Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Terror panics and the war imperative, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Negatives like our passport, or positives like trade treaties, access to oil etc shouldn't have any part of it.
Well, they're like the wipings on the toilet paper, compared to the full dump. They're still little smears of shit I'd rather not have on me, but yes, totally, the main reason not to go turning up in some fucking unlimited military adventure in Arabia is because it is a rotten, evil, stupid thing to do. We did well not to be much involved in the first place, although we could have gone further officially and actually protested the stupidity of King Bush the Second. To join in now is something that we absolutely must hang on our government. Without their willingness, it would not be happening. It should not be happening.
If we are to be involved as peacekeepers then it absolutely must be via the only legitimate channel, a UN sanctioned and controlled force.
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Hard News: Doing over the witness, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
I could construct this same 2x2 box for “aliens are invading earth!”, and come up with the same answers, so by that logic we should be trying to prevent aliens invading the earth.
Yes, it was an argument structurally similar to Pascal’s Wager, which no scientist would ever accept as a good reason to become a Christian.
However, it’s not such a poor argument if there is quantification the chances and costs, and outcomes.
The cost of investigating for police corruption is not zero. The outcome if the police are corrupt and get away with it is not infinite harm. The outcome if they are corrupt and get caught is not complete negation of the harm.
But, the cost of investigating corruption is very low and the outcome of getting away with corruption is quite high harm, which is mostly negated by being caught, and if we have some good reasons to believe corruption might have happened, then we should investigate.
It seems to me that in absence of the last bit, the cost/harm part is usually in balance – we don’t investigate everything the police do as a matter of course just because there is a chance of corruption. And prosecutions are extensively tested in front of courts before actual sentences are passed.
So really, it does actually come down to reasons to believe that corruption has occurred. I think that there most likely was political pressure to rumble Hager, and that this reeks to high heaven. But I accept that I’m somewhat biased towards thinking that this kind of political pressure does happen in this country, with this government, in no small part because of Hager’s revelations.
I don’t think that legal recourses are going to do much here (although I hope I’m wrong). This one is really down to public perception about whether what is happening here is something we want in this country. That needs to be hammered. If this event hurts the Key government, or the media, they will be discouraged, or will cry foul respectively. The scary part here is that both our government and our media are practically unhurtable from having their shocking inadequacies exposed. There’s such a high level of cognitive dissonance in this country that evidence of high level corruption and crackdowns on whistleblowers seems to actually strengthen both the government and the media.
Sleepy hobbits, wake the fuck up, cause Sharkey is here.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Trevor Nicholls,
I wouldn’t call giving a majority party a majority of seats “gaming the system”.
I would if the majority given is far in excess of the majority polled.
ETA: And that’s also on the proviso that you even accept a party getting much less that 50% of the cast votes a “majority” just because it’s bigger than the nearest competitor. In 1981 Social Credit got over 20% of the votes cast, and won 2 (out of 92) seats. I think that may have been the high water mark of how fucked FPP was, that Labour got more seats, and Social Credit a further 20%, between them they had 60% of all votes cast, and still Muldoon got another 3 years.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Trevor Nicholls,
I guess that is the solitary advantage of FPP, it’s hard to see how that could be gamed.
It's super easy to game. You only have to beat the opposition by a little bit everywhere and you can have a massive overwhelming landslide. Which is not theory, it's what happened, over and over.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
TBH, I think the idea that any large party could split into an electorate party and a list party, and come through an election successfully preposterous. I
Obviously they would do it in a much more subtle way to start with, until people got used to the idea, as they have with ACT and UF, both parties whose leaders have been formers National MPs. They do need to pretend to be different. Probably more extreme in some way (Dunne is that lovely paradox, the extreme centrist). Best is for them not to be an actual party of more than one person apiece.
In a way, it's actually what electorate representatives are meant to do. This business of them being party hacks was not how elected representatives were meant to act, it's just how they did act. The fact that they did act that way is what necessitated MMP in the first place - it basically acknowledged that parties were the shadow that had formed over representative government, and if we had to have the buggers then they could at least be closer in proportional size to their actual support.
Personally, I think they're a fucked idea all around, but that's how power works - it concentrates into huddles of privilege.
I'm not advocating that the parties do this more, btw. I'm just surprised that only National seems to have figured it out. I fully agree that it would be bad for democracy. It already is bad for democracy, the way it's already being done.
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As Wolverine said to Captain America: "Terrorists! That's what the big army calls the little army".
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Speaker: Why we should not dismiss…, in reply to HORansome,
Meanwhile, the Police raid Nicky Hager’s home…
Whoa, WTF?
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Although I temper that by saying that it's far less broken than what we had before.
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I see quite a strong parallel between calling "conspiracy theory" on a debate and calling "Godwin" on it. Neither is a strong argument of any kind but they put a very powerful spin on the ridiculousness of what they're calling out. Sometimes it's warranted, but one has to remember that being unable to actually argue conspiracy theories lends aid to genuine conspiracies, and being unable to even mention Nazi parallels lends aid to actual fascists. Both of which are actually real things.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to bmk,
if the major parties were to majorly game it in the manner Ben proposes then MMP ends up fundamentally broken.
Yes, and I suggest that because a major party is already gaming it, it is already quite broken.
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