Infidel753

08 October 2026

The importance of ballot initiatives

Voting for political candidates or parties is increasingly a weary exercise in choosing the lesser of two evils. As I've discussed before, the Republicans started going nutzoid around the time of the Tea Party craze, and have been getting steadily worse ever since; in recent years the Democrats too have been sinking ever deeper into crackpottery. Both have been thoroughly captured by the power of billionaire donors. It's no wonder both parties have such low popularity ratings. These days elections largely work by people becoming so horrified by the abuses, delusional thinking, and tone-deafness of one party (generally whichever one happens to be in power at the time) that they flock to vote for the other one out of desperation.

The situation feels comfortable only for those people who march completely in lockstep with the whole agenda of one side or the other, but I don't believe the majority of people are like that -- and such people are probably becoming rarer as each side's agenda gets more and more baroque under the influence of unhinged ideologists dwelling in their respective echo chambers. There is also a sense that real solutions to the problems that most concern the average person are being put outside the realm of political debate because they are opposed by the billionaire oligarchs who dominate both parties. In short, representative democracy is losing its effectiveness because people don't have the option of voting for politicians who represent most of what they really want.

However, democracy itself offers a way out. Many US states have a ballot initiative process by which citizens can place single-issue proposals on the ballot for all voters to vote on. This enables the people themselves to sideline the politicians and parties and their agendas.

Ballot initiatives allow voters to fine-tune policy on a case-by-case basis, as opposed to having to choose which one of two fixed, all-or-nothing menus is somewhat less unappetizing than the other. For example, the Democrats are pro-choice on abortion but anti-choice on gun ownership, while the Republicans are the other way around -- since I'm pro-choice on both, which party do I vote for? If policy on both issues were set by ballot initiative, I'd have the option of voting for the position I actually support in both cases.

The dominance of the two parties enables whichever party wins to claim a mandate for things that are actually wildly unpopular, when people voted for that party on the basis of other policies that they do like -- "we won because people want to protect Social Security, rein in ICE, and strengthen Obamacare, but that also means we have a mandate to re-impose DEI, let another million refugees into the country, and let men play in women's sports!" The more people can vote separately on each individual issue on its own merits, the more this problem is minimized.

Initiatives also allow citizens to circumvent the fake billionaire-imposed bipartisan consensus on what can and cannot be done. The best current example is California's union-backed billionaire wealth tax initiative. The entrenched establishments of both of the billionaire-dominated parties oppose it, yet it still might pass. The mass movement against data centers has similarly caught politicians from both parties off guard, bloated as they are with infusions of dollars from "AI" companies run by tech billionaires. Many politicians have been reluctantly dragged onto the people's side by fear of getting voted out of office -- but for tough, decisive action against data centers, the initiative process may be the best option, in those states that allow it.

Unless one or both parties shifts in a more economic-populist direction and jettisons the crank stuff so beloved of the insular ideologists, I suspect we'll see steadily greater use of the initiative process going forward. We the people are not sheep whose only choice is between two competing shepherds. We are the boss here, and it is our will that should be done.

07 October 2026

October 7

Today marks three years since the largest single massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. The monsters of Hamas swarmed across the border into Israel, attacking towns and a music festival -- killing, raping, mutilating, burning people alive, committing every atrocity their imaginations could dredge up from Hell, and doing it with a demonic glee that not even the German Nazis in their day had shown. They filmed and recorded their own monstrous crimes, uploading and broadcasting them in real time, actually proud and boastful about what they were doing. Having murdered twelve hundred people, they dragged hundreds more back to their own rat holes beneath the Gaza Strip, to months and years of captivity and further horrors. (This site is dedicated to documenting what happened.)

Almost immediately -- before Israel had begun to retaliate in Gaza, before it had responded in any way -- the streets of the US and Europe erupted with pro-jihadist and radical-leftist marches in solidarity with the murderers. I discussed the implications of this here. Indeed, during the three years since, hate crimes against Jews (yes, against Jews, not only Zionists or Israelis) -- up to and including murder -- have exploded across the Western world. If the original Nazi Holocaust shamed the anti-Semitism that had infested the West for centuries into relative silence for decades, October 7 seemed to have the opposite effect, emboldening the ancient mentality of pogroms and blood libels to re-emerge into the open.

Even after such a monstrous provocation, Israel in its retaliatory campaign against Hamas in Gaza has continued to take the same kind of extreme, almost absurd measures to minimize harm to enemy civilians as it has always done in the past -- measures no other country has ever taken, certainly not under such extreme circumstances. There has probably never been a major military campaign in a populated area which resulted in so few civilian deaths relative to the number of enemy combatants killed. The blood libel of "genocide" in Gaza is defamation escalated to the level of the surreal.

I have extensively discussed the implications of the October 7 attack in this post and this post, but one point deserves strong reiteration. The attack has permanently eliminated the concept of a "Palestinian state" from serious consideration as part of an eventual settlement of the overall conflict. Israel had unilaterally withdrawn from the Gaza Strip in 2005, dismantling all of the Jewish settlements there -- from that point on, the Strip was an independent Palestinian state in miniature. The October 7 attack was the result. There's no longer any room for debate about what a Palestinian state would mean. We already know.

The attack made clear that if the jihadists had had the power to kill as many Jews as the Nazis did, they would have done so. Their determination to annihilate the world's only Jewish state is reiterated incessantly. Jihadism is at least the equal of the Nazi German regime in its innate and intractable murderousness and malignancy -- and as we've seen with September 11 and its other innumerable atrocities in Europe, India, and even within the Middle East, its bloodlust is not limited to Jews, even if they are the people it hates the most. Its apologists and sympathizers within the West, the lunatics who shriek with rage at Israel's every effort to defend itself against the ravening monsters who openly aspire to finish the job Hitler started, the sniveling yes-butters and on-the-other-handers, are the Nazi collaborators of our time. In practical terms it matters little where they fall along the spectrum from evil to naïve.

The October 7 attack was a lesson about the harsh reality of what we are up against. Most Israelis didn't need that lesson. The rest of us had damn well better learn it.