Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Rich Lock,
I don't think it could be expected to happen the same way, since the entire economic structure is different. But it's the most severe and prolonged downturn since then, and it has had no general solution of any kind, other than to do more of the same, but harder. I don't think unemployment stats can be easily compared when we're talking about industrial economies mostly staffed by men then, and now pretty much everyone has to work. You can easily have underemployment that is every bit as severe as unemployment, particularly when the wages are awful, and debt levels are high.
Our solution to prevent banks failing is just for them to extend unlimited credit. That's not better. That's not the system rectifying itself. Just because banks don't fail doesn't mean the system isn't in a depression.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Kumara Republic,
or even a 2nd Great Depression
We've already had that, and it hasn't worked.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to linger,
I’d like that to be right – but, have you got a mechanism for that to come about? ’Cos questions of fact don’t exactly seem a strong priority for most of our politicians, nor for most of our media, as they’re currently configured.
I don't have any particular mechanism to hasten it, but I think it's slowly happening anyway. I think politicians and the media have both been loose with facts forever. In the case of the media, the natural mechanism is just that people are turning away from it when it comes to getting information, because the information they get is low quality. And that in itself means politicians can't get away with anywhere near as much as they did before. Yes, it's easier for the right than the left to bullshit, but that's nothing new - everything is easier for them, almost by definition.
I'm not trying to say it's all good, just that I don't think everything's going to hell in a handbasket. We tend to talk like it is around election time, but that's a function of how tapped out the system is, that people get all wild, but only every three years. Everyone who cares goes hard for their point of view, and then the decision comes down and pretty much everything is business as usual with a left or right wing flavour. Decisions that actually affect us tend not to be actually acted on for years, and then they stay like that for years, and of the things we actually wanted we can expect a very small fraction of them to happen, and they'll be accompanied by a bunch of things we didn't want to happen. It's slow as fuck, built that way. A naturally conservative system.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Keir Leslie,
If you want to increase turnout, make sure all your friends and workmates are enrolled and vote — you can vote early, which makes it easier to chase people up. It’s the most effective way of increasing voter participation: direct contact from someone they know.
It’s not as effective as making it compulsory. That’s like saying that the best way to stop littering is getting bitter on people who litter near you, rather than making an actual law against it. Yes, if you really want to stop littering, you should get bitter, sure. But there should also be a law to give your bitterness any teeth at all.
ETA: Put it another way. Anyone who says that you should vote because you just should, and wants to make a song and dance about it will simply get told to fuck right off because the right not to is protected by our laws, every bit as strongly as the right to drink some alcohol, even though both of them might be a little bit bad for you (or even a lot bad for you in the case of alcohol). If you really strongly believe everyone should vote, then believing it should be compulsory is a no-brainer.
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I think that our democratic system hasn't stopped working. It's just working to the natural limit of its current ability, and we have come to expect a lot more. It's hit some kind of equilibrium, and so we can't expect continual progress out of it.
It's an old idea, more suited to the organization of smaller groups of people than a whole nation. To move forward, our democracy has to modernize. The idea of electing a bunch of people every few years hails from a time when getting people to partake is an expensive thing, and also from a time when it wasn't that long before that they weren't democratic at all, and just expected to have their decisions made for them. We have a system that is just a step along the evolution of modern decision making from a councils of advisors to a monarch. In fact, it's still technically that, even in NZ. We could do so much better, so easily.
I think that we will actually do it anyway, even if the old system doesn't want that. It will just get superceded, like our monarch, and our own Upper House. It won't be violent, and it also won't be fast. It will be a gradual devolution of power towards polling the public on questions of morality and conscience, and towards experts on questions of fact.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Chris Waugh,
If you have to resort to forcing people to vote, you’ve lost the argument.
I don't think so. We can at least remove the rational voter paradox, which probably quite strongly disproportionately afflicts the least privileged classes. I think compulsory voting is a good idea, by which I mean it's a small fine (maybe $50) for not voting, and by voting I mean turning up at a polling station, getting the form, going behind the screen where the pen is, and then putting the form in the box. If you're still super lazy you might choose to not mark it, but we've removed most of that excuse not to vote. People with a genuine reason to not vote can even get a box on the form to do that, or they can write whatever they like on the form, or nothing.
In other words, I think abstaining from the political system is a perfectly valid choice, and they can do so by the simple expedient of ticking a box saying so. Anyone who would vote, but is too lazy or apathetic to go to the polls is given a strong incentive to reconsider. And advance voting should be easy, for anyone whose excuse is that they're too busy on the day. Which it is already.
You don’t get people engaged by threatening them with a big stick, that just creates resentment and entrenches a different ruling class.
Except that we threaten with a big stick on so many other things that are civic duties. This one IS quite important, for the system to actually work.
Making it a public holiday is also quite a good idea.
On Tom's other ideas, I can take them or leave them, and that seems likely to be not just me, which goes to explaining why it's not what Labour does put as their policy. He says:
My personal view is what the public are looking for – and what needs to occur as a precursor to real economic reform – is a political party with the vision to promise a real program of democratic and civic renewal
and yet there are many parties like this, and they don't get massive support. That's not "what the public are looking for". It's what Tom is looking for. I'd like it too, but we're both quite left wing. I think it's a wrong analysis because it still fundamentally changes nothing. It's expecting our current political system to deliver this, when it hasn't done so for my whole life.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Tom Semmens,
What should they be?
...
But what is that idea?<tumbleweeds blow by>
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Myles Thomas,
I wonder who is funding the QC?
Maybe the QC is in the dump, and this is gratis.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Dismal Soyanz,
I hope you are right.
Well, I still think it’s unlikely. But when you consider how many apathetic people will actually go all the way to a shop and then spend money just to get an extremely unlikely shot at something, I’d think that even a one in ten chance would be more than reason enough to say that “if you actually care who wins, then why not have a punt?”. iPredict has it 24%. That’s roughly as likely as getting heads twice in a row on a fair coin. I think I’d take that shot on a chance to change the government.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Dismal Soyanz,
Despite the flaws in the opinion polls, the fact that National support has not flagged makes me agree with Russell that National will be in the driving seat of the next government
It's likely, but it's far from certain. Even a one in ten chance of something else is pretty big shot, considering that the jackpot is control of the entire government. It seems closer than that to me at the moment. I'd say it's more like there's a 66% chance it will be National + Peters. Polls, schmolls - the real wild card is Peters himself, about whose thinking we have no current data at all. Which means that this election will not be over on election day if there are still substantial charges appearing. If National continues to get discredited hard after the election, he has every right to refuse to go with them. He could support a minority Labour government, as he has done before. It could be his Last Hurrah, his final cast to actually make good on his endless claim that he exists to keep the government honest. He's the kind of guy who could do that.
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