Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Sacha,
MMP means no it doesn’t.
He does have a point, though, that the political left as a whole can't just be formed from urban liberals. There's not enough of them, and the right also appeals to many of them. Since National's moved in on the cities, the Left (via Labour or something else) needs to broaden rural appeal.
I'm surprised that no anti-Big-Finance movement has made any serious inroads there for a long time. They have in the past, both via Social Credit, and, ironically, one of the founding parties of National, the Liberal Party. Farmers and small town folks are constantly concerned about the levels of debt required to partake of country capitalism, and they always feel prey to the movements of the big corporations that take control of their product. The only remaining wholly NZ owned bank apart from Kiwibank primarily targets the rural population.
It's not like socialist ideas get no traction in rural communities. They just do it differently to city dwellers. I think rural people have quite a different idea of the good life.
Sure, National kind of have rural welfare sewn up. But that's for lack of strong competition to at least some extent.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Tom Semmens,
The lesson the left must learn from John Key and his popularity is that its primary political vehicle (the Labour party) cannot simply be a party of left leaning urban liberals.
What should they be? This is an honest question. What demographic do you think is untapped, and yet tappable, by Labour? I agree that urban liberals are not enough, since National moved in on them, and there are plenty of other choices for urban liberals. It seems to me that in some ways the fate of Labour is inevitable, unless they fundamentally change their nature.
Since the battle of ideas over social liberalism is pretty much over, and bipartisan consensus reigns, the battle over economic equality is the main distinction they could claim. But there are many left-wing ideas there, so the Left is somewhat doomed to be fragmented unless one single alternative idea can gain dominance. Currently the Washington consensus is just too strong and reaches deep into Labour and the population at large.
But what is that idea?
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Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to Kumara Republic,
I'm not surprised. His explanation makes sense - he shares the ideals but differs in the practical implementation. Differs so much that it's quite important to him, but doesn't show up on the graph. I think that's quite common on the Left - there are, after all, many kinds of interventionism, but only one kind of Laissez Faire.
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Hard News: Show some decency, in reply to Chris Waugh,
The lack of chess players at the higher levels of politics is generally quite worrying.
Well Russia would certainly be improved if Kasparov were elected, instead of being (quite rightly) too scared to return.
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Hard News: Show some decency, in reply to Trevor Nicholls,
No, it’s not, but he’s been talking about nothing else all day.
Which is actually really quite poor strategy. He could be talking about National's policy, if there was anything to talk openly about. This is pretty much allowing Labour to set the agenda.
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You want to know if he’s thick? He’s this thick
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Over these three months Christchurch appeared on national screens on average for 33 minutes a week. Aucklanders saw themselves for 659 minutes – twenty times Christchurch’s lot. And this was after we had had an earthquake.
That's incredible. I really had no idea it was that bad. Admittedly that is because I watch very little TV, and such failures are part of the reason for that, but my impression (obviously completely wrong) was that the air time was reasonably fair. I wonder if that is because almost all the Christchurch pieces are so emotionally charged that I put more mental weight on how long they were, because they burned a deeper trace in my memory. I'd watch some Auckland things but I couldn't really remember anything about them.
Which comes to my tentative explanation. People shy away from the emotionally painful. And the networks cater for that, providing them with safe fluff to veg out on. But it's really astonishing that the Christchurch audience itself should get so little air.
I wish I could say Aucklanders would like something better and they're being failed by the networks, but I don't think it is so. My sad observation is quite counter to this:
Perhaps there are Aucklanders who don't care about Chch, but I never met them.
It seems to me that a fairly big chunk of people I know will say to me (but probably not to someone from Christchurch), that they're over hearing about it. And other things that are "harsh but true", which I won't sully this occasion with. So this wake up call of Gerard's is quite a necessary thing. The quakes are still the most dominant events by far in NZ over the last 5 years, and should be treated as such.
I think what's happened is that people outside of the region have cauterized their feelings on it. It's something that's "in hand", something that's not good, but is being given an appropriate level of support and care. But it seems to me every single time I hear from a Christchurch resident that this is not so.
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Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to Rich Lock,
The trouble with all of those examples you’ve given is that they are effectively one-man bands
Yes, I'm treating both individuals and parties as points. The point would be some kind of point estimate based on the individuals in it. The mean location is a good choice as it marks the center of gravity. But it's not the only choice, of course. You could weight it more highly toward the most powerful individuals. Treating them as points is how most analysis does it, including the Political Compass, but you're right, it could be improved upon. The point takes no account of the uncertainty. Even an individual's beliefs are really more of a cluster or cloud than a point. A party should really have a bigger cluster, which would explain better why the bigger parties reach more people, despite there being other individuals as parties nearer to their own location. Peter Dunne is not this isolated spot hoovering up all the voters between Labour and National. He's in there, but he's surrounded by Labour and National spots which cuts down how many spots are closer to him than to those parties.
Of course, using a 3-D plot, you’d be able to see the individuals in a group as clusters. You could even add in a spectral analysis over time – red shift/blue shift :)
3D plots look cool, but they are actually not so good at conveying a lot of the information we want to see. They're good for illustrating an idea, but when you want to make comparisons, it's usually better to find a one or 2 dimensional plot. We're really not good at judging length, area or volume in 3D, and the viewing angle is quite important. Fortunately there are a lot of good plots that can show higher dimensional (multivariate) information in 2D.
Rather like polling companies, the spin, weight and emphasis you give to various facotrs is going to skew your output, and it isn’t clear how they compensate for that.
That's pretty much the main thing I'm warning about. It's not at all clear how they aggregate the questions along the dimensions they pick, or how much change could occur by using different questions, or a different number of questions, or even just deciding which direction the question contributes to.
For instance, Randroids would consider supporting the free market to be a form of social liberality (you are free to spend how you like, making moral choices with your money), and thus object to being placed at the authoritarian end of the graph. They could consider themselves to be in that untapped purple quadrant at the bottom right. I'm not guessing this - this is exactly what ACToids used to say in the 90s when I first saw these kinds of graphs.
It's a comparatively easy fix to remove the bias from aggregating by not aggregating. There's still always going to be the bias about which questions to include, but so long as people can home in on the differences in the cluster of questions they're interested in, it's a huge improvement. That would also mean that you could remove the requirement that every question gets answered, so the number of questions could be increased. Then you'd start getting a much better idea of the candidates area of decisive difference, and indeed their general beef and competence.
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I'm personally resigned to the fact that even if National were toppled from power in a few weeks that this will still be a land of pointless drug prohibition, and crippling student debt, and that won't change any time soon under Labour. I'm not happy about it. But I'd be a whole lot more happy about it than National getting in again.
ETA: Damn, this post crossed the page boundary. It's in reference to the last one on the previous page.
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Hard News: Show some decency, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Anyone who votes for these people after the disclosures of the last month is saying they are happy to be represented by corrupt selfish politicians.
Well, they could also be saying that they're resigned to it. That's not the same as happy. They might see it as not at the top of their list of priorities. I doubt that many are actively proud of it.
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