In the 19th and 20th century courageous women like Susan B. Anthony struggled against vehement opposition to secure women the right to vote. In the 70s and 80s feminists fought against pervasive discrimination and struggled to live up to their notions of gender equity (even when misguided). But now that we have a woman losing the democratic nomination by hair’s breadth Hillary Clinton and some of her supporters are trying to lay claim to this legacy to complain about Hillary’’s loss. Has feminism really descended this low? Gone from a noble struggle for equal treatment to an excuse to complain when a candidate you identified with based on gender losses.

Now the video from the women’s media center certainly succeeds in convincing me that Chris Matthews is a sexist jerk but aside from that it’s fallacious confusion of the media’s constant microanalysis of electability and likability with sexism. Asking whether Hillary will succeed in appealing to men is no more sexist than asking if Barack will succeed in winning white votes. Anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave for the past 12 years has seen the stupid discussions on cable news channels of whether candidate X has an appealing enough smile, will suffer for being short or has appropriate choice in ties. Sadly, not subjecting Hillary to this ridiculous microanalyses would be sexist response to her candidate.

Of course if you try hard enough you can read sexism into anything but `likability’ isn’t some minor issues that’s only trotted out as an excuse not to vote for a woman, likability is the essence of electoral politics. As we were endlessly reminded by the pundits the voters in ‘04 would have rather had a beer with Bush than Kerry. If it weren’t for the inconvenient fact that Kerry was a man this would be another perfect example of the sexist media. Of course if you just change the channel you can get an equally compelling account of how the racist media has been biased against Obama.

Listening to the recent complaints about sexism that have flooded the media over the last few days one would think that Hillary’s likability problem was a penalty she was paying for behaving too masculine but that’s a load of crap. Hillary played best with the electorate when she highlighted her strength, resolve and experience (3am phone). She alienated voters in the debates not with her confident aggressive stances but with her passive aggressive whining. If anything Hillary was given more leeway than a man would have been given when she ‘observed’ that she seemed to be getting the harder questions instead of angrily lecturing the questioner or keeping a dignified silence. Some people just come across better than others on TV (supposedly Hillary is much more likable in person).

Now this sort of poor sportsmanship from Clinton supporters is bad enough but trying to claim the moral high ground in the fight against sexism is particularly galling and hypocritical. Most of these women complaining about Clinton’s sexist treatment support her (partially) because of they identify with her over gender. These aren’t the rightful inheritors of the struggle for gender equity but rather (for the most part) a group that is happy to impose different expectations on men and women when it suits their purposes and complain about it when it doesn’t. The noble feminist crusaders of earlier generations understood that gender equity would come with a cost. Now, instead, we see casual complainers who seem to think that gender equity means nothing but indulging their feelings of sympathy for other women.

No one could reasonably deny that our society still holds men and women to different standards. I certainly would prefer a culture that treated men and women more similarly but far from working towards gender equity this sort of feminism as sympathy for/indentification with other women is one of the greatest forces holding back equality. When women reward other women with sympathy and support when they are subject to aggressive verbal/intellectual attacks but tells men to toughen up it sends a message about how it’s appropriate for women to act and men to act towards them. If these women were really interested in equality they should be working to eliminate the double standard that says it’s okay to be aggressive and critical of another man but unacceptable and mean to do so to a woman. So long as society sends the message that women are fragile and need to be treated with special delicacy it will also view men as more strong and capable.

Admittedly these last comments have limited direct applicability to the Hillary campaign but they are an indictment of the modern conception of feminism as sympathy for other women that underlies this supposed feminist cause for Hillary. Not only are their complaints largely unjustified it is people like them, not Chris Matthews who make sure that men and women continue to be treated differently in our society. Maybe as a society we simply don’t want real gender equity but what we would need to do to achieve it is to stop treating women as if they needed special sympathy and protection.

I used to wonder why no one argued over affirmative action using practical evidence based approaches to gauge it’s effectiveness in attaining some desired end. I now wonder how I could have been so hopelessly naive. People can’t even parse simple remarks like those Geraldine Ferraro made to the Daily Breeze,

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” she continued. “And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.” Ferraro does not buy the notion of Obama as the great reconciler.

