I read it as a piss-take as well. Looking at the links would seem to corroborate that view. On 4 April 2016 at 10:04, Trent W. Buck via luv-talk <luv-talk(a)luv.asn.au> wrote: -- Colin Fee tfeccles(a)gmail.com

Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote: Oh, I assumed you meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_PARTEI or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-tailed_Dog_Party or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Monster_Raving_Loony_Party Sadly, doesn't seem to be much similar happening in Australia or the US, at least not at the federal level.

Trent W. Buck via luv-talk wrote: Well there was the : Imperial British Conservative Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_frivolous_political_parties regards Rohan Mcleod

On Mon, 4 Apr 2016 10:04:30 AM Trent W. Buck via luv-talk wrote: The petitions are a combination of satire and trolling. The text satirises political arguments and trolls US politicians into acting less hypocritically. All US politics has a lot to do with us. Everything that happens there will be copied into our politics, fortunatly not always successfully. On Mon, 4 Apr 2016 12:25:36 PM Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote: That doesn't necessarily end it. The next step is a petition on the White House petition site for Obama to issue an executive order permitting "protected persons" to request that they have no gun exclusion zone. If all the republican contenders request that guns be allowed I think that the Secret Service should be compelled to allow that. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

On Sun, Apr 03, 2016 at 09:38:39PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote: i kind of hope that Trump does somehow win the republican nomination. that'll outrage the conservative republicans enough that they'll just fail to turn out to vote. and without them, the loony religious right republicans and the loony gun-nut republicans and the loony would-be-libertarian-party-except-for-the-wasted-vote-problem republicans and the self-hating worker republicans etc don't have the numbers to elect a president. of course, that assumes that Bernie fails to get the Democrat nomination. Conservatives would sit back and allow a white female servant of Wall Street to win before they'd allow the same for an old white male democratic socialist. What matters more than anything else is that Wall Street gets to continue doing WTFIW. craig -- craig sanders <cas(a)taz.net.au>

On Tue, Apr 05, 2016 at 01:19:26AM +1000, Russell Coker wrote: that's a pretty simplistic definition of conservatism. i'm talking about actual conservatives, not radicals and lunatics who have hijacked the term as convenient branding. the conservative side of politics has strong associations with right-wing authoritarianism but that's not actually what conservatism is about - and not all conservatives are reactionaries. not all of them are stupid, either - many have a much more coherent and nuanced understanding of their philosophical and political ideology than idiot lefties (and their counterpart idiot right-wingers) who treat political parties the same as a football team "you've always got to support your side, no matter how fucked up they are". i may disgree with them on most things, vehemently on some, but i've got a lot more respect for a conservative who can articulate their position than i have for an idiot who just barracks for their side (even if that side is the same as mine). i suggest you do some reading on the topic. start here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism i believe there are enough 'old school' conservative republicans who would be disgusted enough by a radical buffoon like Trump winning the republican nomination that they'd choose not to vote in protest....and enough of them that it could make a difference to the election's outcome. same as there are 'old school' Liberals here in .au that are disgusted by what the Liberal Party has become (but voting is compulsory here, so most will vote Liberal anyway. some will donkey-vote) they wouldn't vote for him anyway because he's a socialist. he might even try to impose some regulations on the finance industry! also, everyone knows that socialism == satanism. More importantly, as I said: "What matters more than anything else is that Wall Street gets to continue doing WTFIW". Bernie Sanders seems very unlikely to go along with that, so he can't be allowed to win. whatever it takes. they'd vote for a black jewish female atheist as long as she was a slave to wall street, before they'd vote for a socialist of any kind. actually, they wouldn't vote FOR her...but many would choose not to vote for Trump against her. craig -- craig sanders <cas(a)taz.net.au>

feel free to continue with your delusionally cartoonish view of conservatism. i have neither the time nor the inclination to dissuade you. craig -- craig sanders <cas(a)taz.net.au>

On Tue, Apr 05, 2016 at 01:11:24PM +1000, Russell Coker wrote: it's a matter of not giving a fuck. you have every right to be wrong. i simply don't care. just as importanly, i feel no compelling need to spend a significant amount of my time defending conservatism because i'm not a conservative. They are, however, not the simplistic one-dimensional demons you depict them as. The world is multi-coloured and has many shades of grey - it's not black and white. quite the contrary. it's an issue of refusing to accept your cretinously simplistic definition. craig -- craig sanders <cas(a)taz.net.au>

