Month: April 2024

Voter’s Revenge is a generalized, but opinionated tool to facilitate populist organizing.

It can also be used to organize anti-populist goals, but that is a ‘necessary evil’ in creating a generalized tool. It can also be used stupidly or smartly, strategically speaking, though the tool will attempt to guide users along more productive paths.

It can target Democrats and Republicans. Indeed, as will be the subject of a future post, transpartisan efforts can be facilitated by creating allied posses, which target both Democrats and Republicans, toward a single end. (See Glen Greenwald’s youtube Should the populist left ever work with the populist right? – System Update with Glenn Greenwald for real world examples of transpartisanship in Congress).

Development of the re-imagined version of Voter’s Revenge has been languishing, regretably.

Even so, my recent reading of BREAKING: RINOS WIN – AMERICANS LOSE: FISA 702 Again Passes House by Vote of 259-128 – Here are The 117 RINOs Who Voted for Warrantless Spying on Americans , pushed me to try and come up with a shortcut, that would address part of the vast problem with government. While RINOs may only be a part of the problem is, they constitute a HUGE target.

It wasn’t so much the article contents, but the comments that pushed me over the edge. There is nothing terribly surprising about the dark path that Congress is on, including RINOs, given the history of corruption by elites going back decades. Corrupt Congress Critters are going to Corrupt Congress Critter, RINOs are going to RINO, etc. It’s what they do, and who they are. Unless the populists develop real political muscle and more strategic smarts than they typically manifest, things will not get better.

As far as I’m concerned, the public is very badly led by it’s activists, including those who aren’t actually shills for “the man”. It’s the activists that should be looking outside-the-box for any edge against financially superior, entrenched, plutocratic opposition, so they can supply leadership to the “bewildered herd” of non-activists.

Ah, but where is the ground game? For anything? The only politically oriented things I can see, currently, in public spaces in NJ are billboards, both for and against Israel in it’s current military actions against Gaza. The support for Gaza could be considered left populist, but what about any other issue? The left populists used to have a significant anti-war movement, but that seems all but dead, overall. It’s quite dead with respect to Ukraine, even if not Gaza.

So, public spaces, that aren’t controlled by the usual censors infecting mainstream media and Big Tech media (like Facebook) are being ignored by the activists, by and large. 1

Therefore we should not be surprised that the commenters at thegatewaypundit are clueless about how to proceed, but it isn’t entirely their fault.

Anyway, to help out clueless right wing populists, led by strategically inept right wing activists, I am publishing a spec for “DumpTheRinos.org”. It’s tool which just lets nearby right wing populists find each other, via throwaway public emails they create just for this purpose, use geospatial distance calculated by zipcode. The zipcodes and throwaway emails provide a good measure of privacy.

Once these populists find each other, they can self-organize to vote out their common RINO during his/her next primary. (Or even general election, if they have the nerve; which they probably don’t. Once again, this lack reflects the persistent strategic cluelessness I observe on left and right, though it might be more rational for this particular election (for right wingers) because of the political configuration involving Trump facing relentless lawfare, and the enormity of damage that the Democrats have wrought, under Biden).

In the Voter’s Revenge world, the DumpTheRinos posses are voteslinger posses. The goal of such posses is termination of the political career of the target.

Today I tried to get developers on freelancer.com to implement this spec, but the two I talked to severely lowballed their bids. Apparently, to get a serious developer interested, you need at least $1,000 to $2,000. Chicken feed, compared to the $2 billion or so that will be spent in this Presidential election, but that is what it is. I can’t spend this sort of money, right now.

Finally, I’ll note that political websites are, and have been, WASTELANDS for publicly oriented political organizing. This is true of lefty ones (like dailykos) and righty ones (like thegatewaypundit.com and breitbart.com). They could EASILY ask for zipcode information and a throwaway public email, themselves, and provide spatially ordered search results. And thus, facilitate self-organization. Indeed, they could show geographic distance right in their comment sections, for users who are logged in, which would reveal geospatial info at a much smaller scale, but provide a constant reminder of what local organizing is possible.

I don’t think this is an accident. I think the “powers that be” want to contain and control the public, by just providing a place for them to vent; and then, during election season, be guided towards establishment candidates, where it’s understood that, rhetorically speaking (at least), establishment left and establishment right can be very different. After the election is over, the mobilized suckers are demobilized. As reported on more honest lefty websites (like firedoglake and openleft, both now defunct…) Obama’s organization deliberately dismantled his very enthusiastic base, at least after his first Presidential election. Wouldn’t want to let the rubes interfere with Obama’s neoliberal agenda, after all. I’m not aware of Trump asking his enthusiastic base to do much of anything, either, when he got elected.

