Why Should You Vote?

Voting turnout in America has been trending downward for quite some time.  It has enjoyed a modest uptick in recent years and I hope that this will continue.  I believe that it's good for people to be directly involved in their choosing their government representatives.

We are so very blessed to be able to vote!  In the history of the world the number of those who had a voice in shaping their own destiny is ridiculously low.  And that is what voting suffrage represents - the ability to shape your own destiny.

Not having had to live without the rights that we all take for granted in this fair land, it's hard to imagine what life would be like without them.  Every country is different and the reason folks turn out to vote (if they can) are all totally different as well.  Cultural, economic, technological, and institutional factors all play a part in shaping people's choice to vote or not vote.  Here in America, voting is as much a social/traditional thing as a logical one.  If you vote - your children and friends are more likely to vote, too.

I found the article about voter turnout on Wikipedia to be a very interesting (if coldly clinical) discussion:

The basic formula for determining whether someone will vote is:
   PB + D > C
Here, P is the probability that an individual's vote will affect the outcome of an election, and B is the perceived benefit that would be received if that person's favored political party or candidate were elected. D originally stood for democracy or civic duty, but today represents any social or personal gratification an individual gets from voting. C is the time, effort, and financial cost involved in voting. Since P is virtually zero in most elections, PB is also near zero, and D is thus the most important element in motivating people to vote. For a person to vote, these factors must outweigh C.

Riker and Ordeshook developed the modern understanding of D. They listed five major forms of gratification that people receive for voting:

• complying with the social obligation to vote;
• affirming one's allegiance to the political system;
• affirming a partisan preference (also known as expressive voting, or voting for a candidate to express support, not to achieve any outcome);
• affirming one's importance to the political system;
• and, for those who find politics interesting and entertaining, researching and making a decision.

All of these concepts are inherently imprecise, making it difficult to discover exactly why people choose to vote.

Why should you vote?   The answer to that must come from within.  I hope you will ponder the great blessing it is to be able to vote and then to avail yourself of the upcoming opportunity.  Vote!

So Many Ways to Worry

Worry.  It goes hand-in-hand with guilt.  And from my limited experience, it seems that some people seem to feel both these emotions more strongly and more frequently than me.  At least, that is what my wife tells me.  As in, "You never feel guilty or worry about anything!"  I don't think that this is a true statement, but from her perspective it probably is.  My weak and anemic flutters of worry and guilt just don't register on her Richter scale of tectonic emotions at all.

In observing the worries of my wife, mom, sisters, daughters and other people I know, I have come to realize that it goes way deeper than just how much or how often the emotions are felt - I need new terms to accurately identify the classifications of worry and/or guilt.  Here are a few of these new (to me) types of worry and guilt that I have identified thus far:

Mom Guilt/Worry
I think most people have at least seen this one in action.  I assume some Dad's may feel this (indeed, I might if my teenage girls start dating biker gang members or something), but it's mostly the Moms who have this one down pat.  This is the worry that drives Moms to say things like, "Put on a sweater - you might get cold."  If the Mom feels the worry, then inevitably she's going to feel guilt later.  Not about the worry-driven advice - but that she should have given more advice.  "I knew I should have warned him to wear rubber boots!  Now he'll catch the flu!"

The Circle of Guilt
Two or more parties are required for this one to play out.  It all starts when someone does a favor for somebody else (both of whom have high levels of worry/guilt).  Then the circle begins...  Observe:

Person A: "You were so nice to watch my kids for five minutes - I owe you one!"
Person B: "It's the least I could do, when you invited my daughter to play for a couple of hours last week."
Person A: "Oh, that!  My girls love to play with your daughter so that was really a favor you did for me."
Person B: "Well, I wanted to pay you back for watching my kids the other day --"
Person A: "You already paid me back for that with those yummy cookies you shared with me!  I owe you a treat!"
Person B: "I hated to ask you to watch them, since you gave me such a nice Christmas gift last year and I didn't get you anything!"
Person A: "But I owed you for that nice note you wrote me and helping us move my Grandma's stuff."
Person B: "Ooo, now I really owe you one!"

I have observed this one so frequently that I am amazed that it hasn't been codified by Webster.  I don't get it.

Post-Conversation Stress Disorder (PCSD)
Endlessly reviewing what was said in a conversation, looking for nuances that might have some hidden meaning or insult.  Agonizing over the possibility that so-and-so was offended.  Worrying about the fallout such an ill-fated communication will certainly incur.  It's better just not to say anything at all - or maybe an apology is in order?  Surely they will never want to speak to us again...
As Hamlet so wisely said, "Angels and ministers of grace defend us!"  If you are around anyone who is having a PCSD episode, find some way to change the subject - fast!  Any kind of distraction will do!  The life you save could be your own.