On Tue, Apr 05, 2016 at 02:59:13PM +1000, Russell Coker wrote: so, saying i don't give a fuck is abuse? or that i don't care if you're wrong? fuck off, russell. you can be really fucking annoying at times, and i have no fucking tolerance for it right now. go bother someone who gives a shit. craig -- craig sanders <cas(a)taz.net.au>

Quoting Craig Sanders (cas(a)taz.net.au): Oh, from my own perspective, I _certainly_ do, as he's far more certain of defeat than are his two current rivals. (I say 'current' because, again, a contested convention would re-open the GOP selection process to include anyone at all.) For the past seven years of the Obama administration, the USA Republican Party has gotten so crazy that it's literally attempted, with partial success, to prevent the Executive Branch (i.e., the Presidency) from functioning. One hope for the 2016 general election is that a massive defeat might induce in the Republicans some introspection and reform, or alternatively a splintering of that party and electoral realignment. But if on the other hand they double down and get crazier, it'll be enough if they lose not only the Presidency but also their current Senate voting margin -- as appears likely according to polls. They would then have greatly reduced ability to sabotage the workings of government, and most critically no more ability to totally block US Supreme Court and other Federal judicial appointments. I'll happily settle for them sentencing themselves to four years howling in the outer wilderness. And all of this madness over Obama, who by a fair estimation of policy has been what one would normally call a moderate Republican -- rather like Bill Clinton before him. Mr. Clinton also drove them into irrational rage, as you may remember, but nothing like Obama. But then, Obama is black. My late mother warned me on that matter. In June 2007, she knew that my wife Deirdre and I were intending to vote for Obama in California's primary election, while she was voting for Hillary Clinton. She said, 'You don't understand. They'll never let him do the job.' She was quite right. We really didn't anticipate the depth of that. Opposing the duly elected President because he was the wrong race in 2008? Who knew? Well, Mom did, and Deirdre and I did not. It surely isn't just the race thing; the craziness is multifaceted. And I see that you got into a futile brief debate with Russell about the meaning of the word 'conservative'. It really _does_ have a fluid and highly contested meaning in USA politics. So does 'liberal', 'right wing', 'left wing', and a number of others.[1] I'll just leave these two links out here: http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2004/12/i-miss-republicans.html I Miss Republicans. No, seriously. Remember Republicans? Sober men in suits, pipes, who'd nod thoughtfully over their latest tract on market-driven fiscal conservatism while grinding out the numbers on rocket science. Remember those serious-looking 1950's-1960's science guys in the movies -- Republican to a one. They were the grown-ups. They were the realists. Sure they were a bummer, maaaaan, but on the way to _La Revolution_ you need somebody to remember where you parked the car. I was never one (nor a Democrat, really, more an agnostic libertarian big on the social contract, but we don't have a party ...), but I genuinely liked them. How did they become the party of fairy dust and make believe? How did they become the anti-science guys? The anti-fact guys? The _anti-logic guys_? [...] http://thefederalist.com/2016/04/04/yes-the-alt-right-are-just-a-bunch-of-r… Yes, The Alt-Right Are Just a Bunch of Racists Hey, lefties, we finally found your racists for you. For as long as I can remember, people like me—by which I mean advocates of capitalism and free markets and freedom of speech—have been accused by the left of being secret racists who pine for the gold old days of the antebellum South. Tiresome stuff like this. [link] Then along comes a group of actual, declared racists who really do pine for the antebellum South, and who is one of the main targets of their invective? People like me. Kind of ironic, eh? I’m talking about the so-called “alt-right,” which stands for “alternative right,” though I can’t find anything particularly “right-wing” about them —- not in the American sense, which has traditionally meant advocacy of free markets, individual rights, and the ideals of our Founding Fathers. Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing that we even have to debate this, but by launching his campaign on a “Mexican immigrants are rapists” [link] platform, Donald Trump brought the alt-right out of the woodwork. And that has led to a couple [link] of efforts [link] recently to run interference for the alt-right, describing them in sympathetic terms. That’s not going to fly, for five reasons. [...] Meanwhile, keep an eye on http://fivethirtyeight.com/ . (This is Nate Silver's site. Ignore the sports neepery and heed the politics statistical analysis. The name FiveThirtyEight derives from the number of Electors in the USA Electoral College, calculated as: 435 for members of the House of Representatives, 100 for Senators, and three representing the District of Columbia. Silver is the man who has correctly modelled and predicted every major election since 2007, infuriating the pundits who consistently got predictions wrong and were paid to do so.) [1] It pains me that the term 'socialist', however, is seen as a kiss-of-death political shibbleth by people who cannot grasp the concept of a mixed economy and that the only fully 'capitalist' state on Earth is, perhaps, Somalia or some similar failed-state hellhole. I am, accordingly, voting for Sanders not in the expectation of him winning either the Democratic Party nomination nor the November general election, but rather in hopes he will have greater influence at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia in July -- and perhaps make Hillary's policies involve a tiny bit less warmongering and kowtowing to business interests.

