The right talks about more freedom, but their actions result in less of it.
Arbitrary power used to be much more concentrated in one particular race and one particular gender. The left has been trying to diffuse that power, the right is trying to re-concentrate it.
Furthermore, there is the concentration of power that comes with having vastly more money than the median person, and the ability to use it politically. Or the power that comes from monopolistic control over an industry. The left generally seeks to curb these powers (e.g. the fight against Citizens United, or for more antitrust action).
The Magna Carta is illustrative: it's a set of regulations aimed at reducing the exercise of absolute power. The lesson is: if you restrict the powerful, the net freedom of the population increases.
A more modern example: the regulations that prohibit companies from firing their employees without cause are a reduction in freedom for the employer, true. But with them, the far more numerous employees are now more free to be and say things that upset the powerful within the company (in ways that are specifically unrelated to the performance of the work) without fearing retribution. Overall, an increase of freedom.
The right wing, under the banner of "less regulations", have consistently lessened the protections of the weak against arbitrary power. They fight for the freedom of those with money, corporate power, and political influence to do as they please. That's a retrogression of overall freedom, and (IIRC) exactly what Atwood was talking about.
Imagine if you took a vote with paper ballots, and then went to every one of the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people who had a hand in creating a voting machine (think of the millions of lines of code in the OS and drivers, and the billions of transistors) and left the unsealed box of votes with each of them, alone, for several hours. That box would travel to people in many foreign countries, some working for intelligence agencies. Would you trust the votes after that?
It's possible to hide exploits in so many places - consider the obfuscated C contests, or the trojans that have been found in SSDs, or that hack a while ago where someone compromised a RNG by undetectably tweaked the dopant levels on a chip.
It takes very little to swing an election if you're strategic, sometimes less than 1% of the vote, and having the head of a state owe you a favour (not to mention the blackmail material), is well worth compromising one or more of the people involved in the production of the machine.
To make a demonstrably exploit-free voting machine, you'd have to design and manufacture every chip yourself and write every line of software (including the OS) yourself. Not only that, but everyone involved would have to be trusted to not be bribed, and to not make any mistakes that could lead to an external exploit. That's completely unrealistic, so countries are essentially saying "it's OK if there's a possibility for someone to take control of our country through fraud, because even though we know for sure that it's possible, we don't think it will happen to us".
Elections are too important to let the fools and charlatans who say things like "unhackable" to have influence over anyone with the the power to make decisions about electronic voting machines. Everything is hackable, given the resources and the motivations. Gaining control of an entire country is sufficient to have both.
> Elections are too important to let the fools and charlatans who say things like "unhackable"
Can there be process that can be guaranteed "unhackable".
The paper based Ballot Box election in India were subjected to an even higher degree of reported rigging/hack then EVMs.
They are not saying "our elections are unhackable" they are saying "our already manufactured machines as available to register votes are unhackable". It could be true today. But now that they have thrown open the challenge who knows if future such machines will be or not. IIRC the machines are hardware with no installable software.
The issues you raise about chip and firmware vulnerabilities remain. And the Govt of India have painted a target on their backs for the foreseeable future and way beyond.
> It takes very little to swing an election if you're strategic, sometimes less than 1% of the vote
Good points. I'd add that the potential attackers include national intelligence agencies and other very well-resourced groups, including criminal organizations, corporations, and others. For them, the value of controlling the outcome of an election can be many billions of dollars or existential.
It doesn't matter if it takes a little or a lot; the cost is unlikely to be a deterrent to those types of attackers.
This. You are basing the bedrock of your democracy/country on an illusion.
I have had countless discussions with my colleagues and not one of them understands the gravity of closed EVM machines instead believe in security by obscurity. It makes me sad that if the very people who work in technology are like ostriches with their heads buried in sand, how can you expect the lay person to understand the argument for implementing a verifiable system. Its an anathema.
Anyone who argues for this is either a case of sour grapes or anti-government/anti-democracy.
Also can anyone please clarify how one one can go about taking part in this process, wasn't clear to me from the article.
Even if it was possible to guarantee that the machines were not hackable. What is stopping a undemocratic candidate to cry foul. It is just too easy to blame it on the technology. People do it even for paper systems where it is evident even for a lay person to know that fraud cannot be done at a large scale, that needs to involved hundreds or thousands of accomplices.
