Dear Nader supporter

I'm staying here with my pal, Mr. DCH of Highland Park, NJ. He suggested that I put more pictures on this here blog, and, not one to critique aimlessly, submitted Figure I, below.

See, Ralph Nader wants to run for president again. This brings up a number of important theoretical points, of course. The first is Duverger's Law, which I won't go in to. The other is the definition of causality. There are a few, my favorite being the `insufficient but necessary element of an unnecessary but sufficient set' test (the INUS test, as the law theorists call it. I can't tell if it's supposed to be funny.) So, for example, one unnecessary but sufficient set of events that led to the war in Iraq consisted of the following set of events:
--Ralph Nader runs against Gore and Bush.
--Butterfly ballots and assorted other slanty vote-counting methods cause the vote-margin to be narrower than it truly is.
--The Supreme Court has one more conservative member than liberal members.
--Terrorists hijacked a few planes and destroyed a few major U.S. landmarks, killing thousands.
--Saddam Hussein is an assh*le.
--The CIA fabricated/misinterpreted/screwed up intelligence about Iraq.

Everything there was necessary for this story to lead to an invasion, as well as a dozen other little details. But every element of this set fits the INUS conditions. Placing the weight of the blame on one or the other, I leave for the philosophers, but this definition of causality allows me to say the following:

I won't even substitute `is responsible for' for `caused', as is often colloquially done, but I stand by that statement. Ralph Nader has caused the U.S. to incur $87 billion in war and reconstruction costs. He has caused John Ashcroft to be appointed Attorney General.

We can never predict the results of our actions with certainty, although the writing was pretty clearly on the Floridian walls in 2000. All one can really ask of somebody who does something that causes such supremely bad things is that he learn from his mistakes. As we learned today, Ralph has not done that.

So I am left pleading to you, dear liberal reader, to not vote for Ralph Nader this time around. Ralph didn't learn, but we can, and should.

Arguments for Ralph are not very well-founded. The most pervasive is that Republicans and Democrats are all just politicians and there's so little difference between them that there's no point voting for the Democrat over the Republican. As we've seen over the last four years, there really is a difference between how Republican and Democrat governors think and act. Voting for a Democrat really would lead to a different cabinet, different budgets, different laws getting passed and different laws being chosen for enforcement, and fewer invasions of foreign lands than if a Republican is elected, and those differences would lead to real changes in the lives of people around the world.

The argument that we should at least `send a signal' to the government by voting for the outsider are also rather ill-founded. There are a hundred ways to send a signal about the issues, none of which involve anonymously going to a voting booth. If you don't live in DC, you can call your representative and directly state your opinion. Operators are standing by, and will have a much easier time interpreting your comments, stated in English, than they'll have working out the informational content of your vote for Nader. For many political scientists, the sole purpose of an election is to simply throw the bums out. We have bums in office desperately in need of being thrown out, and that is what we need to focus on in this election.