A Report on the Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries

Is this a direction more modern, western democracies seem to be heading? I feel a loss of democratic appeal and subsequent machinations of all kinds by apparatuses of state to keep in power. Democratic in name, but the number of options available to the public limited to what is in line with what public officials think of as good sense.

Examples:

-DNC machinating to get Clinton elected as candidate. The public needed Russia (!) for a fresh dosis of unpopular truths about those machinations. This documents more evidence on machinations.

-The unpopular and undemocratic European Union. Examples abound. The best being the EU-constitution: struck down in popular referendums, flown in as a treaty.

-In my country, the Netherlands, a referendum in which the public voted against an EU-agreement with Ukraine (wholy within law, with very obvious machinations by state and political parties), on which both the government and EU reneged

Counter example:

-Brexit

Disclaimers

-Please, don't hit on the 'red herrings' (if any), like 'undemocratic EU'. I see it as both a fact (imho, populus does not recognize European parliament) and an opinion (mostly in the more populist parties over Europe). Not center to my view of democracies limiting decision power of the populus. -The 'public officials' need not be those paid by the state. But more broadly: those aspiring to have their organisations have a say over public policy.

My country, Ireland, briefly flirted with the idea of voting machines areound the same time, and decided to scrap them at enormous expense and go back to paper ballots: http://www.irishtimes.com/news/opposition-condemns-e-voting-...

> The public needed Russia (!) for a fresh dosis of unpopular truths about those machinations. This documents more evidence on machinations.

I'm not convinced the "Russian hackers" angle is correct, it seems like a convenient cover story for the DNC, to draw a distinction between Hillary and Trump with regard to Putin. They know many older voters don't understand this stuff (no offense to older HN readers!) and will likely buy it. It's just like the North Korean hackers story for the Sony hack. It could just as easily have been disgruntled DNC insiders, and Wikileaks is happy to have the real source of the leak disguised.

Do people honestly believe that evidence of electoral fraud is some kind of Russian scheme? Those claims strike me as an attempt to deflect the issue by the increasingly embattled affected candidate. That narrative seems to be designed to imply that the revealed wrongdoing is actually worth ignoring.

Until substantiated it's just a way for the DNC to deflect from the corruption, 'Russia wants you to vote Republican, don't fall for it'.

But no, let's divine the will of the people from tealeaves instead.

Here's an interview with Julian Assange when asked about the source of the leaks, with direct quotes from Clinton's campaign manager, quoting unnamed experts: https://youtu.be/axuJfX3cO9Q?t=12m50s

"On Sunday morning, the issue erupted, as Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, argued on ABC’s “This Week” that the emails were leaked “by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump” citing “experts” but offering no other evidence."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/us/politics/donald-trump-r...

I mean anyone can quote anonymous "experts" to craft a narrative. Doesn't make it true.

We actually got lucky during the cold war in that the other side was fundamentally quite stupid and bound to lose their power from a lack of economic performance.

Now there's a new crop of autocrats freed from the constraints of ideology. It appears that democracy isn't actually necessary for economic development and they're raising a crop of apolitical hedonists – well-fed, entertained an thoroughly harmless for their grip on power. When a bit more loyalty is needed, a little round of in-group -> out-group hatred usually fixes it.

China, Russia, Turkey, Victor Orban, and now Donald Trump: they're betting that people prefer "democracy on rails" to the sometimes scary or frustrating life in actual freedom.

(Oh, and the EU is obviously perfectly democratic, that just doesn't depend on your or anybody's (populous does not recognize...) opinion)

I only see real Democracy working in small, relatively wealthy and homogeneous countries. As soon as you go >X for some value of X where X is the population size, it starts to rapidly fall apart.

Maybe too many people introduce too much chaos and political structures hate chaos. More than that, the markets hate chaos. If you let the people actually control things, you introduce the potential for rapid change, instability, etc, all things that Big Money hates.

This is why they want larger governments, single currencies, centralization of power, trans-pacific and trans-atlantic trade treaties - it brings economic and market stability. At the expense of your personal freedoms and often, your economic well-being. A lot of money will be made, yes, too bad most of it will go to the top 1%.

The US political farce this year is a prime example of that - the Republican base finally got fed up, the Democratic base finally got fed up. The UK also finally got fed up.

The Elites and Globalists ultimately have a single message that they keep repeating - Globalization is good, immigration is good, if you disagree - you're a xenophobic racist. Oh, you're a blue-collar worker and globalization and immigration actually end up destroying your town's economy - too bad, maybe you should have been a banker or software engineer or bio-med researcher! How silly of you to not be one of those three things!

So yes, the GDP keeps growing, economists are happy, but you're not seeing any of the benefits. Housing is getting more and more expensive and your salary is stagnating and all the Elites keep telling you is that this in your best interest, and is, in fact, the only way to move forward. And if you disagree - well, aren't you a silly little backwards out-of-touch country bumpkin?

