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An Election Of Leaks And Counter-Leaks
The tape of Trump talking dirty was released just in time to sidetrack from the release of more of Clinton's dirty secrets by Wikileaks. Trump's talk was juvenile and sexist bragging in front of other "boys". Surprising it was not. There will more releases like that, all timed to run cover for Clinton.
The just released emails of her campaign chairman John Podesta about Clinton's talk to Wall Street and other Clinton related issues are indeed revealing. She is the sell-out you would expect her to be:
*CLINTON SAYS YOU NEED TO HAVE A PRIVATE AND PUBLIC POSITION ON POLICY*
Clinton: "But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position."
It is funny how the U.S. electorate has a deeper "very negative" view of Trump (-44%) and Clinton (-41%) than of the much vilified Russian President Putin (-38%).
When Trump will come back in the polls (not "if"), it will be a devious fight with daily "leaks" followed by counter leaks and a lot of dirty laundry washed in front of the public. Good.
Many of the people who will vote will vote against a candidate, not for the one that they will mark on their ballot. I expect a very low turn out election, barely giving a mandate, to whomever may win or get selected to have won.
You have, perhaps, heard me mention “strategic hedge simple score voting” here before. Here are two short pieces I have posted at the website “The Center for Election Science”, at:
https://electology.org/forums/theory
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They tend to fall back on a Google+ Groups “site” which I do not use since I refuse to join (corporate) “social media” at:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/electionscience
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Here’s my first piece:
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blues
Distracting, Unworkable Feints
Outrage Can No Longer Be Ignored. The elections methods enterprise consists of an imposing compilation of distracting, unworkable feints, erroneously purported to constitute viable election methods. Get strategic hedge simple score voting. No More Two-Party!!! No more!!!
I have described the strategic hedge simple score election method all over the Internet. It is simple in the sense that does not require easily hackable voting machines, and can easily work with hand counted paper ballots at non-centralized voting places. It is not hampered by any requirement to cater to so-called “sincere,” “honest” (actually artless and foolish) voters. It easily thwarts both the spoiler effect and the blind hurdle dilemma (the “Burr Dilemma”). It just works.
Strategic hedge simple score voting can be described in one simple sentence: Strategically bid no vote at all for undesired candidates (ignore them as though they did not exist), or strategically cast from five to ten votes for any number of candidates you prefer (up to some reasonable limit of, say, six candidates), and then simply add all the votes up.
There is no point in casting “zero” to four votes since that would be useless for thwarting the blind hurdle dilemma, and would only make hand counting more tedious. The maximum is ten since that enables voters to easily assess the percentage of votes they are casting. Limiting votes to no more than six candidates prevents people from “hogging” voting booths by casting votes for large numbers of candidates.
Both IRV-style and approval voting methods suffer from the blind hurdle dilemma, which can be overcome with the hedge voting strategy. An example of usage of the hedge strategy, presuming the case of a “leftist” voter, would be casting ten votes for Ralph Nader, and only eight or nine for Al Gore. This way, the voter would only sacrifice 20 or 10 percent of their electoral influence if Nader did not win.
[….some additional text not pertinent here.]
https://electology.org/forum/distracting-unworkable-feints
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Here’s my second, also rather short, piece:
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blues
Problems With The Election Methods Cognoscenti
Our choose-one voting system has always been a disaster because of the spoiler effect. Because, for example, if you gave your vote to Nader, that might have caused Bush to beat Gore (not that Gore would necessarily have been any better). But we are stuck with this miserable system because of a surprisingly large array of people who I call the “election methods cognoscenti”. Over many years, these cognoscenti have assembled an enormous collection of distracting, unworkable election methods. This “intellectual subject” has, for instance, consumed perhaps hundreds of pages in works such as the Wikipedia. These cognoscenti have created a gigantic Glass Bead Game which serves no real purpose other than to facilitate intellectual speculation. In nearly every instance where their election methods have been employed, disaster has ensued, although in a few cases, their systems have languished on, providing no better results than the choose-one voting system. Millions, perhaps tens of millions of dollars, have been spent promoting the “IRV” method, which has been tried and abandoned in several venues where it caused massive chaos.
As the 2016 elections are now six weeks away, I have yet to hear any of these election methods cognoscenti give any consideration to the fact that where their methods contain any flaws, those flaws will be ruthlessly exploited by a massive corporate regime. They appear to fail to understand that non-casual, elite interest elections are not primarily contests between political candidates, nor contests between various ideological cohorts. Elite interest elections are always direct contests between the common people and some form of massive corporate regime.
[….some additional text not pertinent here.]
https://electology.org/forum/problems-election-methods-cognoscenti
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I am writing additional articles for this site, so I may open some new “topic starters” there soon.
It must be obvious by now that our choose-one (usually called “plurality” for no good reason) method cannot be deemed even slightly democratic since it causes the voters to (quite justifiably) feel trapped. This does not have to be “rocket surgery”.
Posted by: blues | Oct 9 2016 18:51 utc | 52
This is a great blog, one of best on the web wrt ME details almost every media service misses. This has been true for a long time. Kudos.
However, I’m with Ron Showalter @ 2:l I think you are belying prejudice with this stuff.
s e, and has a track record of doing this repeatedly. I don’t know about you, but guys in my locker room who talkeds like this mostly got in trouble. These are character issues, and they run a lot deeper then just his cheap behavior towards women. His University was fraudulent, took a ton of money and never delivered. He’s shafted local contractors on many of his construction projects. He did what is hard to call anything other then a “bribe” to the Florida Attn General to avoid prosecution on his University fraud.
