MinnPost

A new "newspaper" will begin for the Twin Cities and Minnesota, online and printed:
http://www.minnpost.com/

It sounds very high-minded and humble, trying to be what a purely profit driven newspaper fails to be. I wonder if it'll work out?

I suppose politics is where I'm most interested, NOT politics of parties, but politics of policy and issues that need addressing.

I admit there's so much I don't know, so much I just hope works out. I can only focus on a few issues. I wonder how "peak oil" could be addressed by a local newspaper? It's a sort of issue that is both too-complex, and too-uncertain to bring any easy reading, AND equally unclear what response we as a community ought to take. I know the response I THINK we should take - to move our economy away from dependence upon cheap energy to keep it running, and do this through higher fuel taxes, BUT how can a locale do this, and "harm" our competitiveness against neighboring states AS WELL as the global economy.

I like to look at the bigger picture, but no clear answers for the smaller world close to home. I think we should prepare, but who should pay, and who needs to believe before action makes a difference?

Well, just my issue. MinnPost can ignore like a dozen others that are "too hard".

Open Letter to "Generation Screwed"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-smith/open-letter-to-generatio_b_69851.html Dear Generation Screwed, Where are you?... Dumb and apathetic is no way to go through life, let alone unscrew yourself. If you don't get off your collective asses and get active, it's over. Let's go.

The comments are of course more fun to read than the letter itself.

The message of the letter seems to be that "direct action"/protests can change the world, if only 100 million young people would hit the streets and demand change. Well, yes, it probably would IF we actually KNEW what we wanted. I don't have a lot of faith in the power of MOBS to have sensible plans of action.

I suppose my primary failing is being an intectual, wanting to understand things before I change anything. Mostly I understand the PROBLEMS. I just don't think leaders are in a position to change things any more than the rest of us. I do have a habit of defending and forgiving leaders for their weaknesses and failings - not convinced I could do any better.

Anyway, although I agree US 20 and 30 year olds are "screwed", I as well defend this generation as preoccupied with both important and unimportant distractions. I understand a lament, wanting a "new generation" to learn from the old, but I also wonder about what tactics really make a different.

I suppose if I were to MOB for power, my points would be something like:

We want:
(1) to end the war in Iraq AND end our dependence upon petroleum.

So Dubya, get those troops home pronto AND lets get with the program of replacing our gasoline cars with electric ones, along with improving mass transit so more people don't need to have cars at all!

(2) to end the federal budget deficit AND end our dependence upon credit cards to finances our lifestyles.

So Dubya, RAISE those taxes on your rich bastard friends - LET THOSE WHO HAVE MONEY PAY MORE. The rest of us promise to be more responsible, stop buying $6000 flatscreen TVs and pay off our credit cards.

Well, I'm uninspired to add more now, but lots more. Mostly I just wanted some sort of dual-focus - considering both government and personal action.

Anyway, sorry we're not out protesting, but it doesn't mean we're not thinking about things!

Delusional thinking in stepitup2007

Damn, the idiots at StepItUp are still offering their delusional messages about Global warming - reducing CO2 production by 80% (at only 2% per year)

http://stepitup2007.org/article.php?id=466 2: Cut Carbon 80% by 2050 -This sounds like a lot-but in fact, it's about a two percent reduction a year (assuming we start NOW).

Fools or huckters?! If we START at 2% (to 98% say in 2010, then we'll be cutting from 12% down to 10% in year 2050 - a 10 percent drop!) In fact you need a 3.75% drop per year compounded (exponential decrease) to reach 20% after 40 years. Just garbage!

And worse even:
...for all you climate scientists and policy dorks out there, a longer version could potentially read "Cut Carbon 80% below 1990 levels." Our emissions have risen by about 18% since 1990, so our first step will be to start reducing those.

So we're not talking 80% from what we have now, but down to 20% while AT 118% now. Well, that's a 3.9% annual drop.

I'm supposed to smile and "root for the home team" for offering a happy message. What is pessimism worth? I just think their message is delusional given the MOMENTUM of increasing population (to 9 billion people in 2050), increasing per capita energy use everywhere.