“I was reading an article that said young Republicans are out there campaigning for Obama because they believe he’s going to be able to put an end to partisanship,” Ferraro said, clearly annoyed. “Dear God! Anyone that has worked in the Congress knows that for over 200 years this country has had partisanship - that’s the way our country is.”

I’ve included the second paragraph to make the context clear. Ferraro is obviously a bit irked by the bizarre messianic conception many people have of Obama and the perception that Clinton’s actions are frequently seen as base political gamesmenship while they see the same actions by Obama as grand leadership. Now I actually think that is a compelling argument to vote for Obama. This skill is the essence of political talent and a useful attribute to have in a canidate or leader. However, it suggests that Ferraro is likely speaking out of understandable personal frustration rather than the devious political calculation some of the media are suggesting. But understood as an off the cuff remark what did it mean and should anyone get upset about it?

Well Ferraro obviously means that in some possible scenario where Obama wasn’t black he wouldn’t be competitive in the democratic party. The million dollar question is which scenario did Ferraro have in mind? Now it seems pretty obvious to me what she meant was something like: if everything had been the same at the start of the primaries except that Obama was white he would have quickly lost. Not only is this not a racist remark it’s probably true. Even those who are denouncing Ferraro for racism admit that many blacks are voting for him because he is black and it’s silly to think that at least some of his appeal to liberals comes from their perception of him as a healer of racial discord, a trait that (like it or not) depends on his skin color.

What then of the comment that “he is lucky to be who he is?” Far from meaning that blacks tend to have it better in America than whites as many critiques assume normal english usage suggests it merely means Obama’s race is a proximate cause of this good fortune. I mean assume that your friend went down to the corner store hoping to buy a magazine but because his job pays so little he finds himself a dollar short he instead buys a winning lotto ticket. Now you might reasonably remark, “damn man, your lucky you didn’t get that raise last month.” Obviously you wouldn’t be saying that in general people are better off not getting raises. In other words she is doing nothing more than reiterating the fact that Obama’s race is a net political assest in the democratic primary.

This view is supported by Ferraro’s contention that far from being racist her remarks are a positive racial message, i.e., people want to vote for a black man to help heal racial divisions in the country, as well as her remark that she was chosen as a vice presidential nominee because of her gender. Despite the stupendously stupid suggestion by Berkeley professors Edley and Echaveste that Ferraro is demeaning herself with this comment really all she is saying is that had she been in a similar situation but been a man she would not have been chosen. Yet more evidence that Ferraro was never suggesting that Obama owes everything to affirmative action or that blacks are better off than whites as the critiques all presuppose.

Note that this interpretation of Ferraro’s remarks didn’t require any mental gymnastics. It was the obvious meaning that jumped to mind when I heard the words. Now perhaps, because the news had primed you to hear them as racist, the same might not be true of you but really all I need to show is that there is a plausible interpretation that isn’t racist to show that we should give Ferraro the benefit of the doubt based on her past behavior. Now no doubt someone is going to try to argue that even though Ferraro didn’t mean to make a racist remark that her failure to properly guard against unintended racial effects of her words is enough justification for her public flagellation. Yet on these grounds it is the Obama people who have taken it upon themselves to widely publicize these words (even though Obama is reasonably refusing to call them racist) who should be held accountable.

It vaguely grates on me the way Obama seems to happily pick up votes for being a black man while pushing the idea that the election should be color blind. Now this on it’s own doesn’t really bother me. If Hillary was the black man and made this sort of claim I would dismiss this remark as the kind of calculated misdirection required for a black man to become president. After all if you fail to publicly reject the idea of racial solidarity you may scare off the white voters. I don’t like the idea of racial solidarity any more than I like other forms of solidarity (all suffering should be given equal weight) but I understand the need to take cynical positions to be elected.