Empathetic Guilt/Worry
Feeling guilty or worrying about something that is completely out of your control - sometimes even on a different continent or time period.  "I feel so bad for kids who will grow up on the Lunar base - they won't get to play on the grass with puppies!  And how can I help that?  You can't put that kind of experience in a letter and tell them to open it in 80 years.  Oh, those poor kids..."  People who are good at this method can go all day - check in on them frequently to make sure they are getting some food and sleep.

Quantum Worrying

This results when the emotions and thoughts lead to a macroscopic quantum effect.  It's impressive, really.  Worrying about the consequences of events that can only occur when both options of an either-or choice are selected.  An emotional Schrödinger's cat experience.  "Oh, no - lipgloss!  She must want me to kiss her...  Should I do it or not?  I won't!  And then she'll ask me to so I will.  And what if my breath smells like Doritos?  She'll never want to kiss me again!  She'll hate me for not kissing her and tell all her friends that I think she's ugly.  Crap, I'm not a good kisser and she's going to be disappointed with my poor skills and tell her friends that, too."  Actually, I think this one is kind of cool!  These worriers have no idea that they can think using such abstract theories of physics, I'll bet.

So there you have it.  Five classifications of worry/guilt that those of you who don't participate in can get a firmer grip on.  It will help you to better understand and communicate with worriers.  Maybe.

What Card Will Be Played Next?

I ask for the free press to inform me and what do I get?  Card games.

The Mainstream Media can't pigeonhole the news into a known framework and it's resulted in some very illogical responses.  I still don't see many of the Elites-Who-Intuitively-Understand-Everything-Going-On-In-The-Country actually trying to figure it out or question their own assumptions.  Nope.  What I see is attack after attack being made, usually in the form of a static, baseless, Ad Hominem statement that can only be called some kind of card.  Toss out a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card and hope for the best.  It doesn't matter if the card applies or not.

A helpful tip...

Tossing a card down in an narrative is done either 1) for purely cynical reasons, 2) due to personal or institutional projection, or 3) as a knee-jerk statement of prejudice.  I'm willing to give folks the benefit of the doubt and operate under the assumption that it's the first one most of the time.  No matter the cause, this leads to a credibility gap when it comes to the information we hear and the reality we see. 

And what happens when the card fails to work?  The media completely ignores their own statements and then just throw out another card.  They have done this so many times, I'm beginning to think they are just picking cards at random now, since they obviously don't know what is going on - therefore don't know what insult/accusation might work.  Treating each card as if it were a Joker - able to do whatever they want - is their current strategy and expectation.

Here's a few of the cards that have been played over the last couple of years (in roughly the order in which they were played).  Some are still being thrown down, but the older ones can currently produce laughter and other uncomfortable effects, so their use is becoming less frequent.  The card playing strategy of the media also seems to include the hope that people will helpfully forget any past plays made.

Three Signs of a Miserable Job

I just read a fun little book called "The Three Signs of a Miserable Job" by Patrick Lencioni.  The majority of the principles the author is trying to teach are contained in a fictional story which takes up 90% of the book.  The last 10% is a summary of the principles involved.

He believes that the three signs are: 1) Anonymity, 2) Irrelevance, and 3) Subjective Measurement.  A job's 'Misery Quotient' can be determined by how bad each of these three factors are.  It makes sense to me.  People do not like to be considered part of a vast herd, be treated with disrespect in any way, or have their value determined by how someone else perceives them in an unpredictable way.  Of course, I don't consider it a complete list - it doesn't account for personal/social problems, for example.  However, I think the ideas form a sound baseline.

This was a fun read and gave me a lot to think about as a 'boss', both at work and in the house, as to what things to avoid to increase the chances that my employees/kids will be happy.  I think it would be a fun for anyone to read as a means of evaluating their environment and figuring out what elements are worth fighting for or altering.

One of Our Favorite Books

One of the things Tiffany and I share is a love of books.  So it will come as no surprise that we have a lot of books!  More than some small town libraries, I shouldn't wonder - fifteen 6-foot bookshelves full, with more books in storage.  We hope someday to devote a room in our home to be a library/sitting room, but alas!  That fair dream has not yet materialized...

"The Blue Castle" by L. M. Montgomery is one of the favorite books in our collection.  I recently just finished reading it to my older two girls and they loved it as well.  It is funny, romantic, sweet, and poetic.  It has a very predictable storyline, but so do most fairy tales.

The characters in the book are so richly described and so darn human, that you feel like you know them.  The descriptions of the beauty of North-Eastern Canada are sweeping and obviously written by one who has seen and loved the area personally.

I must confess that this title is considered a 'girlie' book by most people.  It's not my usual fare of book, or a genre that I particularly enjoy either.  I love reading it all the same.  My heart goes out to the main characters.  The woman who decides to live for herself after spending years worrying about pleasing others (and the hysterical reactions of her relatives to this new conduct).  The man who seems so simple on the surface, but turns out to be so very deep.  It's just good stuff all the way around.  Gosh, I want to go re-read my favorite chapters again!

