Mini-Deanfest Weekend
By Subway...
W00T!
Got home at 9:30.
What a freakin' weekend!
First of all I have to say something about the Deaniacs gathered in Bellows Falls, Vermont. Geez, where to begin...
As folks here know I missed my bus on Friday morning and that meant I was going to be 7 hours late. So I called my friend, Paul in Staten Island. He's one some of you called when I was in the hospital last year.
He tried to email Jessica, but for some reason, the email didn't go through, so I had him email Rene, in Ohio, knowing if she got the email, she could post something here so that someone might get a message to Thankful, who had been on the road from Chicago.
Denise, in San Diego saw the post and called Thankful, who ended up spending a wonderful afternoon with Reed in Vermont while she patiently for 6 hours for a street musician on a bus.
So now it's 8pm and the three of us are in the parking lot of the station talking as if we've been neighbors for years.
Reed was arriving at The Raised Ranch the next afternoon, and after showing off pictures of his trophy wife, he pointed the way to Jessica's place and and said he'd see us on Saturday.
Now when I got the bus ticket here in New York, I was told that Bellows Falls was the nearest stop to the Mini Deanstock in Pittsford.
So 40 miles later we arrive at The Raised Ranch, Jessica's children have me enthralled. Elijah is showing off his video games and his collection of Star Wars Light Sabers(tm) and it was the first time this grandfather has had a chance to hear the wisdom of one who is about the same age as my grandson.
All the while, daughter Melody at 4 years was the model of politeness and affection and innocence and wonder.
Everyone was up till nearly 4am talking and blogging and generally having a good time.
At The Raised Ranch, they have a 13 year old black Labrador Retriever whose name escapes me at the moment because I spent the whole weekend calling him "Puppy." Editor's note: Jessica told us in the comments that the dog's name is Opus, but he thinks he's a puppy.
Having known all along that large dogs prefer deep tissue massage, we engaged in mutual therapy that was very relaxing for both of us.
My late cat, the former Mrs. Wattles, told me on more than one occasion that animals refer to me as Dr. Rubbins, because they know I understand the art of animal massage where ever I go.
Apparently, this is why large neighborhood dogs have been known to drag their owners a half a block or more just to say hello to me. One owner of a black lab named "Rambo" around the corner has been literally been pulled off his feet in such incidents.
So I'm sitting on the on the floor in the living room, playing ith the kids and the dog. Deaniacs are blogging and Jessica's husband is playing blues guitar riffs...
So I wake up the next morning, the rain that persisted throughout the night gave way to the sunshine of dawn. After about 4 hours sleep I stepped out on the upstairs and took a deep breath of Vermontster air.
Broke out in health and it nearly killed me. Fresh air in the home state of Howard Dean, in the home of one of my heroes...(Sorry, Jessica, but I've been around here for a long time and you ARE one of the unsung progressive heroes among us.)
Early Saturday afternoon I set up Gizmo up on the main computer in the house and one by one, most of the folks there tried both heart and brain feedback games. This was very good for me in that I'm eventually going to be selling lots of Gizmos, and it gave me the opportunity to get comfortable with presentation.
Reed in Vermont had a marvelous plan for a Progressive 'Edutainment' Cable Access Network.
The way this would work is to have progressives across the country would obtain local cable access training and present a unified theme each week. Promotion of each week's show would be promoted through the blogs.
Cable companies have their own in house ratings system, and such a network would be quickly noticed.
It would be really easy to have the skeleton of such a network in place in a few months.
Then Mataliandy gave a presentation on framing issues in discussion, and Jessica talked about Instant Runoff Voting.
Quintas, later in the evening, talked about his efforts in New Orleans and how both sides seem to get caught up in the spin and stereotypes. He also detailed his 'mapping' project.
I was worried that Hurricane Dean could wipe out all of the progress made since Katina. But Quintas was also pointing out that the dead trees from Katrina were being turned into mulch, when they could have been used to shore up the barrier wetlands.
Very interesting...
What impressed me most this weekend past is how just a handful of Deaniacs can get so much done in a single weekend.
I'm very excited about Reed's idea of a community based cable action network that dealt with weekly themes.
