No ID - No Problem - La Raza Posts Guide

[Katiebee]

Well, here's a news flash from Texas. Gov-Elect Abbott's plan to secure the Texas border is to add 500 State Troopers.
This for a border of 1,933 miles.

Got news for the mathmatically and tactically challenged in Texas government. that is like applying a 1 inch bandaid to staunch the flow of blood from a traumatically amputated thigh. Ridiculaously small and ineffectual.

Spend money for no real return.

The U.S. Border patrol, in the El Paso Sector, alone, employs approximately 2,400 Border Patrol Agent positions, six permanent vehicle checkpoints and patrols 268 miles of international border.

Now tell me that the new fuckwad Texas Governor knows what he is doing. Tell that to me with a straight face and I'll label you as stupid as he is.

He's just another oligarch pandering to the stupid proletariat.

[MissBarbara]

Anyone who thinks the electorate wanted to reward Conservatives or any other group, is sadly mistaken. This was a drumming of President Obama's policies and attitude about the voters, and how he does what they view as his job, leading toward prosperity (lack of both).

I agree, though not exactly for the reason you indicate. Midterm election results consistently represent a repudiation of the party in charge, be they Democrats or Republicans. Tuesday's election results demonstrate that voters wanted a change, someone else in charge. The voters sided with the GOP with a Democratic president in the White House and Democratic control of at least one House of Congress -- just as the voters sided with the Democrats in the 2006 midterms, with a Republican in the White House and Republican control of at least one House of Congress.

And the same goes for the presidency. Except for 12 years of Reagan + Bush #1 from 1981-1993, a single party hasn't held the White House for more than two terms since FDR + Truman in the 1930s and '40s. And, given the state of things today, I think there's an excellent chance that a moderate Republican will win the White House in 2016.

In other words, it had almost nothing to do with specific policies and plans. It's all about Hope for Change. Or, as you put it, the pendulum swinging back and forth. These guys failed, so let's give the other guys a chance.

Dems who hid from their President, for fear of being discovered by their constituents, largely were penalized if there was a opponent who was willing to point it out, hold their feet to the fire... and they people did just that. Rejection after 6 years of chaos, with the coming plan worse than what has come before... the President is still seeking his radical agenda, and unfortunately the RINOs and coming 'leaders' will short circuit the process, and "get this year behind us", by caving in most cases during the Lame Duck session, selling you out wholesale, in hope of short memories.

"Dems hiding from Obama" is a fairly accurate way if putting it.

But, Obama has never pursued a "radical agenda." In fact, my greatest criticism of him is based on the fact that he did not pursue a "radical agenda." I know people on the Right define anything that's not Conservative as "radical" or "ultra liberal" (or "socialist" or "communist"). None of those terms come close to describing Obama, based on his actions in office. Obama's a plain old moderate. Would that he were more radical, or more liberal!

Still, better than having Harry Reid in any position of power over us, no matter the clowns who may take over now. The President must be forced to address his own policies with his veto as moves to moderate and correct this mess are presented, then dialog can prevail to hammer out a working arrangement.

That's a somewhat extreme description. Obama's most fundamental failing is his inability -- sometimes, his seeming refusal -- to work with Congress. I know Lefties will react to that statement by proclaiming GOP intransigence. It played a role, but only a minor role. On the one hand, for his first two years in office, the Democrats controlled the White House, House, and Senate, and during his first six years Democrats controlled the White House and Senate. On the other hand, every successful president has succeeded precisely by forging a working alliance with Congress -- even a hostile Congress. Obama's failure to work with Congress -- GOP intransigence notwithstanding -- is perhaps the greatest failure of his administration.

For January 2015, Democrats will control fewer legislative seats in the various States than they have since the Civil War, I heard stated today. If that is not rejection of what has been passing for Democrat Policy and Leadership, I don't know what is. We shall see how it goes forward from here, and what bait the Lame Duck and coming Congress will bite on, what they will pass on, to get this mess under some degree of control.

Comparing the Democratic Party in 1864 and the Democratic Party 150 years later in 2014 is completely illegitimate. As is comparing the Republican Party in 1864 and 2014.