But it’s the tension between this kind of necessary realpolitik and Obama’s idealistic schtick that really underlies my dislike of him. The truth is that getting elected in a democracy requires either extreme stupidity/lack of independent thought or cynical misdirection. If this blog is anything it is a chronicle of the ways in which a thorough logical examination of the situation can diverge from the shallow first impressions. Even if you disagree with me about everything else I write it is extremely unlikely that you both about politics and don’t violently disagree with popular wisdom about some major issue. How much more surprising would it be if an intelligent thoughtful candidate with access to raw data and expert assistance didn’t conclude the electorate wasn’t bat shit crazy about free trade, immigration, global warming, gasoline taxes, smoking regulations, molestor tracking/punishment, drug laws, needle exchanges, prison rape, genetic engineering, desirability of abortion or some other issue.

The truth is that any candidate who tried to honestly discuss their views wouldn’t last a week. There is no coherent policy attitude that wouldn’t deeply offend a majority of voters on some position. It may be possible to be elected without telling outright lies but only by convincing yourself of ridiculous beliefs or engaging in deliberate misdirection. The juxtaposition of Obama’s acceptance of racial votes with his oratory about color blindness (whether a direct contradiction or not) is just one example of why the trifecta of idealism (i.e. honesty), intelligence, and electability is fundamentally unattainable.

Obama essentially doubles down on the cynical/stupid divide with his idealistic message and criticism of washington insiders. I’m quite sure that Hillary Clinton is a smart lady who clearly understands realpolitik and is willing to take the cynical steps necessary to get elected. Obama’s idealistic message forces me to either accept that he is the sort of idiot who honestly believes the voter’s preferences matter more than good policy (and lets his own views be bent accordingly) or believe that he is a charming psychopathic liar.

I might vote for Obama if I thought he was the later but if that’s the case he lies too well to get my vote. If I had to guess I would say that on some level he really manages to believe in his idealistic message and the combination of double think and faith in popular wisdom this requires means he certainly isn’t the candidate I want on the democratic ticket.

In case anyone missed in McNearny, the alternative energy expert who was elected in California, has a Ph.D. in mathematics.

Usually my reaction to people too closely associated with alternative energy is initial skepticism until they prove themselves to be reasonable. This is unfortunate as developing greenhouse gas free power sources is vitally important but far too many renewable energy enthusiasts (the laypeople not the experts) have ridiculously optimistic beliefs about how the whole grid is going to be powered by solar panels on home roofs and use this as an excuse to oppose other alternative sources of power (nuclear, hydro, geothermal).

However, I tend to believe that someone who has a math Ph.D. is probably more hard headed than this. Kinda scary how much trust a math Ph.D. evokes in me. Actually, I suspect that alternative energy professionals are nothing like the enthusiasts. Seeing the numbers in details tends to make people more realistic.

As an aside I tend to think this whole decentralized power business is way oversold. I’m all for competition in the power business including a system where third parties can sell power to the grid but the hope that it will come from individual homes anytime in the near future seems hopelessly misguided. The problem is not the technical feasibility but simply the problem of maintenance. What happens when the home power system gets fucked up? Who fixes it when the solar panels on the roof get hit by a branch? Most homeowners wouldn’t keep their system properly maintained and it just wouldn’t be economical for the power companies to do it for them.

Don’t get me wrong, I think requiring the power company to pay for power given back to the grid is a great idea. Schools, businesses and government agencies that have large roofs might be able to make such a system economical and just opening up electrical supply to competition could have wonderful effects. However, for the foreseeable future the cost of sending technicians out to individual homes all the time seems likely to exceed the cost of purchasing up some empty land in the dessert and setting up solar cells there.

Ultimately it seems to me this decentralized power enthusiasm has more to do with an anti-corporate, pro-self-reliant sentiment than a rational comparison of the benefits. Now I could be very wrong and if McNearny sent me an email saying the calculations worked out the other way I might be inclined to believe him but the whole thing just smells of a failure to take into account real world concerns like maintenance.

So the democrats won the senate modulo recounts but the AP was confident enough to call montana for the dems and they have an 8,000 vote leg up in virgina.

This is an incredibly encouraging result but before you start cheering about the american voter ‘getting it’ take a look at the new crop of propositions across the country banning gay marriage. Or the overwhelming success of the horrific sex offender measure here in california. I’m hoping that the sex offender measure is declared unconstitutional as it puts children at more risk while vindictively targeting many reformed individuals, some of which have committed only minor crimes (dating someone a bit too young) many years ago.

