I don’t know shit about the theory of economics, or politics for that matter – but here goes…

I’m currently reading a book(!)[1] – Dr. Strangelove’s Game – that offers a history of the major figures in the development of the science of Economics.
One of these, the Marquis de Condorcet, was a minor French aristocrat and peer of Adam Smith, whose major contribution to the then-nebulous science of economics/statistics/calculus is known as the Condorcet method.

Marquis de Condorcet

The Condorcet method is an approach to elections that attempts to produce the result that is most representative of the wishes of the voting population as a whole. Condorcet developed it in response to the Voting paradox, which he also first identified.

In short, the paradox describes a situation in which the behaviour of individual voters can skew the results of an election away from the majority vote. The full detail of the paradox is worth reading, but there is only one aspect of it that is relevant here – so I will ignore the wider problem statement.

I will now proceed to hang myself with the just-enough rope provided by my tenuous grasp of what-the-fuck-this-dude-is-on-about.

Consider an election where three candidates are standing for election: Bush, Obama and Krazy Pete. And let’s let three classes of voters show a preference for these candidates as follows:

In this scenario there is no clear winner in a simple majority rule; all three candidates have one supporter in a one-choice-only election. And in a rank-your-favourites election the first two candidates draw level while Krazy Pete loses out. The Voting paradox, from here, goes into a lot of detail about how one of the voters could now cause the result to be skewed etc. but what I am interested in is this:

Condorcet’s paradox illustrates that the person who can reduce alternatives can essentially guide the election. For example, if [the Conservatives] and [the Moderates] choose their preferred candidates ([Bush] and [Obama] respectively), and if [the Liberals] were willing to drop their vote for [Krazy Pete] – who is going to lose anyway, then [the Liberals] can choose between either [Bush] or [Obama] – and become the agenda-setter.

To state this more simply, the voter who is willing to give up his first choice can effectively override the choices made by the other two voters.

This brings me to my point – Karl Rove.

The Thinker?

Karl Rove is generally credited with winning the 2000 and (especially) the 2004 elections for GW Bush. He did this by pursuing a relentless ‘divide and conquer’ strategy.
His approach was to slice up the demographic of the electorate into minute groupings based on issues that voters were willing to override their common sense for and then to target them aggresively to swing the vote.
For example, he would find a micro-segment of the electorate who generally preferred John Kerry, but who could be radically mobilized on the issue of the teaching of intelligent design in schools. He then targets them and pushes this one issue so hard that the targeted voters would willingly give up their general preference for John Kerry and vote *sigh* Bush.
If you can, for a given segment of the voting population, find an issue that would cause them to drop their first choice and settle for the alternative that you offer you can use this small segment of voters to override the decision made by the voting population as a whole[2].

It’s brilliant – and a powerful example of the weakness exposed in just about all electoral systems by Condorcet’s paradox.

Of course in the 2006 mid-term elections this strategy just wasn’t strong enough to overcome the horrible bungle that the Bush administration had made of the war in Iraq and Rove had his ass handed to him.

But this doesn’t mean that the tactic won’t work again in 2008 – the question is who will use it and against whom.

At the moment all the candidates[3] are, naturally, keeping to the high ground and not wanting to start slinging mud around. But I’m willing to bet that Giuliani wouldn’t mind finding the but-he’s-a-black-man or but-she’s-a-woman groups and riding their swing votes into the oval office.

*

As an aside, we don’t see these sorts of tactics used in South African politics – why?
Firstly because the South African political landscape is dominated by an overwhelming majority for the ANC – which means that small groups have no chance of influencing the outcome. And secondly because the tools of communicating political messages to small groups isn’t nearly as advanced as in the US where television ads on local stations can target audiences by city, by age group, by class(financial position) – radical.

[1] The first one that I’m not just picking up and dropping after a chapter or two this year.
[2] A similar, but reversed, situation occurred in 2000 when Al Gore couldn’t convince Ralph Nader’s supporters to drop their support for Nader in favour of himself based on their common loathing of Bush.
[3] Whether in primary elections or already posturing for the main event.

The 2008 US Presidential campaign is gonna rock!

In the words of Dolomite (via Busta Rhymes)

Oh yes, there’s gonna be a lot more money.
Yes a lot more money than before.[...]
Yes more bitches than before. There’ll be more bitches, more and more and more.

And, of course, this time around each candidates is on web 2.0 – blogs, MySpace, YouTube, Second Life and, yes, Twitter[1].
Barak Obama has been on Twitter[2] all of a week and a half.

So what exactly is Senator Obama doing right now?

hmm… I wonder what Barak is doing right about now?

Thinking we can cut oil consumption by 2.5 million barrels of oil per day and take 50 million cars’ worth of pollution off the road by 2020

Oooh Sen. Obam – I was wondering whether I should have my hair cut this week or whether it would be OK to leave it for another weeek, but what you’re doing right now seems a lot kooler. Yay for cuts in oil consumption!

