(no subject)

Some further thoughts about voting:

Voting is more powerful than it might at first appear, insofar as when you decide to vote you don't make one out of the vast number of people voting, you add one to or take one out of the gap between the leading candidate (person or proposition) and the runner-up. This gap is always smaller than the number of people voting--well, technically could be equal to it, if literally no one voted for one of the choices. Usually it is much, much smaller: my vote for Obama, for example, I expanded the gap between him and McCain from, what, nine million to nine million and one. Assuming my vote was counted.

Your relative power here comes from the number of iterations in mostly lower-profile contests: if you vote assiduously, over c. 60 years, including primaries, you're making a small numerical difference to the winner's lead in let's say 1000 contests. Most contests have far fewer people voting for them than that for the US presidency, so I imagine you'd measure your likely efficacy as a voter by the difference you're making to the average voting gap in the average-importance contest (hard to determine--state representative, we'll pretend) and then multiplying that by 1000. So if that turns out to be 1000 votes also, the average vote gap in a state rep. race, over a lifetime one person's dedicated voting will make the difference in exactly one such race (well, assuming also that in a race so close no one knew how close it would be--if everyone correctly assumes candidate A will beat candidate B by 1000 votes, a single vote just makes the difference 999; while it's never the case that everyone does know that, it's usually the case that people have a fairly good guess about it these days). Which doesn't mean you've done the work of one state rep.--you've made as much difference by voting in your life as one state rep. would have made by altering her average Republican voting record to an average Democrat one for a term or so. Which is something, especially when added to what you accomplish by doing your job, arguing with people about matters of substance, observing parking etiquette.

You could even vote less often and still be almost as effective, if you had your eye out for races likely to be close and only voted on those, I imagine. Some of your lifetime effect as a voter comes from its adding one to the statistics for each of the contests you support, though (again, assuming proper counting and reporting).

On the numbers topic: there's no reason to feel especially good if you vote and your candidate ties, or if what would have been a tie becomes an apparent win for that candidate. There are almost always recounts when it's that close, and the closer it is the more random the result of said recount will be (though as we've all seen, the higher profile the contest the more often recounts work in the favor of Democrats, since poorer voters' votes are likelier to have been suppressed and such things can come out in recounts). So the real difference you make will be forever invisible to you--the real win/lose point is at some unknowable remove from the apparent win/lose/tie threshold.

Thinking about this is coming close to convincing me I should be a regular voter after all. It doesn't convince me others should: in general, voting activates a lot of poor thinking about numbers and usses and thems and premature self-congratulation and mood swings based on wild mistakes about one's relative importance--mood swings leading to, among other evils, disillusion with voting and democracy itself, esp. by the more intelligent. And yes, I think disillusion with it can be much worse than not practicing it--as can assuming it'll do much more than it will. Both of these mistakes don't just screw voting logic up, they carry over into poor associations and poor living (tm).

And actually, if the average gap is 1000 votes that's likely because the number of people voting is quite small, which steepens the curve enormously. So maybe one person's voting is next to pointless after all, amounting to a much tinier fraction of the achievement difference between a Rep. and Dem. state congressperson that I'd thought. Though when a presidential election looks that narrow in your state, be at the polls waiting at 3 am (when a state rep. race does, go on vacation)--best to at least be registered in case Florida 2000-style opportunities come up. Not that it was ever down to an apparent tie there either, but as we've seen, the real tying-point is at some unknowable remove. If Gore had been officially behind by 399 rather than 400 (numbers out of my ass again), that might have made all the difference--a local election board member's subjective impression of 300-range numbers as compared to 400 might have changed her recounting diligence at a key point. The least evil of the five Justices had a number in her soul, unknown to her as to us but surely somewhere in between an initial Bush lead of zero and one of 400, at or under which she would have let the process complete itself. Florida may have been down to one vote after all.

(no subject)

My present Lost theory, w/ some debts to Julie and David:

Jacob is an entity that does not exist reaching back in time to ensure his own birth. An instability within reality itself long ago threw a chunk of rule-bending disturbance onto the surface of the earth, which, by creating the possibility of some Entity's gaining infinite power by manipulating the potentially infinite energy caused by the tension between the ordinary course of fate and the contrary influences emanating from the chunk of Something, thereby gave that Entity the ability to climb its way back through the time instabilities caused by that tension into the period in which it does not yet exist so as to work toward ensuring its own eventual existence. If God might exist, God will exist because God both wants to exist and has infinite power, including the power to exist--something along those lines. The existing order is an Esau he's stealing the birthright of or a stranger he's wrestling at night or a ladder he's climbing into his own potential heaven.

The conditions that will allow Jacob to come into being constitute a sort of fate, since they have to happen just right. Jacob speaks to sensitive people, mostly through dreams or through dead loved ones whose corpses have come near the time-disturbing Something and can therefore be maybe'd back into temporary existence, so as to convince those people that this "fate" is desirable or inevitable, often by working on the same guilts and parentlessness that make people susceptible to cult leaders. He has formed something like a cult on the island on which the Something rests, an ancient one if the four-toed statue of the Jacob-to-be is any evidence, the ultimate goal of whom is to breed the very god they worship. The natural order of things seems to reject this effort--fetuses conceived near the Something can't also come to term there. However, the offspring of two people conceived elsewhere but born near the Something (and/or of people conceived near it but born elsewhere) might have just the right combination of natural and unnatural traits to be brought to term without being rejected as viral, thus allowing Jacob into the world officially. Jacob seems to be onto this possibility, hence his interest in children like Aaron & Walt (both of whom have power over fate--Walt called that rare bird by wishing to see it, Aaron lent his mother a similar power in utero as her mother was struck by a car right after she told her she wished she was dead)--and now Sun's daughter.

Something beyond reality itself is fighting Jacob, however--possibly represented by Widmore, evil as he seems, and either stemming from or predating the Dharma Initiative, which either worked against Jacob or was as naive as Ben finds it. A game is being played by two sides, potentially meaning that reality itself is no better than Jacob. Both may be brothers playing a game unfriendly to the human pawns drawn into it. Of course, the world may instead be benevolent, just how things should be.

The Something releases chains of alternate fate into the existing world periodically, which appear as immensely improbable series of coincidences that gather certain people together and transport them to the island, though the world may be resisting these attempts--Jacob's main need is people of a certain kind, but most people who are coincidence-chained into coming to the island are soon killed. Others fight him off, like Mr. Eko, but almost every character who successfully confronts their own demons is then murdered by Jacob, as they are no longer easily duped by him but instead dangerous free agents. Their deaths usually serve some final purpose for him, as though he had some idea when they'd make their breakthroughs--Boone's death reveals the surveillance hatch, Shannon's unites the groups, Anna-Lucia's frees Ben etc.

People very close to the Something chunk when it emanates too much time/fate-bending energy gain the Jacob-like ability to change fate: Desmond has this, making his presence on and absence from the island crucial events for the power game being played--and making his belief in whether he can alter fate by changing his mind also crucial. He must be convinced he can change nothing in order to be controlled--hence the episode with the jewelry shop woman, who's now been revealed as the high priestess of the cult and possibly is Farraday's mother. He was also set up with Penelope as a means of controlling his behavior.

This is probably also why Ben had to leave the island and not come back: he too is now a potential disruptor, someone able to change the course of fate--whether Jacob's version or the real world's.

I forget the rest. Plausible?