Hunting The Muse

Politically Useful Reporting

Rhetorica: Press-Politics Journal: The citizen's job? Shut up and watch...

Dr. Cline at the very excellent rhetorica makes a point about useless political reporting - that the focus on process and electability in favor of issues is completely counter to the aim of our democracy.

And here's where I disagree. What's interesting about this is that the way it's written, it's extremely easy to agree with his point. But there's something about it that gets stuck in my brain. And that is my belief that if our elections were all based entirely on issues and if we the citizens knew nothing about momentum and electability, the election results, using our voting system, would not be ideal.

Our voting system requires us to judge electability as well as issues. I can guarantee that when I compare myself to Dean, I am probably a better fit to many that will end up voting for Dean. But, it's wiser for them to vote for Dean, because he's got more of a shot of winning than I do - and people find that out by reading press articles such as the one that Dr. Cline criticizes.

Focusing on issues only is an ideal, and an honorable one. But we also have to submit to a voting system. And as soon as an idealistic person submits to a system, they have to submit to the pragmatism that that system requires. And until we have a voting system that can accurately interpret the detailed preferences of a voting population, we have to submit to the requirements of our current voting system: making coalitions before we vote. Relevant to the judgments of making effective coalitions are the data about how electable someone is.

These "politically useless" articles are actually quite useful. In this case, I agree with Dr. Cline's ideal, but in practice he is wrong.

Mad Cow and the GOP

Daily Kos || How the GOP gave us Mad Cow

A lot of presidential candidates have criticized the Bush administration for the whole mad cow thing, but I ignored it because I didn't know if the democrats had honestly advocated anything that would have helped but was shot down by the GOP. This brief article shows that it is a real issue - this may have been avoided if not for the Republicans.

Arnie And The Prisoners

sacbee.com -- Politics -- Major parole moves on the table

Evidently Arnie is considering early release for all nonviolent offenders in California prison.

Boy, that would make me reconsider my opposition of him real quick.

Saddam not captured by US?

Evidently there are some news sources that are claiming that Saddam was actually captured by Kurdish troops, drugged, and then left for US troops. We'll see if this goes anywhere. The sources aren't exactly all that reputable at this time.

Democracy As A Weapon

ajc.com | Opinion | World knows our foreign policy better than we do

Whew! It's a banner night for blogging!

This article makes a great point about how we only seem to care about exporting democracy when it suits our national interests. It's not, like, a principle or anything.

Winning And Losing

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town

An excellent article that makes the comparison between US/Iraq and France/Algeria.

Nader And Me

In the summer of 2000, I was flipping past C-SPAN and came across a televised speech by Ralph Nader. I was thunderstruck. He was actually saying stuff that had been gone unsaid for so long, I had forgotten they existed. Do you know that feeling when someone finally says something that is so right that it's like when a muscle unclenches that you didn't know was clenched? It was an emotional experience.

As the summer went on, I watched the polls and saw how close the election was. I felt like I was desperately trying to rationalize a way to vote for Nader. (I now know that I was experiencing cognitive dissonance, see below. ;-) ). I learned about how the electoral college worked, I learned about how even if Nader won, it would still be a victory even if he only got 5% support, and I was disgusted at how he was frozen out of the debates.

Our state is a swing state, and the local papers recommended that if you supported Nader, wait until late in the day to see how the election was going, and to vote for Gore if things were in doubt. We're a vote-by-mail state, and I had my ballot with me. I waited until the end, with my ballot filled out with everything except for the presidential selection. Things were in doubt. I voted for Gore, tore down the streets, and turned in my ballot as they were packing up their collection boxes.

Obviously, a lot has happened since then. People that supported Nader hate him now, for reasons fair and unfair. I have my own opinion about 2000 - I think Bush actually had more support than Gore, all things considered. Gore had a strategic advantage, and Bush had a corruption advantage. I also think that if Gore and Nader had a coalition, Gore would have won. And I think the lack of a coalition is a failure on the part of both the Democrats and the Greens.

Nader has recently launched his exploratory bid for the 2004 election. This time around, I am 100% opposed to his running. My reasons are from years of careful thought about the nature of the electoral college, our voting system, and what it means to vote your principles. I even created a petition to ask Nader not to run, before I learned that those petitions are ineffective. Reading the petition will show my reasons why a Nader bid would be ineffective and damaging.