We discussed perhaps trying to introduce Instant Runoff Voting into the Democratic Primary system.
We got a concise, spin free view of New Orleans, and I got to introduce to a small but important segment of progressives, a technology that will soon alter the course of Civilization itself.
But there was much more to it than that. I can't stress enough that this community is unique in the blogsphere.
It's a sense of community that I have not seen in many churches.
Deaniacs are going to be at the forefront of the next election cycle. They not only have the Power, they have the Wisdom and Compassion and insight to lead. I have no doubt that at the heart each victory there will be the heart and mind of a supporter of Howard Dean.
Finally, I would like to offer my heartfelt thanks to my hosts and friends who helped me make this journey go far more smoothly than I had anticipated. It lasted for what seemed like a moment, but it was liquid silk from start to finish.
Jessica's mom even gave me a spare laptop, which will not only help with my impending retirement from the subway, but will also lead to my showing it to Judy and other friends at the nursing home and elsewhere.
This loving, compassionate community has changed my life many ways.
I've often said that I hand out the Love that has been given to me in thimbles.
In the not too distant future, I will be delivering it by the truck load.
I may have to change my handle.
How about "Astral Technician?"
Imagine playing "Stairway to Heaven" and Heaven is actually up the stairs.
Thank you all.
Namastethon
Celebrate the light.
Haloscan comment thread
I'm not sure what Jessica said about Instant Runoff Voting, but I'll cynically assume the worst. IRV is generally perpetuated on the basis of egregious falsehoods and misconceptions. The simple fact is that better and simpler methods than IRV exist - and IRV is lethal to third parties, because it makes voting for a non-major-party candidate statistically more likely to hurt than help his supporters. The world needs Range Voting or its simplified form of Approval Voting. Here's why.
ReplyDeleteConsider this hypothetical election using IRV.
#voters - their vote
10 G > C > P > M
3 C > G > P > M
5 C > P > M > G
6 M > P > C > G
4 P > M > C > G
C is the clear Condorcet (condor-SAY) winner, meaning he is preferred by a landslide majority over all his individual rivals. C is preferred over G, P, and M all by an 18-10 margin.
But... M wins, even though he also has fewer first-place votes (6 voters) than C with 8.
Also:
1. P is preferred to M by 22 of the 28 voters, yet he's the first candidate eliminated.
2. G also has more first-place votes (10) than M's 6.
3. So M either loses pairwise to, or has fewer first-place votes than (or both) every rival, but still IRV elects M.
The example above was intended to be "realistic," perhaps somewhat resembling the situation in the (now evolving) 2008 US presidential race with G="Green", M=McCain, C=Edwards, and P=Paul. But if you are willing to drop realism and construct artificial election scenarios, then this demonstrates how to construct arbitrarily-severe election examples of this kind: http://rangevoting.org/IRVamp.html#bad
IRV sounds initially appealing, because people picture a weak third party candidate who loses in the first round. The myth is that this takes away the fear of voting for your sincere favorite candidate, and gives third parties a fair chance to grow; but if that candidate or his party ever grows to be a contender, he is statistically more likely to hurt the party closest to his own than to win. It doesn't matter how unlikely you imagine the above scenario to be - it's still _more_ likely than the odds "Green" will win. And so third party voters will learn to strategically vote for their favorite major-party candidate, because it will more often be a good strategy than a bad one. You don't have to buy my math; you can look at decades of IRV usage in Australia's house, and Ireland's presidency. Both use IRV, and have been two-party dominated. So much for the myths that IRV allows you to "vote your hopes, not your fears", and eliminates spoilers. Now you can see why the Libertarian Reform Caucus calls IRV a "bullet in the foot" for third parties, and why Australian political analysts at AustralianPolitics.com say that IRV "promotes a two-party system to the detriment of minor parties and independents." Ironically, most of the many countries in the world who use a genuine _delayed_ runoff have broken free of duopoly. Yet third parties just worked to help replace that system with IRV in Oakland, CA. This can be chalked up to a result of massive public ignorance, largely perpetuated by groups such as FairVote and the League of Women Voters (http://RangeVoting.org/Irvtalk.html).