The Democratic Party in the antebellum and Civil War years was intensely conservative, bearing closer comparison to the modern-day Tea Party than the modern-day Democratic Party. Lincoln, on the other hand, was a "radical." And, had be not been murdered and left free to pursue his reconstruction plans, he would have gone down in history as, perhaps, our most radical president.

[joan1984]

Here is something for anyone remotely interested in voting as action:

http://reason.com/archives/2012/10/03/your-vote-doesnt-count

Enjoy!

[MissBarbara]

Here is something for anyone remotely interested in voting as action:

http://reason.com/archives/2012/10/03/your-vote-doesnt-count

Enjoy!

I'm very interested in reading this. But:

"To view the remaining section of the article, you can create an account and login."

No thanks -- I get way too much junk email as it is...

[anvil]

that didn't happen to me, read the whole article.

double talk philosophy based on a false premise.

[MissBarbara]

that didn't happen to me, read the whole article.

double talk philosophy based on a false premise.

I still can't access it. Could you copy and post it here?

[joan1984]

have same trouble, barb, access denied without joinign... maybe they know I read it before. or free access timed out. was a fun read anyway

that didn't happen to me, read the whole article.

double talk philosophy based on a false premise.

I still can't access it. Could you copy and post it here?

[anvil]

here you go,,,

.