Please. Does anyone fall for that whole ‘I’m a presidential candidate but in between addressing large crowds I still find time to blog’ nonsense?

[1] I must admit that what I do like about Twitter is how well represented China/Japan is – I can’t read half of the entries on the starter page.
Not great for Twitter from a usability point of view, but it does relieve the US overload that the rest of the web always seems to have.
[2] from what I can tell

Iran have launched a space rocket.

And in doing so they have become, in my opinion at least, the most credible antagonist to US foot-stompery since ???[1].

Iran – centerpiece to Middle Eastern stability

Unlike Kim Jong Il, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems to understand (i) the reality of geopolitical power and (ii) how to use this power to promote Iran’s cause in the Middle East. And through the judicious use of scientifically legitimate (i.e. non-military) tests he has managed to ruffle the feathers of those clout-spent hawks in Washington while carefully retaining the moral highground on external interference in his country.

Well done to him – a very astute play on the politics of lines in the sand.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

And what about his cause for flexing his well-behaved muscle like this?
As I see it, it is relatively simple; as the only Shi’a dominated Islamic state he must, at all costs, not allow the invasion of Iraq to marginalise Shi’a muslims even more.
He is, both geographically and socially, in a unique position to prevent the Middle East from being overrun by the US and their Sunni trade partners.

I’m not saying that his motivations are without a personal agenda (influence in Iraq) or ambition for his nation-state[2], but Iran (and I know that this sounds weird) is the best-placed Islamic state to maintain a sensible balance of power in the region.

Iranian rocket launch

Another Iranian rocket launch

Which brings me to my point; how little I actually know about Muslim history and politics.
As anyone who scans on-line news headlines knows the Muslim world is divided into two dominant camps; Sunni and Shia.
But what I didn’t realise is how overwhelming the Sunni majority is.
Shi’a muslims account for around 8-15%[3] of all muslims – Sunni for just about all of the remaining 85%. There are also other marginal groups such as the Ibadi.

The odds are seriously stacked in favour of the Sunni.

Have a look at the below map (courtesty of the CIA, via Wikipedia).

Distribution of muslim groups

Given this headcount reality Iran have a very important part to play(along with, especially, Israel) in retaining a balanced diversity of power in this region.
Rock on, keep your head, stand your ground – claim your Gravity’s Rainbow.

[1] I’ll still think of one
[2] let’s not be naive here
[3] depending on who you believe

For lack of anything better to say (while I craft away at the next hillarious episode of TGFS) here’s some news.

Kerrrazy Weather Times!

Since our ridiculously balmy time in New York and Toronto I have been watching the US weather as it lurches from Fall to Spring to Winter and back to Spring on an ongoing basis.

Blue Mountain where we spent three days skiing on man-made snow is reporting temperatures between -1°C and -19 of the same.
So it seems that at least there winter has settled in – though they are still getting mostly flurries rather than real solid snow.

What’s more interesting/bizarre is the weather in the US where temperatures are yo-yoing all over the place, in California the Governator is looking for disaster relief for crops lost due to cold and Texas is covered in ice, but still no real snow some northern states where it should be white as a U.S.-based company’s South African workforce.

A pedestrian runs to cross a downtown Montreal street
Monday, Jan 15, 2007,
during the first snow storm to hit the city this winter.
(CP / Paul Chiasson)

The Neocon Newshound!

And on the neo-con front, here’s a refreshing approach to regime-change[1] in Iran. Michael Ledeen is a classic neo conservative who wants to export democracy and freedom[2] to arabic nations in the Middle East[3].
And for some time now he’s been advocating the boom-boom approach to bringing peace and `freedom` to the world.
But he does also have another, more interesting approach which he mentions in an interview with Salon.

I want to support the pro-democracy groups in Iranian society, which includes like 80 percent of the population.
I want to support them politically and financially if they want it.
I want to broadcast at them, exactly as we did into the Soviet empire during the Cold War. I want to replicate Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which we’re really not doing. I mean, they pretend to do it, but they really don’t. Farsi service on [the Voice of America] is sort of a replica of CBS News or something like that.
They want to be balanced; they give both sides. And we’re not giving them what they need, more than anything else, which is the experiences of people who have participated in successful nonviolent revolutions.

Michael Leeden

I am in no way a proponent of the notion of exporting any sort of ideology for the `betterment` of another society.
While I do support projects that aim to provide people living in `oppressive`[4] societies access to information, I don’t support his call to broadcast to the Iranians. It’s simply propaganda, no matter how you look at.
However, what I do appreciate about his approach is that he wants to promote non-violent change by supporting civic activism from within Iran.
Of course this is not because he is a pacifist who cherishes human life but because he believes that the US can achieve its goals without having to spend money and political capital on bombs.
But it is a more pragmatic take on the value of letting a society change itself if it wants to rather than just bombing the shit out of it for its own good.

