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U.S. Politics: If Trump Is In Attendance, The Next Protest Should Be A Roman Salute


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15 hours ago, The Great Unwashed said:

I think it's a bit of a stretch to call Trump merely a symptom of the current state of things. I mean, the Republican Party has been actively campaigning for years or even longer on a paradigm that views people merely as commodities to be exploited.

I think Trump was able to thread the needle by capitalizing on racist, sexist and homophobic backlash while also promising economic governance in outright contrast to Republican orthodoxy (won't cut SS or Medicare, health care for all, raise taxes on the wealthy, etc.). His actual governance of course has been right up Republican alley, and most of the noises being made are weak-kneed Republican zealots scared that his intemperate nature will screw the sweet deal they have going on now.

Kind of. Trump is a cause and symptom in that Trump basically exploited the division between the base and the Republican establishment to steal the nomination out from under the party's control. (PS - this is why primaries like the US has can be very dangerous)

Just regarding foreign policy and US hegemony, Trump's antics are in line with standard US populist rhetoric, especially on the right. But that has always been at odds with what the interest groups who usually actually direct US foreign policy want. Because of that previously this was never really an issue.

But now the GOP has elected themselves a populist who's views are the same as their base's and put him in a position where the party establishment and/or Congress has no control over him. So he's pushing the populist vision of american foreign policy. Who's inevitable result, if it continues long enough unchecked, is the destruction of american hegemony.

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Also, your latest update on how current US immigration is a crime against humanity, from Trump right on down to the lowliest jackbooted racist thug in border services:

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Aleman-Bendiks, the public defender, said several of her clients have told her their children were taken from them by Border Patrol agents who said they were going to give them a bath. As the hours passed, it dawned on the mothers the kids were not coming back.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2018/06/09/borderseparations/Z95z4eFZjyfqCLG9pyHjAO/story.html

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The G7 meeting ended with Trump repudiating it after first signing off on it. Apparently Trump was out of sorts with Justin Trudeau for not giving in to him. 

Right now Kim is thinking to himself "I am dealing with an idiot here. A fucking idiot." 

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17 hours ago, Triskele said:

Will read the article, but even if it's true that there were fault lines before Trump it is still stunning to see the American President antagonizing Germany and Canada and others like this.  Putin wants NATO weakened and what better way to facilitate that than for the US to no longer be allied with Germany, France, Britain, etc..

NATO is not going anywhere though. Trade people and military people are pretty distinct and the military people have no quarrel with each other at the moment. Trump does sit at the top of both hierarchies, but I consider it extremely unlikely that he'll try to do anything about NATO beyond demanding that the Europeans pay more for it. Seriously messing with NATO is one of the very few things that can actually get him impeached.

16 hours ago, The Great Unwashed said:

I think it's a bit of a stretch to call Trump merely a symptom of the current state of things. I mean, the Republican Party has been actively campaigning for years or even longer on a paradigm that views people merely as commodities to be exploited.

Look at the bigger picture: every country has its own traditions, its own power structures which are conducive to populism and others which oppose it. Considered individually, each movement looks unique and there's no overarching ideology that binds them all (in fact, some are from the right and some from the left). However, despite the local flavors, they are all reactions to the same underlying problems.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/books/review/jon-meacham-soul-of-america.html

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. . . . What’s troubling is the continuing history, amply if less fully documented in the book, of another abiding element of the American “soul,” an authoritarian politics that is absolutist, oligarchic, anti-egalitarian, demagogic and almost always racist. This political strain emerged before Meacham fully begins his story, flowering in the Confederate States of America, the modern world’s first experiment in building a nation founded explicitly on racial supremacy. Although defeated in 1865, this dark strain was never destroyed; indeed, if the Confederacy lost the Civil War, Meacham remarks, in important ways it won the peace following the white South’s fitful overthrow of Reconstruction.

Thereafter, he shows, the authoritarian strain mutated into numerous deplorable appeals and movements that incited white racism, demonized immigrants and promoted plutocracy. For adherents — as he observes of the original racist neo-Confederates during Reconstruction — the rejection of federal rule was “a holy cause.”

Although these antidemocratic impulses have sometimes infected conventional partisan politics, for the most part national parties and politicians have kept them at bay. Under President Trump, however, they have become not just ascendant in the White House but entrenched in what was long ago Lincoln’s Republican Party. . . . 

 

 

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7 hours ago, dmc515 said:

Anyway, I disagree with the underlying assumption that ranked choice is intuitively more fair than plurality.  Arrow's impossibility demonstrated this is a faulty assumption nearly 70 years ago.

Arrow proved that it's impossible to have a perfect voting system. That doesn't mean no system can be better than any other system!

7 hours ago, dmc515 said:

Plurality - and majority - systems perpetuate two party systems, so that's what both parties are always going to prefer.

Which is why they're much worse than ranked systems that pick the Condorcet winner.