If we want to reduce our fossil fuel usage, we need to reduce our consumption! That means converting our homes to be solar heated, converting our electricity to be solar, converting our cars to be electric, convert our agriculture? The problems are real, but they come at different levels than GW.

How many people are willing to work twice as hard for half their consumption? How do we deal with the level of debt in our country? How do we tell people they have to give up their cars?

I just don't believe ANY problems can be solved from a global focus. It's all local top to bottom. People need to divest from a global economy and find local energy to meet their needs. I can't see how it'll happen, but at best I see it like images of camelot - you create "pilot communities" who get wider investment to "go green" and see what can be done. There's no silver bullet, and maybe most of our ideas now are wrong, what CAN be done, and what people will put up with, if there's still choices to consume more.

It's a nasty mess, and I hate clueless cheerleaders. Get out of debt is still my first commandment to virtue.

Range voting

Against my better judgement I checked out the website advocating for range voting for political elections:
http://rangevoting.org/

Supporters of Range voting especially don't like Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) because it is the only politically viable rival to their politically unviable alternative.
http://rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html Why Range Voting is Better than IRV (Instant Runoff Voting)

I am an IRV support and am NOT a Range Voting supporter, although I acknowledge that IRV is "only better than plurality" and defendably "inferior to a top-two runoff".

A top-two runoff is BETTER primarily because voting is simpler - you pick one candidate to support, and then (if necessary) return for a second vote to confirm a majority winner among the top-two. In contrast IRV requires voters to rank enough candidates so that they can be SURE one of their choices will be among the final two. Ranking may sound easy AND truth-be-told, OUGHT to be done in a top-two runoff as well. Basically in either runoff system, voters must GUESS who could make the final round. I say MUST only in the sense of "best tactic". Honest voting is fine under a runoff, you just have a little less influence than those who think further. How? Basically if there's three strong candidates and the top-two is UNCERTAIN, then a "strategic compromise" might help. Basically you don't want your favorite to BEAT your compromise and then LOSE, if your compromise could have won. Yes, messy, but that's the reality of runoffs.

There's still the alternative - plurality - let the top candidate win no matter how few votes he or she gets. That's what we got for most elections, and plurality and runoffs BOTH rewards parties to organize and unify their support behind one strong candidate.

But why must we do this? I mean WHY can't we all just vote for as many candidates as we want, add all the votes and elect the winner with the most votes. This is called Approval voting and it is JUST like plurality, but there's no restriction of identifying ONLY one best candidate. The winner might have less than a majority, OR there might be multiple candidates above 50%, and still only the top one wins.

I'm all OK with this as it goes, as written above. I mean the strategy is still messy, AND the BEST choice is still to "vote for one" if you think your top choice has a good chance to win. BUT you have the bonus option to hedge your bet for a bunch of decent candidates as you like.

Approval voting doesn't promise a majority winner, BUT worse than that it should NEVER TRY. I mean for instance you might be tempted to say "Well, if there's no majority winner, we'll have a runoff and try again" BUT why?! If you force elimination (like IRV), you open the door to manipulation of false support. If you disallow forced elimination, why would anyone change their vote? And why allow people to change their vote at all? Approvaling voting requires a strategy, like the game Chicken - so taking away consequences takes away the incentive for people to vote honestly and seriously in the first round. Similarly if there was two majority candidates, allowing a revote opens doors that reward false votes in the first round.

Secondly with Range Voting, it is Approval voting, but allowing fractional votes, like percents. I could support Nader 50%, and Kerry 90%, or any combination.

Now there is a "single-vote" intepretation of Approval, has been called "Equal and Even Cumulative voting" (CV), so I could vote for Nader and Kerry and both get 1/2 my vote. And equally I could have fractional Cumulative voting, giving Nader 35%, and Kerry 65%, as long as the sum doesn't exceed 100%. That's merely an extention of plurality, a harmless choice (doesn't given anyone any more power to influence the results), AND it has a property called "Semiproportionality" for multiple winner elections which means in guarantees, if you're electing say 4 seats, any candidate who gets 20% of the vote will be elected, although there's no lower limit on support to be elected, if there's too many candidates running.

