Politics

What are the options for Ukraine?

In shock like most of us, I am trying to play out the various options for Ukraine and the west. None are good. What others can you suggest?

Capitulate

Ukraine quickly surrenders, Putin installs puppet government. Much repression, modest insurrection, if that, as in Crimea.

West wimps out: Russia walks away with success, looks for next target. Extreme sanctions: Russia toughs it out, or Russia capitulates, restoring a battered Ukraine. Or Russia goes nuclear.

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A means to restore equal representation in the United States through the division of States

A frequent lament is that the design of the US constitution has created a system where voters are highly unequal. Most of all this is seen in the Senate, where the nearly 40 million residents in California have 2 seats in the Senate, and so do 550,000 in Wyoming. Indeed, if you take the 20 smallest states, they have fewer people together than California and get 40 seats in the Senate compared to the two. That same fact also means a smaller but real bias in the electoral college, with the smaller states having a bit more say in how the

How to vote on things by not voting

The overwhelming of the vote of the World Science Fiction Society to send the 2023 convention to China created controversy and not for the first time. They had a similar problem with the Hugo award nomination process which is even easier to overwhelm with a much smaller concerted group. They solved this problem by making the nomination rules much more complex, with an algorithm to attempt to de-rank candidates that appear in "slates" on many ballots.

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The World Science Fiction Convention (worldcon) goes to China, and of course there's politics

I used to be a lot more involved in the annual science fiction Worldcon and the Hugo awards, but have drifted away of late. One of the reasons is that, even more than before, they have become more about politics than science fiction or community. There was a huge controversy over an attempt at bloc voting to change the Hugo awards, which both succeeded and failed, and had somewhat faded into the past. But the intrigues continue.

The Electoral College: Why it is, Why it's hard to fix, and why it's not as big a deal as you think

As we do every 4 years, people are lamenting about the crazy system of the electoral college. It is archaic and should be replaced, but that's far more easily said than done.

Preventing the chaos of super-close elections

When elections are close, they get chaotic. If the flip of a single vote, at the tie-point, can cause a massive change, like who runs a country, things can go nuts. People will do everything, from legal battles all the way up to the supreme court, to voter suppression, to voter fraud, to fake claims of voter fraud, all to move the needle a tiny bit around that tipping point.

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Questions for the Judge

If a judge were hearing a case, and the judge were known to have a strong positive bias or strong resentment of a party before the judge, should the judge recuse?

In our justice system, do we allow parties to a case to select which judge will hear their case? Why?

How do we currently assure that parties do not get to pick their judge?

If you learned that in a case that party in a case before a court had been able to somehow pick their judge, should that judge recuse?

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Covid deaths could change election results: Do more Republican voters die than Democrats?

The projected deaths for Covid-19 in the USA are horrific -- 100,000 to 240,000. Let's hope it's not nearly that bad, but those numbers are enough that they actually could alter the election. Not simply because Covid-19 will be the top issue in the election, but because voters will die.

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Will the Covid crisis sink Trump?

In some discussion, I have seen it become almost an assumption that the economic meltdown and the Covid crisis will erode confidence in the President and settle the election, presuming things continue to November as they likely will. Historical patterns suggest that Presidents with good economies and stock markets get elected, those without them don't. We're seeing economic meltdown, high unemployment, fear and more.

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