Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Habib.

Friends, the mania of elections and voting has seized the American imagination again.

And as usual, it brings about its accompanying threats and promises.

It seems like, as usual, that the stakes are higher than ever.

And the anxiety and the urgency that we see each and every day in the news cycle about the elections can pull anyone in the moment they consider it.

Of course, the lines are mostly already drawn. Also, again, as usual. It's not like anyone needs any more information about

who Donald Trump is or Kamala Harris or the Democratic Party, and everyone who's decided to vote

for the Green Party and Jill Stein probably has already been swayed. Also, as usual, no one's

going to win this election, since there's no hope that anyone

is actually being represented by these figureheads and their accompanying administrations.

It's just that one candidate will be less not elected than the other candidate, and we will

call that candidate a winner. But the fervor, the accusations, the panic,

all continue nevertheless. And all of that is totally demobilizing and totally enfeevling.

Whatever you think of the candidates, U.S. presidential elections don't really do much more

than shove the imagination into the ballot box,

creating the illusory dependence on a state that has long since forgotten what it's supposed to be doing for us.

This limits our ability to think, feel, and act in new ways. And it tethers us.

It tethers all those aspects of being human to the state.

And that means the state is empowered in the actions people with that state power take,

that the state is empowered in the way people with that state power describe the feelings

we're allowed to have for other human beings

and the world, and that the state is empowered in the way that people with that state power want us

...