Quoting Geoff D'Arcy (gdarcy(a)zeff.org): Not sure. That's an interesting question of political tactics, objectives, and estimation of what's feasible, what's vital, and so on. Occasionally, seeming Pyrrhic victories are worth the cost in the long run, but, since one is never able to re-run history with differing inputs, the best approach is anyone's guess. In the strict sense, FYI, Deirdre and I changing our primary election vote would have made no outcome difference: Democratic Party voters in our Congressional district, the California 18th District (southwest San Mateo County), voted something like 80-90% for Obama in the primary. (To correct my earlier post, this was Febrary 2008, not June 2007.) Thus, our district's four Democratic Party delegates (one of 441 seated from California) would have been pledged to Barack Obama irrespective of our two primary votes. More specifically, 241 of the state's 441 were awarded as candidate-pledged delegates at the Congressional district level (such as my 18th District's four delegates chosen pledged to Obama), 129 were awarded as delegates pledged to the California statewide winner (Hillary Clinton[0]), and 71 were 'superdelegates'[1] not obligated to vote for any candidate at the convention. I mention this fact because, in my experience, people discussing politics tend to spend entirely too much time thumb-sucking about philosophical posturing and rather too little understanding how it works. Present company excepted, though, I'm sure. ;-> [0] Statewide among voters participating in the 2008 Democratic Party California primary: 51.47% for Clinton, 43.16% for Obama. Changing this margin the other way would have required 210,762 voters to change their position, not just two. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate

Quoting Russell Coker (russell(a)coker.com.au): I've been a big, highly vocal, consistent proponent of IRV for, oh, call it, in round figures, about four decades. Happily, IRV and variations (STV, etc.) have been making gradual inroads, e.g., San Francisco city elections have been using IRV since 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting_in_the_United_States#Sa… (To said inroads, my basic reaction is 'It's about bloody time.') Outside of real-world politics, for _many_ decades, IRV has been used for final-ballot voting for the WSFS annual Hugo Awards for best science fiction / fantasy novels, artists, editors, dramatic presentations, etc. -- with a modification called the 'No Award Runoff'. The process is documented here: http://www.thehugoawards.org/the-voting-system/ (I said 'final-ballot' to distinguish that phase of voting from nominations, which just closed five days ago for 2016's Hugo Awards.) Well, maybe they need their meds adjusted, first. ;-> Not an objection to your suggestion, but just as a point of clarification for anyone who doesn't know: Please remember that political parties are _not_ part of the US political system -- and I do mean that seriously -- at either the Federal or state (or local) level. They are private political associations. The US Founding Fathers didn't anticipate the emergence of political parties -- again, I mean that seriously -- and were reportedly taken by surprise by the emergence of the Federalist party in the early 1790s, and their opposition 'anti-Federalists' coalescing into what became the Democratic-Republican Party starting in 1791. Nothing in the US Constitution nor (to my knowledge) state constitutions calls for them. They were merely an emergent effect of the voting framework. In consequence, to this day, US political parties basically govern themselves. You could speak of the 'US having a system' for political parties in the sense of the Federal government encouraging particular things and discouraging others, I guess, but that basically doesn't happen. My state of California accomodates political parties to the extent of being willing to include party 'primary election' functions (where parties pick their candidates for the general election that follows a few months later) on state funded ballots. I infer that California's logic in this is that it's paying for a June ballot anyway for various other state electoral issues, so it's willing to also include the 'primary election' functions of qualified parties. Listing criteria: http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/political-parties/qualified-political-parti… http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/political-parties/political-party-qualifica… In short, aspiring political parties, to be on my state's June ballot, must show they've registered at least 0.33 percent of the total number of recent California voters, or submit a petition of registered voters equal to 10 percent of the votes in the most recent Governor election. These five currently qualify and are on the ballot: American Independent Party Democratic Party Green Party Libertarian Party Peace and Freedom Party Republican Party There are few victories by other than the big two, because of Duverger's Law (First Past the Post voting in winner-take-all polities tend towards two parties). Of course, the general election (both in California and elsewhere) is _not_ in any way limited to candidates of these or any other party. Any candidate who meets state qualifications about minimal support can be put on the ballot, and write-ins are also accepted. (Once a candidate for a general-election partisan position proves the minimal support required by state criteria, he/she can and invariably does provide the party name to be stated next to the candidate's name. (Some state and local positions are deemed non-partisan, and party affiliation is not listed. See http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/household.html for local details in my area.) California voters approved an interesting reform in 2012 to moderate the effect of Duverger's Law and specifically punish and discourage party extremism and politicians' maintenance of 'safe' district seats in the state Senate and Assembly, and resulting gridlock in the Legislature. It's called the 'top two primary', and seems to be working pretty well. Details here: http://ww2.kqed.org/lowdown/2014/06/03/a-last-minute-guide-to-californias-t… Likewise, redistricting was taken out of the hands of the Legislature by a voter initiative in 2010 and assigned to a state commission of retired judges and other similar folk: http://wedrawthelines.ca.gov/ This was done to eliminate the gerrymandering formerly used to create 'safe' districts, which of course, was another foundation of partisan gridlock. This, too, appears to be working pretty well. But anyway, getting back to the point, the internal functioning of the political parties is entirely left up to the parties' respective leaderships to decide, because they (the parties) are _not_ public bodies, i.e., not themselves part of government. E.g., if I'm not happy with the conduct and policies of my political party (Democratic Party), I am free to change to (e.g.) Green Party or Peace and Freedom Party, or to change to a no-preference voter who declares no party affiliation, _but_ I have no direct say in my party's conduct and policies. Nor does the US Federal government, nor do any of the states.