6 hours ago, maarsen said:

We just had an example of a weighted voting system delivering an contrary result. The Progressive Conservative party up here in Ontario had an election for party leader using the format of a ranked ballot and a system where each riding had an equal number of points towards the outcome regardless of the voting numbers in the riding. The person who was the first choice of the most delegates in total... still ended up losing.

"Most" in this case meaning "less than 40%", not "the majority". If 60% hated that person and were ok with the person who actually won, then it would make perfect sense for the first person to lose. Though in this specific case, it appears the final result was very close. And the weighting-by-ridings thing is an electoral college style deformation of actual voter preferences that gives low population areas disproportionate power, and is unrelated to using ranked voting.

6 hours ago, maarsen said:

As a result we now have a premier who has the lowest approval rating at around 20 %, and yet still managed to get elected with a majority in our legislature. The flaws inherent in both systems are on full display here in Ontario.

Ontario appears to have an FPP system, which allowed the PC to win a majority of seats with only 40.5% of the vote. If half of PC voters don't like their own leader (which would have been the case no matter which candidate won!) and nobody else likes the PC at all, then  yes, you'd be at around 20% approval for the premier.

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10 minutes ago, felice said:

Arrow proved that it's impossible to have a perfect voting system. That doesn't mean no system can be better than any other system!

It does mean no system is going to be inherently more fair in all outcomes, which was my point.

12 minutes ago, felice said:

Which is why they're much worse than ranked systems that pick the Condorcet winner.

Again, the point of the Arrow impossibility - and the Condorcet paradox - is that no system can guarantee the Condorcet winner in all outcomes due to the potentiality of cyclical preferences (and difficulty of satisfying the rather stringent IIA condition in Arrow's case).

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BTW, this is not just theory.  During the 2016 GOP primaries, me and a few colleagues ran a series of Mturk surveys trying to determine the Condorcet winner using a number of methods - asking a series of all possible pairwise preferences, ranked choice, etc. for all (well, the top 8) candidates.  Based on our sample, it was impossible to determine the Condorcet winner using any voting method - which was part of the problem with that primary.  When there are a large number of significant candidates, this is often the case.

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4 hours ago, Shryke said:

Also, your latest update on how current US immigration is a crime against humanity, from Trump right on down to the lowliest jackbooted racist thug in border services:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2018/06/09/borderseparations/Z95z4eFZjyfqCLG9pyHjAO/story.html

This sounds like a really creepy euphemism. I wouldn't be the least surprised if these children turn out to have been drowned. Together with the recent reports about border patrol keeping children in cages, it's time to get extremely concerned. Historically, such behavior resulted in massive death tolls, whether the GULag or the KZ...

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On voting systems: as someone who has voted in national elections using both FPTP (UK) and instant runoff (Aus), I find instant runoff to be infinitely better.

I can vote for minor party or independent candidates who I more closely align with ideologically, knowing that if they don't get in my vote will go to my preferred major party candidate, and my vote isn't wasted. I don't have to do any strategic voting bullshit. Seems more fair to me anyway.

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3 hours ago, maarsen said:

The G7 meeting ended with Trump repudiating it after first signing off on it. Apparently Trump was out of sorts with Justin Trudeau for not giving in to him. 

Right now Kim is thinking to himself "I am dealing with an idiot here. A fucking idiot." 

Nah, he's thinking "I'm dealing with a fucking rube. This might be even easier then I thought!"

He's gonna have a one on one meeting with the guy, no handlers. And Trump cares only about his own ego, his own pocketbook and his image in the press.

Kim can easily wrangle at least Trump publicly saying he's gonna give real concessions to North Korea in exchange for empty words,  some bribes and a few "good" photo ops.

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1 hour ago, dmc515 said:

It does mean no system is going to be inherently more fair in all outcomes, which was my point.

But some systems can certainly be much more fair than others on average.

1 hour ago, dmc515 said:

Again, the point of the Arrow impossibility - and the Condorcet paradox - is that no system can guarantee the Condorcet winner in all outcomes due to the potentiality of cyclical preferences (and difficulty of satisfying the rather stringent IIA condition in Arrow's case).

In some cases there is no Condorcet winner; that's not the same as a system failing to select the Condorcet winner. And in those cases, a system that's trying to find a Condorcet winner isn't necessarily going to end up with a less desirable outcome than one which isn't.

Basically no practical system (including FPP) satisfies the IIA condition, so it's not worth considering.

1 hour ago, dmc515 said:

BTW, this is not just theory.  During the 2016 GOP primaries, me and a few colleagues ran a series of Mturk surveys trying to determine the Condorcet winner using a number of methods - asking a series of all possible pairwise preferences, ranked choice, etc. for all (well, the top 8) candidates.  Based on our sample, it was impossible to determine the Condorcet winner using any voting method - which was part of the problem with that primary.  When there are a large number of significant candidates, this is often the case.

