Trying to vote absentee in Texas

Version 1.0

Trying to Vote Absentee in Texas

Here is a now-open letter that I just sent to my voter registrar. Any questions?

Recently received my voter registration form, so I decided to request my absentee ballots for any elections in which I am entitled to vote. I just spent a while getting the runaround of your various websites. Links can be useful, or they can be designed to lead on a merry wild goose chase.

In conclusion, I still want to perform my duty and exercise my right to vote, but I'm convinced you don't want me to vote.

Wasn't it nice back in the old days? Back when the voters actually got to choose their representatives and before the politicians learned how to choose their voters.

I was going to thank you for the voter registration, but since it now appears to be an exercise in futility, I guess not. Let me repeat my ancient suggestion, though I'm sure you'll ignore it again. If someone has taken the trouble to vote in most elections ever since becoming old enough to vote, then you ought to assume that the person in question actually wants to vote in the next election, too. Instead, there is a clear trend over the years of Texas politicians doing their damnedest to make it as hard and as inconvenient as possible, but especially in the years since I became a resident of Japan. At this point, your anti-voter policies are one of the strongest reasons I am unlikely ever to return to the States.

Oh yeah, who am I? According to this new fangled voter registration certificate, I'm voter # .

Whoever you anti-voter bastards are, I hope you have a really bad day, and I still want to vote in any elections for which I am an eligible voter. It's my duty and supposedly my right as an American citizen, for what little that is worth, thanks to people like YOU.

--

Freedom = (Meaningful + Unconstrained) Choice ≠ Beer

All Your Attention is Belong to the Google

Version 0.2

All Your Attention is Belong to the Google

This one is actually based on a social meeting and email exchange with one of the googlers I know socially. For the sake of social convention, I think I have to protect his anonymity and also preface these comments with a caution that I think he disavows my conclusion, which is summarized in the title of this blog. However I also feel that he has partially failed to understand my central points. Not sure if it is worth continuing that discussion with him, but for now I'm evidently just blogging my spleen, as they say.

One place to start is with the various kinds of realities we live with. Some examples include mathematical realities (absolute within the bounds of the assumptions), scientific realities (supposedly based on solid evidence), religious realities (where faith trumps evidence), business realities (reduced to the bottom line), and political realities (such as the dysfunction in today's USA). However, the particular kind of reality that is bothering me just now is social reality, where a particular social reality is based upon what some group of people believe about their society. The underlying problem is that a social reality can be wrong, can be changed, or, worst of all, can be manipulated. Today's questionable social reality is that advertising can and even should be shoved in your face.

Plodder that I am, I want to start with an example of a thoroughly discredited social reality. Take the ancient social reality of slavery. I think nowadays we have a pretty solid consensus that human slavery was always wrong, but it still prevailed as a social reality for thousands of years. The exact forms of slavery changed over the millenniums, but the operative conventions were that the slaves were supposed to accept their status (and treatment as property akin to domesticated animals) and therefore work hard for their masters. The exact rationale for their enslavement varied, though racial inferiority was a pretty frequent theme. Sometimes it was defined by their lack of military prowess that allowed them to be conquered or their lack of belief in the proper religion (of the masters), but the important thing was that the social reality said the slaves were slaves and should remain slaves. (Going tangential again, but actually, it isn't clear to me that we've fully eliminated slavery, though we continue to change the branding. About 35 years ago I studied a major church in Houston where South African apartheid was defended as upholding the proper blessed and sacred hierarchy, with the 'niggers' on the bottom (though I'm reasonably sure the preacher didn't use the N-word himself). In the last few years we seem to be developing new forms of indebted servitude and effective wage slavery based on inescapable student-loan debts in an economic environment packed with minimum-wage jobs that can never repay those loans. Separately, there's also the aspect that governments always have a strong preference for citizens who obey the government without annoying questions.)