Quoting Russell Coker (russell(a)coker.com.au): Forgot to mention earlier as background for Oz folk: The 'Tea Party' is not an actual political party. It is a wacky reactionary, relatively small, Koch Brothers-funded ideological faction that attempts to control Republican Party functions and policy. However, e.g., no US state's ballot ever has 'Tea Party' as a qualified political party -- because there is no such party. No party central committee, no partisan affiliation that candidates run under on state ballots, no party nominating convention -- because no actual political party at all. Individual Republican candidates declare themselves to be 'Tea Party' aspirants, talk about their gob-smackingly stupid convictions, and, if elected, attempt to conspire with other, similar ideologues to do or not do particular things. Primarily inside the USA Congress, this has involved near-total refusal to participate in the normal functions of Congress, and ongoing effort to sabotage both the Executive Branch (the Obama Presidency) and their own Republican leaders. (This is the biggest reason why John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives and conservative Republican from Ohio, resigned as both Speaker and Congressman in 2015, and why conservative Republican Paul Ryan of Wisconsin only reluctantly agreed to take his place as Speaker: The job has been made difficult and thankless by mindless obstruction from the small ~10% faction of Tea Party nitwits, who undermine and sandbag Republican Party leaders.) (Trumpism, if there is such a thing outside the celebrity ego cult, is idiocy, too, but the point is that it's a different type of idiocy.) To my knowledge, this is true in all Commonwealth countries using or adapting the Westminster system. (Please pardon any areas of total ignorance I have about provisions unique to Australia. I have a general acquaintance with the UK implementation, as well as of Canada's derived system that differs mainly in its allocation of powers between Federal and provincial matters. Australia obviously implements a similar division because of a similar need, but I'm fuzzy on details, except learning about the Senate controlling government supply, which fact emerged when I read about the 1975 constitutional crisis.) In general, the Westminster system _generally_ proves to be quite resilient and responsive. And certainly, there is far less of a Duvenger's Law problem (and particularly less in Australia specifically, on account of IRV). And last, of course, the Westminster system is easy to understand, which cannot be said of USA voting. (US voters would disagree, but solely on account of ignorance.) [US political parties govern themselves] Doubtless true, but legal, political, and historical realities are such that there's no credible way to force an end to those differences, so they are part of what make electoral mechanics complex in the USA. For example, the Democratic Party has superdelegates (party regulars who will attend the national convention as delegates without being pledged to vote for a particular candidate on the first ballot), while the Republican Party does not. Also, each of the fifty states is free to conduct its primary elections entirely as it pleases, _and_ also each party within each state is free to conduct its primary-election affairs as it pleases within limits set by the state's government (which, after all, is paying for the balloting). To my annoyance, news reporting typically behaves as if those complexities don't exist, and reduce electoral results to sports metaphors. For example, if you read about yesterday's primary election in Wisconsin, you probably read that the despicable Cruz 'won' the Republican Party primary, and Sanders 'won' the Democratic Party one, and wasting a lot of verbiage talking about 'momentum' and about percentages of the vote count statewide. This is partly nonsense, as neither party's primary in Wisconsin awards delegates on a winner-take-all basis, and what matters is delegate counts. Wisconsin has eight Congressional districts. The Republican primary's voters in each district select three convention delegate pledged to whatever candidate wins a plurality in that district (for a total of 24), and 18 at-large delegates are selected pledged to whatever candidate wins a plurality of votes statewide -- for a total of 42 delegates. As it turned out, because of the despicable Cruz's narrow plurality lead over Trump in all the diverse parts of that state, all 42 delegates went to Cruz. Meanwhile, in the Democratic Party primary, 86 delegates were selected pledged to candidates (Clinton, Sanders, and O'Malley, though O'Malley has suspended his campaign) proportional to their voting percentages, subject to a 15% threshold (minimum vote to receive any delegates), with some delegates being selected according to statewide voting percentages and others selected according to voting percentages in the eight Congressional districts. (This allocation is according to one site I consulted -- which could be mistaken.) And ten 'superdelegates' are sent unpledged, for a total of 96 from the state. As it turned out, Sanders eked out over Clinton in at least most of the eight districts and statewide, and it's likely that he'll get 48 pledged delegates and Clinton 36. (Numbers are approximate, on account of preliminary nature of data.) Wisconsin imposes an 'open' primary on all parties: Voters may choose on election day to choose which party's primary they wish to participate in. It also requires all parties to permit each voter, if he/she wishes, to cast a vote for an 'uninstructed delegation', meaning selecting an unpledged delegate (generally selected by party regulars) who would then attend the convention and represent the state any way he/she wishes. Given the prevailing idiocy elsewhere in the press, FiveThirtyEight is the best place to follow this and other aspects of the 2016 election cycle. I gather that this has always been the case. The UK Labour party is a very curious beast, post-Thatcher. It's