Nader has also been public lately, giving interviews and quotes about how he may run. This is what perked up my ears. This guy has got to know that this announcement, before he makes his case of a positive vision for America, would only elicit howls of dismay rather than cheers. Why would he do this if his aim was to build support? A better strategy would be to give a policy speech, not muse aloud about how he may run. In short, it sounds like a threat. I mean, I think he intends it as a threat.

The outcry is of course all over the net.

But then there are some other clues. Kos has some details that show some doubt. And Dr. Cline over at rhetorica.net has an insight that's interesting as well. He links to a transcript of the interview, check out some of the pro-Dean excerpts.

So, I've come to a conclusion. I believe that Nader is attempting to get concessions, either by aiming for an administrative appointment, or more probably, by influencing policy. I think this just may be the beginning of a Green/Democrat coalition.

Here's hoping.

Cognitive Dissonance

You know, I've heard that phrase so often and I've never heard a clear definition. But now I have one for you! Cognitive Dissonance is the thing that rationalizations fix.

Scrounged from this article about Bush's use of rhetoric.

Social Organizing

I want to organize a better discussion system. Discussion boards are good but it's all talk usually. Blogs are better, but it's hard to organize groups. Both are too ephemeral. Wikis are good, but they don't really invite in new viewpoints.

I want a discussion system - no, a participation system - centered around three main ingredients:

• Ideas bubble to the top: Anyone can suggest an idea. If it's good, it picks up steam, it gains life. Whether through linking, rating, popularity, I don't care; although I don't really like popularity because it's susceptible to the power law. Decentralized moderation is better.
• Education: Ideas that are hashed out by the community are made permanent, to be reviewed by new entrants later. A curriculum dynamically grows. The documents are living.
• Action Items: Discussion yields ideas. The ideas need to become action, however. Action Items are identified, and associated with projects. Discussion topics may or may not be associated with multiple projects.

It should be an open system, so someone can just start talking, and then the community would route the user to what he'd be interested in. Passion starts with venting, which is unstructured, and that should be channeled rather than denied. Worst thing to do to a new user is require them to jump through hoops before they can indulge their interest. Better to help them feel welcomed and then lead them to where they are useful.

As ideas crystalize into causes, polling could be frequent. A user could be associated with several causes and beliefs, on which they are active to various degrees.

Location information would be stored, so interest in issues could be reported by location - by state, by congressional district, by zip code. It could end up feeding viewpoints to elected representatives.

The other entry point into the system would be through education - reading the living documents created by the community in a choose your own adventure fashion. Eventually the path of finalized preparatory documents would lead to an open discussion, or to an action item that the person could complete.

It would be nice if the site could be structured so that it wouldn't necessarily only attract like-minded people. But that is probably more up to the branding of the site than the actual functionality.

Lieberman's Alliance

One of the reasons I don't support Joe Lieberman:

Oregon Blogs

ORblogs is a cool new syndication service that bundles together the feeds for any oregon-based weblog that wants in. A good way to meet weblog neighbors!

Earth Erotica

Earth Erotica Photography by Heather Firth

I like to think I'm an enlightened guy. But there are certain things... that make me go, "hehe... that looks just like someone's butt!"

via what if.

Secret Plan

I've been blogging about politics for a little while now, and spent more time making diary entries and comments as "tunesmith" over at dailykos.com.

I've mostly focused on media and presidential politics, and some of the voting issues.

What's interesting about it is that recently I've felt like a lot of the points of view I read are ones I already have. After a while it starts to feel like everyone is pretty much parroting each other. When I discovered it, it was enough to fill up my self-definition of being more politically engaged than before. Now it's still worthwhile, but it isn't quite as fulfilling. I'm learning in terms of the issues they talk about, but not learning as much in terms of being more clued in than I was before.

So the question is what the next step is. There are a lot of potential directions that interest me lately. I've decided against law school multiple times because of all the damn paperwork, although the idea does keep on coming back to me. There's also political science. Or eventually running for some sort of local office or getting on staff. Or finding a local political organization.

There's a doozy of a local political organization called the Oregon Bus Project. It's located at SecretPlan.org. They seem really vital and a lot of fun. So as part of my research I gave them a call and got to talk to briefly to their communications director, Reed. Soon, their director of operations, Jennifer, called me up to talk more to me.