Wearing an “I Voted” sticker on Election Day
announces that you are a proud participant in the
grand tradition of representative democracy, the
worst system except all the others. It says “I care,”
“I’m informed,” and perhaps also “this shirt is
machine washable.”
On that day (November 6! Mark your calendars!),
when Americans are resting from their quadrennial
labors of locating a polling place, standing in line,
and pushing buttons, pulling levers, filling bubbles,
or poking a touch screen, there is a surefire way to
start a fight in any bar, church, or bus in the
country. Three little words: I don’t vote.
Voting is widely thought to be one of the most
important things a person can do. But the reasons
people give for why they vote (and why everyone
else should too) are flawed, unconvincing, and
sometimes even dangerous. The case for voting
relies on factual errors, misunderstandings about
the duties of citizenship, and overinflated
perceptions of self-worth. There are some good
reasons for some people to vote some of the time.
But there are a lot more bad reasons to vote, and
the bad ones are more popular.
‘Every Vote Counts’
Let’s start with the basics: Your vote will almost
certainly not determine the outcome of any public
election. I’m not talking about conspiracy theories
regarding rigged elections or malfunctioning voting
machines—although both of those things have
happened and will happen again. I’m not talking
about swing states or Supreme Court power grabs
or the weirdness of the Electoral College. I’m
talking about pure, raw math.
In all of American history, a single vote has never
determined the outcome of a presidential election.
And there are precious few examples of any other
elections decided by a single vote. A 2001 National
Bureau of Economic Research paper by economists
Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter looked at
56,613 contested congressional and state
legislative races dating back to 1898. Of the 40,000
state legislative elections they examined,
encompassing about 1 billion votes cast, only
seven were decided by a single vote (two were
tied). A 1910 Buffalo contest was the lone single-
vote victory in a century’s worth of congressional
races. In four of the 10 ultra-close campaigns
flagged in the paper, further research by the
authors turned up evidence that subsequent
recounts unearthed margins larger than the official
record initially suggested.
The numbers just get more ridiculous from there. In
a 2012 Economic Inquiry article, Columbia University
political scientist Andrew Gelman, statistician Nate
Silver, and University of California, Berkeley,
economist Aaron Edlin use poll results from the
2008 election cycle to calculate that the chance of
a randomly selected vote determining the outcome
of a presidential election is about one in 60 million.
In a couple of key states, the chance that a random
vote will be decisive creeps closer to one in 10
million, which drags voters into the dubious
company of people gunning for the Mega-Lotto
jackpot. The authors optimistically suggest that
even with those terrible odds, you may still choose
to vote because “the payoff is the chance to
change national policy and improve (one hopes) the
lives of hundreds of millions, compared to the
alternative if the other candidate were to win.” But
how big does that payoff have to be to make voting
worthwhile?
‘Voting Is an Investment in the Future’
If you ask a man on the street why rich people are
more likely to vote for Republicans, he will probably
tell you a story about how the GOP promotes
policies that favor businesses and lower the tax
burden of the wealthiest people in society. But your
sidewalk interlocutor is wrong on two counts. First,
rich people are not more likely to vote Republican.
(It was a trick question.) Second, study after study,
poll after poll, finds that people do not typically
vote in ways that align with their personal material
interests. The old, for instance, don’t support Social
Security in higher numbers than the young.
In their seminal 1993 book Decision and Democracy:
The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference (Cambridge
University Press), University of Virginia philosopher
and reason Contributing Editor Loren Lomasky and
his co-author, Geoffrey Brennan, offer an alternative
theory of what drives voters. But first they offer a
methodology for calculating the value of a vote. On
their account, the expected utility of a vote is a
function of the probability that the vote will be
decisive, delivering gains (to the individual or
society as a whole) if the preferred candidate wins.
The probability of casting the decisive vote
decreases slowly as the size of the voting pool gets
larger, but it drops dramatically when polls show
that one candidate has even a slight lead. Which
means that in a presidential election, where the
number of voters is about 120 million and one
candidate is usually polling a point or two ahead on
Election Day, you’re screwed.
In his brilliant 2011 book The Ethics of Voting
(Princeton University Press), on which I have relied
heavily for this article, Georgetown University
philosopher Jason Brennan (no relation to Geoffrey
Brennan) applied the Lomasky/Brennan method to
a hypothetical scenario in which the victory of one
candidate would produce additional GDP growth of
0.25 percent in one year. Assuming a very close
election where that candidate is leading in the polls
only slightly and a random voter has a 50.5
percent chance of casting a ballot for her, the
expected value of a vote for that candidate is
$4.77 x 10 to the −2,650th power. That’s 2,648
orders of magnitude less than a penny.
It’s not hard to beat that offer. Say you plan to
sleep for an extra hour instead of voting. Unless
you are astonishingly well rested, an hour of sleep
is almost certainly worth more to you than an
infinitesimal fragment of a penny. Or say you plan
to use that time to write an election-related blog
post. The expected social payoff of even the
lowest-traffic blog post is higher than the payoff
from voting. In fact, an alternative activity plan
isn’t even necessary: Simply not driving to the
polls slightly reduces the chance that you or
someone else will die in a car accident on Election
Day, which is worth more than your vote can ever
hope to be.
Those figures reflect 2006 GDP figures and 2004
voting totals, but it almost doesn’t matter what
batch of reasonable numbers you plug into the
equation. Say you think victory is worth 10 or 100
or 1,000 times more than the roughly $33 billion
that 0.25 percent of GDP amounts to. Say the polls
show a gap of two percentage points between the
candidates. In any plausible scenario, the expected
utility of your vote still amounts to approximately
bupkes. A vote for a third-party candidate pushes
the figure into even more infinitesimal territory.
Voters know this on some level. If they truly
believed that each person’s vote could be the vote,
imagine how they would treat people who disagree
with them in early November. Voter suppression
happens occasionally, of course. Unscrupulous
actors send out flyers that give the wrong date for
Election Day or mislead voters about the correct
polling place. But if people were operating on the
theory that your vote actually counts, far dirtier
tricks would be happening everywhere, every day.
‘Voting Is a Civic Duty’
No individual vote is likely to determine the
outcome of an election; nor is it likely to result in a
material gain for the voter. Does that mean people
who vote are irrational, evil, or stupid? Not
necessarily. Or at least not all of them.
In October 2000, Harvard economist Gregory
Mankiw penned a column for Fortune called “Why
Some People Shouldn’t Vote.” During his years-
long stint as a columnist for the magazine, this was
the only article the editors refused to run. The
column, which he published on his personal blog
years later, suggests that “the next time a friend of
yours tells you he’s not voting, don’t try to change
his mind.”
Mankiw’s argument draws on a 1996 article by
economists Timothy Feddersen of Northwestern
University and Wolfgang Pesendorfer of Princeton
University that cites the phenomenon of “roll off”—
people who make it all the way inside the polyester
curtains on Election Day and then leave some
blanks on their ballots—to illustrate the point that
people who believe themselves ill-informed
routinely choose not to vote, thereby increasing the
quality of voters who actually pull the lever for one
side or the other. There is some additional
evidence for this claim: Education is one of the two
best predictors of voter turnout (the other is age).
Better-educated people are much more likely to
vote, which suggests that the pool of voters is
better informed and more qualified to make
election-related judgments than the pool of
nonvoters.