And that's the difficulty of CV. Without a runoff, voters have to divide their vote too widely to get a chance to pick a winner and voters with better guesses on where support is needed will have more influence. STV (Single Transferable vote) is a sort of combination of CV (a fractional vote divided among choices automatically optimized where needed) and IRV rank-preference ballots. Not even Range supporters usually put down STV even if they don't like IRV for single winners.

Back to Range voting, there's no great value in supporting someone "half-way" - no reason to not give Nader 100% and Kerry 100%, if you like both. I mean you don't want Kerry losing to Bush because you only gave him 90%. It's always best to maximize the difference between the candidates you don't like and those you do - SO approval voting represents that limit.

Incidentally, there's other compromises that are interesting. You can mix IRV with E&E-CV with an approval ballot rather than a rank preference ballot. So if you support 3 candidates in the first round each gets 33.33% of your vote. If one is eliminated (for being last place), then your new vote is 50% for your two choices. In the final round, you'll ideally have 100% of your vote on one choice. This has an advantage of using simple ballots. It has a "cute factor" for transfering votes more smoothly thank rankings, but it still can have nonmonotonic results like any runoff. (Your favorite can help defeat your compromise and both lose.)

Okay back to Range/Approval, I consider them "mostly harmless" as a single round of voting, no runoff. Voters still have a difficult problem, and different strategies - from "bullet voting" (for one) to "saturation voting" (for ALL acceptable) or something between. How much you want to compromise basically equals how afraid you are of those you don't like.

I accept the conclusion that you should vote in Approval identically as you would in plurality. This is vote for the candidate you WOULD vote for in plurality. THEN add votes for everyone you like better, but didn't vote for because you didn't think they had a chance.

That means if everyone makes rational choices, Approval and Plurality will always agree in winners. So no reform if you're a smart voter already in plurality.

I mean for instance, in the last election for MN Gov, I planned to support Peter Hutchinson from the Independence Party, BUT polls showed he was far behind AND Hatch and Pawlenty were close. I didn't have a great preference between Hatch and Pawlenty, but seeing they were on top, I compromised to Hatch, and abandoned Hutchinson. So in Approval, I could have done my compromise AND supported by true choice. A cute but mostly powerless choice.

That said I believe in Approving voting for something I called "Variable number of winner polls." Specifically asking a question like "Who do you want to hear in the debate?" This question can really have varied answers from EVERYONE to NO ONE and they're all legitimate. So a debate sponsor might offer an Approval (or ratings vote) and allow all candidates above some rating level to participate, like 20% perhaps, or start with a low threshold like 5%, and slowly raise it for later debates. That's a clear example to me because you really do have N independent elections - that's a legitimate use for approval.

Anyway, I don't have too much to disagree with from what I read on the Range Voting website. I won't defend IRV as being "spoiler free", and I accept its weaknesses. I just disagree that approval has much to offer either.

I consider plurality as "the enemy", but I can have sympathy for plurality supporters as well. Majority rule isn't that great of an achievement and not clearly better than "strong plurality". PLUS I know the spoiler factor of plurality is what strengthens parties to unify behind one candidate and what helps leave us with a smaller number of candidates to consider.

Ultimately plurality is also "mostly harmless", and approval as equivalent.

More interesting is STV and multiple winner elections, and that's where FairVote wants to go, and I like experimenting, so happy to support it. PR has its own detractors who say it empowers the wrong candidates - special interest candidates who aren't interested in the bigger picture of the common good. I won't argue except to say no election method promises good candidates will win, or that voters know what they're doing.

But Range voting, oh, intellectually interesting for a while, but I can't support it. Sorry!

Can I defend Critical Mass?

The last Friday of each month in evening rush hour taffic has been designated as "Critical Mass" night by the young Anarchists of Minneapolis and other cities.

