View From the Bushes

I did an awesomely stupid/bad thing today. I voted for Kerry. No, I'm joking, I actually voted for Michael Peroutka. The really bad thing I did was accidentaly delete ALL of the comments for my blog. No, I'm not kidding; yes, that was a pretty dumb thing to do. I was trying to mass delete a whole bunch of spam comments, and since I hadn't had any "real" comments today I told it (or at least I thought I told it) to delete all comments where the date was greater than November 1st. I was sort of guessing at the syntax and instead of deleting just the comments from today, it deleted all of them...

I have a backup, but I don't think it's very recent, so most of the comments should reappear but I'm afraid that there will still be quite a few that are missing. Yes, this is definitely one of the moments that causes one to have serious self-doubts. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to add it to the list. In other news, I took the opportunity to vote bright and early at 7 am this morning as soon as the polls opened. It was quite crowded. I guess everyone basically had the same idea I did. Now to just sit back and wait for the results.

My gut tells me that Kerry will win. As I may have mentioned viscerally, I really hate the idea of Kerry winning. Intellectually, I think it's probably for the best if he does. I was heartened to get my copy of The Economist and find out that they basically mirrored my sentiments, saying that it was with "heavy heart" that they decided to endorse John Kerry. On the topic of third-party voting, I came across an interesting article which made some very interesting points about "tactical-voting" as opposed to voting for the candidate which most closely matches your ideals. Basically his conclusion is that "tactical-voting" only makes sense if you're focused on "immediate-election utility," which is only important if by some miracle the election is decided by a single vote, whereas voting your true preference has much greater utility than tactical voting in regards to "policy-shift utility" and "future-election utility." Definitely something to think about.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross