Rigging

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

popularized by Carl Sagan 

This quote is usually used to debunk supernatural events, but I believe that it applies equally to conspiracy theories. Oftentimes what we call conspiracy theories speculate from ambiguous evidence and draw conclusions about what might be turning them into, in their view, what is?

One of the latest conspiracy theories is that the Clintons and their media allies are colluding to "rig" the results of the presidential election. As with most conspiracy theories, it is based on scant evidence, and what supposed evidence there is, is extremely ambiguous.

The vague allegations that the election would be rigged came first; some time ago Trump suggested that the only way that he could lose would be if the election were stolen from him via "massive fraud". Later the (mainstream) media were added to the mix, Trump alleging that the media was an arm of the Clinton campaign, that they were biased against him, and that they were poisoning people's minds against him. Finally, he combined the two allegations into one, that it was media collusion and voter fraud that would cost him the election. Of course he praised the media when a story was run that supported his narrative or criticized Hillary Clinton.

I'm not surprised that Trump thinks this - he's a nut. He's a self-absorbed, narcissist who's overly impressed with his own resume, and who has demonstrated a predilection for conspiracy theories. What I find disturbing is the number of seemingly intelligent people who believe it as well. Despite the fact that every allegation against Clinton, not only in this campaign, but for decades has enjoyed media coverage, Trumpists still believe that the Clintons have the mainstream media in their pocket. This is not to say that there's no bias, or that different news organizations haven't supported Clinton, but look at the New York Times, supposedly the media stooge of the Clintons, and their very much complete coverage of every Clinton pseudo-scandal. When I've pointed this out on occasion, the goalposts move and the standard then becomes that the media isn't criticizing Clinton. Trump, who had received free and scrutiny-free coverage from the mainstream media for most of the primaries, when he finally starts to see some actual coverage of his positions and questioning of his blatantly false statements, he and his followers think that everyone is against him. Most of the coverage is actually just reporting of Trump's own words.

Then there's the supposed rigging of the election. Despite there being no evidence of any voter fraud, let alone massive voter fraud, Trump has his people believing that huge amounts of people will be voting in the name of dead people, and that despite Republicans being in charge in most of the swing states, that institutional election fraud will be perpetrated.

Like most of Trump's fantasy allegations he has people believing that if it could be true, then it must be true.

To refer back to Sagan's putative quotation, this is quite the extraordinary claim, therefore it requires extraordinary proof, or at least some proof.

Managers Part IX - What Does a Manager Do?

So what does a manager do? To most people, a manager is just a higher-paid, busier version of the people he or she manages, who also bosses people around. What just what is a manager supposed to manage? According to Bill Oncken Jr., whose book Managing Management Time is one of the most detailed, practical management guide that I have ever seen, a manager is someone who, in contrast to someone who does things, a manager is someone gets things done.  How does a manager get things done? Allowing for the fact that some people with the title "manager" don't supervise anyone, but oversee processes, managers get things done by way of other people. How the professional manager utilizes others to get things done consists largely in how his or her time is spent.

There are broadly three categories of time: boss-imposed, system-imposed, and self-imposed. As we progress, you'll see that time can also be divided in other ways, some that overlap with the three categories listed here. Boss-imposed time is pretty easy to explain - it's the time you spend doing things that your immediate supervisor tells you to do. System-imposed time is time that you spend dealing with the administrative tasks - paperwork, tracking, answering emails. The amount of system-imposed time varies from industry to industry and flourishes when there active factions within a company all vying for control and influence. Self-imposed time is a little harder to pin down. It's not playing hooky from work and going fishing or playing golf, it's not deciding to spend your work day with your feet up on the desk. What it is, is time that you spend conducting your business as you see fit, free from the constraints of the system or the orders of your boss. It's the time you spend planning, the time you spend coaching your subordinates and anticipating and solving problems that haven't occurred yet. In a perfect world, your boss- and system-imposed time will be minimized and your self-imposed time will be maximized. But how do you do that? We'll look at the boss and the system in a later post, but first let's look at a group of people who aren't really part of the three categories of time: subordinates.

In theory, there is no such thing as subordinate-imposed time. In any organizational chart that you're likely to see the big boss is on top, medium and little bosses are under him, front line supervisors are father down and the workers are on the bottom. There is no organizational chart in the world where the subordinates, again, in theory, can tell the boss what to do, or make demands on his time. The fertilizer flows downhill! So, if you are allowing your subordinates to determine how your time is to be spent, then you are exercising some self-imposed time by willingly upending that org chart. (This is not to say that lower-level managers and workers are without worth - later on we'll talk about how to manage your manager). You are letting yourself be managed, reversing the roles and eating up your self-imposed time.

More detail on this in a later article, but the key to eliminating subordinate-imposed time is to delegate. Let me point out that delegating and assigning are two different things. Assigning is when I give you a task, perhaps even tell you how and when to do it. Delegating is when I give you responsibility and authority for a certain aspect of your job and hold you accountable for getting it done. Certainly training and coaching is involved, but someone to whom responsibility is delegated does not wait to be told what to do, or how or when to do it. Someone who has tasks assigned, goes from one duty to the next, and is at a loss when the list of jobs runs out. Time for a break! (or to go ask the boss what to do).

At one time in my life I managed a retail store. When I left for the day, I entrusted the operation of the store to an "evening supervisor". Once I had fully trained this person and clearly communicated my expectations, I allowed him to manage his time as he saw fit, as long as the standards that I had set had been met. My immediate supervisor however, insisted that I provide my evening supervisor with a list of things to do every night. Not only that, but I had to let him inspect this list at any time to prove that I had created it, complete with check-marks indicating that my supervisor had completed the list. And I couldn't just hand out a generic list every night - no - it had to be a brand-new, fresh list every night. My boss-imposed time increased and forced me to burden my subordinate with some boss-imposed time as well. Nobody won.

But there is a way to minimize, or even eliminate, subordinate-imposed time...stay tuned.

Moving the Goal Posts

Moving the goal posts is a logical fallacy wherein one side "changes the rules" mid-discussion. This can take the form of one side demanding higher and higher standards of proof, or of changing definitions as their positions are debunked. An example of this involves two roommates, Cain & Abel. Cain maintains that he does more of the household tasks than Abel does, and that Abel should do more. Abel disagrees and requests that Cain put together a spreadsheet showing all the household chores, who does them and how much time it takes; if the spreadsheet shows that Cain spends more time doing household duties than Abel, then Abel will adjust. Two days later, Cain presents his spreadsheet to Abel. It clearly shows that Cain does 62% of all the housework. Abel points out that he works longer hours than Cain, 50 hours/week to Cain's 35, and that mowing the lawn is a more physically demanding task than washing the dishes, and cites this as a reason not to adjust. Abel has moved the goalposts, i.e. he has changed what they were measuring after they had agreed what would be measured. Another example is personal - I was participating in a forum of ex-members of a religious group. I was taking the position in a discussion that Christianity could not be demonstrated to be more "true" than any other religion. One of my fellow posters suggested that Christianity had stood the test of time - over 2000 years and counting - and that's what showed that God was behind it. I pointed out that Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism had all predated Christianity, and if we were going to use longevity as proof of truth, then Hinduism would be the winner. My fellow poster quickly dropped the longevity argument. She had changed the standard mid-discussion. I have run into this pretty regularly in my political discussions this election cycle.

I've encountered goal post moving fairly regularly during the election season. I've probably even done it a time or two myself! You might be in the middle of talking about Trump's immigration policies and point out that we actually do need to get better control over our borders, and that Trump is correct that as a sovereign nation we should not allow illegal immigration. The goalpost is: the premise that the United States need to control its borders. Any arguments should be restricted to whether that premise is correct or not. Someone else responds with "Yeah, but Trump's a bigot and he only wants to do this because he hates Mexicans, remember, he called them rapists. Do you see where the goal posts just moved? The argument isn't now about whether controlling the border is a good thing or a bad thing, it just became about whether Trump's policy is bad because he's a bigot. Okay, it's arguable whether Trump's a bigot, and that might be a legitimate point if we were talking about his fitness to lead, but we're not, we're talking about a specific policy. The goal post move now changed the standard for evaluating Trump's plan from "Is border control a good thing" to "Is border control advocated by a bigot a good thing".

A goal post move that pre-dated the election was the so-called "birther movement". Donald Trump and others speculated that Barack Obama might not have been born in the United States. The goal post was seeing a birth certificate proving that he was. When the birth certificate was produced, the goal post was moved to "we need to see he long form birth certificate". When that was produced many still didn't believe that it was genuine; those goal posts are turbocharged.

"Moving the Goal Posts" is just one logical fallacy that politicians and those who support them use in rationalizing their own positions.

Demonizing the Opposition

Rather than have an actual, substantive discussion about the relative qualifications of different governing philosophies, most people find it easier to characterize the "other side" as in some way evil. Sometimes they even use the actual word "evil", but more often than not some euphemism is applied. The other guys "hate America", or are racists, or are crooks. Name-calling is so much easier than taking the time and energy to understand the other side's position, to understand why they believe the way that they do, and to understand why they don't agree with you. Why do people seem to at times vote against what you think are there best interests? Why do people tolerate in their own preferred candidate things that they abhor in the other candidate? There's no easy answer to this; it takes work, it takes thinking, dare I say that it takes empathy to put yourself in another's shoes, in that person's head. 

And I'm not just talking about person-to-person attacks, when you characterize a politician as, for example, a hater-of-America, you are by extension painting anyone who agrees with or supports that politician with the same brush. Statements like that just kill civil discussion right off the bat. There are people that I get along with fairly well, who can't talk about "liberals" without unmistakable disgust and accusations that we are destroying America.

The current Presidential election has just made things worse. Previous modern elections have involved serious and fundamental differences in vision for the future of the country, and there has been no shortage of ad hominem attacks, but the salvos fired by the campaigns of the major party candidates resemble the comments on Facebook, and they are often literally just that, considering the Twitter war that one of the candidates continually wages.

The root of some of this incivility can be traced partially to the rise of certain political talk radio personalities in the nineties, for example, Rush Limbaugh. The constant drumbeat of attacks against Bill Clinton gave conservatives some source material for their anger and challenged liberals to come up with counterattacks. The rise of and widespread use of social media allowed everyone to be able to publicly voice an opinion and we saw "sources" multiply like mushrooms on a rainy day. Facilitating political discussion while at the same time separating real face-to-face discussion made it very easy for people to always be in "insult mode".

I doubt that we'll see civility reign any time soon. I almost typed in "a return to civility", but I'm not sure whether I am allowing false nostalgia to color my perceptions. Just remember, when you're discussing political positions, you're talking about real people, not cartoon demons.

It's Not Paranoia If...Okay, Yes It Is

In a discussion on Facebook this morning about Candidate Trump, an acquaintance suggested that Trump was better than Clinton, and disputing my assertion that Trump doesn't know what he was talking about, opined that Trump would "get up to speed pretty quickly".

No, Trump would not get up to speed at all, let alone pretty quickly, because he believes that he already knows all that he needs to know. He doesn't listen to his advisors now, why would he listen to anyone if he were elected? I imagine a "decider" on steroids. That's not a compliment.

Trump is paranoid, hyper-sensitive to slights and extremely defensive. When he is attacked he unleashes a flurry of tweets, few of them especially coherent, defending himself and attacking his attacker. He creates "facts" out of thin air to buttress his position and consistently accuses others of what he is on record of being guilty of.

His paranoia regarding his shrinking poll numbers shows just how far off the cracker his cheese his cheese has slipped. For months he reveled in all the free air time he received, playing the media for suckers as he called ego-stroking news conferences, he cited his good standing in the polls as if popularity somehow equaled competence.  Until his poll numbers started slipping and the media began calling him on his bullshit. Of course, if he was now behind, the polls must be rigged, the election itself would be rigged and the media is colluding with Clinton. How many remember that when it looked like the Republican leadership and Ted Cruz might have an outside chance of denying him the nomination he speculated that the Republican nominating process was rigged against him?

This man is unstable.

Lying Liars Who Lie

I really try to understand the attraction of Donald Trump, I really do, but sometimes I just have to scratch my head...or smash it against a wall, when contemplating why people say that they're voting for Trump. I understand why some people don't like Hillary Clinton. For some it's philosophical, they're conservative in their political viewpoint and don't want to see a perceived liberal in the White House, a President who would appoint "liberal judges". These people sincerely believe that liberals are destroying America and see Hillary Clinton as exemplifying the liberal politician. If that's as far as they went, and claimed that Trump was bad, but at least he's nominally a Republican, so they're going to vote anti-liberal I'd get it. But then they try to justify, to further rationalize their preference for Trump by pointing out that "Hillary lies", "Hillary is deceitful", "Hillary is corrupt" as if Trump somehow is not.

I'm not going to spend the time in this particular post fact-checking all the accusations against Hillary Clinton, or voicing my opinion on their significance, but, even stipulating that the basic accusations are true and that Hillary Clinton is a basically dishonest, dissembling, deceitful human being, why, oh why does anyone think that Donald J. Trump isn't?

Donald Trump lies so often that it is often difficult to keep up. His speeches are full of made-up "facts". He lies about things that can be easily checked, he lies about things that he is on record as saying, he lies when he says that he didn't tweet something that he tweeted just days before, he lies about why he doesn't release his tax returns, he lies about his net worth, he admits lying during business deals, he lies about his opponents and their families, and on and on it goes. And then, he accuses others of lying, while he lies about them.

You want to make a political case for Trump, go ahead, there are legitimate, if shaky, points to be made, but to claim the moral high ground versus Hillary Clinton? Don't make me laugh.

Words Mean Things

Political contests have always been as much about style as about substance. There's a small percentage who geek out over policy positions, but the majority make their decisions based on feelings, impressions and sound bites. The majority isn't influenced by facts, and like religious devotees, will not change their minds no matter what evidence is presented to them. This is something to be sad about, but it isn't likely to change any time soon.

Another thing that will likely not change in the near future, and is likewise a sad thing, is politicians telling us what we want to hear, shading the truth and outright lying. Politicians generally will not lead, that is, will not stake out a position that they hold dearly and idealistically, the consequences be damned. People like that sometimes run for office, but seldom get elected, and if elected seldom get re-elected. Rather, our politicians attempt to determine what position will garner the greatest number of votes and financial support (not necessarily in that order) and stake out that position. It's not unusual for politicians to tailor their speeches and policies depending on who they are talking to.

This is why I am not upset or at all surprised that Clinton has said things to Wall Street executives (or is alleged to have said) that differs from what she says on the campaign trail, or that her position on the TPP has changed. I'm not worked up that Trump's position on immigration has somewhat changed over the course of the election season, or his "plan" to defeat ISIS has bounced around. This is normal, run-of-the-mill stuff. The same with a candidate doing whatever it takes to win an election. Clinton called in a lot of chips, Trump used his own chips, neither one pulled any punches. I'm okay with that.

As a Clinton supporter, I'm not irked about Trump bringing up Clinton's deleted emails, or the appearance of impropriety with The Clinton Foundation, or his spin on her record as Secretary of State, including Benghazi. It's all fair game, these are weaknesses that Clinton has and he's right to try and bring attention to them. Honestly (or, as Trump would say "believe me") I'm of the opinion that much of the mud thrown at Clinton is fabricated, blown out of proportion, or assigned meaning and significance that it does not really have.

What I have a real problem with is that we have, running for President, the most unprepared person who has run for the office in my memory, and probably in my parents' memory as well. Some will, and do, argue that what we need in Washington is an outsider, someone not tainted by politics as usual. I'm not going to debate that point, but being an elected official is a job like anything else, and there has to be some minimal level of qualification for the position.

Of all of our Presidents, most had some level of government or military experience. Herbert Hoover was Secretary of Commerce, Chester Arthur and George HW Bush held appointive office below cabinet level; all other Presidents had experience either in Congress or as a governor, or were elected immediately after military service, like Eisenhower. Even among the military men, other than Ike, only Zachary Taylor had no political experience.

While Donald Trump's abrasive and demagogic style annoys me, it is his utter lack of understanding of how government works, including what a President actually does that bothers me. He shows no knowledge or even curiosity about international affairs, economics or even about the way people in this country live. Unlike the usual politician, who "clarifies" a position when it causes consternation among the electorate, or apologizes and moves on, at least acknowledging a realization that the wrong thing was said, Trump often denies that he said something that he is on the record as saying. He makes baseless accusations without even a shred of evidence (remember Ted Cruz's father being accused of colluding with Lee Harvey Oswald?), and when it is pointed out that there is no evidence, or his allegation has been debunked, he just repeats it louder and more often. It's not that I disagree with him, it's just that he makes no sense. 

His attacks and insults on multiple segments of our society, his vicious attacks on his kinda, sorta allies in his own party, the gratuitous insults to anyone who disagrees with or opposes him, should worry all of us. And then there's his promise, if elected, to instruct the Attorney General to "look into [Clinton's] situation"; bellowing that she should be in jail. He is dangerous in his ignorance.

Trump appeals to much that is deplorable in our country. He has whipped up paranoia among a segment of our people with his cries to jail his opponent, to ban immigrants based on religion, and his allegations that the system is rigged and that the media is in Clinton's pocket. A crowd cheered at a woman's suggestion at a Mike Pence appearance that if Clinton is elected, we stage a "revolution" to prevent her taking office. The bigots and the ignorant among us have been given a safe place to express their bigotry. I'm not saying, like Clinton did, that half his supporters are a "basket of deplorables", in fact, the Trump supporters that I know, friends and family are pretty upstanding, good and decent people. But when I see video of Trump rallies where people are  shouting out racial slurs, screaming to lynch the opposition, including the opposing candidate, using violence against protesters; when white nationalist and racist groups support him, I can't argue that he is appealing to that which is deplorable and shameful in this nation.

Fortunately, it looks less and less likely that Trump will win this election in four weeks. It might be easy to shrug it off and, if a Republican, look to 2020, but the genie is out of the bottle.