We talked some about how to reach people and convince people, and it got me thinking. People that aren't very politically engaged relate to each other, and there's a suspicion sometimes against people that are more active. I've had two occasions recently - meeting an email friend for the first time, and a haircut - where we started talking about politics and Dean eventually came up. In both cases, there was almost a sense of embarrassment about admitting support for him. It wasn't being embarrassed about Dean per se, but about stepping away from that whole "politics is bullshit" thing. There's a song and dance that happens: "Well, you-know-I-don't-follow-politics-all-that-much..." and "I-suppose-if-I-had-to-pick-one-it-would-be..." The funny side note of that is that after I would bring up Dean, the agreement would actually be a little bit rushed and relieved. It's like people who just start dating. You get all coy, then someone says I love you, and rockets go off. (Well, sometimes.)

But the point is that it seems as if the display of being uninvolved is important somehow.

It's no wonder. People are self-protective. And there's a lot of bullshit out there. The hardest part is that when you become more politically active and actually start advocating things, you can get written off! It's like you can actually lose a bit of credibility compared to someone who isn't as involved.

So there's these camps. The people that aren't as engaged, and the people that are. And there's a chasm, where the people that aren't as engaged are eyeing the gap warily. "I kind of want to go over there... but then I'd be over there."

You can battle ignorance with education, but I'm not so sure yet how to battle cynicism. I think you do it by fostering trust. That's why enabling people to link to each other works so much better than preaching from a soapbox. And each time "normal people" witness someone they already trust take the steps to let go a little bit more of their own cynicism, it enables everyone to be a bit more open to possibilities. The witnessing is what makes it effective.

Finally, it got me thinking about what is cool. One of their efforts, which I understand I'm not to talk about specifically, is along the lines of getting people convinced that it's cool to vote. I'm not sure what to think of that yet. (Although their particular approach is pretty damn funny.) But abstractly, it seems really difficult. I almost wonder if it might be more effective to convince people that it's uncool NOT to vote. Like mock someone who is uninformed. As much as I hate that new drug commercial that makes the point that drug buyers fund terrorism ("My body, my life!") I have to admit the rhetoric is pretty effective - people hate to be mocked and they distance themselves from it. And for positive marketing, I think appealing to people's sense of honor and compassion is more effective than appealing to their desire to be cool.

I was going somewhere with this, honest. But something came up. You'll just have to trust me. :-)

Is Dean This Crafty?

I'm starting to think that Dean must be some sort of political genius.

First, while on Fox News (of all places), he talks about Bush not being forthcoming about 9/11. He mentions that the wildest theory that he heard was that Bush was forewarned of 9/11 by the Saudis. Then he proceeded to make the point that he of course didn't believe that theory, but Bush's lack of openness was leaving space for those sorts of theories.

Okay, so a guy that has been running president for over a year muses aloud about a conspiracy theory. On Fox News. You'd think he would know better, right? Right? I mean, you'd think he'd KNOW that they'd take that ball and run with it. Right?

All right. So Bush has a press conference. And he's asked a leading question about it. And not about the Saudis, but simply if Bush had advance knowledge. "Howard Dean mused aloud that... " and something about the RNC calling it political hate speech.

Now, to my eyes, Bush's reaction was very, very interesting. In the papers he's quoted as saying "That's an absurd insinuation." But his behavior... I don't know, he looks a little bit freaked out to me.

See for yourself.

Then, just a couple days later, we get this news that the head of the 9/11 commission is for the first time saying publicly that the attacks were preventable, should have been prevented, and that the blame falls on members of the current administration.

I know, I might be connecting dots that shouldn't be connected, but it sure is interesting.

Saddam

Guardian | 'Saddam, tell me about your mum'

"It all goes back to his mother's womb," Post declares with some professional satisfaction. "During the mother's pregnancy with Saddam Hussein, his father died, and another son died when he was only 12 years old. She both tried to commit suicide and to have an abortion."

As the story goes, Saddam's mother, Subha, was prevented from killing herself and her unborn child by a compassionate family of Iraqi Jews. That family is now reported to be living in Israel, where it may think itself the tool of some huge cosmic joke. In any case, it does not seek publicity for its act of kindness.

You know, wasn't there a similar story about Hitler? Or maybe it was just that he was a really sickly baby.

Saddam Captured

Thank God our military gave us a little bit less mess to clean up after Bush is voted out of office.

Football and Marching Band

ESPN.com::Pontiac High Performance Challenge

If you have never seen the film for the most famous play in NCAA Football history, you can see it now. I just saw it for the first time and had tears in my eyes.

"The band is on the field! THE BAND IS ON THE FIELD!!!"

