[ExI] election stuff

[hkhenson]

At 11:44 PM 1/10/2008, spike wrote:
>
>Oh my.  We just saw a thousand Kenyans slain over a questionable election.

No we did not.  The election was the trigger, but considering it to 
be causal is just wrong.

What we saw in Kenya was Rwanda writ small, too many people for the 
economy.  That leads humans to anticipation of a bleak future.  In 
the stone age bleak future prospects turned up the gain on xenophobic 
memes circulating in the group.  After a while the warriors were 
fired up to kill people in neighboring groups.  That solved the 
problem.  It is a mechanistic negative feedback mechanism that kept 
the population remarkably stable over long times.

Fast rising technology can increase the size of the economy enough to 
keep down the gain setting for xenophobic memes--for a while.  If 
population growth is close to zero it can do so for a long time.  But 
if the population growth gets ahead of economic growth, then there 
*is* going to be a massive die off, if not from war then from one of 
the other horsemen.

>We can see how an election could be easily designed to be private, fair and
>verifiable, yet no democracy that I know of has made any effort to do it.
>Am I the only one who sees a huge threat here?

As threats go, I rank it near the bottom of the pile.

>Please note that this post isn't about any particular politician, it's about
>elections in general and how we are losing confidence in the integrity of
>the process itself:

Have you ever thought about the function of elections?  It isn't what 
it seems.  As for confidence, heh heh, look up "Landslide Johnson."

Keith