Anyway, back to the main theme of why I believe "All your attention is belong to the google" is such a bad thing. The discussion in question actually started from my belief that time-based economics makes more sense, as jovially summarized in "Couch Potatoes of the World, Unite!" I was rather surprised or even shocked by his frankness in response. Google just wants the most precious time of all, the time with our attention attached to it. That's the time when an ad is most likely to do the most "good" and result in a paid click for the google and a possible sale for the advertiser paying for the click.

Consider the ethical ramifications of "All your attention is belong to the google". My position is that your time is a vital and precious resource, and you want to maximize the value of it. For example, if you have children, then I think you want to give lots of your attention to your children, but now that means you are intruding on the google's rights to claim all of your attention for more advertising. Yes, I'm overextending his position, but my point is that this claim on my attention fails the most basic ethical test: No one would not want to live in a world where that principle was broadly applied to everyone all of the time. Unfortunately, that is where the google is heading, in a desperate search for new and innovative ways to intrude on our attention and divert our precious and limited time to responding to ads.

My response to that meeting was to conclude that the google has become a kind of Russian Pravda joke. I'm pretty sure things have changed since the Soviet Union went away, but it used to be that the skill of reading the newspaper in the Soviet Union involved projecting backwards from the actual news stories. For example, if there were several articles about airplane crashes in other countries, the sophisticated Soviet reader understood it to signify that there had been an airplane crash somewhere in the USSR.

From that perspective, "Don't be evil" probably represented an understanding that the google was fundamentally an evil enterprise from the git go, whereas my original hypothesis had been that the google only became evil after it reached a critical mass and was 'captured' by the American legal system. (This is actually a diversion, but here is my brief summary of business in America: Most businesspeople are fine and upstanding folks who just want to play the game by the rules. Unfortunately, the rules are encoded as laws written by the most cheaply bribed professional politicians working for the greediest and least ethical businessmen. As 'big' businessmen, they are profiting from and therefore pushing forward a cancer-like economic model that must end with the death of the host.)

In the subsequent email, he had apparently concluded that I was arguing the world is generally evil, whereas my focus is simply on making things better. To be clear, I don't think the world is evil or bad, but that the world is a pretty amazing place and getting better—but only on the long-term average, and none of us live on the long term. For example, I believe that good people generally have better lives, but any individual can have bad breaks, no matter how good. (There are many religious and philosophic books on the theme of why bad things happen to good people, but you should be glad I'm not going there today...) I would diverge farther into consideration of evolutionary versus deliberative progress, but instead I'll just recommend a couple of the relevant books: The Blind Watchmaker, one of the best treatments of evolution, and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which has a lot on related topics from the perspective of what we eat and how. (Or is this diversion just another aspect of my zen collapse?)

Not sure how to bring all the threads together, but I strongly believe that "All your attention is belong to the google" is a joke of the sickest sort. Feel free to react, and my apologies in advance for the moderation (but I will not support the spammers).

There will be more change

Version 0.4

There Will be More Change

An open letter to Lloyd Doggett (and Dan Grant):

There was once a time when I felt that I was participating in America's government and that my vote was just as good as the vote of any other American. That was a long time ago, and you [Llyod Doggett] were my representative to Congress in those days.

There will be change.

One of the older changes was that my district was gerrymandered. I didn't change my mind or move or decide that you no longer represented my [basically moderate] ideas. The district was deliberately changed and mangled to make it into a "safe" neo-GOP district. Amusingly, I just read that they had to gerrymander it some more to defend the trivial political tool whose name I can't recall. That district should be the poster child for anti-democratic neo-GOP tactics. (In response to the gerrymandering, you moved, and two Democratic representatives were reduced to one, which was the entire point of the exercise.)

Today I decided to do some searches on the big Internet. I was looking for a recent video of Lloyd Doggett and President Obama speaking together. Couldn't find one.

I searched for my district and found that someone named Dan Grant will apparently be the Democratic candidate for my district. I looked for a video of "Dan Grant and Obama". Nothing.