Panther Printing

You know, for all they say about how easy OS X makes everything, there's just some things it doesn't. I have this old LaserJet 6L attached to a linux box. I don't want to buy a new printer, it suits me well. At some point I will just get an apple base station and a USB printer, but this works great.

In Jaguar, it took me forever to figure out how to print to it. I ended up having to download gimp-print cups printer drivers, and then configure an IP printer using LPR/LPD. I set it up to go to my default printer ("lp") and it just wouldn't work. It took me a while to figure out that I actually had to type the "lp" in there. It was a Jaguar bug.

Now in Panther, it just flat out doesn't work.

Luckily my linux server also has a samba installation so I can fake it out by calling it a windows printer and printing through Samba. But there are probably a bunch of unix-only LPR/LPD printers out there that can't receive Panther documents anymore. Stupid.

2000 Proportional Results

I was bored so I decided to re-examine the 2000 Presidential Vote using some numbers I found here.

The biggest statistic that people always mention is that Bush won even though Gore won the popular vote. And then all the gnashing of teeth about Florida.

I've long held the opinion that the popular vote argument is stupid. I'm actually in support of the general concept of the electoral college. We have a nation with a history of balancing popular representation with regional representation. Even our congress is set up that way - the Senate gives states equal representation, while the House is (in theory) set up for popular representation. So it makes sense to me that the electoral college would strike the same difference, of giving each state different weightings to balance its popular representation (by awarding it one electoral vote for each congressional district) with its regional representation (by also giving each state one electoral vote for each of its two senators).

So, given that the general concept is a good one, how good is our actual implementation of it? One of the common arguments against the electoral college is that each of the states are "winner take all", so for instance none of the democrats in Alabama are having their votes "counted" in the electoral college calculations. In general I believe this balances out because other states that go Democratic will then not have their Republican citizens "count".

But what would be more fair? Leaving aside the question of how we determine how many congressional districts (and electoral votes) each state receives.

One thing that would be more fair would be to proportionally award the electoral votes, by how much popular support each candidate received in each state. If the real purpose is just to better represent states that have regional interests but not as much population, then it really is just a matter of weighted averages. So if Texas had 32 electoral votes, and Gore had 38% of the Texas vote, then he'd get 12.16 electoral votes.

So I went through and calculated it for each state - and rather than figure it in terms of electoral votes, I figured it in terms of person votes. Since the smaller states have more regional weighting, the votes of the people in those states effectively count for more than they do for people in California. By weighting all the votes by how much their states are worth, I came up with some interesting results:

Of the 105,412,329 votes cast in 2000, when the votes are weighted properly for regional representation, Bush actually got more:

Bush: 48.17%

Gore: 48.01%

Nader: 2.77%*

Other: 1.05%*

This "weighted popular vote" is even closer than the regular popular vote we had, where Gore led by 0.5%.

What's interesting is that if things had been more fair, Bush would have won. But we all know Bush won unfairly. Why was Gore in the position to have been the rightful winner, even though the intent of the system would have picked Bush?

Believe it or not, it's because Gore's strategy worked better. Of the top seven closest states, Gore won five of them. The other two were New Hampshire, and of course, Florida, which Gore actually won. What this means is that the argument of "I'm an x in a y state so my votes didn't count" actually worked overwhelmingly in the Democrats favor in 2000. Basically, Gore squeezed a lot of blood out of the turnip of 2000, with the Nader distraction, an apathetic Democratic base, and a population that underestimated Bush's conservatism.

A postscript: What the Democrats should really be doing is convincing 30,000 California Democrats to move to the east side of Lake Tahoe. I mean geez, just live in your vacation home for three months next winter, long enough to register, vote, and move back. If the states are the same as 2000, you'd swing the whole election.

Optimism

I have great faith in optimism as a philosophy, if only because it offers us the opportunity of self-fulfilling prophecy. - Arthur C. Clarke

There's something approaching self-proof or recursion in that quote. At the least, it's an optimistic quote.

Wow, here's another great one. They all come from this article:

But it is vital to remember that information – in the sense of raw data – is not knowledge; that knowledge is not wisdom; and that wisdom is not foresight.

Freelancer Group

I met with a group of people today who are all trying to make their way as a freelance something-or-other. And, they all found out about my weblog, so there's a good chance they'll be reading this very entry. Helloooooo! Anyway, it was a good meeting and I like it better than the idea of it being a pure professional networking group, or it being a group of people all doing the exact same things. It's more interesting this way. I hope they all keep showing up. If you're in the group feel free to drop a note and say hi!