Fran Lebowitz on Race and Racism

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https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2016/01/fran-lebowitz-on-race-and-racism

The way to approach it, I think, is not to ask, “What would it be like to be black?” but to seriously consider what it is like to be white. That’s something white people almost never think about. And what it is like to be white is not to say, “We have to level the playing field,” but to acknowledge that not only do white people own the playing field but they have so designated this plot of land as a playing field to begin with. White people are the playing field. The advantage of being white is so extreme, so overwhelming, so immense, that to use the word “advantage” at all is misleading since it implies a kind of parity that simply does not exist.

It is now common—and I use the word “common” in its every sense—to see interviews with up-and-coming young movie stars whose parents or even grandparents were themselves movie stars. And when the interviewer asks, “Did you find it an advantage to be the child of a major motion-picture star?” the answer is invariably “Well, it gets you in the door, but after that you’ve got to perform, you’re on your own.” This is ludicrous. Getting in the door is pretty much the entire game, especially in movie acting, which is, after all, hardly a profession notable for its rigor. That’s how advantageous it is to be white. It’s as though all white people were the children of movie stars. Everyone gets in the door and then all you have to do is perform at this relatively minimal level.

Approval Voting in Fargo

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https://electology.org/blog/fargo-nd-makes-history-first-us-city-implement-approval-voting

Fargo just voted in a new voting system. “Approval Voting”. The text of the measure is here: https://reformfargo.org/ballot-initiative

Article 11 – Election procedures

  1. MethodologyCity officials will be elected so that each voter may vote for all the candidates the voter approves of in each race. Candidates receiving the most votes will be elected until all necessary seats are filled in each race.
  2. Ballot instructionsFor each race to elect city officials, the instructions on the ballot will instruct voters with the directions, “Vote for ALL the names you approve of,” with “ALL” being written in uppercase.
  3. Reporting of resultsFor each candidate’s result in each race, reported vote percentages must be calculated by taking the number of votes for that candidate divided by the total ballots cast.

 

Michael Hudson: Rescuing the Banks Instead of the Economy | naked capitalism

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“MICHAEL HUDSON: I think what the newspapers said was that the bailout saved the banks. To bankers, their banks are the economy. The problem is, you can’t save the banks and the economy. If you save the banks, you’re saving all the debt that people owe to the banks. And if you save all the debt that the people owe to the banks – and you foreclose on the millions of families that forfeited their homes in the mortgage crisis – if you leave the debts growing at compound interest, raise the debt equity ratios and the debt-to-income ratios, then the economy is going to shrink and shrink, and we’re in a slow crash. So in a sense the celebration over “Yes, we saved the banks” was correct last week, but people don’t realize that the economy cannot be saved unless there’s a bank crash.”

source

Michael Hudson: Rescuing the Banks Instead of the Economy | naked capitalism

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“MICHAEL HUDSON: I think what the newspapers said was that the bailout saved the banks. To bankers, their banks are the economy. The problem is, you can’t save the banks and the economy. If you save the banks, you’re saving all the debt that people owe to the banks. And if you save all the debt that the people owe to the banks – and you foreclose on the millions of families that forfeited their homes in the mortgage crisis – if you leave the debts growing at compound interest, raise the debt equity ratios and the debt-to-income ratios, then the economy is going to shrink and shrink, and we’re in a slow crash. So in a sense the celebration over “Yes, we saved the banks” was correct last week, but people don’t realize that the economy cannot be saved unless there’s a bank crash.”

source

Stop defending liberal arts degrees

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It’s common to hear defenses of the liberal arts framed in economic terms. How the MFA is the new MBA etc. This is a mistake. To frame it all using economics is a losing battle. University is much more than “job training”. Most young people will move through many different kinds of jobs in their lives. What they need is to discover their own minds, what they are good at, what they aren’t, to learn some skills, but also to contextualize their lives in the long history of the world and the nation, learn how power works, how to write and speak, how to give and receive critical feedback. If we were to design higher education around the size of the first paycheck out of college, the only thing we’d teach is oil drilling technology.