unclear what if anything it stands for, any more. Well, no, that's not true. It is a problem in many corners of even the Westminster system. It's basically true in any constituency that applies first-past-the-post voting. Let's say you were a UK citizen living near Heathrow Airport (west of London). You'd get to vote for councillors of the Hillingdon Council, for the London Assembly member for Ealing Borough and Hillingdon Borough, for the mayor of Greater London, for the MP for the Hayes and Harlington constituency, and for the Greater London area's single EU Parliament representative. In most of those geographical constituencies (not sure about the Greater London area as a whole), Labour Party has an ongoing voting edge. As a LibDem voter, or Conservative, or UKIP, living near Heathrow, your votes for your party lists are inevitably 'wasted votes', in the sense that you are pretty much guaranteed to be outvoted by the Labour turnout within your geographical constituency. IRV would at least partially fix this situation, of course. And there are a _lot_ of other big problems -- serious distortions and disenfranchisements -- in the UK's Westminster mechanics. You really should see CGP Grey's explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9rGX91rq5I I'm reasonably sure similar problems occur in any Westminster system that relies on local districts implementing first past the post. Which means Oz does better. Which is why I've been an IRV proponent for eons. BTW, I recommend CGP Grey's videos generally. The man has a questing mind. https://www.youtube.com/user/CGPGrey/videos (Despite the Yank accent, he's a Irish citizen, FWIW.) [California 'top two primary':] It helps by forcing all state candidates to appeal during the primary election season to _all_ voters and not just narrow constituencies. Extremists of all types will have a more difficult time prevailing at the primary stage to pass along to the subsequent general election -- because they will appeal insufficiently to voters in the middle of the Bell Curve of ideological and other voting criteria. There are some pronounced regional biases. The biggest urban areas in California are the San Francisco Bay Area that includes Silicon Valley (heavily Democratic), Los Angeles (same), the Orange County city cluster just south of Los Angeles (heavily Republican) and San Diego (mixed). All other cities are relatively small, and many probably have party skews but have much less voting power. The very large agricultural Central Valley is heavily Republican (except in some of its cities), but its sparse population means also low voting power. The state as a whole skews strongly to the Democratic Party in most matters, with some exceptions. If you are saying IRV would be an improvement, I've been maintaining that for about four decades. ;-> [Redistricting reform:] In time, perhaps. For now, I'm happy that California voters have grown to trust the redistricting commission, and that the latter's done a creditable and trustworthy job. It is very difficult to get voters to try something new that they don't intuitively grasp and trust. Last year's WSFS voting for the Hugo Awards had an influx of new voters, and it was frustratingly difficult to get many of them to understand how IRV works and affects voting mechanics and tactics. (Technically, this was two related voting blocs, but I'm trying to simplify this recounting.) Essentially, there was an organised effort at bloc voting, attempting to overwhelm traditional Hugo Award voters by 'brigading' particular categories such as Best Novel, Best Editor Short Form, etc. In the nominations phase, five nominees per category get selected, and the voting bloc managed to completely swamp (IIRC) five categories because other voters' choices were diverse and got pushed off by the bloc's five nominees ('slates'), because each category was filled by the five plurality leaders, those five nominated works or persons with the highest nomination count. (The bloc put individual entries into some other categories but did not overwhelm those categories' five nomination slots.) The dominated categories were many of the most important Hugo Awards: Best Novella, Best Short Story, Best Related Work, Best Editor Short Form, and Best Editor Long Form. The final ballot, however, was IRV, with the choice of 'No Award' always being also a votable option for each category. Some bloc voters did not (it seems) understand IRV at all, and were stunned to discover that brigading cannot work without far greater voting strength than they had. Traditional Hugo Award voters had high turnout for the final ballot and utterly annihilated the bloc voting slates: In all five bloc-dominated categories, voters selected 'No Award' on the first IRV pass, and not a single bloc-endorsed nominee got an award in any of the 16 Hugo Award categories. Sitting through the awards ceremony in Spokane, as my wife Deirdre and I did, was electrifying. http://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/ The bloc voters generally failed to understand any of this, and have issued an unending wail of protest against many parts of it, including claiming that 'No Award' deprived them of some sort of entitlement. Cynicism aside, it's quite possible that this is genuine failure to grasp the voting system in question rather than just sour grapes. Anyway, the larger point is: It is difficult to introduce voting innovations voters cannot easily understand and trust. Perhaps less so in California than in many places, because ideas both good and bad get cheerfully voted in here, first. We're stuck with term limits for that reason, for example. Call it California craziness, low impulse threshold, whatever you want to label it; we try things. (There are limits to what Californians can tinker with, though: Neither the 'top two' voting provision nor term limits apply to the Federal offices of US Senator, US House of Representatives, and President / Vice-President, as California jurisdiction cannot override Federal jurisdiction.)

