By a Vote of the People

[Paladin]

Originally Posted by wil

Got this in an email the other day, to be honest I don't know how true any of it is, but without our war machine, could we have helped as efficiently??

[FONT='Times New Roman','serif']Then there was a conference in France where a number of international engineers were taking part, including French and American.[/font]

[FONT='Times New Roman','serif']During a break one of the French engineers came back into the room saying 'Have you heard the latest dumb stunt Bush has done? He has sent an aircraft carrier to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims. What does he intended to do, bomb them?' [/font]

[FONT='Times New Roman','serif']A Boeing engineer stood up and replied quietly: 'Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can treat several hundred people; they are nuclear powered and can supply emergency electrical power to shore facilities; they have three cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a day, they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water from sea water each day, a[/font]nd they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck.. We have eleven such ships; how many does France have?'

You know Wil, I was with you up to this line. Kind of sketchy logic at best. Though the point that a war machine was used to help instead of hurt is well taken.

[wil]

Originally Posted by Paladin

You know Wil, I was with you up to this line. Kind of sketchy logic at best. Though the point that a war machine was used to help instead of hurt is well taken.

Namaste Paladin,

It wasn't really my logic, more of a question. I thought it handy to get the email the same time we were in this discussion. So I contemplated.

11 aircraft carriers, billions of dollars of investment I'd imagine, handy that we can send it in to that disaster ravaged area to assist. Would we ever have built such a monstrosity or had it in the neighborhood if it hadn't been for the arms war?

I stood on one of these once, walked from the deck where all the jets are kept onto the monster elevator that takes a fighter jet to the flight deck. Boggled my mind the enormity of it.

China with its growth in resources is now building a navy that will soon dwarf ours, I am positive it won't be long that we are no longer the world power. As stated throughout this board, we've misused our wealth and resources to the detriment of our economy and world opinion.

[Alex P]

Seems slightly.. Mine's bigger than yours... lol. Just the explination would of been fine perhaps...

Wil, it is a sad pattern, but a constant pattern so far... We've all misued our wealth and resources....

[Paladin]

Originally Posted by wil

Namaste Paladin,

It wasn't really my logic, more of a question. I thought it handy to get the email the same time we were in this discussion. So I contemplated.

11 aircraft carriers, billions of dollars of investment I'd imagine, handy that we can send it in to that disaster ravaged area to assist. Would we ever have built such a monstrosity or had it in the neighborhood if it hadn't been for the arms war?

I stood on one of these once, walked from the deck where all the jets are kept onto the monster elevator that takes a fighter jet to the flight deck. Boggled my mind the enormity of it.

China with its growth in resources is now building a navy that will soon dwarf ours, I am positive it won't be long that we are no longer the world power. As stated throughout this board, we've misused our wealth and resources to the detriment of our economy and world opinion.

Yup they are big, I used to go down to Pearl Harbor and watch them come in back when I was with the 25th Inf Div.
I don't know, I just felt that saying something is good if it does a good thing and ignoring everything else it has done just didn't sit well. But I do understand your point. I wonder if China will have any redeeming social value to their Military Industrial Complex.

[path_of_one]

Originally Posted by wil

Screw the diatribe, how do we find solutions??

That's where I'm at. I understand the need for questioning, challenging... the critical perspective. But there are already thousands upon thousands of people doing that. Few people actually generate solutions that work- even at a local level.

After someone deconstructs what is, there remains the task of building what should be.

The U.S. has done a lot of lousy things, but it's done a lot of good things, too. There are very few issues in the world that don't have two sides to them. The Green Revolution, for example, gave us heavy pesticide and fertilizer and water dependent farming, but it also gave us a way out of the predicted widespread famines. There is no easy way to feed 6 billion people locally, especially in large ecologically diverse nations like the US.

Almost any issue is like this- many critical theorists harp and whine about injustices, shortcomings, and failings but fail to propose anything that would work better. Some people make a career out of it. The reality is that we are facing some very big problems with no clear solution. The least we could do is spend some of our time that we devote to critizing in thinking up better plans. Doesn't have to be anything that grandiose or top-down. The guy who thought up the bucket-stove for India solved a huge fuel crisis with a very basic idea. Instead of focusing on huge issues and being negative, at least some of that energy could be directed toward local issues and positive action.

Without some shift in focus toward solutions, all we do is make ourselves depressed, anxious, and hopeless.

[Pathless]

Related to Amiri Baraka's speech, Howard Zinn on direct action:

Election Madness | The Progressive Magazine since 1909

Originally Posted by zinn

I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.

