Around Election Time, This Column Almost Writes Itself
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Just when I was despairing of finding an appropriate topic for this week, I received an email that hit the spot. Of course it is a political statement.
To keep the record clear about what follows, I am not an active Hillary supporter, and I certainly do not support the Bush policies. Other than that, I am watching the electoral process with interest to pick the best candidate. This disclaimer is necessary because the letter I received attempts to pillory Hillary by listing a series of quotes supposedly taken from her speeches and then forming them into a quiz in which the multiple-choice answers to who said the quotes are typically Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, etc.
Since I first received this letter, I have been exposed to several variants; some of them come across as authentic, even giving dates and locations of the supposed quotes. Being rather lazy myself, instead of checking out the original sources, I did the obvious thing and went to Scopes. See this for an in-depth analysis of this supposed Hillary quiz. The bottom line is that some clever anti-Hillary people cobbled together out-of-context statements, and when that was inadequate, they juxtaposed partial quotes to shade the implied meaning more toward making her look like a real menace.
Is this simple fun and games as usual in the political arena? Probably. However if a reader does not check with Scopes, would that potential voter be swayed? On the other hand, if voters recognize the distortions, will they tend to support the slander victim? My betting is that hit pieces like this are depressingly effective at garnering votes from casual readers. After all, if they did not work, we would expect them to disappear as new tools evolve.
This is an example of distortions applied against a single candidate, but supporting or defeating any given candidate is not what this column in about. My goal is to help people make decisions more rationally than they might otherwise. No party or candidate has a monopoly on distortions, hit pieces, or dirty tricks. They have been with us since we gave up (more or less) choosing our leaders by who was still standing after hand-to-hand combat.
But I speculate that hit pieces have another important role besides simply enticing people to change their vote. Probably very few voters will change their mind after reading the Hillary quiz. But people who are already opposed to her will more readily believe the distortions and in that belief strengthen their determination to oppose her. That is, hit pieces are more effective at keeping the already committed in line than in converting new believers. It is a well-known psychological principle that once a person makes a decision based on inadequate data, newly acquired data is more likely to be interpreted to support the decision that it would have been otherwise.
We experience a relative of this condition when we buy a new automobile. Few of us are absolutely sure of why we buy what we do, but after we buy a new car, we suddenly become much more aware of how many of that model are on the road. “There is a car like ours — it looks pretty good, doesn’t it?” Similarly, do you notice the short-comings of operating systems you do not use — maybe that is a bad example!
So for at least the next year, I need not fear about not finding topics suitable for discussion here. I can always find some political tidbit to analyze. Maybe next week I can look at anti-Rudy literature so I can claim to be fair and balanced.
In response to the interest my original tutorial generated, I have completely rewritten and expanded it. Check out the tutorial availability through Lockergnome. The new version is over 100 pages long with chapters that alternate between discussion of the theoretical aspects and puzzles just for the fun of it. Puzzle lovers will be glad to know that I included an answers section that includes discussions as to why the answer is correct and how it was obtained. Most of the material has appeared in these columns, but some is new. Most of the discussions are expanded compared to what they were in the original column format.
3 Comments
Don Henderson
November 29th, 2007
at 8:11am
Why is it that around this time in the election cycle, everyone from sportswriters to weatherpersons to technical writers suddenly consider themselves to be political pundits? I can’t read newsletters on any subject without finding at least one item where politics has been inappropriately shoehorned into the topic. Alright, already!
wreckage
November 29th, 2007
at 2:12pm
Voting as political narcotic in the US
By Joel Hirschhorn - posted Tuesday, 27 November 2007 Sign Up for free e-mail updates!
What happens in the US impacts the whole world, therefore everyone should care that America’s political system is a large and complex criminal conspiracy. Those who vote enable it without benefiting from it. Voting is a ploy of the two-party power elites to keep the population docile, delusional and duped. Our government has been hijacked in plain sight, despite elections. We cannot get it back by voting. All the main candidates are part of the conspiracy - voting only encourages them. In our fake democracy, corrupt politicians use doses of voting as a political narcotic. We must free more Americans of the addiction. Otherwise they will keep hallucinating that some Democratic or Republican President or Congress will actually give us the changes we crave.
Attempts to hold the government accountable have failed and will continue to fail. The system is rotten to the core. It sustains itself both by preventing major political reforms and undermining those that get passed to temporarily placate the public. Arrogant power elites feel no obligation to be accountable to the public. Elections are not a threat to the status quo. They are distractive entertainment.
Voting became a political narcotic when it stopped working to improve government and became used to legitimise a corrupt, two-party failed system. Power elites own the government and use it to serve their interests and protect a corporate plutocracy. Through a numerical minority - probably about 20 million Americans - an upper class easily manipulates the remaining 280 million by controlling the consumer economy, the distractive culture, and government policies and spending.
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This is what America’s political freedom has morphed into: dissidents free to protest (to make us feel good); elites free to control (to maintain corruption); conned citizens free to vote (to keep the system looking democratic); and most Americans free to borrow, spend and consume (to stay hooked on work, anti-depressants, sleeping pills, alcohol, sports, computers, religion, gambling and illegal drugs). Where do you fit in?
In our drugged fake democracy, Americans replace objective reality with illusions. The US does not excel in nearly any statistical measure of democracies. Our voter turnout is a disgrace; we imprison more people than all other nations combined; we do not provide universal health care or affordable prescription drugs; our primary education system is mostly awful; economic inequality is considerable - with the top 1 per cent owning 21 per cent of the nation’s wealth - and getting worse. People are encouraged to consume and borrow, then left to suffer from crippling debt. Painful economic insecurity blinds the submissive middle class whose belief in the American dream is akin to expecting to win a lottery.