What sort of sample size were you dealing with, and how representative of the actual voting population? I'd be more interested in statistics on how often actual ranked vote elections don't have a Condorcet winner - eg data from Australian elections.

Though I am curious to know who your surveys picked as the 2016 Primary winner, for those methods that produced a single outcome.

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22 minutes ago, Shryke said:

Nah, he's thinking "I'm dealing with a fucking rube. This might be even easier then I thought!"

He's gonna have a one on one meeting with the guy, no handlers. And Trump cares only about his own ego, his own pocketbook and his image in the press.

Kim can easily wrangle at least Trump publicly saying he's gonna give real concessions to North Korea in exchange for empty words,  some bribes and a few "good" photo ops.

Yea, this will be easy for Kim. He'll do exactly what every other strong man has done with Trump. Flatter him over and over while giving up absolutely nothing.

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4 minutes ago, Los Ticos Mexal said:

Yea, this will be easy for Kim. He'll do exactly what every other strong man has done with Trump. Flatter him over and over while giving up absolutely nothing.

Wanna bet on how soon after the meet Trump notes how sympathetic Kim was about the difficulties of not having a state run media?

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2 hours ago, felice said:

But some systems can certainly be much more fair than others on average.

I suppose, but this is solely a normative argument.  It can't really be empirically determined..well, I suppose it could, but the logistics (both cost and time) of such a research design are so prohibitive it's not happening any time soon.  More importantly, no formal modeling has been able to derive any method as Pareto optimal (let alone satisfying IIA) as of yet.

2 hours ago, felice said:

In some cases there is no Condorcet winner; that's not the same as a system failing to select the Condorcet winner. And in those cases, a system that's trying to find a Condorcet winner isn't necessarily going to end up with a less desirable outcome than one which isn't.

Right, but there's no reason to assume plurality - and especially majority - systems do not render the Condorcet winner in two party systems (in which the set - or candidates - is inherently going to be smaller) at the same rate as any other voting system.

2 hours ago, felice said:

What sort of sample size were you dealing with, and how representative of the actual voting population?

So the project emanated from a faculty member happening to have a bunch of grant money left over.  Accordingly we probably over-sampled - two sets (for pairwise and ranked - bad form to ask the same respondent to do both) of 2,000 respondents for three stages - one right before the Iowa caucus, one shortly after New Hampshire, and one after Super Tuesday.  So, overall, we had a 12,000 respondent sample, or thereabouts.  We obviously included a likely voter (in the GOP primary) item as a filter, then eventually weighted the results to reflect the GOP primary population like any polling firm.  I don't know how we did the latter, it wasn't my job.  Could ask the guy who did do it if you're really interested.

2 hours ago, felice said:

Though I am curious to know who your surveys picked as the 2016 Primary winner, for those methods that produced a single outcome.

Trump won the plurality vote, but I distinctly remember he consistently lost in the pairwise preferences to Bush, Kasich, Cruz, and Rubio.  I think he beat Christie and Paul while they were around - obviously there was attrition between the stages.  Don't remember with Carson, think I blocked it out.  It's hard to remember who was "leading" the pairwise matchups.  I think Bush and Rubio.  In terms of the ranked, Rubio and later Cruz were the leaders. 

Honestly, all this work was done over two years ago, so I'd really have to go digging in my dropbox or ask one of said colleagues to know for sure.  I left the project when (1) I grew frustrated we were building a camel and wanted to focus on my diss and more promising projects and (2) I realized it would never be published as anything more than a research note.

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Meet the guys who tape Trump's papers back together

The president's unofficial 'filing system' involves tearing up documents into pieces, even when they're supposed to be preserved.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/10/trump-papers-filing-system-635164

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Armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape, Lartey and his colleagues would sift through large piles of shredded paper and put them back together, he said, “like a jigsaw puzzle.” Sometimes the papers would just be split down the middle, but other times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti.

It was a painstaking process that was the result of a clash between legal requirements to preserve White House records and President Donald Trump’s odd and enduring habit of ripping up papers when he’s done with them — what some people described as his unofficial “filing system.”

 

 

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19 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

Trump won the plurality vote, but I distinctly remember he consistently lost in the pairwise preferences to Bush, Kasich, Cruz, and Rubio.

That's interesting because by the time the race was down to three candidates (Trump, Cruz and Kasich), most of Trump's wins were either 50%+ (in which case he wins every pairing even if we assume that reducing the field nets him no additional voters at all) or pretty close to it.

It's worth noting here for people from outside the US that the party-wide Presidential candidate selection has one or two features that would be considered completely unacceptable by most people aiming for a fair vote. First, the various states vote on different dates separated from first to last by around half a year. This gives candidates who are not well-known nationally a chance, but it also means that votes in some states are worth a whole lot more than in others. Second, a significant number of states chooses candidates via caucuses rather than primaries which means, among other things, the lack of a secret ballot. I suspect that most people who debate the merits of an ideal voting system would agree that US presidential candidate selection is nowhere close to anything of the sort.

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