(Page 2 of 3)
“A classic argument for why democracies need
widespread public education is that education
makes people better voters,” Mankiw writes. “If this
is true, then the less educated should show up at
the polls less often. They are rationally delegating
the decision to their better educated neighbors.”
What Mankiw doesn’t go on to say, perhaps
because he fears insulting his readers, is that
people aren’t particularly good at knowing whether
or not they are well-informed. Many people who
follow politics closely hold views that are
dangerous and wrong (see George Mason
University economist Bryan Caplan’s October 2007
reason cover story “The 4 Boneheaded Biases of
Stupid Voters”). Even if everyone who had the
slightest suspicion that he was not knowledgeable
enough to vote stayed home on Election Day,
millions of people would still be casting ill-informed
votes.
Demographically speaking, if you’re reading this,
you’re probably closer to the top than the bottom
of the distribution. But you still have very little
knowledge of what a politician will do once you
send him to Washington. The gap between the
promised and real consequences of electing one
guy over the other is very difficult to anticipate.
Even jaded libertarian types, for instance, were
hopeful that President Barack Obama would be
better than his predecessor on issues such as civil
liberties and the war on drugs. Look how that
turned out. You don’t know as much as you think.
‘Rock the Vote’
Encouraging more ignorant people to vote is not
just pointless, argues Jason Brennan; it’s morally
wrong. There is no duty to vote, but many people
may have a duty not to vote. Boosting turnout
among citizens who are young, uneducated, or
otherwise less likely to be engaged—the primary
targets of get-out-the-vote campaigns—is likely to
have the unintended consequence of encouraging
people to fail in that duty.
To explain why we might worry about casting an
uninformed vote even when no particular vote is
likely to be decisive, Brennan conjures this
terrifying thought experiment: Imagine you come
across a firing squad about to kill an innocent
child. Assume all the bullets will strike at the same
time and that there’s nothing you can do to stop
them. You are invited to be the 101st member of
the squad. What do you say? Brennan posits a
framework to deal with this kind of hypothetical, the
“clean hands principle,” which states that “one
should not participate in collectively harmful
activities when the cost of refraining from such
activities is low.”
None of this is to suggest that the government
should test voters or use some other legal means
to limit voting. Instead, this is a private moral
concern for each voter. If you believe your vote is
likely to be ill-informed or that a particular race is
likely to yield an unfair, unjust, or otherwise bad
outcome, you should refrain from participating in a
collectively harmful activity, thus keeping your
hands clean. Get-out-the-vote campaigns promote
precisely the kind of morally condemnable ignorant
voting we should be discouraging.
This is the perspective that informs those “Don’t
Vote, It Only Encourages the Bastards” bumper
stickers. Washing one’s hands of the whole system
is a good way to ensure that they remain clean,
even when the politicos are dirty.
‘What If Everybody Stopped Voting?’
What if the arguments against voting were so
persuasive that everyone stopped voting? This
worry, which channels the categorical imperative of
18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant,
posits that if everyone behaved as the nonvoters
do, the whole system would fall apart. A certain
minimum level of participation is necessary for
elections to appear legitimate.
This objection is natural and intuitive. The force
behind it is reflected in the Golden Rule and many
other moral systems. But there’s no reason to think
that one person’s choice not to vote, or even to
write a magazine article making the case against
voting, will dramatically alter the behavior of the
tens of millions who currently vote.
Even if individual voting behavior were
universalized, an anti-voting stance could easily be
reframed to deal with this narrow hypothetical. One
ought not vote, say, unless one’s vote has a
nontrivial chance of determining the outcome of an
election. If someone found herself in an electorate
with zero other voters, she could happily vote
(perhaps a write-in of her own name) without
violating the general anti-voting principle.
‘If You Don’t Vote, You Can’t Complain’
For someone who complains about politics, policy,
and politicians for a living, the prohibition on
complaining by nonvoters strikes close to home.
Again, this Election Day cliché is intuitively
appealing. If someone invests in an enterprise, we
generally recognize that he has more right than an
outsider to determine the course of that enterprise.
And voting feels like an investment: It takes time
and perhaps costs money.
In his 1851 book Social Statics , the English radical
Herbert Spencer neatly describes the rhetorical
jujitsu surrounding voting, consent, and complaint,
then demolishes the argument. Say a man votes
and his candidate wins. The voter is then
“understood to have assented” to the acts of his
representative. But what if he voted for the other
guy? Well, then, the argument goes, “by taking part
in such an election, he tacitly agreed to abide by
the decision of the majority.” And what if he
abstained? “Why then he cannot justly complain…
seeing that he made no protest.” Spencer tidily
sums up: “Curiously enough, it seems that he gave
his consent in whatever way he acted—whether he
said yes, whether he said no, or whether he
remained neuter! A rather awkward doctrine this.”
Indeed.
Whether there is a duty to be civically engaged, to
act as a good citizen, is a separate question from
the issue of voting. But if such a duty exists, there
are many ways to perform it, including (perhaps
especially) complaining. According to Mankiw’s
argument, the ignorant voter is a far less admirable
citizen than the serial-letter-writing Tea Partier who
can’t be bothered to show up on Election Day.
The right to complain is, mercifully, unrelated to
any hypothetical duty to vote. It was ensured,
instead, by the Founders, all of whom were
extraordinary bellyachers themselves.
‘Voting Is Fun’