I'm a biker, and really can't imagine participating. I've participated in on-foot protests in the past, on specific issues, and don't clearly find them valuable, at least the traffic blocking side - I have more support and sympathy with groups like the local peace movement and their protests on the Lake Street bridge, sharing awareness and letting traffic be.

I would like to find some defense for the CM movement, even as I largely agree with much of the opinion article at the Strib:
http://www.startribune.com/191/story/1463278.html Katherine Kersten: Bike-riding mob owns the streets of Minneapolis
Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs has studied protest movements. He points out that political protest has changed since the '20s and '30s, when those involved were usually poor. ... The '60s and '70s brought a sea change. For the middle- and upper-class young people who flooded into the streets, protest became a vehicle for self-assertion -- the "politics of personal expression." ... In his psychological studies of '60s-style radicals, Lichter discovered two revealing things: They scored high on the power scale, exhibiting a strong need to feel powerful. They also scored high on narcissism -- the need to call attention to themselves, to get public notice.

I didn't know narcissism is about the need to call attention to one's self, but okay whatever, hard to reduce things well to a short description.

My primary complaint about self-righteous judgement over self-righteous rebellion is we're all imperfect human beings trying to find our way and judgement like this article basically pretends what I think it is a false moral highground. (We're civilized, and you're the savages.) I suppose I have to assume that the writer has properly analysed her own moral failing in private and has worked them out sufficient, and now needs not consider herself more than a pure innocent bystander.

Anyway, can I defend CM? Can I give it meaning I could believe in? I'm sure I COULD. I've got my fair share of rage at the outrageous abuses of power in our world, and our daily bribes that keep us silent. What I DON'T have is answers, or at least clear ones, ones that fit into the consciousness that keeps our way of life afloat.

Critical Mass is outrageously offensive, in the sense that it's INTENT is to offend, as easily deduced by their choice of an "innocent bike ride" in downtown in rush hour traffic. Some will admit this. Others are just looking for a cause to celebrate and turn their attention away from the pissed drivers caught in their nets.

I mostly don't see the point in rage, except in SELF-motivation. I don't think MY rage can change YOUR mind on anything except concluding that I'm an asshole.

I do think, if you're going to piss people off, you'd better not be smiling when you're doing it. You'd better not be laughing, and expressing your apparent joy in your power to dominate your will over others. So they ought to be very sober, you know, like a funeral precession. SURE, it's not much fun to go to funerals, but at least that makes sense to me.

If you want to SMILE and LAUGH, do that on your Sunday morning bike rides, when no one is in a hurry and you can take the time talk to people along the way.

I'm not doing well in my defense so far. I could compare another protestor, a nun who has camped herself outside the whitehouse for some crazy period of time like 20 years, in protest against the US possession of nuclear weapons. That's 24 hours/day, minus some strategic bathroom breaks. Such a person might also be narcissist for all I know, but the cause is just and the symbolism crystal clear - she values human life over her own freedom and prosperity. She's a living message to the vision of peace, and when we climb into our cozy beds, we can know she's there outside in the cold, and we're not. Her power isn't apparent, but the process of power is a mystery, like Gandhi showed with his outrageous quote “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

If CM has meaning, in changing consciousness, what would it look like? We have a bunch of mostly kids breaking traffic laws, riding their bikes in unity, defying the control systems.

For riders, I can see the exhileration, to face fear of doing something not allowed, and more than challenging external authority, they're challenging their own inner projections of external authority. They are saying NO to simple rules, even PRACTICAL rules. Some will call putting one's self above the law as narcissist, and others will consider it learning the nature of liberty - to tear down the childish submission to external authority, and open the door to rebuilding a more mature authority that is based on higher reason.

Well, that's a defense for all youthful rebellion. Interestingly it only "works" in some way if the external authority that is being rebelled against actually responds to the transgressions. WELL, this is where it looks tricky! At one level "The law is the law" and there's no exceptions.

