Treaties and thugocracies...

Treaties and thugocracies...  There's an alarming pattern visible out there in the big, bad world right now.  Several thugocracies (Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran) are taking actions that seem clearly designed to test the U.S. (and possibly EU and NATO as well) will to enforce treaties that obligate us to defend our allies.  The Russians are getting more and more aggressive with their submarine and long-range bomber probes, and of course there's the whole Ukraine kerfuffle.  Iran has seized a U.S.-flagged ship and its crew.  China is building military bases on islands it doesn't own in the China Sea.  North Korea is counterfeiting U.S. currency on an industrial scale, selling or enabling illegal drug sales to the U.S., and constantly making threatening gestures with their military.  These things aren't happening by accident.  They are the entirely rational actions of the powerful thugs at the helms of these countries, and they are testing the U.S. to see what they can get away with and still suffer no retaliation. 

Under Obama, the answer is that they can get away with a lot.  In fact, there is no limit in sight.  The mad mullahs in Iran must be cackling with glee as they discover the lengths Obama is willing to go to in order to get a “nuclear deal” signed – and how skillfully he avoids the U.S. treaty obligations to defend Marshall Islands-flagged ships.  Likewise Putin must believe at this point that he could do nearly anything he wants – he's already stolen half of Ukraine without major consequence.  After seeing the Iran sanctions crumble, Putin surely doesn't believe the sanctions against Russia are durable.  China is certainly carefully watching the U.S. non-response to its territorial ambitions. Vietnam, Japan, and Taiwan are vastly more effective adversaries at the moment, despite their lack of military might.  They have the will to resist, which apparently the U.S. (under Obama) does not.

To any student of history, this pattern is very familiar.  It happened in the early part of the 20th century, with the rise of Nazi Germany.  The thug kept testing his adversaries, time and again, without suffering any consequences until he pushed one bit too much.  Then we had a war that killed millions of people.

Will that pattern play out?  That depends greatly, I think, on who the next President of the U.S. is.  If it's someone with a robust sense of responsibility for treaty obligations and a grounded understanding of history, we still have time to stop these thugs before things get out of hand.  If, on the other hand, it's another vacillating weasel, we got trouble.  There are a lot of vacillating weasels running for President, dammit...

Moonrise in Mauna Kea's shadow...

Moonrise in Mauna Kea's shadow...  Debbie and I have been on the summit of Mauna Kea a half-dozen or so times.  That's not as impressive as it perhaps sounds, though – if you have a four wheel drive vehicle, you can drive right to the top!  On one of those visits, we stayed for the sunset, and saw Mauna Kea's shadow stretching eastward over the fantastically green slopes below, and onto the blue, blue ocean beyond.  This photo shows the shadow mainly on the cloud tops far below the summit, and in the haze in the air above.  Full resolution version here.  Via APOD, of course...

Alternative voting schemes...

Alternative voting schemes...  The “one person, one vote” (1p1v) canonical standard for voting in democracies worldwide sounds “fair” to most people.  So much so that very few countries or localities even attempt any other scheme.  About the only variation I'm currently aware of is that in certain countries voters are required to vote.

So what, you say?  The 1p1v system has some very bad flaws:

• Tyranny of the majority.  As long as more than half of voters support some position, the rest of the voters lose.  Nothing else matters.  It doesn't matter if the voters on the majority side are ignorant or misled.  It doesn't matter if the voters on the minority side are materially damaged.  It doesn't matter how important the issue is to voters on either side.  The majority wins.
• Vulnerability to fraud.  Buying votes in 1p1v systems is a time-honored practice.  
• Disenfranchisement of the minority.  Any voter taking a minority position has cast a useless vote.  They might as well have stayed home.
• Plague of low-information voters.  A voter who knows next to nothing about an issue has exactly the same influence on the outcome as an expert.  Study after study shows that significant numbers of voters – often a majority of voters – decide their vote for reasons as trivial as the physical appearance of a candidate or the wording of a headline.  They are often profoundly uninformed about the alternatives being voted on.  Nevertheless, their vote counts precisely as much as the well-informed voters.

All of the above issues are rampant in the current U.S. polity, and easy to spot.

Since the majority of voters in 1p1v systems are generally relatively uninformed, it shouldn't be surprising to discover that majorities support the 1p1v system – after all, it empowers them in a way that virtually any other voting system would not.

There are many proposed alternatives to the 1p1v system, and some of them have even been tried before (with varying levels of success).  This article discusses a couple of the alternatives that I find intriguing, though it's easy to see that they have some challenges as well.  The most interesting point to me is just how difficult it is to come up with an alternative to 1p1v that solves 1p1v's problems without creating worse ones of its own...