(Page 3 of 3)
Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Maybe people
vote not because of what voting can accomplish,
but because they like to vote . They like the message
that voting sends about who they are (e.g., the kind
of person who cares about poverty, or fiscal
responsibility, or what his neighbors think).
Many people like to be perceived as altruists, for
example. Voting is one of the cheapest forms of
altruism. If you (rightly) believe that the expected
material payoff of your vote is near zero, then it’s
easy enough to vote in a way that maximizes your
halo rather than your bottom line. “Voting
sociotropically,” Jason Brennan writes, “is cheaper
and easier than volunteering at a soup kitchen or
giving money to Oxfam.”
A 2009 survey of 569 professors conducted by
philosophers Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of
California at Riverside and Josh Rust of Stetson
University reinforces this view: 88 percent said they
considered voting in public elections to be morally
good. In fact, when asked to rank different acts, the
professors reported that they considered voting to
be on par with regularly donating blood and giving
10 percent of one’s income to charity.
Loren Lomasky and Geoffrey Brennan theorize that
voting is best understood as an expressive act.
Communicating preferences at the ballot box is
something people do for its own sake, not a duty
they perform or a selfish bid for material gain.
So maybe voting is like going to a football game
decked out in team colors and cheering as loudly
as you can. The chance that your individual voice
will sway the outcome of the game is vanishingly
small. (Acts can be both instrumental and
expressive, of course.) But you are communicating
to the other people at the game: I am one of you. I
value the system in which we each participate. I
am loyal.
Bryan Caplan takes the idea a step further.
Perhaps, he suggests, voting is more like cheering
while watching the same game from your recliner in
a darkened living room. If you really try, you can
still tell an (ultimately unsatisfying) story about
why your actions matter in the rest of the world.
After all, your viewership of the game might show
up in the television ratings, which boosts the
team’s advertising revenue. Of course, you’re
probably not a Nielsen household, so you may not
show up at all in the metrics that the team’s
owners can see. Which leaves solitary game
watchers right there with the voters: The main
payoff is that you can show up at work the next
day and say you did it.
So what’s wrong with that? Individual cases of
expressive voting in large elections are just as
unlikely to affect the outcome of the election as
other kinds of voting. But the fact of widespread
expressive voting explains why elections are silly
season. Politicians offer themselves up as
opportunities for expressive voting, as aggregations
of easily comprehensible slogans rather than as
avatars of sensible policy. Ignorant expressive
voters, even rationally ignorant ones, may be
committing immoral acts, as Jason Brennan
argues.
All of which is a pretty steep price for an “I Voted”
sticker. Maybe better to stay home and watch the
game instead. 

[MissBarbara]

here you go...

Thanks, Anvil.

I agree with your summary above: "Double talk philosophy based on a false premise."

A single vote will not determine the results of a given election. But an accumulation of single votes will.

Plus, an important point he misses is that participation in the process -- casting that "single vote" -- manifests a willingness to affect change. And that willingness, once it gains a critical mass, can affect systemic change.

[joan1984]

Thank you, anvil.

[anvil]

two thank you' s from two ladies,, my my this is a wonderful day.

my pleasure