I visited both of your websites. You both want my money. Sorry, but that's a silly request. I can't help you against Sheldon Adelson and Mitt Romney and the Kolk Brothers and Karl Rove and a few of their extremely rich friends. For each dollar I would strain to give you, Sheldon Adelson can easily give a million.

The ONLY way my money donated to you could possibly matter is if there is a massive multiplier to make things more fair. Looking at the recent results in Wi$con$in and California (Proposition 29), that would take some convincing. You don't need to fool all of the people all of the time. You just need to fool about 20% of the voters on Election Day.

Here's a campaign suggestion. If I do that kind of search, I should get some videos. Show me President Obama endorsing the candidate and telling me that it's up to me--to ME personally--whether or not that candidate has a chance. It's up to ME whether democracy has a chance in America against the corporate money. I don't think Obama should go into the nitty-gritty local issues, but rather focus on corporate personhood. I actually think President Obama should endorse a simple Constitutional Amendment saying that human rights have priority OVER corporate rights, and I believe that ANY candidate I would support should agree to that position. (Of course, I think that the neo-GOP candidates would be lying about their agreement to negate the issue.)

Let's imagine that President Obama can flip a few districts from "safe neo-GOP incumbent" to "probable Democratic challenger". Here are my predictions for what would happen:

(1) Karl Rove and his friends would pour a FLOOD of black money into those districts, but it would be relatively visible (because of the concentration) and it would have a HUGE multiplier effect (since there would be almost no Democratic campaign money involved).

(2) Mill Romney would be obliged to respond by leaping to the defense, and most of the people he would be forced to defend and link himself to are extremist morons.

Here are some more changes America desperately needs: Joe Walsh, Allen West, Peter King, and a bunch of other rightwing lunatic neo-GOP politicians.

Some of those madmen should be black holes. They are SUCH bad candidates that NO amount of money will save them, but by making them prominent national figures and exploiting their irrational hatred of President Obama, the neo-GOP is liable to pour a LOT of money into those black holes before they figure that out. When they give up on those districts after accepting the challenge, they will be LOSERS in the most public and humiliating way possible--plus they will have that much less money to spend elsewhere.

Oh yeah. The neo-GOP thing. Today's so-called Republican Party is NOT the progressive and liberal party created by Abraham Lincoln. It is NOT the GOP of such leaders as Teddy Roosevelt and General "Ike" Eisenhower. The neocons were NOT conservative, and today's neo-GOP is even farther from their Republican so-called roots.

I want to rant on about political philosophy and flagrant liars in American politics, but let me try to reduce it to a simple theme. Most businesspeople are good folks, but the WORST businessmen are legally bribing the CHEAPEST professional politicians to write the WORST possible laws. At this point the rules of the game of American business require your company to become an evil cancer just to survive--and now, thanks to Citizens United, I think the corporations are calling the shots. The experiment in democracy in America was a glorious one, but I think it's over. Please prove me wrong.

A narrow victory of President Obama that retains an obstructionist Congress will NOT lead to change. We have seen that over the last years. The only hope for America is if the neo-GOP Congress is CRUSHED in November. Time to go on the offensive.

--
Freedom. It's about meaningful and unconstrained choice, not beer.

President Obama versus the neo-GOP Congress

Version 0.7

Is There Still a Path to the Survival of Democracy in America?

In the future, there will be change. If it is not change for the better, then it will be change for the worse.

If President Obama is going to help America change for the better, then his only hope is to campaign against the Republican Congress. EVERY Congressional race for a seat held by a neo-GOP politician must become a referendum on the performance of Congress.

If President Obama wins reelection, but Congress remains a gang of noisy neo-GOP obstructionists, then there will be no change for the better. The last four years have proven this. A narrow Obama victory is a defeat.

I strongly believe that a Romney victory with a staunchly conservative neo-GOP Congress will lead to a change back to Dubya's failed policies (which were actually the policies of Rove and Cheney and their associates). Those policies did not succeed when Bush was in the White House, and they will do no better on the second, third, or 10th attempt. This will NOT be a change for better.

