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Monday, November 05, 2012

Ohio and Florida Shenanigans Circumvention

Ohio Secretary of State Husted and Florida Governor Scott are not even hiding their efforts to disenfranchise voters and structurally lower turnout in the hope of squeaking out GOP "victories" that way. For Democrats those are two ill-omened States given their role in the theft of the 2000 election and the headaches of the 2004 election. Of course, if turnout matches expectations in Ohio or is even just a smidge greater than polling suggests in Florida, then the margin of victory for President Obama in either state will overwhelm these desperate anti-democratizing Republican efforts, which tend after all to be about gaming the edges of tight races.

Maybe after such failures it will occur to the GOP that rather than denying as much of the pesky electorate the vote as possible they themselves will have to change to appeal to the electorate that exists and is emerging, secular, multicultural, interdependent, planetarily conscious as it is... NAH!

Anyway, if we get verdicts for Florida and/or Ohio before 11 pm, then the game is over -- if not, well, then here come the lawyers, and it may be more like eleven days before we know whether the GOP is getting away with their criminal anti-democratic misconduct this time (given the recent court decisions and the army of lawyers and observers fanning out into those states, I suspect they will not, but no doubt the confusion and acrimony would stink up the place in a way the GOP finds edifying for fiscal cliff negotiations in the lame duck).

Needless to say, if Obama gets either state, all this ugliness just provides one more tale of a party of evil irrelevant whiny white guys contemplating oblivion to add to the rest of the obituaries that everybody will be writing in the aftermath of this exhausting election contest. I want to add, however, that Obama has at least four plausible paths to an Electoral College victory I can think of off the top of my head even if he were to LOSE Ohio AND Florida, or if victories there were shunted off into the future by GOP dirty tricks, so that we can all go to bed with a smile on our faces even if Republicans manage to do their worst.
1) 237 Solid/Likely EVs + NH (4) + WI (10) + IA (6) + CO (9) + NV (6) = 272 EVs

2) 237 Solid/Likely EVs + VA (13) + WI (10) + NH (4) + NV (6) = 270 EVs

3) 237 Solid/Likely EVs + VA (13) + WI (10) + NH (4) + IA (6) = 270 EVs

4) 237 Solid/Likely EVs + VA (13) + CO (9) + NV (6) + IA (6) = 271 EVs
Any of these scenarios will nudge a concession speech out of Romney before the sun comes up Wednesday morning. I really don't think Romney even wants to be President enough to go scorched earth for it (I think he's dead inside and doesn't want anything that badly, frankly, though he definitely expects and feels entitled to much more even than he has) and I also don't think Republicans like Romney enough to move heaven and earth for him -- Romney has gone further than his Dad did and I think that will suffice for him, and any legitimate victory puncturing the delusive Fox/Hate Radio bubble of Romney landslide fantasies of the Obama-hating Muslifascisocifurrinfoodstamparmy crowd will send most of them into saucer-eyed demoralized quiescence and the rest for their guns anyway. I don't share the daydreams of our punditocratic gossips who think Obama will win the Electoral College but not the popular vote, I think Obama will win the latter as well by a slim margin Tuesday night that plumps up by a point or two in upcoming weeks as all the provisional and absentee ballots get counted by and by.

By the way, I still think it's going to be a good night for Democrats in the Senate, a good night for Progressives in same-sex marriage, marijuana legalization, tax-raising for education, three strikes reform, capital punishment ending ballot initiative fights in California and nationwide, and I am hopeful about the prospects for Democrats in the House (though a reversal of control looks sadly to be out of reach, mostly due to GOP redistricting but them's the rules).

9 comments:

Mark Plus said...

You progressives can't get your framing straight. You portray America's white population as an obsolete holdover from the past; yet you point to pasty-white Scandinavian countries as progressive utopias.

BTW, Sweden's social-democratic government pursued aggressive sterilization of people it consider undesirable for breeding through much of the 20th Century. Perhaps Sweden turned out as well as it did because the state restricted the people who could become the ancestors of the current population.

Dale Carrico said...

It is of course your racism that is obsolete. And there is no "framing" that will help you crawl out of the hole of ugly stupidity you are in. I'm "white" -- who the fuck cares? -- there are "non-white" people in Scandanavian countries -- who the fuck cares? I love America's diversity, and I love America's ongoing transformation into an ever more secular multicultural social democracy, while you wingnut losers howl and howl. For readers who don't know, by the way, "Mark Plus" isn't just a white-racist reactionary idiot, he's also a Robot Cultist (that is to say, a reactionary idiot twice over).

jimf said...

