The role of the Commentator on campus is to inform people about the BS and to attempt to get them to pay attention to it. Also, to call a spade a spade. We also, classically, have done more than any other campus group to try and stop wanton spending: not having stipends, going to PFC meetings, running real and joke ASUO candidates, filing suit, filing grievances and complaints…And, most of all, by printing, year after year, large and in-depth stories about ASUO perfidiousness, University Administration shenanigans and DPS aggression. Between the ODE and the OC there is a wealth of information available to students about this stuff, they don’t care, and they don’t have to, but it’s not like the only thing this magazine has ever done is complain about the ASUO kids on the internet*. And I find the insinuation that there’s no value in an opinion journal for its own sake to be a tad insulting, not to me personally, but to an organization with a 24 year history.

Lasty, I am emphatically not indifferent about the results of the political process (real or student), I am cynical about the possibility to change them through voting. There’s a world of bloody difference.

*As an official OC geezer who graduated from college in 2004 and is just a few days shy of 25, my primary role is to complain about things on the internet. Namely the ASUO and that the kids today should get off of my lawn and publish more issues.

One wants to control what I watch in my own home, with whom I can consort sexually, what I may say about elections and when, whether or not I may light certain colorful strips of cloth on fire, and what I can say about people in public, and what I may consume for my own enjoyment.

The other wants to control what I watch in my own home, what I can say about elections and when, what I may consume for my own enjoyment, where I can send any future offspring to school, from where I buy my health care, how I may save my my retirement, who I can hire and how, the way in which I can insult people, what I can say about religion, and on and on.

There’s so much overlap that I’m having trouble coming up with ways to distinguish. I mean, I guess one is more excited about foreign military misadventures and one wants to raise my taxes even more…but seriously, not a functional difference. A government empowered to help is one empowered to harm, and the latter is much more prevalent throughout history.

At the ASUO level it’s less important, but basically the same. Everybody wants to waste a lot of money on stupid bullshit, one of these people will win. The role of a gadfly is to agitate and point out the bullshit, and to endorse the better candidates, but you can’t force people to care. And they won’t, but you can at least put it in front of them.

And that’s really the purpose of fora like this one, to put stuff out there for people to see. The problem that a lot of folks have is they think that people would change if only they knew, but that isn’t true. You can’t make them pay attention to the information, and you can’t make them care about it, so you put it out there and you go down the pub.

Can’t get any more involved than that ;)

There is a good reason not to vote - these assholes don’t represent me in the slightest. Almost every student here at UO, save those ‘without privledge,’ isn’t represented and is just having their money taken from them. If these groups were so important to campus, then wouldn’t students give their money freely to them?? The whole shebang is just a ponzi scheme to transfer money from the average student to the politically connected. That’s it.

Rahr.