User talk:Kizzle/secret

I'm discussing this here now, because, well it's the discussion page for it.

I'm a big fan of the theory that vote suppression made a bigger difference in ohio than vote machine fraud. and i think all aspects should be in there. take them through the entire process and show how every single attack point was hit, "bumper to bumper", and make it clear that this quite outside the norm and quite outside the tolerable. I just know people'll make the argument "but that happens all the time." Really? Show me. Uhhh... It's common sense. Oh, it's your intuition, huh? if your intuition is so reliable why don't you go use it to gamble all of your money away. Meanwhile, I'll stick to the facts. It didn't happen last election, or the election before that, or... (in ohio). now let's look at the other states...

hmm... myth-breaking? we'd have to break some myths somehow, otherwise people will shut everything and cling to their "answers". we have to take the answers away, before we can get them to ask questions.

but ya, add it up, as it goes along, possibly. a fraud accumulator. Moss v. bush should be in there, and the congressional challenge. show the dems being professional and the repubs being assanine. no commentary neccessary.

public hearings, you could make a story section in real chronological order.

Make it obvious that the dems are looking at this close-up, while the repubs are standing far away, completely oblivious, denigrating the shit out of something they haven't the slightest clue about - mob-psychology largely led by tom delay. Kevin Baastalk 01:21, 2005 Feb 17 (UTC)

and do you have anyone else working on this? Kevin Baastalk


 * They need to be able to simulate it.  The brain works by simulation. (dreaming) if they can construct a working probability model in their head (a book for actuaries: "modeling and simulation"), they can "concieve" it.  hence narrative and people.  (humor works because it's a "social corrective")  i thought of this when i was thinking of the vote suppression, it might have to start pre-election.  i remember reading a lot of news reports in the new york times that pissed me off, but i never put it all together until after the election, when the shit hit the fan.  they were all about the ohio secretary of state, (here's something that would be funny: show all the lawsuits against blackwell!  -oh, the chicago tribune did a write up on him, might be helpfull.  one thing that caught me in the write up is that he opposed busing as a means to end segregation in the 60's (i guess he doesn't like white people)).  major point, if it helps any: to think is to simulate in one's head. (this is a kinda postmodernesque (baudrillaud?: simalcra and simulation) i thought of alan turing "we will have artificial intelligence, not because of advances in technology, but because what we mean by "intelligence" will change.  I also thought of how an analog, or even a continuous surface computer (a greater-than-zero-dimensional line of parrallel analog signals) would "compute", since "logic" and "analysis" are only meaningfull in discrete space.  And i realized that, therefore, i had to think of computation differently, and I realized that it was simulation.  and the brain works that way too.  so we need to find the right input codes to build a ship in a bottle, so to speak.  Sounds difficult, but we know exactly how the bottle works.  just think of how we function in our natural environment, and desing the film according to that. narrative (coherent chronology) and people are examples of this.   I don't know if this helps any, perhaps it's too abstract, but fwiw, i wanted to throw that way of looking at it at you. Kevin Baastalk 02:25, 2005 Feb 17 (UTC)

I added "a guide to voting in ohio, america", first draft. that's the method of organization and presentation that made it best come out of my head. (with a little satirical embelishment) Kevin Baastalk 04:17, 2005 Feb 17 (UTC)

Nice KB! Preferably, I'd like to start with a little background on voter suppression (very little bit on 2000 election, just enough to jog people's memory), then introduce the material a bit.... then I want to jump into what you've put down as a segway, that would be awesome to have an Ohio voter's guide, kinda like in F9/11 the transistion to the animated short as a segway....  thanks for contributing :)...  I'm going to spend the next few days on electronic voting machines, as that's what I'm passionate about... Try to develop the segway if you have time.  You don't have to follow the format that I'm using in terms of bullet points as questions, then answering them, but I'm going to bullet-point your short one-liners, so that later on when we add literal text to include, it looks easier on the eye to breakdown the information in writing the commentary.  Keep in mind KB, the bar we set for quality of sources is going to be higher then it would on Wikipedia, because every single fact and line will be mulled over by people, so we want to make it as rock-solid as possible. Try to add just a citation link to every bullet-point if you know one off the top of your head without the text so its just like (1), so that later on the other person can go research it and flesh out the section.

Thanks for helping out, this is going to be fun :) --kizzle 04:54, Feb 17, 2005 (UTC)


 * Working on the precinct squeeze section gave me an idea for presentation. Do it like for a schoolm just educating on what it's like to be in government, how precinct adjustment works, etc.  very pedagogical, no hint of making accusations, then jsut drly and matter of factly state something like "In 2004 Kenneth blackwell decreased the number of precincts where the population increased."...  (i was thinking "for example... oh, bad example...", but i think the matter of fact would work better, less derogatory; forced, more they realize it for themself.  the less we spoon-feed, the less pushing an agenda-we look.  we're just presenting facts.  let's just present them, no flavor.) Kevin Baastalk 05:43, 2005 Feb 17 (UTC)


 * KB, start adding these facts to the voter suppression issues, and use bullet-points to each indvidual fact or quoted passage so that we can use them as building blocks and reassemble them later into the commentary. Like I said, if you just put a bullet-point to a question and a link to a source, I'm more than willing to flesh out the details of the issue, I'm in one of those moods I get into once every while where I'm trying to soak in as much information as possible, so I'd love to research it myself, just show me where :) --kizzle 19:39, Feb 17, 2005 (UTC)

What's the objective?
The decisions about structure, focus, style, etc. would turn on the objective being sought. A dramatically compelling narrative might omit something that was mportant but doesn't play well on screen. An attempt at NPOV or some semblance thereof would give at least some attention to counterarguments, e.g. the explanations by Mitofsky and others about the exit poll discrepancies (young polltakers were more likely to elicit cooperation from young (pro-Kerry) voters, so the machine totals were accurate, it was the exit polls that were wrong, rather than vice versa). Or is the goal to produce an advocacy piece that seeks to persuade as many people as possible that the election was stolen? JamesMLane 12:31, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * This is somewhat in-between an advocacy piece and a NPOV documentary, here's what I want. This is an advocacy piece because I am presenting an argument in a personal sense, I do not want to use traditional style documentary of third-person storytelling, the *only* thing I want to take from F9/11 is his narrative style in that you know you're listening to a personality rather than some random voice.  I DO NOT however want to twist facts to make my side look good, and if some article effectively refutes something in here, then I want it in (provided that we in addition search for rebuttals on the rebuttal article).  Seriously, the main theme of this is, if you had 2 hours to tell someone what went wrong with the election and you could not lie, misrepresent facts, use dubious sources, and had to include counterarguments?  While I don't think I'm explaining it very well, I'm trying to write this as a philosophy paper, in that I want the premises to be as strong as possible, include counter-arguments, and simply present what I think is the truth, for better or worse.  But this piece will not conclude that the election was stolen, only that there were significant intentional detrimental actions by certain groups and organizations towards the integrity of the vote.  That's why i need your help JML, I want you to keep us honest by showing me the weak points of the argument (or any points that need to be mentioned as well). , and if Rex were back I'd almost want him to tell me where he would think I'm wrong.  Almost. ;) --kizzle 19:34, Feb 17, 2005 (UTC)

IMHO
IMHO, the screenplay construction space should be broken up into sub-articles, per section (one for voting machines, one for exit polls, one for voter suppression, one for blackwell, one for intro, etc.) and perhaps a cat made, as well, for nav? and/or a template box in the upper right for nav?


 * you mind if i break it up into sub-articles, and turn the main into an outline? Kevin Baastalk 20:13, 2005 Feb 17 (UTC)


 * I personally don't mind, as this is going to get very long. Don't bother filling in info on the summary, just make links to the pages so we can go directly to the point, and you can ditch the trial motif for now, just make voting machines, voter suppression, exit polls, ohio controversy.  Keep the intro maybe in the outline. --kizzle 20:29, Feb 17, 2005 (UTC)

Oh, and a section for moss v. bush, and for conyers and congress, the hearings, and the electoral contest.

Structure - i'm not sure i like the criminal case idea - it's too innuenda/agenda-ish. i think if it just presents things as they are, matter-of-factly, so long as the audience gets the message that this is comprehensive, not just a few small "glitches" blown out of proportion (which i'm sure critics will be apt to think), it would work. We can't look like we're distorting anything, that's just ammunition for the critics. Perhaps we might want to think: What would John Conyers do? Kevin Baastalk 18:41, 2005 Feb 17 (UTC)


 * Yeah I'm not really feeling the trial theme anymore, I just wanted some sort of external structure to it other than simply moving from exit polls to voting machines to voter suppression, etc... more like a logical progression that the audience could anticipate. That can be decided later, for now, we can flesh out the details of each section.--kizzle 19:35, Feb 17, 2005 (UTC)

An idea: if possible, interview first-person; witnesses, arnebeck etc.
and ask them questions from both sides, even extreme ones, challenging them (but not too extreme; don't make it look like a forced ridicule) things like "That didn't really happen, did it?" and "Now tell me the truth, those are actors in the film, aren't they?" Or a simple statment "I don't believe you." or "X says you're a 'loony'. Are you a 'loony'?" Give the critics a chance to test their hypothesises, right from the source. Kevin Baastalk 19:48, 2005 Feb 17 (UTC)


 * There will be interviews, hopefully many, but that comes after the screenplay. Basically, we have to form an argument that is complete in itself, then if something happens with this we can use interviews to strengthen it.  In writing this rough-draft, however, lets make it self-sufficient on its own.  I would almost like to use placeholders for interviews, but determining what interviews would be available to us in the future is impossible to predict. --kizzle 20:00, Feb 17, 2005 (UTC)

Collaboration on information, assuming different knowledge areas
If it works, where you "don't know what [i'm] talking about", you could insert a question as an "issue", that the audience would ask, to be addressed in the film. that is, you thereby make a perfect test audience for those areas. Kevin Baastalk

And I'll work on filling them in, but if someone preempts me, I won't complain. Kevin Baastalk 20:20, 2005 Feb 17 (UTC)

I'm just going to start adding questions to my section of voter suppression, like I said I would actually like to pre-empt you on filling them in, just attach a link next to any of the questions I post and I'll dig through and answer them myself, I just don't always know where to look. --kizzle 20:25, Feb 17, 2005 (UTC)

bizarre
while researching, I found this on Sequoia Voting Machines offical website on the about section:

Nobody pretends that democracy is perfect or at all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

- Winston Churchill, November 11, 1947

Why the f*** would a voting company put that in? --kizzle 22:24, Feb 17, 2005 (UTC)

analysis: an arrogant person would say that - it basically implies that the masses are dumb and often do the wrong thing, but this is better than letting one ignoramis rule the others. ofcourse, the speaker believes, to a significant extent, that they can objectively say that the decisions of the democatrically elected leaders are lacking in quality - and the speaker would have to believe he knows better than said leaders to believe that he can say this objectively. The question is, then, is there a third type of government? rule by "smart people" (like the speaker)? Kevin Baastalk 22:38, 2005 Feb 17 (UTC)

don't get me wrong, though. i love winston churchill. (who, btw, was a temporary dictator, pretty much) i just would never use that quote. Kevin Baastalk

All I'm saying is, what the hell is a voting company doing putting in about how democracy isn't perfect. It's right after it describing its corporate parent.... just kinda out of place. --kizzle 23:30, Feb 17, 2005 (UTC)