Also the oil tax measure didn’t pass. It’s a shame since we need higher priced gasoline and in contrast to what all the commercials imply it would be a national security benefit to keep all our oil and burn foreign oil while we can. On the other hand I was always skeptical of the oil tax initiative because of the idiotic provision which created state oversight power to make sure oil producers couldn’t pass increased costs along to the customer.

Unexpectedly my favorite initiative, legalized marijuanna in Nevada, failed by a large margin.

Weird Bush just decided to fire Rumsfield and admitted to lying about denying it a few days ago.

So over on digg they link to s a story about a man who exposed himself to a ten year old being sentenced to wear a T-shirt saying “I am a registered sex offender.” A sentence like this not only seems disproportionate to the crime (primarily this is just going to scare and disturb children…just like seeing a guy wearing a sex offender shirt will) but also to increase the danger to children. Not only do such humiliating and harsh sentences discourage people form turning family members in by ostracizing the offender from any social support network they make it more likely that he will molest. While this man seems like nothing more than a harmless flasher if he was going to molest someone this makes sure he has the least to lose.

But what really blows my mind are the comments on the article. These are comments by a relatively tech savy, liberal, anti-Bush crowd and they literally include a fair number of people demanding that people like this get the death penalty and many more who are outrage that the judge didn’t lock this guy up and throw away the key because he had previously exposed himself to children. Yes apparently people are eager to sentence someone who pulls down his pants to far worse punishments than people who beat their wives, steal senior citizens retirement funds, or even some kinds of rape.

Moreover, some brief thought reveals that this has little to nothing to do with the crime itself and everything to do with the man’s desires. People are responding to a sexual desire towards children not any act. If you doubt this look at how people react to a pedophile who is so morally upright as to refuse to ever indulge his raging desire. Instead of regarding such a person as a moral paragon as they would someone who resisted other sorts of temptation they view them as a sicko who ought to be punished. Indeed the public has been fairly vocal about prosecuting people for any pornography involving the idea of sex with young children even if it is only written or computer generated irrelevant of any issue of encouraging molestation.

Obviously people just have a deep psychological need to push away their disgust at the notion of children as sexual objects and feel righteous condemnation. I’ve known this for some time but it really does make me sick to observe how pervasive and extreme the reaction is and disappointed to observe the lack of any influence of reason on the process. I mean I can think of little that is more selfish than counterproductively punishing people and thereby increasing the danger to children just so you can expiate your disgust.

As you can guess this also indicates my opinion on the sex offender proposition on our ballot. I just haven’t remarked on it because it is so obviously bad. The experience of other states, experts in criminal recidivism and good sense cry out that this measure will increase sex offenses by making families less likely to report offenders and, as John Stewart said, creating roving bands of homeless child molesters. Not to mention the severe drain on law enforcement resources by the totally useless monitoring system that will tell us where everyone who was arrested for streaking in college is at every moment.

I want to clear up a few points about my recent post on e-voting fraud.

First of all when I claim that electronic voting fraud is checked by polling I mean that individual or small groups of fraudsters couldn’t get away with turning an obvious loser into a winner. The examples people keep wanting to give about discrepancies between polls and results are all cases where the polls all agreed the race was close. So sure maybe e-voting fraud can shift who wins in someplace like Florida or Ohio but it would have been very hard for a small band of fraudsters to have shifted California to the republicans in 2004 without being detected.

My claim is essentially that polling would stop a small group from shifting a race polling at 60-40 to the 40% canidate. Not that it couldn’t change who wins tight races like Bush v. Kerry. Also even if you think someone could shift a 60-40 election and get away with it they are unlikely to be able to do so repeatedly and certainly not repeatably on a national scale.