His “kind” words (comparably) towards Putin I suspect have more to do with his business associations with Russia then any insightful policy given his utter lack of knowledge of world affairs. For example, he’s repeatedly said we should have siezed Iraq’s oil fields to pay for our Iraq “liberation”. Anyone who followed that misadventure will recall our own CIA reports warning Bush the escalating insurgency was fueled largely by middle m (doctors, lawyers, tradesmen) pouring in from neighboring countries with no history of extremism BECAUSE they (correctly in my view) percieved our invasion as an attempt to get control of Iraq’s huge, undeveloped oil fields. (SOme of you may recall the EXXON exec. emails to Bush well before 9/11, strongly expressing their desire to get control of those oil fields).
THis proposal of Trump’s is… insane.
,
He fed the Obama “birther” lie. His Foundation is riddled with illegal activities and, it seems… fraud.
His rhetoric on China is infantile. They didn’t “steal” our manufacturing, Wall Street moved it their for low labor costs (about $0.60 p/hr in 2k when the mass exodus began) and (then) almost non-existent environmental regulations. These company’s took the cost savings and pocketed it (not passed onto consumers). It was pure and simple greed. And lots of $$ & lobbying by their interests to prevent establishment of international environmental regs.
Trump’s said China’s playing curreny games: China’s been pegged to the $$ for over 4 years now, he’s at least that far behind the times.
What’s this guy got, that some of you think he can bring to US presidency in arguably, the most challenging and dangerous world situation most of us have seen in our lifetime?
For a group on this blog so strongly critical of US imperialism in ME (again correctly), to overlook this stuff from Trump because of loathing for Hillary is foolish.
Your work (B) on MoA has been too important to taint with such highly speculative writing such as this. It’s more or less the same thing 1/2 ass “journalists” have done dismissing Stein entirely as an “anti-vaxxer” and wifi fanactic (both untrue). E
From what I’ve seen, I think Hillary has been unfairly maligned on a lot. The Clinton foundation is one of the best run on the planet, well over $0.80 per dollar going to their work. They’ve done a lot of good. When she was SOS, I’ve sure heard/read the accusations been when I looked into details she handed all the details of approving requests by SA (etc.) to State Dept. processes and had little or nothing to do with State’s decisions. She had little to do with Benghazi. Bush’s White House didn’t use “private email servers”, they used email hosted by the sleaziest right wing organizations which had a lot to do with Iraq, Enron and the financial crisis… AND, no records were ever produced.
Powell used private email.
The Clinton’s server was more reliable then State’s: for those who paid attention, HRC’s staff produced subpeoned records state simply didn’t have (they lost them). AFAIC, Clinton’s private server is a minor peripheral issue. I haven’t seen anything damning in any of them. Most of the “CLASSIFIED” mails were posthumously classified.
I don’t see her as the incarnation of evil which here (and so many other places) seems to be, now… a given.
I could never vote for her simply because of her postions and actions in the ME: voting for Iraq, advocating to take down Khadafi… all of which led to and gave momentum to the Syria nightmare. Her (and now Kerry’s and most of US federal government’s) rhetoric towards Russia/Putin is scary as hell. And almost completely untrue. Given what this has cost us and the world, this is more then enough reason why I won’t vote for her.
I’m 60. Been politically active since 2k election fiasco (massive election fraud). I’ve put some time in here, took almost 6 months off to work for Obama in NM in his first election. He broke every promise he made to us… Wall Street/Banking reform and the bailouts, his ME policy (and expanding torture) and an utter lack of courage in most every major issue.
Since 2000, things here and US standing in the world has gotten worse and worse and with either candidate it looks to me like different paths to the bottom. I have -0- faith in either party.
I voted for Stein in ’12, and will do so again… enthusiastically. She’s the best informed presidential candidate I’ve come to know in a very, very long time. She’s not going to win, but cards are so stacked she’s fighting Goliath with slingshots. She does have a very good shot to get 5% this time, which would mean automatic entry on most state’s ballots in 4 years.
She’s the only one detailing solutions that could work here and on the global stage, they just-make-sense. Would be nice if B (or somebody of his choosing) would write a well researched (eg. HER words, her policies as SHE’s written, review of her many interviews written and on YouTube) to write a detailed, PROFFESIONAL article on her proposals, instead of the the knee jerk dismisslals I see even here like she’s a “jewish princess”, or vague associations with various European or Canadian “Greens” which have little or nothing to do with what she’s up to. Really weird thing about this (especially on MoA) is, she is by far the best informed candidate (and probably US politician) on US ME atrocities since Iraq. Many of her speaches line up almost point by point with what B’s been saying here for years. She correctly identifies SA as financing worst of ME (Yemen, Libya, Syria etc.) Islamist weapons and has proposed sanctioning them. She has proposed same with Israel (I’m all for it). People just don’t read this stuff here; it’s all “Putin’s fault”.
Stein has correctly identified responsibility in a lot of this (in detail), and is proposing antidotes… not more war.
What’s not to like? Seems clear to me: spend the next few months arguing seriousness of pussy grabbing activities, or nuances of Clinton’s utterly destructive ME/Russia polices, or…. vote for an articulate under dog with proposals most of the hard working (eg; been paying attention) “progressives” have been begging for, for a very long time.
Posted by: jdmckay | Oct 10 2016 0:02 utc | 83
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