It’s because people generally take it out of context. If you read what I said about the war, I said two things. I said, first of all, that it was much too military and much too little political, and that we should spend much more time supporting democratic forces in Iraq, the same thing I said about Iran, the same thing I said about the Soviet Union, et cetera. And the second thing that I said about the war before we went in was that Iran was the primary target and that we should not invade Iraq before we dealt with Iran, and that we could deal entirely politically with Iran and not militarily at all.

And yes, so once the national policy was that we were going to go militarily into Iraq, I supported it. But I kept on saying that we were going to have all these problems, and that it would have been better to do it the other way, and that dealing with Iran was inevitable, and so it has proven to be.

And all those people who think that my only position was that we should invade Iraq and send armies to invade Iraq just haven’t read what I wrote, or they haven’t read enough of it. And I will plead guilty to not having put those lines into everything I wrote, but you really can’t. You can’t put everything into 700-word articles, as you know.

Of course he could just be another standard neo-con covering his own ass before the hunt for scapegoats goes into overdrive.

His blog is also worth a look[5] – if only for this reportage of the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei[6].

In spite of the official denial by the Foreign Ministry and Iran’s UN ambassador over the weekend, American researcher Michael Ledeen, who was the first to report of Khamenei’s death, continued to insist in his blog that “(Khamenei’s) continued absence from all official events suggests that the source may be right.”

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

[1] Their euphemism, not mine
[2] Their version of freedom, not mine
[3] Funny how they’re not quite so keen to export that same `freedom` to Palestine, huh?
[4] Sorry about all the `quotes` – I know it’s crappy – but terms like freedom and betterment and oppression are serious things, they should be used sparingly in their un-qualified form. [5] Though I hate to give him the inbound link. [6] Which I suspect might well be true – even if he’s not dead, but just out of commission. I reckon Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a badass motherfucker to cross.

A recent Vanity Fair article[1] relates how the Greek government went about shutting down a Marxist revolutionary/terrorist[2] organisation in the country named 17 November.
They were(are?) basically a standard left-wing militant organisation whose origins are in opposition to the military government(U.S. sponsored) during the 1970′s.
After the replacement of this government with a democratically elected version of the same thing(U.S. sponsored) the group continued to organise and execute(!) a series of high-profiile murders and bombings over a period of twenty years.
Over this period their targets morphed from purely political/military types associated with the Western ‘occupation’ of Greece to include industrialists and various Turkish diplomats[3].
In all this time not one arrest was made and it is generally agreed that the Greek police did a really crap job of controlling this organisation.

17 November – featuring Che, Marx and Trotsky

However, with the 2004 Olympics in Athens looming the government knew that they had to get their asses in gear, which they did. Some old fashioned detective work, a lucky break[4] and some quality interrogation later they went about arresting 19 individuals; all in time for the arrival of the sport-hungry tourists.

Alexandros Giotopoulos – Leader of 17 November	Savvas Xiros – Mr. Fingers

So then, problem solved, right? Phew! Let’s go have an ouzo.
Uhm, not quite.
It seems that since the demise of 17 November several small groups of radical militant types have sprung up.
One of them[5] launched a rocket-propelled grenade at the US Embassy in Athens last night. No one was injured.

The US envoy condemned the “very serious attack”, as fire engines and police cordoned off the area.

*

US embassy after the attack

Now I’m not so naive as to think that the Greek government didn’t expect groups to carry on where 17 November left off – let’s be realistic here, they have McDonalds in Greece.
I’m more interested in whether, had 17 November still been around, these other groups would have formed at all.
Before the Olympics had even arrived (after the arrest of the 17 November crew) new threats (and indeed another bombing) by successor groups had been reported.
It seems to work like punk music – when your local punk band break up[6] all of a sudden there is a drive to form a band to replace them. Had they hung around no other band would have been formed.

It’s as if people have a strong need to have _someone_ fight for them; someone who kicks the shit out of the common enemy.
And when that someone gets beaten up it somehow motivates someone else, who might never have considered doing it before, to take up their communal cause – whatever it might be.

[1] Yes, I know – enough with the Vanity Fair already. But how else will I get my glamour fix? And I couldn’t survive without The Coaster Correspondence.
[2] Isn’t it interesting how the description of a group changes depending on which side of the coin you are. I distinctly remember that, when I was young, the ANC was known as ‘the terrorists’ – bizarre.
[3] Clearly the dispute over Cyprus was a big deal for 17 November, as it still is for most politically active Greeks. [4] After one of the members, Savvas Xiros, succeeded only in blowing some of his fingers off on a bungled bomb-planting excursion.
[5] Most likely a group name Revolutionary Struggle.
[6] Due to some vicious beer-fueled fight or because the bassist had to grow up start pulling in those big bucks or even due to *shudder* creative differences.