In other words I am arguing that if we gave the republicans (or the democrats) a permanent 10 percent handicap in elections then in the long run the country wouldn’t be much worse off. This might sound like an incredible thesis but plenty of irrelevant things affect how people vote and we someone manage through all that. Despite being pretty damn conservative my paternal grandfather voted democrat his entire life because of Roosevelt. African Americans insisted on voting republican until about 50 years ago or so because Lincoln had been a republican. Ironically JFK and Johnson were probably elected because of the converse bias of southern whites towards the democrats. In other words having the voting system be free of arbitrary bias, even quite significant arbitrary bias, doesn’t seem to be essential.

So how can that be? An answer comes from basic political science. Even if one canidate is guaranteed to get 10% of the vote for free it doesn’t alter the strategy for a two person election. Both canidates still want to maximize the number of people voting for them and they can best do this by moving to the center. While this is a simplified model and real world canidates shouldn’t always position themselves as perfect moderates in the long run this effect is very real at the party level. Parties are run by the people who win elections and if the country shifts to the left then both parties will follow it because that is what will win more elections.

Additionally if this evoting fraud doesn’t occur consistently it won’t make much of a difference at all. If the parties select their canidates and the canidates make their promises thinking the election will be fair the fraudster can only choose between two fairly mainstream canidates. Thus unless you suspect that Diebold could get away with hard coding a permanent 10% advantage for republicans into the system our elected officials will still be very mainstream.

In other words what is important in the long run is not whether our public officials come from the right or left but whether they follow the changes in mood of the country. Even if you think that evoting will be exploited to create a permanent 10% advantage for one party of another it still won’t undermine the structural pressure to follow the mood of the American public. It might shift our policy a bit to the left or right of what the electorate favors but by an amount that is no bigger than other random factors affecting people’s votes.

On the other hand I think there are more concerning things like safe districts and long term barriers to certain groups voting that are more of a concern. These sorts of effects can make certain (non-random) segments of society totally irrelevant to the voting process. Safe districts mean that the canidate need not worry about appealing to anyone but the hardcore supporters of his party. Felon disenfranchisement or systematic failure to provide polling places in certain neighborhoods allow canidates to ignore significant sections of society. Unlike randomly reassigning 10% of the vote keeping groups with common interests from effectively voting removes/reduces the incentive for politicians to appeal to that group.

Finally I should clarify that in my last post I was only talking about the sort of fraud that evoting uniquely makes possible. Of course evoting, just like paper ballots is vulnerable to machine politics and organized corruption. These sorts of voting scams can truly make elected officials immune from public oversight not just bias things a bit.

However, this sort of long term massive, organized voting fraud (which is much less common since the rise of the accurate poll) isn’t possible without massive organized corruption. Relying on the polls to find problems only works if you have an essentially honest system which will acknowledge fraud it stumbles upon. If the organization running the election is essentially corrupt I acknowledge that polls aren’t going to fix the problem (though they may help). However, I don’t see how evoting is any worse than paper voting in this situation. In both cases the week link the corrupt scheme isn’t the security of the voting machinery but the people in on the scam.

So Kerry made a slip up in a speech. Big deal. Well it wouldn’t have been a big deal if he hadn’t looked like he was reluctant to apologize for sounding like he was insulting the troops. I still don’t think this will be a big benefit for either side but it could have been a big win for the democrats by making the republicans look like silly rabid attackers and focusing the discussion on Iraq.

I wish Bill Clinton was still our democratic figure head. If he made a slip up like this he would have just sat down and given one of those speeches with little thumbs up gestures saying, “Sorry I forgot to say a word. It happens to all of us,” and then preceded to calmly diss the republicans for making such a big deal out of it.

Since this is Kerry some people are actually getting excited about it. If it had been Bill everyone would have been like, “Jesus give the man some slack. He just botched a joke.”

Can’t Bill just be a ghost candidate? Get some other schmo to put his name on the ballot and agree that he’ll let Bill make all the decisions?

So recently there has been a great deal of concern surrounding electronic voting. Just yesterday Ars Technica posted a long article about how easy it is to steal an election with electronic voting machines.

