WEDNESDAY, JUNE 30, 2021
With anthropological insights: It can get extremely dumb here in the streets of Our Town.
The Dumbness can play a very large role in Our Town's affairs. The Dumbness, and the Incompetence. Corruption is sometimes observed.
Regarding the Incompetence, we don't think we'd noticed this problem until we were in college. We did start to notice it then.
Some of us are never able to take this step. This doesn't mean that we're bad people. It just means we're human.
To what extent can The Dumb hold sway in Our Town? Especially given the way we've mocked The Others for their claims, beliefs and behaviors concerning last November's election, the meltdown about the New York City mayoral race is a striking case in point.
Gotham is Our Town's most famous major city. In its news report about the mayor-race meltdown, the New York Times offers this:
GLUECK (6/30/21): For the Board of Elections, which has long been plagued by dysfunction and nepotism, this was its first try at implementing ranked-choice voting on a citywide scale. Skeptics had expressed doubts about the board’s ability to pull off the process, though it is used successfully in other cities.
[...]
Some Democrats, bracing for an acrimonious new chapter in the race, are concerned that the incremental release of results by the Board of Elections—and the discovery of an error—may stir distrust of ranked-choice voting and of the city’s electoral system more broadly.
In a statement late Tuesday night, [Maya] Wiley laced into the Board of Elections, calling the error “the result of generations of failures that have gone unaddressed,” and adding: “Sadly it is impossible to be surprised.”
“Today, we have once again seen the mismanagement that has resulted in a lack of confidence in results, not because there is a flaw in our election laws, but because those who implement it have failed too many times,” she said.
According to the Times, the board "has long been plagued by dysfunction and nepotism."
According to Candidate Wiley, the board has "failed too many times...Sadly it is impossible to be surprised,” the candidate gloomily said.
Meanwhile, will this latest remarkable bungle "stir distrust of ranked-choice voting and of the city’s electoral system more broadly?"
Yes, it surely will! It will also stir added distrust concerning the outcome of Campaign 2020. More broadly, it will stir distrust concerning the way Our Town functions in general.
How puzzling is the latest meltdown? We've wondered about this too:
GLUECK: The results may well be scrambled again: Even after the Board of Elections sorts through the preliminary tally, it must count around 124,000 Democratic absentee ballots. Once they are tabulated, the board will take the new total that includes them and run a new set of ranked-choice elimination rounds, with a final result not expected until mid-July.
[...]
Other close observers of the election separately expressed discomfort with the decision to release a ranked-choice tally without accounting for absentee ballots.
“There is real danger that voters will come to believe a set of facts about the race that will be disproven when all votes are in,” said Ben Greenfield, a senior survey data analyst at Change Research...
Exactly! Why even try to release a vote count now, when it will have to be done all over again when the absentee ballots get counted? Maybe there's a reason for that, but we've found this puzzling too.
(We'd put that decision right up there with the bungled logic of high-end Gotham schooling. Why kick all those Asian kids out of Stuyvesant High? Why not create a Stuyvesant II, doubling the number of seats at the high-powered school? Here in Our Town, we're so dumb that we pretty much never ask. It's all about our desire to show which "racial" groups we favor!)
Things can, and do, get very dumb here in the streets of Our Town. Despite this fact, we Townies are inclined to insist that our thought leaders can never be wrong.
This is a very dumb belief, but it seems to be widely held.
In truth, Our Town's thought leaders are often notably lacking. Our journalists and academics have routinely failed to serve, or have actively led us astray.
Despite such facts, when a dispute breaks out along tribal lines, we're inclined to insist that The Others just have to be totally wrong. Meanwhile, we'll agree with every damn-fool thing our own thought leaders might say.
Our thought leader are often mediocre corporate-selected and corporate-paid multimillionaires. Despite our love of transparency, we aren't allowed to know how many millions they're paid to entertain us in the requisite fashion.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. As is the nature of the race, the performance of Our Town's elites is often very poor.
Our Town is often comically awful, but this is hard for Us Townies to see. Top experts say we're wired this way—as are The Others, of course.
In Gotham, Our Town has now done it again. Maybe Cuomo can write another book explaining how he worked it all out!