Wouldn't a reliable safeguard be to have people vote and then verify their vote using an entirely separate system with an entirely separate database... then compare the two and identify any possible mismatches.
You'd then require a hack to comprise entirely different systems of hardware & software simultaneously. No one hardware vendor could control it?
That theoretically makes the hack harder (you've got to hack two systems/vendors), but we're talking about attackers with potentially state-level resources.
The bigger problem is that it can be used to verify that a coerced voter cast their ballot the way that the coercer wanted.
My question is: why go through all this incredible effort, and take such huge risks, when paper ballots do the job just fine?
I'm guessing you only need to hack one system to throw doubts on the election process, and maybe start some sort of narrative that influences people to vote the other way in the repeat election. Also, the second verification database, mey be needed to be guarded more securely for a longer time in order to give people a chance to verify their votes.
The electronic voting machines are not much different from a paper ballot system in that they are just boxes that hold vote counts, in bits rather than bits of paper. They are not network connected and to my knowledge they are not easily programmable once deployed in the field. i.e, they would require collusion of a large number of local officials, including that of the central election commission officer deployed in order to facilitate reprogramming.
Elections if rigged are done so by people, so the threat comes from the vast numbers of government employees who are deputed from their day jobs to perform election duty. These people hold the power to rig elections by miscounting the paper votes. If the counting process is digitized using dumb machines, then that would maybe take care of the malicious counting problem.
Ultimately any system would rely on the integrity of the actors involved to function properly. In a country with levels of corruption that India faces, it is easier to keep an eye on the few direct employees of the election council rather than every person deputed for election duty.
Survive or die, i am thriving because i am smart, dedicated, hardworking and you won't because likely you miss some of these things (backgrounds do not matter)
/s
If you haven't heard anyone address that point, you haven't looked very hard. It's an (IMO) important part of the left-wing philosophy to be intolerant of intolerance:
I voted for Bernie in the primary and Hillary in the general, but the hypocrisy of Zuckerberg publishing his travels to rural America like he's a politician while Palmer is pushed out of his company is too much.
I'm mostly responding to your "Why does diversity initiatives never seem to care about diversity of political opinions?" question.
I'm saying that it's legitimate for diversity initives to not support all political positions in the name of diversity. Yes, it's a paradox, but it's not something that hasn't been addressed.
And, yes, the Trump ticket was intolerant. You can make the argument solely on the grounds of the anti-muslim rhetoric, not to mention his running mate's public views on gay rights.
A lot of Trump voters probably don't want more Muslims immigrating into the US. Are you saying that can't even be discussed, despite the fact that Muslims don't approve of homosexuality, even in Britain?
Are Americans intolerant for questioning if we should have more of that intolerance?
Should we not let Muslims into this country "solely on the grounds of" their "public views on gay rights"? I mean my god, should a Muslim be allowed to work at Facebook's London office based on their homophobic beliefs?
It's a left-wing value that you can, and should, separate the person and what they believe from their actions.
If anyone were to suggest that we should ban Trump supporters from immigrating to my country, I would be very opposed to that. I would also be opposed to denying those people the ability to hold public office, or receive services, etc., based on their beliefs.
So it's fine to be a Muslim. But if a person wants to use public forums to push Sharia law, which includes the subjugation of women and punishment of gays, I support removing their access to those forums. What goes on in that person's head, or what they discuss in the privacy of their homes/email/etc., is none of my business, no matter how odious I find it. But if those beliefs start impacting the public and are discriminatory, then the hammer comes down.
You see it as hypocrisy to condemn specific actions without also condemning affiliated people. I see those as separate things, so you can have a different policy for each. You can't punish people for something you think they believe should be done, but that they haven't actually done or incited others to do themselves.
Trump and Pence have both taken substantive actions against Muslims and gays, not based on what those populations actually did, but based on what they believe or who they are. If a Muslim campaigned for and legislated in accordance with Sharia law, I would condemn them in exactly the same way (but more strongly).
But I will not condemn every Muslim a priori even though I completely disagree with their beliefs.
My take is that the "hacked the election" is mostly a right-wing framing.
What's much more interesting is evidence of collusion: money changing hands in undisclosed ways, policies changing dramatically after secret meetings, means of blackmail, etc. The first two wouldn't surprise me at all at this point.