Electoral reform advocates (especially third parties!) should be demanding Range Voting - score all the candidates and elect the one with the highest average. Its simplified form, Approval Voting, is probably the most feasible to implement. It simply uses ordinary ballots, but allows us to vote for as many candidates as we like. Consider the benefits:
* More resistant to strategy: As we see above, IRV strategically "forces" voters not to top-rank their sincere favorite; the general strategy with IRV is to top-rank your favorite of the front-runners (typically the major party candidates). But with Range Voting and Approval Voting, this _never_ happens. The worst a voter may do is exaggerate his sincere scores to the max and min scores allowed. But with Range Voting, a vote for your favorite candidate can never hurt you, or the candidate, whereas with IRV it can hurt both. -- http://RangeVoting.org/StratHonMix.html
* The previous fact helps to explain why IRV results in two-party duopoly, just like plurality voting. -- http://RangeVoting.org/TarrIrv.html
* Spoiler free: Whereas IRV merely _reduces_ spoilers. -- http://rangevoting.org/FBCexecSumm.html
* Decreases spoiled ballots: Since voting for more than one candidate is permissible, the number of invalid ballots experimentally goes down with Range and Approval Voting. But IRV typically results in a seven fold increase in spoiled ballots when we started using IRV. -- http://rangevoting.org/SPRates.html
* Simpler to use: In 2006, the Center for Range Voting conducted an exit poll experiment in Beaumont, TX. There were 5 gubernatorial candidates, and voters were allowed to rate them 0-10 (or "abstain"). They all seemed to find the process as simple and intuitive. There were no complaints of complexity, or any questions for clarification. And the fact that spoilage rates go down with Range Voting, but up with IRV, shows that there is some objective sense in which RV is simpler. Voters literally make fewer mistakes.
* Simpler to implement/tabulate: A simple one-round summation tells us the results, whereas IRV's potential for multiple rounds can cause long delays before the final results are determined. A positive side-effect of Range Voting's simplicity is that it makes the necessary transition to manual counting, and away from voting machines, more feasible. And Range Voting can be conducted on all standard voting machines in the interim. Whereas IRV's complexity leads most communities implementing it to purchase expensive and fraud-conducive (electronic!) voting machines, the fraudster's best friend. -- http://RangeVoting.org/Complexity.html
* Greater voter satisfaction: Using extensive computer modeling of elections, a Princeton math Ph.D. named Warren D. Smith has shown that these methods lead to better average satisfaction with election results, surpassing the alternatives by a good margin. But IRV turns out to be the second _worst_ of the commonly proposed alternatives. This mean that all voters will benefit from the adoption of either of these superior voting methods, regardless of political stripe. -- http://RangeVoting.org/vsi.html
* Reduces the probability of ties: While they are not extremely common, they do happen. IRV statistically increases them, but Range Voting decreases them. -- http://RangeVoting.org/TieRisk.html
* In case you're going to say, "But IRV has more _momentum_ than Range Voting", you should consider this. -- http://RangeVoting.org/IRVsplitExec.html
* In case you wonder why groups like FairVote and the League of Women Voters support IRV, maybe you should consider all the misleading and even patently false claims they've made about it. -- http://RangeVoting.org/Irvtalk.html
Get the facts at RangeVoting.org and ApprovalVoting.org
And if you're in the market for a better system of proportional representation (http://RangeVoting.org/PropRep.html) than the antiquated STV system, check out Reweighted Range Voting and Asset Voting.
http://RangeVoting.org/RRV.html
http://RangeVoting.org/Asset.html
Clay Shentrup
San Francisco, CA
415.240.1973
clay@electopia.org
Hey, sounds like you all had an unexpectedly interesting, fun and outgoing weekend! Love it. (I'm a blogger from Maine and I like to keep up with what's going on!)
ReplyDeleteBTW, I love, love that you all were talking about IRV. There is a group trying to move that forward in Vermont and other places. It's a great idea. I don't know what this guy is talking about... Dean is a fan for the same reasons I am (or at least that's what I'm telling myself!) Let's let independents flourish and bring them to the table.
FairVote.org is working on this and I'm sure they'd love to know you're all pitching in!
Cheers,
~MissDem