Quoting Russell Coker (russell(a)coker.com.au): They are extremely odd people. I heard discussion on public radio, recently, of a biographical book about that family, and they had some intrigues worthy of the Italian Renaissance. And some good reasons for turning out a bit warped. I listened to that and thanked my lucky stars for having grown up among overwhelmingly sane and pleasant people. I'll gladly take your word for it about there no longer being a Koch sponsorship of Tea Party nutters. I really wouldn't know. In fact, I really ought, in all honesty and modesty, to make something clear: Much as I'd like to explain everything that's puzzling about the United States of America to my esteemed international friends, all too often, I'm sitting here in Silicon Valley scratching my head and saying 'WTF?' too. Because I was only born here, and have that passport. I was raised in the British school system for key parts of my early life (in Hong Kong), and then returned to California just in time to see my native country's culture mutated weirdly by the late '60, then by Richard M. Nixon, then by Watergate, then by the Oil Crisis and Jimmy Carter, then by that mouth-breather Ronald Reagan. The Bill Clinton years I almost caught up with change and I started to feel less like a cultural anthropologist in a strange land -- just in time for George W. Bush and whacko time again. I'm a liberal whose cultural touchstone is his parents' culture, that of WWII, so I'm totally an outsider to political conservatives and especially modern ones, and to Tea Partiers, birthers, preppers, Sovereign Citizens, and other political loons. I'm a secular person raised by an atheist Mum and an agnostic Dad, so I'm totally an outsider to anyone deeply religious, let alone fundamentalists, Mormons, and various even weirder things. I'm deeply oriented towards books and traditional magazines and study of history, so I'm totally an outsider to cultures that get their worldviews from Twitter, Facebook, and reality television, and who don't really read. I'm Scandinavian, so I'm totally an outsider to flag-waving lunatic hyperpatriotism and Texas-style boasting. I'm the product of an Ivy League college, so I'm totally an outsider to anyone so incredibly ignorant as to take Trump seriously. I'm a Californian and city boy, so I'm totally an outsider to the Bible Belt, Utah, Oklahoma, and other places where you need to set your clocks back 50 years upon entering the state. I'm an internationalist, so I'm totally an outsider to xenophobic and isolationist American exceptionalism. I'm a person who defines politics as 'the public's business' and the government as 'us', so I'm totally an outsider to the infantile cult of dismissing politics as inherently evil and working solely to throw out the bastards with no Plan B, and want to shrink government until it's small enough to drown in a bathtub (as evil genius and Tea Party strategist Grover Norquist says). I'm a devoted voter who fanatically seized onto the right to vote when the USA lowered its age of majority to 18 just before my 18th birthday in 1976, so, I'm totally an outsider to the politically disaffected who seldom bother to participate. I'm a straight, white, aging male privileged homeowner who nonetheless is an avid political ally of immigrants, youth, the poor, the LGBTQ, and all kinds of other mutants, so I'm totally an outsider to those who fear change and think Bad People are ruining the USA. I'm a basically peaceful person who thinks civilised people fight using attorneys if absolutely necessary, so I'm totally an outsider to both firearms worship and the recurring urge to invade other countries. So, in short, what I'm saying is, don't expect me to necessarily be able to explain Americans to you, let alone head-scratching Americana, just because I am one. I'm just _here_. Whether I'm _of_ here is debatable. Certainly I'm of a _part_ of here, though I'm also of Hong Kong, of Norway, of the UK, and many other places. And many American subcultures are totally, deeply, wrenchingly alien to me. Just so you know. [reporting about US electoral news:] My standards are perhaps unreasonably high. School didn't do a _great_ job of teaching me civics, not to mention that I was in the British school system part of when some of it was being taught. So, I read. I studied. I thought things through. And I compare the results of study to what the press writes about who's 'winning', and who has 'momentum', and treating a state's electoral results as winner-take-all when they just aren't -- and find that lacking. Newspapers have sadly been underfunding and underusing their remaining _real_ reporters, is part of the problem. Also, it's the desire for instant news 'material' rather than waiting for sensible analysis. And reliance on bloggers. Shockingly, erosion in the public schools is also having its effect. During the Dubya years, a trend towards teaching strictly towards tests became common. Schools started being evaluated, teachers rewarded or punished, school budgets rewarded or eviscerated, based on how well or badly their students did on standardised tests at graduation. The inevitable consequence of this was that music teaching went away, arts teaching shrivelled, many things -- including civics. Civics! Good God! And all the time, I've been saying and voting 'No, no, a thousand times no! Go the _other_ way!' [follow FiveThirtyEight:] I swear one of the most enjoyable things I've seen in ages was Dubya's political Svengali Karl Rove's live television appearance on Faux News (excuse me, 'Fox News') during coverage of the 2012 general election, the night Obama was re-elected. Rove was on there saying right up through the final minutes that weird Mormon Republican Mitt Romney was a shoo-in for success. Of _course_ he was winning. Why, it was seconds away. All the dominoes were falling as planned, he explained. Cruel reality had other plans, and Rove had an extended on-screen meltdown, as his neat predictions utterly failed, and nothing went right. He freaked out. It was glorious. And everything happened precisely as FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver predicted. I'm sure the Rove meltdown is on YouTube for your schadenfreude enjoyment. [California 'top two primary':] I don't know what to tell you, but it really does seem to moderate the hopefuls' positions. And that really was the idea. Low turnout is a complicating factor in many US elections. Yes, one of the really annoying thing I've seen repeatedly over a long life as a voter is the tactical trolling of the public, just before an election, by finding emotional 'wedge' issues to attempt to whip up single-issue potential voters and 'swing' voters. 'Swing' is a euphemism for dumbass, more or less, i.e., a low-information voter who's easily swayed and might not vote at all unless stimulated in the limbic system by overheated manipulative agitprop. You'd think people would learn, but there I go expecting rationality and sober reflection again. There is also a problem of voter exhaustion. California has the trait of a wildly overdeveloped initiative legislation system. In any given statewide election, there might be a dozen proposed bits of initiative ordinary legislation (and also initiative amendments to the state constitution) and referendums that have been referred directly to the voters. Starting in the 1980s, the ballot grew by leaps and bounds, partly because the Legislature in Sacramento suffered deadlock between conservative and liberal factions, ergo it was seen as necessary to punt many matters to the voters. (Redistricting reform and the top two primary have started to heal this breach.) Sometimes, I think California is utterly election-mad. Note all of these elected offices I'm called upon to vote for: http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/household.html (Scroll down to subhead 'Elected-office political districts'.) That's a _whole_ lot of things to vote for. Because I consider politics the public's business, I take it quite seriously, and research diligently before each election. But imagine all that on ballots, _plus_ initiative statutes, constitutional amendments, and referendums. Doing this right takes a _lot_ of time, and concentration, and patience.[1] [my explanation of regional party biases in parts of California and statewide, with attention to 'safe seats':] I'm going to disappoint you on this, and say I don't have figures. I'm sure you can find them, though. True, that. [1] Coming up in November is a California initiative statute to completely legalise marijuana, another body blow to Nixon's War on Drugs that I traditionally refer to as the War on Some Drugs -- or as the War on Drugs Lacking Major Corporate Sponsorship. By the way, it's going to pass. Can't wait for the lovely political fallout from that. And as part of understanding American politics, please see this piece to appreciate just how evil and twisted Nixon was in launching that misbegotten crusade: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ (Though, it should be noted, the cited and now-famous comment by Nixon aide Ehrlichman is disputed by some scholars of the period, e.g.: http://www.vox.com/2016/3/29/11325750/nixon-war-on-drugs )

Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck(a)gmail.com): The Sage of Baltimore was a man of much wisdom, not counting the latent racism, mental rigidity, and limited vision -- and in my dreams I'm having dinner with him, Mark Twain, Lao Tsu, Gore Vidal, Voltaire, Oscar Wilde, Marcus Aurelius, Aphra Behn, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Ambrose Bierce. But they'd probably have hated each other, and the price for being in the same state of being as all of them, at the moment, seems rather too high even for their company. At least I did get to meet Gore Vidal -- and vote for him for junior US Senator from California. He lost, of course. Tant pis. Mencken suffered a horrible decline and death: At the age of 67, three years after WWII, a massive stroke left him, suddenly and permanently, almost completely aphasic. For eight years, he lingered on, one of the wittiest homo sapiens alive, fully conscious inside his skull, but almost completely unable to communicate, and effectively silenced. But his influence was wide, and yet lives. Most of his writings were wholly topical, hence less appreciated now than they were in contemporary context, but _then_ he was a lion of the printed page, read by everyone.

Quoting Russell Coker (russell(a)coker.com.au): Hear, hear. Though, oddly enough, one of the Koches is gay and apparently a thoroughly decent person -- who sadly is obliged to deal with the others, who despise him for his sexual orientation. As I said, they're a particularly odd family. I'm not entirely sure that would help. You see, the elder Reagan was also governor of my native state, and rather a disaster at that, IMO. I do dip into Twitter, very selectively. See, for example, the many tweets enshrined in my .signature blocks: http://linuxmafia.com/pub/humour/sigs-rickmoen.html But, to reiterate, my problem is not with Twitter; my problem is with people getting their worldview from Twitter. Tweets are about the world's worst substitute for any of the other ways of understanding national and world affairs. [citation needed] https://xkcd.com/285/ Utanning kan ikke unngå å bli uklokt, men i det minste noen av oss er flerkulturelle. (Education cannot prevent being unwise, but at least some of us are multicultural.) FWIW, polls suggest that Trump's current electorate are overwhelmingly poorly educated. More's the pity. I'd like to declare some artificial island Galt's Gulch, drop the lot of them off, and let them work things out.