https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/10/22/arguments-support-humanities-education-should-not-focus-just-economic-outcomes

Should it continue to dwell predominantly as a defensive response to those who mistakenly deride the economic outcomes of a humanities education, it risks being subsumed by similar terminology and rhetoric. Such an exclusively reactionary focus, rather than mitigating erosion, threatens a continued dwindling of the imaginative, interrogative and empathetic impulses core to the humanities that deserve enhancement and celebration even if devoid of immediate monetary value. The power of the humanities is best revealed on our shared pursuit of common and essential questions about what it means to be human. What constitutes a good life? How do we know the truth? How do we preserve democracy? The foundational role of the humanities in a civil society stems from the connections made between the lessons learned from history, literature and philosophy and the significant moments in our personal lives.

Kids are “Anti-Fragile”

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https://bigthink.com/videos/3-great-untruths-to-stop-telling-kids-and-ourselves

there’s some systems that get stronger if they get pushed around, knocked around.

It turns out kids are anti-fragile and when we protect children from unpleasantness, from conflicts, from insults, from teasing, from exclusion, we’re preventing their social psychology, we’re preventing their social abilities, we’re preventing their strength from developing.

There are some systems that have to get pushed around, and Taleb wrote this book ‘Antifragile’ or antifragility because things like the banking system had to be tested or it gets fragile and collapses. Bones have to be tested, used, or they get weak; if you were to fly to Mars your bones would get weak. The immune system, if you protect kids from bacteria, if you keep them in a sterile environment you’re damaging their immune system. The immune system has to face challenges in order to learn.

Single Transferrable Vote

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I love reading and thinking about alternative voting systems. Why? I think it’s the counterintuitive notion that making collective decisions is not the same as making individual decisions. There is no perfect system and each system can fail and produce a paradox. But there are more sophisticated systems that what we are used to. They are a bit complex but generally would aggregate our collective preferences well.

Some of the most interesting variants are considered “Single Transferrable Vote”, which is a variation of “Ranked Choice Voting”.

THE OSCARS USE A MORE FAIR VOTING SYSTEM THAN MOST OF AMERICA DOES

The System Really Is Rigged: Why Winner-Take-All Voting Is Killing Our Democracy

Ranked Choice Voting

The state of Main does ranked choice voting

Single Transferable Vote

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote

https://www.opavote.com/methods/single-transferable-vote

Meek (Single Transferable Vote)

https://blog.opavote.com/2017/04/meek-stv-explained.html

Arrow’s impossibility theorem

But, there is no perfect system of voting. Group choice is not like individual choice, every method can fail in different ways.

https://kottke.org/16/11/voting-paradoxes-explained

 

also we should always vote on paper. It’s the most secure:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/guardian-of-the-vote/544155/

MORE!!!

Continuous voting

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Is it strange to be as interested in alternative voting mechanism as I am? Part of me just thinks that this winner take all system is like being in the democratic dark ages. If the goal is collective decision making, winner take all is really lame. There are better ways (but there is no perfect way).

Here is a strange idea about Continuous Elections

For a variety of reasons, I think it a good idea that we introduce into our voting system a greater element of stochasticism, of structured, intentional randomness.

Wow. Go on please.

Suppose we had an electoral system that looked like this: Every month, 5% of the voting roll is randomly selected to cast a ballot for a representative. There’s no big election day: Any time during their month selected voters can come in and cast their vote. After the balloting period has passed, one ballot is randomly selected, and then a virtual coin is flipped that comes up heads only one time in 24. If the coin comes up heads, the current representative is replaced with the randomly selected ballot. If not, that month’s ballots are thrown away, and the representative’s term continues. Under this system, on average, a representative’s terms would be 24 months, but there would never be a period when a representative is more or less near an election.

Extended links:

Choosing Representatives by Lottery Voting,  Akhil Reed Amar

Random Ballot

Towards a more perfect democracyDavid R. MacIver

Proportional representation could save America

This voting reform solves 2 of America’s biggest political problems