Warning: Toxic Politics

[mithriltabby]

I’ve just been reading Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine, which is an excellent introduction to memetics. Like genes, memes have no life of their own, but treating them as if they do can provide a useful perspective for understanding how they spread and change. Since I’m rather worried about how it seems to be getting warmer in this handbasket we’re all in and there’s a distinct smell of rotten eggs in the air, my thoughts turned to the memetic swamp of politics.

There are some very nasty political memes roaming the world today, even in supposedly enlightened democracies. Dirty tricks are employed by the campaigns for candidates on both sides, and the major media outlets are perfectly happy to provided distorted perspectives on targeted candidates.

There’s no point in listening to speeches and debates any more, because they have no bearing on what the candidate will do if they take office. My general principle for evaluating any political candidate is to look at their financial backers and their actual record, because the politicians with the “say anything to get you elected” meme have clearly out-competed the honest ones.

How can we create selection factors to weed out these pernicious memes? The strategy of refusing to support candidates who have embraced these tactics will only work if we can get a majority of American voters to sign on. Refusing to vote at all, which is apparently the most common strategy in this country, obviously doesn’t work. We need incremental steps, or we run the risk of the nation being run into the ground.

Voting reform would help a lot. Currently, we only have one vote, and have to choose between voting for the candidate we want to win and the candidate we think has a chance of winning. There’s no way to express a preference that would influence politicians. Ranked voting systems like the Condorcet method and Instant Runoff Voting deal with the “lesser of two evils” problem by having you cast your highest-priority vote for the candidate you like, then cast a vote for the one most likely to win who is closest to your own positions. The statistical results will be available when the voting is in: if a large proportion of the votes that elected someone were second choices, it expresses the will of the people better than the current “hold your nose and vote” system. I support all efforts to adopt ranked voting, though it may be a long time before it can achieve national prominence.

Since the mass media seem perfectly happy to ignore the foibles of some candidates while exaggerating others, it’s important to find ways of bypassing the mass media; getting a large enough fraction of the populace to react to what’s really going on might be able to influence voting patterns within the “lesser of two evils” constraints. At this point, however, I am stymied by my own memeplex of politeness: I have no wish to become a social bore by ranting about politics at every opportunity, but I also want to stamp out these political practices as soon as possible. I’m going to adopt the rules “wait for someone else to bring up politics” and “for the sake of decency, keep these things behind cut tags on my blog”, and see how things go.

Comments

Postscript

[mithriltabby]

Looks like Media for Democracy are worth helping out.

Post-Postscript

[mithriltabby]

Partisan views on IRV and the Condorcet method.

[daehith.livejournal.com]

...is it any wonder that more and more people are watching election coverage on Comedy Central?

Have you ever read any of Al Franken's books? I read his latest...scary sickening stuff, really. I thought his analysis of the so-called "left-wing bent" of media -- which revealed that it's actually a right-wing bent -- was quite revealing.

Re:

[mithriltabby]

Haven’t read the books, but I’ve been following the same politics. On the plus side, all we need to do is hook up the skeletons of the Founding Fathers to some dynamos, and the energy generated from having them spin in their graves should take care of New York City’s electric bill.

Re:

[daehith.livejournal.com]

Heh. That's a good one!