But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.

Let’s remember that even when there is a “better” candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.

As for the critiques of being critical, what can I say? Your points are well taken.

[wil]

Author sheds light on who is really behind Ralph Nader's bid for presidency; Practice of trying to split the vote goes way back in U.S. politics

Posted By Theresa Bradley



Most analysts doubt Ralph Nader's bid for the White House will divide Democrats and tip the presidency to Republicans in 2008. After all, he received less than 0.4 per cent of the vote in 2004, down from nearly three per cent in 2000.

But according to William Poundstone's new book, "Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It", tipping the vote is exactly what Nader has sought to do.

To draw votes from Democrats, Republicans paid cash to get Nader on the 2004 ballot - an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend tactic that both parties used to divide and cherry pick congressional opponents from San Diego to Pennsylvania in 2006, Poundstone says in his book.

But spoilers are nothing new, having determined at least five presidential elections since popular voting for the White House widely began in 1828, Poundstone argues. James Polk, Zachary Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush all benefited from a split vote, taking office even though a majority of voters preferred someone else.

How can that happen in a democracy? Poundstone looks for answers in an offshoot of mathematics called social choice theory.

The problem, it turns out, is that neither plurality voting, nor any other known method, is entirely fair. This depressing notion was proved in 1948 by Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow, whose "impossibility theorem'' showed that when three or more candidates compete, no voting system yields truly representative results.

"Arrow's work was a death knell for any idealistic notion of democracy,'' causing concern at the cusp of the Cold War when many of the greatest American minds were bent on proving democracy superior, Poundstone writes.

That's not to say voting theorists and political strategists failed to seek alternatives. Many had long been looking for fairer voting methods - and better ways to game the plurality system now in place. In an avalanche of quirky anecdotes, Poundstone surveys their alternatives: The so-called "Borda count'' lets voters rank choices on a ballot, while "Condorcet voting'' pairs every possible combination of candidates in a one-on-one duel. "Approval voting'' allows voters to give a thumbs up or down to multiple candidates, while an "instant runoff'' redistributes losing votes to stronger, second choice contenders.

All alternatives are flawed, but Poundstone suggests that one method, "range voting'' - an Internet favourite used, for example, to rate books on Amazon.com - is actually the best among imperfect options, because it allows voters to express their degree of preference with a numerical score, rather than a simple yes or no.
Split into contentious camps, railing proponents of these different methods dismiss one another as "snake oil'' salesmen and "mathematical zealots.'' But their feuding theories leave it unclear what general readers are meant to learn from the mess.

As Poundstone acknowledges: "This ongoing lack of expert consensus has been the biggest obstacle confronting those who would reform American voting.''



To an extent, Poundstone's argument is obvious: Spoilers tip elections and political consultants game them because the math behind the vote allows it. What is surprising to hear, though, is that every other way of voting is also inherently flawed.

It seems it might be best, then, to just play the game and stop complaining about the rules.

"Democracy is the worst form of government,'' Poundstone recalls, citing Winston Churchill, "except all those other forms that have been tried.''

[DrFree]

Thanks, Wil, for a very interesting perspective. I wonder though whether a relatively simple method that has the appearance of greater fairness might be preferable to a more complex system that meets a higher mathematical standard.

Namiste

[Vajradhara]

Namaste all,

darn it Will, i was going to say that:

"Democracy is the worst form of government,'' Poundstone recalls, citing Winston Churchill, "except all those other forms that have been tried.''

metta,

~v

[wil]

Originally Posted by Vajradhara

Namaste all,

darn it Will, i was going to say that:

"Democracy is the worst form of government,'' Poundstone recalls, citing Winston Churchill, "except all those other forms that have been tried.''

metta,

~v

I like his other one as well, quite similar. You can always trust the Americans to do the right thing, after they've tried everything else.

As for the vote, I'd like to consider be it primaries or the general election, you go to the polls and vote for your top 5 choices. First choice, second choice, etc. And then your vote is weighted in reverse, 5 points for your first choice, 4 points for your second....1 point for the fifth choice.

Most points wins.

A voters could be split three or four ways for first choices, but if most of them had the same second choice, we'd all be a lot happier if our second choice made it.

Now we used to select Vice Presidents by whoever came in second, we revert to that as well, second most points is VP.

We'd get to have an elected official who 30% wanted as first choice, 30% wanted as second choice, 20% as third, 10% as fourth...or whatever.