The point being: if a foreign - hostile - state has substantial, non-disclosed power over US executive branch, that's a very big deal, and there's a number of laws meant to prevent exactly that sort of thing. The speculation is that at least one of these laws has been broken - that's much more damning than evidence of troll armies trying to sway votes.
I'm in the same boat. But my naivete was in thinking it would be easier to dispel lies when facts where easily linked to. The propagandists' workaround was to just attack facts.
The thing is, "facts" aren't just mined out of the ground, and people underestimated how much our concept of what a "fact" is was affected by our information infrastructure. There is very little true foundation of facts to build on; scientific inquiry and reason are structures just like anything else, and can be disrupted by new media.
You're not wrong, but I also think that culturally we've made a big mistake by not acknowledging that there's a gradient here.
There /is/ an objective reality, and we can measure it to varying degrees of accuracy. The air temperature at a given place and a given time, for instance. Of course there's always the possibility of it being wrong (e.g. a passing hot air current, a faulty thermometer, etc.), but to live as though you can't record the temperature is absurd. It paralyses action based on evidence, rather than ideology, if everything is considered equally suspect.
Yes, we're going to get it wrong sometimes, and that has a cost. But there's also a cost to thinking that you can't ever get it right, and that is letting people the who routinely dismiss inconvenient evidence have their way all the time. I think we've swung too far towards the latter.
You only think that there is an objective reality, and others may think differently. Thus, even if there is an objective reality, facts are nonetheless subjective because the actual basis for believing in facts is subjective.
If you like maths, Tarski's undefinability theorem suggests that anything which is a fact about our objective reality cannot be shown to be a fact from within reality.
You're espousing what some have termed the "Kantian correlationist" perspective. A very reductive summary is:
"...correlationism is a form of scepticism for it asserts that whether or not things-in-themselves are this way is something we can never know because we can only ever know things as they appear to us, not as they are in themselves."[1]
It's worth noting that some philosophers, particularly Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux (whose work the above quote is given in the context of), have argued strongly against correlationism. Though they don't claim we might ever have a completely unfiltered view of what objectively is, they argue that the absolute limitations on knowledge of reality imposed by correlationist thinkers are mistaken, and that we can make progress by degrees towards an ever fuller perspective on reality. So, even though you assert
>Thus, even if there is an objective reality, facts are nonetheless subjective because the actual basis for believing in facts is subjective.
as a factual (somewhat ironically), it should be noted that this too is disputable. Also I would argue that Tarski (or any formal mathematical result) does not necessarily have implications about "our objective reality." As Alain Badiou would say, mathematics is ontology - i.e. the language with which we might speak most precisely about "what is" - but this does not entail that mathematical concepts are real in the Platonic sense.
I agree strongly with gp that we shouldn't err on the side of formally foreclosing on the possibility of finding truths about the world. It literally legitimizes ignorance to espouse the correlationist worldview.
Philip K Dick was once asked 'what is reality'. He replied 'reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away'.
The problem with beliefs that don't reflect reality are that unlike the lies, the reality you don't believe in can still hurt you. Whatever you think about the true nature of reality, it's a good idea for our politics to include a recognition of the things that can hurt us regardless of our beliefs in them.
At best that's correct in a very narrow sense; my point is that extrapolating that model wholesale into the realm of politics has had real and very dangerous repercussions.
Liar's Poker was written as satire. Michael Lewis found it perplexing that some of his audience thought the characters in there to be ideals to emulate.
Like Lily Allen's The Fear, could be taken as a satirical bash against a consumerism she is disgusted with, or it could be interpreted as autobiographical, blaming society for her being the way she is as if to remove herself from being at fault.
I understand the argument for excluding housing, food, and fuel from the official inflation stats, but at this point it's making that number a complete departure from reality.
Canada right now is basically getting divided into two classes: those who happened to own real estate a decade or two ago and their children, and everyone else.
That's not success based on how hard you worked, or how much you contributed to society, or proportionate to the amount of risk you took. It's just (mostly) Chinese money randomly landing on some of the population, and causing real issues with quality of life and serious opportunity costs for the rest. That is not something we should be happy about, and it's something that we should have better numbers on.
http://www.vox.com/2016/6/2/11833548/donald-trump-support-ra...