Those 600 bikers should ALL be ticketed for breaking the law AND hopefully they'll submit peacefully to authority, and those that don't ultimately need to be subdued. A tricky place for police, to find a level of force that respects the law and the law-breakers.

I guess the August messy ride had police trying to arrest some, and got surrounded by a mob yellowing in unison, telling the police to let them go. Mob democracy isn't very good, and I don't know what they ought to do. If it's just yelling, I'd say continue with the arrest. If a physical fight breaks out and the police are overwhelmed, they're better off retreating rather than using stronger force. I don't know - it's damn scary to be surrounded, and probably 90% of the mob might be ultimately peaceful. Ideally the police need to gain the trust and respect from the crowd, and brutality (like clubbing randomly) isn't going to gain this.

Worse than being outnumbered is to have TWO large forces, so neither feels so weak that it needs to retreat. In general I'd accept that arresting people in a mob situation is difficult and so a united mob can "protect its own".

I could speculate further, but maybe enough to see that it is a rather strange "football game", and people must make up the rules along the way.

With that, perhaps I can wonder "What POWER does a MOB have?" Okay, so they're a mob. They're "above the law" because they have "critical mass" to protect their members from being arrested. Now what? They can "take over the streets". They can break windows and loot. They can even carry weapons and shoot or hurt people. I guess I can classify action as (1) Annoying (2) Destructive (3) Violent. I'd tend to think police ought to refrain from violence until violence has occured, but even that is messy. If 1% of a mob is violent,"mob rules" say the sins of the mob are equally shared among all the members, so once violence erupts, NO one can declare their innocence. This makes mobs rather dangerous political institutions - ultimately being held hostage to the most extreme members. OF COURSE with responsibility means that a MOB is responsible for their own violent members. So perhaps police SHOULD give a mob some time to police ITSELF (i.e temporary strategic retreat if needed.) AND the same holds for police controlling their own "overenthusiastic" officers.

Its all so much nonsense, and the mob people and the police people are not in an sort of personal conflict. Just like wars of old, each side being fought by soldiers no different except wearing a different color uniform.

Perhaps it is "good practice", to face the power of mobs and armies, to surrender your individuality for a collective voice. I can see value in the "game" of expressing power. I don't call it names like "narcissistic" which is just a "power-over" label to explain why the claimed and demands fom the other side ought to be ignored.

Okay, a value for CM? I ought NOT to be held as a promised event, a celebration of freedom, but only as a political tool with very specific political aims - of drawing attention to an issue that has been ignored by all other attempts.

BUT really the "bike" side makes no sense to me UNLESS practical - like ESCORTING people in danger of arrest from place A to place B. Bikes could also help in a "multi-front" protest where the mob is divided and needs more help in some areas over others. But the strategy of mobs is not what I'm intersted in - since it creates success more from cleverness than anything else. Generally I'd say it is better for a mob to simply stick together and not overextend to where it can't defend itself.

So CM as expressed contines to be nonsense to me - it is (1) youthful rebellion searching for its power (2) Learning to wield collective power and the need for self-responsibility.

I might have added a (3) but I can't support it. There's no justifable political reason for monthly bike rides that distrupt people's lives.

I imagine (1) and (2) can help explain why CM has partically been responded to lightly by authority - FOR ONE - the more you fight back - the more will participate in the future, so violence itself will help it grow. AND in defense the "predictability" of the event means affected drivers can respond by avoiding the streets at that time.

I accept it is "lawlessness" in the sense of overriding the law. I accept there is a place of "civilization" where everyone behaves and shares and follows rules that treat others with the golden rule. THEN there's a "wildland" where civilization doesn't control, and all laws are open to negociation. I don't have a GREAT hope that mobs have much to teach, except in lessons of failure - seeing how easily things turn muddy and dark. Humility might come out, and respect for the safety we live in most of the time.

People shouldn't just be terrified of the wildlands, they should be prepared for them, to KNOW what power looks like, and how to de-escalate violence. Good lessons, even if seemingly silly ones to be learned on the street - any better than a football game, I don't know!