At any rate, nothing is ever as dumb as Our Town. Until you go visit Theirs!
It's impossible to be surprised by this, Candidate Wiley has said.
"Skeptics had expressed doubts about the board’s ability to pull off the process"
ReplyDeleteOh, whoa, expressing doubts about the election process.
Sounds like your dembot NYT has violated a core tenet of democracy, dear Bob. Outrageous.
You mean like Trump supporters voting illegally.
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DeleteFor once, in a long time, we totally agree with Bob! The NYC BOE is totally incompetent, with tons of deadwood, nepotistic hires in its ranks, making the competent employees work even harder. The BOE in NYC has much more funding than other BOEs in the state, but even it struggles to find resources for its mission. Cuomo and the NYS legislature are primary responsible for this problem, starving BOEs of funding and allowing Counties to give them the bare minimum to function. The staffing bill that would require more full time employees at other BOEs went no where in the legislature…
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/SarahGoat/status/1410071700432207872
The issue is that Somerby is not arguing in good faith. He brings this up to justify the insane conspiracy theories and election lunacy being floated by Trumpworld. That is par for the course for this increasingly desperate Trumptard
DeleteThe USA, a 230-year-old pseudo-democracy that still hasn't learned how to count votes in an open and sane manner using sensible standards. Funny that we never hear of this kind of thing happening in other long-time democracies like Canada, Britain, Holland, France, etc. Face it, as a people, we just don't care about the basic principles of democracy.
ReplyDelete'Our thought leader are often mediocre corporate-selected and corporate-paid multimillionaires. Despite our love of transparency, we aren't allowed to know how many millions they're paid to entertain us in the requisite fashion.'
ReplyDeleteThe reason MAddow is successful is that she can command an audience and advertisers. The sort of thing that Somerby can't demand, because he's a miserable, jealous failure.
'To what extent can The Dumb hold sway in Our Town? Especially given the way we've mocked The Others for their claims, beliefs and behaviors concerning last November's election, the meltdown about the New York City mayoral race is a striking case in point'
ReplyDeleteThere is a massive difference between incompetence/problems in an election in one jurisdiction and an organized claim by Trump and other Trumptards that half a dozen states, at least 2 with R Gov/SoSes actively cheated with help from the ghost of Hugo Chavez. In fact, these problems show how hard it would be to rig even one election.
This is not even a false equivalence, it's not any form of equivalence. It's the difference between saying 'Somerby is incompetent' vs 'Somerby is a lunatic Trumptard dedicated to overthrowing an election with insane theories'.
But SOmerby pitches this bogus equivalence as part of his increasingly desperate attempts to defend Donald Trump and other Trumptards like Ron Johnson, Roy Moore, Devin Nunes and Matt Gaetz. Somerby is a malevolent Trumptard whose s redeeming points are only
1) he's too incompetent to be a useful idiot for Trump, he just ends up being a useless idiot
2) his Trumptardism is so blatantly obvious that only Trumptards and the extremely naive believe he is a liberal.
"Why kick all those Asian kids out of Stuyvesant High?"
ReplyDeleteNo one is kicking Asian kids out of Stuyvesant High. The changes proposed would affect new applicants to the school, not existing students.
Instead of attacking people involved in running the mayoral election, Somerby should focus on the problems themselves. All that happened this time was that the data used to test the voting system was not purged before the vote counting. They had to redo the results without the test data included. That kind of mistake does not depend on nepotism or corruption. It is simple human error.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, the largely Democratic absentee ballots may swing the election from the current frontrunner to the second place candidate. That again is not a matter of corruption or nepotism, but the result of the demographics of those who cast absentee ballots. The ability to vote absentee has nothing to do with who is related to whom among election officials. That procedure was not put into place by election officials either.
So this seems like a politically motivated hit job on the election process. The question is why Somerby is aiding those who wish to undermine faith in the voting process.
'The question is why Somerby is aiding those who wish to undermine faith in the voting process.'
DeleteBecause Somerby is a Trumptard devastated by Trump's loss. This seems to be a common right wing meme that Somerby is regurgiating.
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