In a nation that supposedly prizes competitiveness there is no real political competition. The two major parties maintain a collusive stranglehold on our government. Third party candidates are purposefully disadvantaged. Incumbents can thwart opponents. Worse, though the two major parties shout their differences, they are merely two sides of the same coin, two heads of the same beast, two servants of the upper class, and two protectors of the corporate plutocracy. They are criminal co-conspirators. Superficial differences between candidates keep voters entertained, manipulated and rooting for “their” team in the political game, from which the mainstream corporate media (more co-conspirators) make tons of money.
In America’s democracy citizens are fooled by personal freedoms. It is a fake democracy because the will of the people is not respected by those elected to run the government. The rule of law is routinely violated by those in power, the Constitution is regularly dishonored and disobeyed by elected officials and judges, and all but the wealthy are sold out through government-assisted corporate globalisation.
Foreigners envy our materialism, but not our government. With horrendous hypocrisy we use military power to impose democracy abroad despite having a flawed democracy at home. No wonder America has become a joke to much of the world’s population.
To sum up the situation, despite personal freedoms we also have political tyranny as oppressive in its own way as any authoritarian, dictatorial government. Americans have lost the revolutionary spirit of their ancestors. Americans are unable to revolt, despite revolting conditions. They have accepted the tyranny of taxation with MISrepresentation. The political criminal conspiracy has successfully used cultural genetic manipulation to replace the DNA of revolutionary courage with the DNA of distractive, self-indulgent consumerism. Our primary freedom is to borrow and spend. Our currency should read “In Greed We Trust”. We have populist consumerism, not populist politics. Divisive politics keeps people fighting each other rather than uniting against the rotten system.
Few Americans are dissidents. Many more block the painful truth that their cherished democracy is a fraud. The land of the free is no longer the home of the brave. Foreign enemies are used to keep people from bravely fighting domestic tyrants.
With false hope, voters believe that the right Democrat or Republican will do what none of their predecessors has done, and that campaign rhetoric and promises will actually translate to post-election action and policy. Voters fail to understand the depth of our culture of dishonesty, which has also invaded the voting process.
Like magicians using slight of words and misdirection, politicians (and those that own them) have trivialised the fact that about half of the electorate does not vote. Non-voters have been blamed when the corrupt system is at fault. But rather than see non-voters as apathetic we should perhaps see them acting rationally because voting is unproductive. Non-voters should never feel guilty, only proud to have sent a none-of-the-above rejection message.
Voter turnout has not been sufficiently low to forcefully discredit, dishonor and de-legitimise American democracy. Though low, it has become an accepted norm, allowing the manufactured myth to continue - that we live in the world’s greatest democracy, though nothing could be farther from the truth.
Held secretly in private hands is proprietary source code that instructs the voting machines on to how to count the vote. More than one-third of all votes cast in our nation are made on touch screen machines driven by proprietary source code and 90 per cent of all votes cast are counted by software that’s unverifiable.
No sane American should trust the political system, the politicians, and the voting process. And when you cannot trust all three, you have a fake democracy. Many of us thirst for major change, but mainstream politicians simply exploit this and lie. By voting for any of them we ensure no serious change. The way to shake up the system is to boycott voting.
True, we have plenty of passive non-voters, a good head start. Now we need active, vociferous non-voters - proud protestors and dissidents urging others to join the civil disobedience to reach the tipping point for revolutionary change.
Massive, unprecedented non-voting has the power to produce systemic political reform by defiantly discrediting, dishonoring and de-legitimising America’s fake democracy. When I choose not to vote I do not make the votes of others more important. Their votes already serve an evil system. The critical choice is to vote or not vote, not picking a particular Democrat or Republican. When I choose not to vote I embrace an honorable, patriotic rebellious act of civil disobedience. I no longer buy the BIG LIE that there still is an American democracy worth participating in. As James Madison said, “Conscience is the most sacred of all property”.
Voting - especially lesser-evil voting - sustains our fake democracy more than any other citizen action. It lets politicians claim that they represent the sovereign people. It tells the world that our elected government has public support. Voting sends the wrong message to everyone. No matter whom you vote for, voting says the political system is fair. It is not.
Mass non-voting sends the message of rejection - as powerful as using guns. The Second American Revolution begins with a boycott of voting: We must work together to drive voter turnout down to abysmal levels - so low that everyone gets the rejection message. We must let the world know - and America’s power elites fear - that we sovereign Americans intend to take back our government.
See it as a populist recall of the federal government that would make our Founders proud.
This action would be followed by demanding what the Founders gave us in our Constitution: the right to call a convention of state delegates that could propose Constitutional amendments, which would reform our political system to make it honest and trustworthy again (learn more at http://www.foavc.org).
Why have we not had a constitutional convention in over 200 years? There is only one logical explanation: an intensely watched convention could wreck the political status quo and take away the power of those running and ruining our nation. That so many Americans fear a convention just shows the success of the social conditioning and political narcotics the elitist plutocracy has imposed for decades. Imagine an amendment that required at least a 90 per cent voter turnout for federal elections to produce a winner.
When it comes to our nation, our choice is not to love it or leave it, but to accept the painful truth and take responsibility for restoring American democracy - because we love it. Let’s move forward with this slogan: “Don’t vote - it only encourages them.”
bern muller
November 29th, 2007
at 6:34pm
Twice you mentioned “scopes” as a reference. It is, of course, “Snopes”.
There may be folks looking for a “scopes” and failing.
bern muller