Polls have closed in a historic election in this secessionist republic of one. This year there was only one candidate for Head of State, Charles W. Johnson, but remarkably, as a result of a protest boycott campaign against the one-party state, Johnson has refused to vote for Charles W. Johnson, leaving the popular vote at 0-0. Given the lack of any voter turnout, there have been widespread fears of legal disputes or civic unrest, turning Charles W. Johnson against Charles W. Johnson, but tonight the state media agency has announced that the SRO will be issuing a press release later tonight declaring that Charles W. Johnson will peaceably step down as Head of State, the Republic will provisionally operate as a free spokescouncil, and all political decisions will henceforward be made by an endless consensus process meeting which will continue until the next election cycle, or until someone needs to leave to go to the bathroom or get some sleep.

So Walking Dead has more or less announced that it is definitely headed from the land of General Horror and Misery into the territory of Completely Gratuitous Gore & Misery Porn. With the latter calculated to punish the characters who are the most conventional horror-film targets. Given the settings they decided to bring over from the comics for this season I cannot say that I am surprised. (Roughly the same thing happened at the same time in the comics, although in a different way.) But I also can’t say I’m especially pleased to watch it happen.

I would like it if people telling me to vote for their favorite candidate would decide whether they think voting is for hard-nosed, reality-based pragmatism, or pie-in-the-sky idealistic expressions of your convictions. If you’re trying to get me to vote for your favorite candidate out of hard-nosed pragmatism, you need to keep in mind that I live in Alabama, a state where somewhere around 60% of the vote will more or less certainly go to the Republican candidate no matter what I do. I could not possibly take away a single electoral vote from your least favorite candidate, or give a single electoral vote to your favorite candidate, no matter what I did at the polling place. There is no realistic case whatever for the claim that it matters whether I vote for your favorite candidate, or vote for someone else, or vote for no-one at all. If I snuck into the polling place 20 times and filed fraudulent votes, all of them for your least favorite candidate, I still could not possibly be helping your least favorite candidate get elected, because the number of electoral votes the winning candidate gets doesn’t diminish with the margin of victory.

Now when I point this out people will say that maybe I ought to vote for their favorite candidate anyway because at least that way I’ll be registering my opposition or my protest to all the awful things their least favorite candidate(s) have done or are going to do or seem likely to do. It won’t have any practical effect, but at least I am putting it out there. But then if the point of voting is supposed to be to express my deep political convictions, without any reference to the practical effects I can get out of it, why in the world would I vote for any candidate for office at all? I am an anarchist and my political convictions cannot possibly be expressed by attaching myself to a candidate for government office. If I’m going to express a political conviction, without concern for results, then I figure I may as well actually express the political convictions I believe in, not the incredibly vague and approximate cluster of convictions that might be loosely associated with the least-shitty candidate on the ballot. And the best way to do express those convictions — the ones I actually do believe in — is by refusing to participate in this ridiculous and corrupt struggle for political power.

In addition to other festivities, I should mention that to-day is the first anniversary of the publication of Markets Not Capitalism.

Many happy returns and many grateful thanks to my co-editor Gary Chartier, to all the contributors who made the book what it is, to Stevphen Shukaitis, Minor Compositions, and the Autonomedia Collective for helping recover a vital conversation within the Anarchist tradition and doing so much to help start so many fascinating new ones, to Stephanie Murphy for her amazing work in preparing the audio book, and to everyone who’s made this such a fascinating exchange.

is at the Auburn University library, tracking down information on a forged proclamation attributed to Jefferson Davis, and scanning PDFs of Vol. 2 of The Liberator (1832).