I agree the threat of someone throwing a close election to one side or another is real. Recently a group in the Netherlands demonstrated an easy to apply reprogram of their voting machines that would steal some percent of votes. As the Ars article points out the flaws in the US used Diebold voting machines are even more extreme. Surely we shouldn’t let Diebold continue to make a profit by selling insecure, shitty voting machines and we should move either to a complex cryptographically secure voting system or a paper trail. But until we do so is this something we should panic about?

No! Electronic voting fraud can only change the result in close races. If the polling by the media outside voting places was radically different from the actual results people would notice. At worst we can imagine that voting fraud creates a system where republicans win whenever they get 45% of the real vote. Yet such a system creates exactly the same pressures on candidates. The republicans and democrats would have just as much incentive to track public opinion to stay on the right side of the 45/55 divide.

Ultimately the actual outcome of elections is influenced by many random factors. Did it snow in some places that day, did someone who is a democrat get caught having gay sex, etc.. etc.. In the long run what makes republics a better form of government than monarchy or dictatorship is not that the government is always run by the person the majority wants. The per state representation in the senate by favoring small states, is effectively the same as a small skew toward republicans in the election system yet while we might now dislike the results we haven’t abandoned the important check of public opinion on government operation. What makes the republics a better form of government is the structural pressure on the government to shift with public opinion and this remains even if elections are shifted by small amounts.

A much more alarming trend in elections is the creation of safe electoral seats. I can’t say for sure if this is happening more now than it did in the past but in any case it is far more worrying than election fraud. Unlike election fraud this imperils the structural force of public opinion by shifting the power to the extremists who are more likely to vote in primaries. In fact by colluding representatives can totally eliminate public pressure on issues that don’t split down partisan lines. They merely let the few representatives in embattled districts vote whatever way they want and the safe majority overrides them. This problem is made much worse by the seniority system which creates a strong incentive for districts not to change their representatives.

Well I guess I can’t actually expect people to realize this. Beliefs about voting rank right up their with religious beliefs in terms of irrationality. People believe all sorts of random things, for instance that it is better if everyone votes, that one has a moral responsibility to vote green even if you really prefer the republicans didn’t win, that discouraging people from voting (like the new AARP commercial is alleged to do) is intrinsically bad, or most notably that there is some intrinsic moral superiority of direct elections to something like the electoral college. As always I’m amazed at the ability of people to blindly believe.

Alright I’m giving up on getting anything of substance done tonight on my math research so it’s time to watch the election results (the official state page is here but nbc and abc seem to be about 100 precincts ahead but I couldn’t find an abc summar page). So far the results are looking pretty good from my perspective. Prop 75 (the union contribution one) looks to be passing and everything else is failing. Though the numbers on the abortion proposition are stil worrying and I also find it sorta disappointing that redistricting didn’t pass though I suppose that it’s failure is a strategic advantage for the dems on a national level.

UPDATE: Looks like both the abortion and the union contribution propositions (73, 75) are both going down. Overall this special election could have turned out awful but ultimately turned out totally neutral with absolutely nothing passing. What a waste of money!

Anyway if you want a graphical look at the cultural divide in california take a look at this map of the results of prop 73 (the abortion one).

I’m still not sure what to think of the teacher’s tenure initiative. It isn’t like high school teachers need tenure for research integrity so I’m not really sure why they have it in the first place. On the other hand what is effective in atracting good teachers and driving off bad ones is going to depend on alot of complex statistics. Unfortunately this is exactly the sort of question government seems utterly incapable of dealing with. The issue is too complicated and technical for the voters to deal with it (I don’t have the time to read through piles of economic analysis about teacher pay. Do you?) and concentrated interests on one side make it impossible to deal with in the legislature. Not that teachers are somehow ‘evil’ but they naturally lobby for their interests (greater pay, more benefits) while it is in the governments best interest to get the most work for the least pay out of teachers. Since teachers are excited by the issue and no one is excited by the complex economic analysis all the legislators have a strong incentive to listen to the teachers.

There needs to be some solution to deal with these sort of issues. We need some kind of oversight by reputable independent analysis groups. I do not, however, have any idea of how to bring it about. In particular I don’t know what can be done to draw enough attention to reputable analysis groups so that the average person doesn’t just get confused by industry or party created ‘foundations’ at election time.