It's time for the people of Tampa to vote, among other things, for who their next mayor will be. To commemorate this event, the streetcorners were full of people holding signs for candidates this morning.

What exactly does this accomplish? Do they actually think people will get into the voting booth and go, "Hey, I saw someone holding a sign with this guy's name, so I'll vote for him"?

I don't understand politics, or politicians. I especially don't understand the need to demonize and hate people who have different socioeconomic priorities. Then again, politics was rarely a topic of discussion when I was growing up; my mother was (and is) a Republican, and my father was (and is) a Democrat. They argued about plenty of things, but politics was never one of them. I was pretty much left to my own devices to develop views on the issues.

Perhaps that's why my own politics aren't easily categorized into "liberal" or "conservative". There are some points of view in each camp that I agree with, but quite a bit in each that I disagree with. Both the major American parties are plagued by corruption, hypocrisy and outright stupidity — unfortunately, they conspire between them to keep any truly alternative parties marginalized.

I had a good friend in high school — highly intelligent in all respects — whose last political decision was to join a particular party. At that point, he stopped thinking about anything political. He accepted the party line without question (sometimes even reversing his own long-held positions in order to toe the line), voted only by party affiliation, and refused to even listen to other points of view. Failings in his own party's leaders were ignored, while failings in the opposition (sometimes even the exact same failings that he was accustomed to ignoring in his own party) were gleefully seized upon as proof of how horrible their party was.

What is it about politics that turns normally intelligent people into mindless automatons?