

>Even in my most cynical moods I am not as cynical as you. Please don't take that as an insult because I have always liked you. You are just cynical to the core.

I'm taking that as a compliment, my friend :).

> Probably anyone would be growing up in the climate you did.

Amazingly, I was more idealist while I was there. Only at the age of about thirty I stopped believing in the "it's generally good but it's the local scum who are bad" and understood that the rot begins at the top. There were probably other delusions which took longer to shake off.

Seeing how things here aren't that much different helped a lot. You may see a Smart next to a Hummer... nothing could be more different, yet, the working principles are the same.