[EM] Fwd: Chicken Dilemma--To whom is it a problem? (pt 1)

[Michael Ossipoff]

Hi Juho--

> On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 12:24 AM, Juho Laatu <juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On 17.10.2013, at 5.47, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
>
>> Though Dem isn't worse than Repub, it's largely a matter of principle
>> with me, to not endorse the Republocrats by voting for any of them. A
>> matter of aesthetics too.
>
> Yes, this is thought-provoking. We usually define rational voting so that we refer only to the outcome of this elecion in > question. In that sense, do you agree that you would be an irrational voter?

[/quote]

Sometime maybe a very little, yes, if we narrowly define rationality
according to the immediate result.

But I don't even agree that there's really any immediate benefit from
electing the Democrat instead of the Republican. Look at Obama. Could
a Republcan really be worse? The time when the Democrats might sound
better is during the campaign. Someone at _The Progressive_ magazine
pointed out that the Dems are progressives in the campaign, and
Republicans in office. That's because they get their votes from one
segment of the population, and their money and instructions from
another segment of the population. So maybe I'm not really so
irrational, then, if it really doesn't make any difference. How many
of the Democrat promises turn out to be true?

Besides, as you said, it can be rational to refuse to endorse
corruption and criminality, even if it comes in two versions, with one
microscopically less bad than the other.

You continued:

You could help electing the second worst instead of the worst (risk
free, let's assume that), but you refuse to do so. On the other hand
this definition of rational voting is not the whole truth. In real
life sometimes it makes sense e.g. not to vote at all to carry a
message to the system that the election is no good. I guess this is
what you are doing, in a rational way.

[/quote]

Yes.

You continued:

 I guess the question is then, what if you would have an election
method that would be better than the current one, and also others than
republocrats would have been elected a few times, would it be possible
that you would then change your voting behaviour and start ranking all
the (meaningful) candidates?

[/quote]

Even if the voting system were IRV, which meets Later-No-Harm, I still
wouldn't include any Democrats in my ranking. I wouldn't want to dirty
my ballot thereby, and I wouldn't want to endorse corruption.

And what does it mean to be a "meaningful candidate"? How legitimately
meaningful is a party whose success is purely an artifact of dishonest
media promotion, and blackout of alternatives?

Michael Ossipoff