A Perspective on Last Week

Last week was hard.  I spent most of it working like crazy to finish milestones for several different projects.  I usually love working hard - productivity and getting things done are my drugs of choice.  But I didn't get to spend as much time as I like with the family as a result.  I made up for that last night and today!  Last night, Tiffany and the older girls went to see a play at ISU called, "You Can't Take It With You".  They told me all about it when they got home; how it was a wonderful production and that they had a blast.  While they were gone, I held a huge movie party with everyone else - with popcorn everywhere.  Tiffany and I had a nice long date today and that was awesome - as every moment with her is.

Something that I've been thinking about on one of my Back-Burner Processors^TM all week is this:  Most human beings think that what they do is hard and everything anyone else does is easy.  I'm not saying that I'm immune to this way of thinking, either - I believe it comes naturally to all of us.  I am constantly reminding myself that I can't completely understand someone else's perspective, because I'm not them.  It saves a lot of time at work in my dealing with people and it's clearly a winning strategy in relating to my family and wife.  I don't jump to as many conclusions with this thought running around in my brain.

It's almost like we're all a bunch of similar-looking aliens living on the same planet having a totally different experience here, while subconsciously convincing ourselves that everyone else around us is sharing what we see, hear, feel, and think.   Looking at current events, this actually makes a lot of sense to me...  It would explain how groups of people can be so absolutely certain that they know how the world works and that everyone else must be total and complete morons - or else they must be evil or stupid on purpose which is even worse!

Come to think of it - I'd rather be a different species from people who have such a limited perspective anyway.

Argumentum Ad Plausible

I'm a rational guy.  That's how I think.  I look at things from a very logical perspective (well... most of the time).  Cause and effect, process flows, statistical analysis, and temporal contingencies are all intellectual friends of mine.  My enemies are, naturally enough, logical fallacies.

I made a handy and humorous little chart that is a quick overveiw of many common logical fallacies a while ago (you can download it here).  The sad thing is how easy they are to slip into.  And how easy we, as humans, nod our heads when we hear a totally illogical statement.  This is especially true if we hear it as a part of a joke or in defense of something we believe in.  Politicians can't communicate at all without using them...

I just read a little article by Morgan Freeburg as he defines a new class of logical fallacy, "Argumentum Ad Plausible".  Here is how he describes it:

"A logical fallacy that used to occur only sporadically, but requires a name now that we’re living it every single day.
It is a theory of events related to each other by cause-and-effect; the person advancing the theory, who in the realm of reality is not known for respecting cause-and-effect, mistakes its plausibility for its proof. 'See, we sit down with our enemies to talk out our differences with them, and war is avoided. It could happen!'
And when it doesn’t — when reality runs up against theory, and it turns out they disagree — the exuberant demonstrate that sanity has deserted them, or avoided them for the time being, by declaring that reality lost and theory won. 'See, never mind what you saw happen just now, what’s supposed to happen is this…' and then they recite the same sequence of events again.
It is an insistence on engaging in experimentation, coupled with an intellectual disability to engage in true experimentation."

Fantastic!  Basically, this is a sub-set of the good, old standby Argumentum Ad Nauseam, where you just keep saying the same thing over and over as your argument.  Add a dash of Post Hoc and Use/Mention fallacies for flavor...  Poof!  There it is!  I can't tell you how many times I have heard this exact verbal mess from people who should know better - it's nice to have a new name to go with that familiar, yet ugly face...

Grassroots Evolution - Part 2

In my last post about the next level of grassroots evolution, I talked about finding a better class of person to serve us as political leaders.  And that would be great.  But even if everyone did this and we had a higher quality of person running for office, we'd still have a problem.  How do you comparison shop among politicians?

Cruise through your favorite blogs or news sites and you will see all manner of statements and platforms from different political figures.  But how on Earth is the average voter supposed to take all of that unorganized data and compare two choices and not be extremely subjective or even arbitrary about it?  Even during debates, the politicians are not always asked the same questions - and they usually are responding to each other.  In addition, we as voters don't usually get the assistance of a debate during primary elections anyway.

To analyze the problem, I asked myself, "How do people decide who to vote for right now?"  And to answer that question, I had to enter the realm of supposition, since I don't know how other people pick a candidate - I only know how I do it!  A quick brainstorm lead me to the following possibilities:

Offically a Mad Scientist

I just took an online Jung Typology test and came up as an extremely inventive INTJ personality type - also known as a Mastermind.  There's less than 1% of us in any given population sample...

I must embrace my inner mad scientist and firmly face my destiny...

Call me mad, will they?  Fools!  I'll destroy them all!  Bwah-hah-ha!