We haven't even seen the worst of it yet. Automation and smarter AI will keep removing jobs at a break-neck pace, population migration will keep destabilizing countries and what is the end-game to fewer and fewer good jobs and more and more people? Well, we're looking at the results already. Nobody has a back-up plan either.

-Convention machinations to get someone elected are certainly nothing new. And a statement like "The public needed Russia" to shine a light on these machinations, in the context of this being an example of a bad direction, implies... that previously, these machinations came to light on their own?

-Similarly, with respect to the unpopularity of the EU, it's the unpopularity that's new, not the EU. And I think it's hard to say if Euroskepticism over the past 5-6 years is due to the Treaty of Lisbon more than broader economic uncertainty. Is the EU gaining power, or do people just like it less?

I don't want to have too Whiggish a conception of history, but I think there's a big difference between "The world isn't as democratic as it should be" and "The world is getting less democratic," and I keep finding it hard to find evidence for the latter.

Now, what do you do with that? Britain could have required some level of majority before making that change (60-40? 67-33? 75-25?), but they didn't. On the other hand, they could have made it a binding referendum, and if I understand correctly, they didn't do that, either.

But one of the big reasons people wanted to leave "the unpopular and undemocratic European Union" (as wjnc said), was that when people voted "the wrong way" (as determined by Brussels), that vote got ignored. If this vote gets ignored/sidelined/not implemented somehow, for the 52%, that's going to be pouring gasoline on a fire.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/27/us/politics/spy-agency-...?

FYI, the Sony hack was very likely not committed by an insider (https://www.operationblockbuster.com/wp-content/uploads/2016...). DISCLAIMER: I worked with the team who did operation blockbuster.

Motive is less clear. In reality, they probably hacked the DNC because everybody hacks everybody; that's the reality of modern cyberespionage. America hacks the Russian political parties, they hack us back. But this time someone screwed up and they got caught, so now we need a cover story.

The coverstory of trying to manipulate the election is basically convenient for all involved. It is far fetched enough to sound unbelievable, so it provides diplomatic cover. It also provides cover for why there's no similar story at the RNC, which is better than admitting either the Russians couldn't do it, or they could and they got away with that one. It provides cover to Clinton who can now claim the Russians want to elect Trump so please focus on that instead of anything to do with email, and it provides cover to Trump who would like to keep the word email in the news. This is the story that all our characters are happy to go with.

But the Russians being the perpetrators? That part is definitely true. There is way too much evidence over way too many years. The DNC did not create a Russian intelligence organization in 2007 in order to cover up their email leak in this election.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofacy_Group

[1] http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/36195/cyber-crime/cozydu...

It is a scientifically verified truth that we are puny monkeys playing at God. The problem with leaving democracy to small groups is when the small group’s decisions affect the entire world. For example: San Francisco neighborhood associations’ affect on the housing market and technological development.

Another example: The “commoner” reaction to oil prices going back down, first after the OPEC embargo, and now during this weird fracking + Saudi thing. The “elite” Elon Musk is still going ahead with trying to get us off fossil fuels, but the commoner keeps trying to use more.

Learning enough to have an informed position makes you an elite. One problem is there is so little connection between being a political elite and being a smart, benevolent elite. There’s a reason why Obama is seen by Republicans as condescending and dictatorial.

> Oh, you're a blue-collar worker and globalization and immigration actually end up destroying your town's economy - too bad, maybe you should have been a banker or software engineer or bio-med researcher!

Why should you “be” a blue-collar worker, banker, software engineer, or any other job description? You are a human, and you can learn and do anything (modulo actual physical limitations). Lifelong learning is the goal, and research and personal experience suggest that lifelong learning actually gives you better quality of life than the alternatives.

But the US education system is horrible at that. It is shaping and limiting people’s options from the time that they enter elementary school, and are immediately sorted into, oh, you’re bad at math and good at reading, or you’re bad at reading and good at sports.

By and large, globalization has been good. We have more access to stuff and communications than any society in the history of the world. Past performance does not guarantee future results; we are still monkeys playing at God, so globalization can cause problems. When the US is exporting our restrictions on freedoms, for example.

I don't find them particularly reliable. Their heads perjured themselves in front of Congress not long ago, let's not forget.

All that can be truthfully said is that N people wanted to stay, and N + Y wanted to leave, where Y is a small number. One of the negative sides of democracy - sometimes more people wind up disappointed than others, but the only thing that matters at the end of the day is 50% plus one person.

You're not the only one; attacking the messenger rather than refuting the message seems to be a common tactic among career politicians.

b) What if some monkeys just want to play with bananas? Why should some monkey decide that "lifelong learning" is better for them?

Even if most of the voters give their best effort to think this through, for a lot of them that wasn't much, other than what UKIP barfed into the air and into their minds. Now a lot of them are having second thoughts.