Peru: Between round one and round two

This looks like a mess.

Peruvian police raids property of former electoral chief amid irregularities in elections

So ... Peru has a two-tiered system of electing a President. In the first round, there is a free-for-all, with dozens of candidates. If no one gets 50% + 1, the two top vote getters from that round run against each other in the second. Much like California's Governor's race.

The first round took place on April 12th. Various snafus delayed some of the voting until the next day and snafus in the counting since then have been legion. It is clear as I wrote this that the largest vote total was the one that went to the daughter of a former President, that is to Alberto Fujimori's girl, Keiko Fujimori.

It is not at all clear who will be running against her. But the cliffhanger or "who came in second" isn't what is generating the headlines in Peru right now. Nor are they generated by the complicated nature of the Fujimori family's political legacy in Peru. No, the headlines go to the arrest of José Samamé Blas, the electoral management director, on the charge of dereliction of duty, and analogous charges.

The arrest took place after Blas has already submitted his resignation, accepting his responsibilities for the said snafus.

I began with an understatement. This doesn't just look like a mess. It IS a mess on an epic sale.

Comments

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable a...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog