Why the Democratic Party Demonizes Third Party Candidates

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard of the shitstorm started by Hillary Clinton when she spoke on David Plouffe's podcast Campaign HQ.

I'm not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She is a favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she is also a Russian asset.

If you're just visiting this planet, you may not be aware that the "somebody" that Hillary references is none other than Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who is currently running in the Democratic primaries to be the presidential nominee.

There are so many levels of weirdness attached to this, I need to prune some of them to narrow the focus. Forget, for the moment, that Hillary, whose supporters have been rightly claiming for years has been the subject of unfair accusations, is now leveling unsupported accusations at a fellow Democrat.  Forget that she is a senior member of the Democratic Party wading into a primary to shoot at one of the candidates. Forget that Gabbard's campaign was dying and Hillary's foray into this mess has shone a new spotlight on it.  Forget even that by stirring up controversy, Hillary is doing the Russians a huge favor because they ostensibly are trying to sow division in the US.

The weirdness I want to focus on is this: why do Democrats get so passionate when it comes to third party candidates?  After all, Jill Stein, who Hillary directly accused of being a "Russian asset", garnered a grand total of just under 470,000 votes in 2016.  Rough math tells me that's just around 1/3 of 1% of the votes cast. It seems hardly enough to make a huge deal over.  Democrats claim that she took enough votes away from Clinton in swing states to cost the election but this is nonsense.

Though Democrats have often pointed to Stein getting 1 percent of the vote in key states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as a reason Clinton lost those longtime Democratic strongholds, exit polls have shown that most of Stein's voters would not have supported either Clinton or Trump if Stein had not run.

 The Democratic Party is an institution with lots of money and elections run on data; so I'm sure they know that Stein didn't cost them the election.  So, why are Clinton and others making with the histrionics?  More to the point is this.  If third party candidate really are a threat to the US electoral system, isn't there a way to change the voting system to address the threat?

The answer to the second question is yes and provides insight into the first question.  If third party candidates were a threat to the US electoral system, there is a fairly simple way to address it.  Simply switch from a from a "first-past-the-post" single choice ballot to a ranked ballot where voters can rank their choices.  The inherent assumption in the Democrats complaint is that if the third party candidates (like Jill Stein) weren't there, the voters would still show up and they would vote Democrat.  This isn't actually true but for now, let's assume it is.

You might think that the Democratic Party would jump at the prospect of an "alternative vote" system with ranked ballots where people who really wanted to vote for, say, the Green Party but would choose the Democrat second.  This would allow the Democratic Party to capture the votes of those "spoiler" candidates.  If you think this, you would be wrong.

The last thing that either the Democrats or the Republicans want is a system that encourages more parties.  They have a monopoly on voter choice and they don't want to give it up.  Every election, they use fear mongering to get people who don't really like them to vote for them anyway, just to stop the other party.  It's a dumb, anti-democratic game but it works for them.  So, they don't want it to change.

The Reality Show Presidency

Say what you like about Trump but the fact is that he's transformed government.  No longer is it a dry, boring affair where serious policies are crucial and conflict of interest can ruin you.  Now, you can be as smart, as honest, as empathetic, as telegenic as you like.  If you're not entertaining, you're out.

You can be perplexed and offended by this.  You can point out that millions of lives are deeply affected by what the government does.  You can insist that governing is a serious business and needs to be done by serious people - people with expertise, compassion, experience and vision.  I agree with you but that clearly isn't what people expect anymore.  This is an era of memes, pet videos, bizarre pictures and emoji.  If the government isn't entertaining, people's attention will shift in an instant.  It isn't just young people, either.  Plenty of Xers and boomers now have the attention span of gnats as the digital age drowns us all.

Twenty years ago, Trump would have single digit approval and would have been dumped by his own party.  Twenty years ago, Trump would never have won the nomination.  Twenty years ago, he could have been the Ross Perot of his day, a crank; a joke.  He is a joke but the joke is now on Americans and on the world.  Make no mistake.  What's happening is deadly serious.  Nationalism and its ugly twin racism are engulfing the US.  The myriad of links from Trump and GOP to Russian money are not, as Glenn Greenwald and Tulsi Gabbard might have you believe, baseless conspiracy theories. Authoritarian regime expert Sarah Kendzior's warnings that Trump and his minions are using well-understood tactics to move America closer to authoritarianism are not completely ridiculous notions.  It's time for people to pay attention.

Unfortunately, most of the people who are paying closest attention seem to come from the old era of boring government.  They aren't learning.  Consider this tweet posted yesterday by Kurt Eichenwald:

1. Messages from@RadioFreeTom,@JRubinBlogger,@WalshFreedom and others are the key to the survival of America. If we have learned anything from the Trump era, it is that we MUST end the personal invective of politics. Politics is about governing, and governing is about policy..

Trump has been running circles around these folks by the last three years by doing the exact opposite of what he proposes.  Does anyone think that the ~120 million Americans that, judging from the polls, still support Trump and have no intention of abandoning him, are going to have their minds changed by that?

So, what to do?

1. Stop chasing Trump's every crazy tweet.  The one yesterday about buying Greenland is a great example.  It's not going to happen so ignore it.  If the press and progressives do this and leave Trump's base to talk about it among themselves, he will look as weak and foolish as he is.
2. Focus on issues that matter to Trump's base like conflict of interest, his Russian connections, lack of wage growth and the way tax cuts have benefited the wealthy.  Use House investigations to dig up dirt.
3. Impeach.  Maybe Nancy Pelosi is a genius who is dragging her feet to make sure impeachment hearings can become an election issue.  Maybe she's timid. Maybe she's compromised. Maybe she's a genius and I just don't understand. But if Trump isn't impeached, this will be a message to future presidents. There will be no consequences for anything you do as long as your base doesn't abandon you.
4. Learn from the last election.  The Democrats need a populist, someone who can draw a crowd and make people care enough to show up and vote.  Someone like Bernie.
5. The Democrats need to firmly address the elephant in the room - the spiraling gap between the poor and the rich.  For decades, they've been promising to help the poor but pursuing policies that make the wealthy wealthier. Universal health care is a good start but it's not enough.  Bernie or or Elizabeth.  Not Joe. 

The game has changed.  If the Democrats and progressives don't change with it, they will always lose.

Socialism? wtf is that?

In the past few years, I have seen a noticeable uptick in anti-capitalist sentiment on social media.  In a remarkable turnaround from the 90s when being called a "liberal" in the US could end your political ambitions, many people are openly labeling themselves as socialists.  I always wonder what they mean by that.

While socialism actually means one of a variety of forms of collective or public ownership of the economy, the word socialist is still widely used by people on the economic right to mean almost any policy they don't like.  Even on the political left, many call social programs like welfare or socialized medicine as socialism.  Nordic countries are often described as socialism when they clearly social democracies with capitalist economies.  Bernie Sanders has, at times, called himself a socialist; something he is definitely not. 

I find that much of conventional socialist thought is still modeled after Marxist thought - exploited workers and cooperative ownership of organizations.  I find this curious in 2019 as we move towards a future where a manufacturing facility might consist of a building full of robots.  Although I support unionization of workers who truly are exploited, I also see the limitations of this from three perspectives.  First, unionization raises wages which causes companies to  invest more in labour saving technology, which in turn reduces employment.  This isn't inherently a bad thing, providing we have societies that look after unemployed people (which we currently don't).  Second, technology acts as a multiplier that allows individuals to become wealthy to an extent that wouldn't have been possible in Marx's time.  Finally, I regularly see unions on the wrong side of environmental issues as they support expansion of dirty industries for the benefit of their workers.

I think socialist thought requires an update.

First, instead of focused on workers, it needs to be people-centric.  Over the next few decades, we may find ourselves increasingly in a position where workers aren't needed for production of necessary goods and services. People still need to be free, cared for and provided opportunities to challenge themselves and grow.

Second, the resources of the world need to be equitably distributed to the people of the world.  Also, consumption needs to be capped to within and amount that is sustainable across the planet.  This means that sooner or later, there needs to be some form of democratic world government.  No, not the UN.

Third, there needs to be limits on the amount of wealth inequality allowed.  I don't care how good of a singer you are or how talented at curating cat videos, you are not entitled to enormous wealth because that wealth allows you to consume disproportionate resources.  Inequality is corrosive to social cohesion.

Finally, we need to abandon nationalism in favor of localism.  Nation-states should be weakened, with more control given to local governments, under an overall global administration.

I know this all sounds so utopian but it's all possible.  The key element is for people to wake up and understand that giant corporations and the billionaires that own them are pan-national.  When trade deals are negotiated and pundits claim that this or that country won the negotiations, what isn't mentioned is that the corporations win no matter what.  They operate in both countries and simply adjust their operations to maximize their profits.  While ordinary people are played into acting against their own interests in pursuit of the "national interest", billionaires win either way.   When people understand that their interests are more aligned with people in other countries than the billionaires in their own country, then things become much clearer.

Good luck to us all.

Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?

I grew up in a world before the Internet.  There were no social media, no online games, and no email.  Most importantly, in the rural location where I lived, there were few sources of information: TV and radio news, one daily newspaper from Edmonton, one weekly newspaper from Toronto and Time Magazine in the mail monthly.  The local town and school libraries were a joke and so my reference information was a set of encyclopedias.  It was a different world.  While you and your neighbor might disagree on the interpretation of events, for the most part you were in agreement with what events took place and which events were most important.

Fast forward to the1990's and the explosive growth of the Internet.  Suddenly people had free online access to major newspapers around the world.  Chat groups and online discussion forums meant that you could have discussions with people anywhere, anytime.  Wikipedia came online in 2001 and in 6 years became the largest encyclopedia in history, replacing the Yongle Encyclopedia, which had held the record for 600 years.  Social media is so pervasive is our society, it's easy to forget that it has only been mainstream for about 15 years since MySpace took off.

We're now connected in ways that in my youth would have been considered science fiction.  Although much of the most valuable information has become secured behind firewalls, there are still vast troves of information freely available.  We should be the most knowledgeable people in history.

It's Not All Good
In the 1990's, when the Internet was first coming into its own, I found myself drawn to conspiracy theories and other topics where mainstream knowledge was questioned. It started as harmless fun with topics like Roswell, the existence of UFOs and whether the moon landing was faked.  This morphed into more serious issues like the JFK assassination and the Gulf of Tonkin incident that triggered the Vietnam War.  As it went on, people I knew were starting to be immersed  topics like Internet health cures and whether vaccines cause autism.

Spending time reading about topics in which you have no expertise starts out as interesting but soon becomes bewildering.  How do you fact check something when everyone comes with their own set of facts? Over time, the concept of truth becomes hazier and more malleable; and the research begins to feel like a project that will never lead to a conclusion.

For me, the turning point came after 9-11.  So many improbable events happened on one day, it was hard to absorb.  Predictably, it took almost no time for groups to start accusing the US government of a "false flag" operation.  Although many of the conspiracy theories arising from 911 lack any real evidence, there are many credible people who simply question weaknesses in the official explanation.  Over 3,000 architects, engineers and scientists have signed on to Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.  They are questioning the official NIST version of how the 3 buildings fell and demanding a new, independent investigation.  One article I found particularly chilling was this 2009 article in the Open Chemical Physics Journal documenting the analysis of dust collected from points around New York City after 911.  It claims that particles in the dust are consistent with an explosive form of thermite, a material which could be used to bring down buildings.

Hours spent researching 911 left me feeling bewildered and lost. It was impossible to ignore the holes in the official story yet it's awful to contemplate the the potential implications of the official story being wrong or worse, lies.  I gave up and moved on to other things.

The Problems Continue
The Internet continues to be a place of questionable information, fake news, "alternative facts", well-written disinformation and just plain lies.  Two recent examples are the climate change debate and the 2016 US election and subsequent Trump presidency. 

In the case of climate change, it's hard to imagine another branch of scientific research that is subject to so much controversy, resistance and disinformation.  The reasons are fairly clear - people don't like change, especially when it costs them money; and there are huge industries that stand to lose trillions of dollars in revenue by switching away from fossil fuels.  The Internet provides support and ammunition to those who don't want to change.  Meanwhile, scientists have been issuing increasingly urgent pleas for citizens and politicians to take action.  It's only recently, since the effects of climate change are becoming more apparent, that people are starting to take it seriously.

In terms of the election, the Internet was a cesspool of false information and entirely made up news. These articles were widely shared on social media. There is incontrovertible evidence that points to Russian involvement in swinging the election towards Trump. A study conducted in 2018 concluded that fake news may well have cost Clinton the presidency.

So Now What?
The Internet is the greatest revolution in human communication since the invention of written language.  However, like all technology, its power can be misused as easily as it is used.  It can be used to spread information and build knowledge or it can be used to spread disinformation and shut down debate.


Some practical suggestions for dealing with the dangers of false information include:

• Social media giants need to take more accountability for false information that is spread on their sites.  This is starting to happen.
• We need entities that can call out fake news without being attacked by the left or the right.  This need has been variously filled by websites like snopes.com, some journalists and certain academics.  However, so far, none of this has proven capable of effectively calling out or correcting misinformation.
• People need to develop better critical reasoning skills.  In particular, there is a phenomenon called the Kruger-Dunning effect which describes peoples' tendencies to overestimate their knowledge and abilities when it comes to forming conclusions on technical topics.

Navigating Climate Change for Lay People

I'm not a scientist.  My credentials consist of a couple of entry-level university courses, reading of popular science literature such as Scientific American and deep curiosity and concern for the world.  Still, I'm not naturally inclined to believe or do something just because the experts told me so.  I try to balance a healthy skepticism with respect due to scientists who've devoted their careers to inquiry in specialized fields.

So, the topic of climate change has produced a serious quandary for me.  It covers such a huge area of topics that I found it almost impossible for me a as a lay person to completely understand.  Although the bulk of the scientific community has largely rallied behind the science, there is an active community of detractors anchored by a small number of contrarian scientists.  How many are genuine and how many are part of a funded proponents of the fossil fuel industry is a matter of speculation and debate.

The broad strokes of climate change science are simple enough.  The earth's climate is produced by an interaction of heat with the atmosphere, water, and land.  There is a balance between the energy received from the sun's rays and energy radiated off into space. An important part of that balance is the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere such as water vapor, methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2).  Greenhouse gases absorb a portion of the spectrum of the sun's rays that would otherwise be radiated out into space and radiate the energy back to the earth in the form of infrared radiation.  Without the greenhouse effect, the earth would be too cold to support life as we know it. 

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, human activity has significantly increased the amounts of 2 greenhouse gases in particular - CO2, which is produced by burning oil, coal and other fuels; and CH4, which is the main component of natural gas. Here's where the complexity comes in.  Although the effect on an annual basis of the additional CO2 and CH4 is slight, it's cumulative over time.  Scientists say that models and experience show that the increased energy over decades and centuries produces significant rises in temperature, affecting the  the biosphere and causing disruption to the conditions that support life which has adapted itself to specific circumstances.  Detractors argue a multitude of contradicting points of view including

1. The world isn't actually warming - perceived warming is due to measurement errors
2. The world is warming but it's not due to human activity
3. The warming exists but it's actually a net benefit
4. The warming exists but it's cheaper to live with it than avoid it

To make it even more complicated, there are numerous types of feedback, both positive and negative, that will affect the ultimate impact that the increased greenhouse gases have.  There are factors like the loss of the albedo effect (cooling due to reflection of energy from pale surfaces like ice) when ice melts, the increase in plant growth due to increased CO2 and the increase in methane when the permafrost melts, and the potential for massive loss of rain forest due to temperature change.

Unless you're a scientist with a significant amount of time invested in this, the chances of you drawing an informed opinion from the details are remote.  So, how do you move forward?  How do you make a decision when the evidence is so complicated, you aren't qualified to evaluate it?

 I've taken a 3-pronged approach to evaluating the problem of whether we should be actively reducing our GHG output:

1. Which side has the most credibility?
2. Which side presents arguments that are most consistent with observed results?
3. What are the relative risks and rewards of of each side?

Credibility
On one side of the debate you have the vast majority of the world's scientific community (no major scientific body disputes the science of climate change), most of the world's governments, and environmental groups.  On the other, you have a small number of contrarian scientists, the fossil fuel industry, right wing politicians and think tanks.  Each side has accused the other of distorting the issue to protect their respective financial interests.  There are persistent claims of industry-funded "astroturf" groups on one side and environmentalists being funded by liberal billionaires on the other.  To me it's difficult to equate the two.  The financial interest of the fossil fuel industry is clearly massively greater than that of climate scientists vying for grants.  If there were something improper about the way climate scientists arrived at their conclusions, the fossil fuel industry with its almost unlimited funds would surely have uncovered it.

Some claim that because the community of climate scientists is relatively small and they peer-review each other's work that group think and confirmation bias have tainted the results.  This is possible - it wouldn't be the first time that the scientific community have gone off in a false direction and shouted down contrarian views.

In my view, the scientific community has significantly greater credibility than the the fossil fuel industry and the few contrarian scientists.  The scientific community is fairly conservative and shies away from the most extreme (and speculative) scenarios that could come from climate change.  Whatever the financial rewards for scientists who publish on the risks of climate change, they pale in comparison to the trillions of dollars of revenue at stake for the fossil fuel industry if carbon intensive industries are curtailed.

Observed Results
To me, this isn't even close.  This chart clearly shows an upward trend in temperature.  All of the 20 hottest years on record have occurred since 1997.  1998 was an unusually hot year due to a a particularly strong el nino and it took several years afterwards for the warming to catch up.  There are still people who are falsely claiming that "warming stopped after 1998".  Other visible signs of warming include the loss of ice in the arctic, glacier loss and the accelerated melt in Greenland and parts of Antarctica.

Some will claim that the warming is due to some other reason besides GHGs (eg sunspots).  They've yet to provide convincing evidence to back that up.

Risk Analysis
It's impossible to be 100% certain of what will happen in the future.  Risk analysis is the practice of considering and adjusting for the effects of uncertainty on outcomes.  There are unlimited possibilities but for the purpose of this exercise, I'll consider 4 scenarios:

1. Climate science has correctly or conservatively determined the causes and effects of climate change; and we continue to increase GHGs
2. Climate science has correctly or conservatively determined the causes and effects of climate change; and we cut GHG's, trending to zero over 25 years.
3. Climate science is wrong about the causes of climate change or has dramatically overestimated the effects; and we continue to increase GHGs
4. Climate science is wrong about the causes of climate change or has dramatically overestimated the effects; and we cut GHGs, trending to zero over 25 years.

Scenario 1 is the disaster envisioned by many climate scientists and environmentalists.  The only benefit I can see is a delay in transition costs to cleaner energy.  The downsides are potentially vast: drought, mass starvation, mass human migration, ocean acidification, greater regions of hurricanes, areas of the world abandoned due to extreme heat and sea level rise. At the same time, fossil fuels will gradually grow scarcer and more expensive. If human migration, food shortages, and water scarcity become extreme, conflict and wars and virtually certain to follow.  Some areas in Canada, Russia and other northern countries may have somewhat enlarged agricultural zones but they will be more than offset by losses in other areas.  Many people seem to focus on extreme weather when contemplating the effects of climate change but I see that as just the tip of the iceberg.

Scenario 2 is scenario 1 but with greater costs due to transitioning energy and much less severe impacts. There are side effects to electrifying the energy system - cleaner air, water and soil.   A few years ago, it was common for people to claim that switching to renewable energy was akin to reverting to the stone age.  Now, however, solar and wind energy are the cheapest forms of new energy and electric vehicles are the fast growing sector of the auto market. Mark Jacobson, Professor of Engineering at Stanford University, has developed scenarios that show 100% renewable energy is not only feasible, but cheaper than continuing to develop fossil fuels.

In scenario 3, global warming either mysteriously abates or it turns out to have more positives than negatives.  It's very unlikely that a warming planet will have a net positive impact to the biosphere in the short term because plants and animals have spent thousands of years adapting to the climate they are in.  A drastic change over a short time frame is normally associated with extinction events.  Although, this scenario avoids the transition cost to cleaner energy, there are still downsides: continued increases in pollution, scarcity & cost of fossil fuels.

Scenario 4 is what fossil fuel companies and climate change deniers fear the most - we'll transition away from fossil fuels and it will be all for nothing.  Will it really, though?  The development and usage of fossil fuels is one of the most environmentally destructive things that people do.  Also, fossil fuels themselves are very unevenly distributed and this distribution has resulted in significant geopolitical strife over the past 100 years.  Even if it costs more in the short term, switching to renewable energy has environmental and geopolitical benefits that can't be measured in dollars.

In summary, I would say that from a risk/reward standpoint, reducing GHG's has greater potential rewards (a cleaner, lower conflict planet) and lesser potential downsides (transition costs vs the potential of societal collapse) than continuing to do what we have been doing.  The risk of continuing to increase GHG emissions is reckless.

Summary
The topic of climate change is incredibly complex, particularly for someone who's not a scientist.  Still, it's possible to logically analyze the options without detailed technical knowledge of the intricacies involved.

To me, it's an easy choice.  When I consider the subject from a standpoint of which side has credibility, which outcome is most aligned to observed results and when I look at potential scenarios, it's clear that the best path is to accelerate the transition to cleaner technologies, eliminate fossil fuels and end the risk practice of using the atmosphere as a dumping ground for GHGs.