The only hope is if the neo-GOP politicians are punished for blocking constructive change. There is only one path to progressive and constructive change. The first step on that path is that President Obama has to win and the neo-GOP Congress has to lose.

In light of Citizens United and considering that so many Americans have been so well trained to obey the ads, the situation looks quite bleak. All good things must come to an end, and I fear that I am about to witness the end of America. I would much prefer to believe that I will not outlive my country.

Truth, justice, and the American way in Wi$con$in

Version 0.1

  

Truth, justice, and the American way? You silly rabbit! How much cash do you have? Thanks, Wi$con$in, and go to the devil.

Basically just recording my initial reactions to the debacle of Wisconsin. Unleash the hounds of hell? Well, the big, bad money has certainly been unleashed and we'll see its full wrath in November.

One question is why the same math (statistically sampling) apparently failed (again) for exit polling but apparently worked perfectly in predicting the final results within an hour of the polls closing. Apparently the exit polling showed a very close race. Statistically, that should mean that the actual result is quite close to even. Then they start looking at a different sample and almost instantly decide the result is NOT close to even. Do you believe in math? I think that's the real problem with the anti-evolution nuts. After all, genetics is really statistics, too. I would like to see detailed comparisons of the exit poll results and the actual results.

Obviously worth very little, but I can put my defense of democracy rather succinctly: Any system (1) will work better if all of the people involved care about making it work better and are trying to make it better. A system (2) will work worse in direct proportion to the number of people who are NOT sincerely trying to support it, and the system (3) will work worst of all when most of the people involved are working to destroy the system.

America was never a perfect democracy, but it used to be much closer to Clause (1) in a more democratic condition. There were periods of high social mobility when it really was possible for almost any white man in good health to succeed as an independent farmer. Most Americans could rationally feel they were roughly equal to most other Americans and had roughly equal prospects for the future. Not perfect, of course. For example, if you were a black slave, there was no reason you couldn't be worked to death, ordered to warm your master's bed, or worse.

The neo-GOP Congress is the perfect example of Clause (2), where an obstructionist minority is clearly most focused on their own political success to the point where they can't even stop themselves from cheering when they receive BAD news about the country. "Unemployment is up? GREAT--for US in November." I even think America is headed for Clause (3) in the style of the Russian Empire in the 19th century.

However, if you have enough money behind you, there are NO limits now. Our advertising and political propaganda technologies have reached the point where people routinely vote against their OWN future.

Rather safe prediction for the November is that there will be LOTS of secret black money poured into the campaign. President Obama's people have already realized that they will be badly outspent and that they need to focus their limited resources to have any chance of winning. However, such a narrow victory will be no victory at all. The only victory that would make a difference would be a victory that allowed us to get the money out of politics, a victory that would lead to LEGAL proof corporations are NOT people. For that meaningful victory, Obama needs a LARGE victory, not a narrow victory that will leave the obstructionists in place.

Yeah, I still love America, but it's evolving. It was already to the point where I had to compare it with love for a close relative in the last stages of an incurable disease. Now it's like the close relative has adopted crazy and self-destructive habits, snorting cocaine, juggling flaming clubs, and worse.

Young Aristotelian Libertarians

Version 0.3

Young Aristotelian Libertarians

Another lightbulb went on today as regards the crazed Libertarians in relation to the Aristotelian Principle from Rawls' book on justice. As a brief review, Rawls argued that people were naturally motivated to excel, to seek to be the best people they could be. At the time it struck me as a ridiculous notion because most Americans (and lots of people elsewhere) have pretty clearly become couch potatoes. But ridiculous? Now I'd say "Not so much." It's a matter of age. Children really are driven by a kind of Aristotelian Principle because they eagerly want to grow up and become adults with full control over their own lives.