Quoting Russell Coker (russell(a)coker.com.au): [Reagan:] Ah, the rare valid point. I will bear that in mind, so, thanks. This lamentable person seems to be one Susan A. Patton, Princeton U. class of 1977. Ms. Patton holds, among other things, that many past incidents labelled as rape are better interpreted as 'learning experiences'. On account of various embarrassments of that general nature, 123 of her fellow alumni recently wrote a letter asking her to please cease associating herself with Princeton University in public: http://time.com/3700935/princeton-mom-alumni-susan-patton-sexual-assault/ In any event, my '[citation needed]' was not particularly serious, _but_ your phrase 'more than a few' seems to imply a significant percentage -- and I really rather doubt such quantity of Trump-leaners exist, even bearing in mind any number of dullard and/or mentally unbalanced Ivy Leaguers. And one single lunatic is not quite in the ball park. You have just moved the goalposts onto an entirely different playing field, as I said nothing about 'all'. Er, apologies, but I'm unclear on the person you're intending. There's an Attorney General from Mississippi who went up against the tobacco industry (events shown in the movie 'The Insider') named Mike Moore. There's of course the the film-maker and author, but he goes by Michael and not Mike. There are also a number of sysadmins and coders involved with Linux named Mike Moore, though I have no idea why any of them might arouse anger. In any event, my word, that's striking that merely mentioning someone's name nearly led to a fist fight. The other party would seem to have some issues -- perhaps an entire year's worth of issues, suitable for binding. ;->

Russell Coker via luv-talk wrote: Nitpick: as Rick pointed out, it's *all* FPTP jurisdictions. "Large countries widely using FPTP include India, the US, the UK, & Canada."

Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck(a)gmail.com): You wound me. ;-> Nicely put! That is indeed a fair summation.