> "Mark Plus" isn't just a white-racist reactionary idiot, he's
> also a Robot Cultist (that is to say, a reactionary idiot twice
> over).

That's not precisely correct. Though an erstwhile Extropian,
and the credited coiner of the term "Singularitarian" (if you can't
lay claim to the stem word, better than nothing to be able to claim one
of the suffixed inflections ;-> ), Mr. Plus vociferously (and entertainingly,
and correctly IMO) disparages the Singularitarians and (what you call
the) "nanocornucopiasts" on his blog "The Life of Man Qua Man on Earth".
(See, e.g., the posts under
http://thelifeofmanquamanonearth.blogspot.com/search/label/Eliezer%20Yudkowsky ).

He remains a staunch "senior cryonicist", however.

Nevertheless, he may very well deserve the label "reactionary" (if not "idiot"),
as he will himself cheerfully admit (and has, in numerous blog articles
of his own -- see, e.g., the posts under
http://thelifeofmanquamanonearth.blogspot.com/search/label/Strict%20Father%20Model ).

jollyspaniard said...


I think all the voter supression tactics may have backfired on the GOP. They can't stop people from voting. People tend to resent such efforts and they're perfectly capable of punishing the miscreants at the ballot box.

Dale- The transhumanist thing is pretty obvious by the handle as soon as I read it I reckoned he was probably a Tool+

Dale Carrico said...

That's not precisely correct.

This is a longer conversation, but...

I do think it is important to grasp that the Robot Cult archipelago has many islands and reefs -- transhumanoids, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, cornucopiasts.

Further, there are sects within these: cornucopiasts come in nano- digi- nuclear- p2p- 3D- geo-engineering flavors; techno-immortalists come in SENS-less, uploader varieties and some transhumanoids are eugenicists others gengineers others longevists others prostheticists and there are complex overlaps between the two. Singularitarians have their gofai dead-enders and their libertopian techno-triumphalists and their evo-psychos and these interact with other branches as well. And so on and on.

All of these can be described as discourses with customary tropes and topoi and so on, and they can also be described as subcultures with ethnographically discernible commonalities and membership signals.

There are some Robot Cultists who take up the whole package (which is actually logically incoherent, but there you are), but most foreground one conceptual/ sociocultural site and read the rest through its terms, sometimes even feeling for other elements of the archipelago the same scorn critics like me feel for the whole package.

And of course, just as there are important differences and dependencies that become legible once we differentiate these futurologies discursively and subculturally, there are also questions of the relations between superlative and more mainstream futurological frames (futurology is in my view the prevailing rationality of post-WW2 corporate-military developmentalism even though its Robot Cult periphery seems koo-koo bananas from its core), and all these vantages, levels, positions are navigated differently by each futurological member/believer.

This complicates the assertion that these are True Believers even though superlative futurologists exhibit so many tell-tale signs otherwise.

Anyway, as you can probably guess from the granularity of this comment, I am working on an elaborate paper on this very topic right now for the APA so it's on my mind.

joe said...

Shit, for all this talk of Mark+ being an extropian this or cryoncist that...I just know him as the fat old dude with the shitty T-shirt...kinda like Santa, on a cheap holiday look.

Dale Carrico said...

I call attention to the connection because it helps folks see that this blog's two main preoccupations -- ridiculing reactionary Movement Conservatives and libertopians, and ridiculing retro-futurist Robot Cultists -- are actually more continuous than might initially meet the eye.

jimf said...

> There are some Robot Cultists who take up the whole package. . .
> but most foreground one conceptual/ sociocultural site. . .,
> sometimes even feeling for other elements of the archipelago
> the same scorn critics like me feel for the whole package.

Speaking of which, John Howard seems to have taken one of Mark Plus's
expressions of scorn as a signal that he (Howard) might have
found a new ally in his fight against "comic book mentality
postgendered humanity". Talk about barking up the wrong tree!

( http://thelifeofmanquamanonearth.blogspot.com/2012/06/dangers-of-geek-culture-to-men-who.html#disqus_thread )

Dale Carrico said...

I'm pretty sure at this point that "John Howard" is performance art.