The concrete and probably genetically predisposed manifestation is that children love to play games. They just naturally want to spend lots of time playing, and they really do want to win and hone their skills. Without any incentives, they also want to learn or even create new games. Children really do have the kind of boundless enthusiasm that Rawls was claiming for humanity in general--but most of them grow out of it. I think that's mostly because as they grow they learn about the larger world and realize that there are always other more skilled and more creative players, so they realize they can't win. Or maybe the main influence is the need to go to work every day? Anyway, for whatever reason, most adults don't play as much as children or with the same boundless enthusiasm.

How does that relate to the Libertarians? They are quite like children in that they think they are going to win the game of life and they therefore deserve ALL the spoils of victory--just like children. The main thrust of Rand's writings was that the superlatively creative people are the only ones who should decide what they do, and the rest of the human scum are basically just parasites benefiting from their generosity in sharing their 'divine' creativity.

One of the pundits was describing Ron Paul's Libertarian supports as mostly being young, enthusiastic males. I'd like to see the demographics. but it certainly seems highly plausible. Libertarianism as a immature phase that they mostly grow out of? How many old Libertarians have you seen?

Libertarians are confused about freedom

Version 0.1

Interesting that this entry wound up suspended for a long time.

First is a meta-comment about the version numbers. I've decided to write more skeletal pieces without waiting for my muse. If there is some indication of interest, most obviously via comments with questions or reactions, then I will be motivated to flesh things out, but there isn't much evidence of interest. Or perhaps it should count as more evidence of the negative effects of the Internet on such intellectual activities?

Now to the topic at hand, freedom. Let me start by noting that "free" is an extremely confused concept, at least as the word is used in English. Just taking the online American Heritage Dictionary as a random source of authority, we find 17 senses for the adjective. Amazingly enough, or perhaps it's additional evidence of American confusion, but NONE of those 17 senses is the one that is probably the most common usage in the so-called real world. That sense appears near the bottom as a kind of footnote for an informal idiom defined as "without charge". In other words, the common monetary sense of "free beer" is barely noticed, but if you do a search for the word "free", most of the hits are related to that usage. Comparing three of the leading search engines for "free", Google, Bing, and Yahoo all list 5 of the top 8 for some sense of "free beer" (but the FSF is evidently gaming both Google and Bing for 2 of those hits in each list).

Since I want to focus more narrowly on "freedom", the situation isn't quite as bad. We don't have to worry about "freedom beer" and there are only 9 senses of the noun. Unfortunately, none of them is really relevant to my focus here, which is freedom for the individual. Sense 5 comes closest, and there are relevant aspects in some of the other senses, but none of them consider the context. Therefore I must begin with a short definition:

"Freedom" is about informed, meaningful, and unconstrained choice.

The "informed" part means that you need to know what the choices are, and your knowledge of the differences between the choices must be factual, sufficiently complete, and relevant to your own goals. The "meaningful" is both about the relevance and the number of choices. Having 1 or 0 choices is not meaningful, but having too many can also become meaningless, as in the famous example of trying to find the best pair of jeans among a hundred different styles. The "unconstrained" is mostly a tip to advertising, which is almost entirely about you to value mediocre merchandise more highly (and thus pay a higher price) or convincing you to want something without regard to your actual needs (and therefore buy unneeded stuff), but it can include any sort of interference or intrusive manipulation.

In contrast, Libertarians think "freedom" is about selfishness and the ability to do whatever they want. They usually say that's without hurting anyone else, but in the end that just means that whatever they want is still okay as long as the other people who were hurt were 'free' to get out of the way, and it's really the victim's own fault if the victim is too slow or too lazy or too stupid. The libertarian might agree that there is a moral obligation to consider the ramifications and side effects of the libertarian's selfish actions, but you would be infringing on the libertarian's freedom to try to specify how much consideration is appropriate.

They key thing about libertarians is actually evolutionary. It's just that they think they are the ones who deserve to win in the struggle for survival. You show me a strict Libertarian who has become physically crippled and who still clings to his Libertarian principles, and I'll show you a dead Libertarian. Maybe not right away, but soon enough.