I’m basically on lifelong independent, but in my previous online life haunted mostly progressive websites. There was a very lefty (but very decent) guy named Jeff Roby, who I ended up meeting, befriending, and even collaborating with. We only found out that we lived in adjacent towns (Newark and Jersey City) by accident, as it fell out of an online conversation. The host website, like basically all of them that I had surveyed way back when, didn’t bother facilitating any face to face organizing. (Some websites and organizations do occasional, social meetups, perhaps only when attended by the “big cheese”. E.g., I think nakedcapitalism does the “big cheese” version, and dailykos will serve up these meetups without markos present.)

1 – here in NJ. I’ve seen headlines about blocking bridges in CA. Hey, it’s a big country, and my point remains.

I found a version of the original Voter’s Revenge source code on my laptop, which I’ve now uploaded to a new github repository @ https://github.com/sldev2/VR . (Note that this project began from a clone of an open source project called Mvc5IdentityExample.)

I probably have a more current version of the code, somewhere in a disk in storage, as I made some modifications to demonstrate the basic functionality using a date in the past when the data was current. (I posted an article about this on codeproject.com called “Allow Users to Selectively Override your Website’s Default Date” ). The bits indicated in my article are not in the code, so for sure it’s not the very last thing I worked on.

At present, I don’t think it’s worth it trying to dig up the very latest source code.

I’ve abandoned this version of the project long ago, and have since re-imagined it, though I’ve done no coding on a new version. I’m posting this mostly because any programmers who might get interested in the re-imagined version might make use of the database as a starting point, whose structure can be reproduced using the ‘modelBuilder’ calls.

“Recruit, recruit, recruit”

The “prime directive” in Star Trek was to not interfere in the evolution of planetary civilizations.

Posses should also be mindful of a prime directive – namely, the need to grow the posse, since it’s political muscle scales with size of membership. We can adopt the slogan “Recruit, Recruit, Recruit” to express this idea. Even after a posse reaches a critical mass where it can more or less guarantee the removal of an incumbent during their next primary, it’s important to keep growing the posse. The reason being that a removal in no way guarantees that a better replacement gets elected, and a larger accountability group of local citizens is required to coalesce around a primary challenger to therefore all but guarantee a primary victory for this challenger. In purple districts and states, we can easily anticipate a yet larger accountability group membership milestone, which is a size large enough to all but guarantee a victory in a general election.

“Accountability group” is introduced, here, instead of just “posses”, because posses (at least as originally conceived) were punitive in nature, and I’ve described them as “negative vote blocs”. (More recently, I’ve introduced 3 flavors of posses, including supportive posses; however I anticipate more reform coming from watchdog and adversarial posses.) However, when the public is more integrated into large enough accountability groups, they will naturally want to act as a positive vote blocs, conduct unofficial votes before official elections and primaries to determine a champion to rally around, and install new elected officials that they are confident of being better than the bum they intend to throw out.

Voter’s Revenge is an opinionated tool, and thus will try to steer posses in the direction of public facing payback actions (which result from redline violations), which simultaneously exploit opportunities to “recruit, recruit, recruit” during the payback action. Nevertheless, there is some freedom involved in choosing payback actions, so having “recruit, recruit, recruit” in mind, is important.

Posses can be used wisely or foolishly. E.g., payback actions need to aim for a goldilocks zone of aggressiveness. It’s easy to see that most actions by the public towards Congress critters are not nearly aggressive enough. These are actions such as emails, petitions, faxes, etc. Is your Representative terribly concerned about his constituents’ emails? Compared to how many campaign contributions he got that week? Probably not. On the other hand, we have seen some lefty activists, in recent years, engage in tactics that are too aggressive, and even illegal.

So, in considering payback actions, let’s say that, against, well, my recommendations, they engage in typical email campaigns. Such campaigns have the same target (e.g., Congressman), but the emails fail the “recruit, recruit, recruit” principle. Therefore, it is hoped that Pareto Principle considerations prevail, and the email campaigns are either abandoned, or at least viewed as merely part of the 80% that are not expected to yield the same relative benefit towards the end goal.

The new requirement of QR codes, which provide links to specific posses, are sort of a no-brainer, and shouldn’t require much explanation. They are used for providing, e.g., links to restaurant menus. Because a posse will live in a distinct corner on a website, it doesn’t suffice just to provide the votersrevenge.com website, along with items to search for. (As a backup means of finding a specific posse, that is fine, and anticipated.)