Posts by Moz
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to Russell Brown,
it just officially became a hung Parliament.
Oh I wish.
I'd settle for even just some of them. Pour encourager les autres, as they say.
Still, a good result for Labour, sad in a way to see Scotland swing back to a more balanced pattern, but jeez, can they get with the electoral systems sooner rather than later please? Something vaguely proportional would be nice.
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Crooked Timber have interesting summary, including a comment or two on whether it would be survivable for Labour to actually govern after this election. Viz, whatever they did they'd be accused of sabotaging Brexit. Best result is probably what Corbyn seems to be trying to achieve - shore up support in safe seats. And with the help of Teresa May, they're both trying to leave the Cons in government but with a slim majority and possibly dependent on the LibDems for support (or, like National having the option of asking for supply from The Greens... she could turn to the SNP :)
http://crookedtimber.org/2017/06/07/open-thread-on-the-uk-election
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to BenWilson,
There's also a bunch of reports of a 2015 article saying "if we get this level of house price inflation we'll be in a bubble" but prices have gone up faster than forecast.
I'm sitting on a house that I own barely 20% of and hoping prices don't drop.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to BenWilson,
if the average "house" in the UK is around $400,000 NZD and in NZ it's $500,000 that's a pretty straightforward measure of NZ prices being inflated beyond UK values.
And in the UK they think they're in a housing bubble, despite higher incomes and lower house prices. Hmm.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Older white people who vote are now more powerful as there are more of them statistically.
Ben listed excuses, including " No party represents me "
I've just spent two days with my mother and her sister, both white women in their 70's, and they put themselves in that box. Explicitly they don't like National but "have you seen the others?". Yes, yes I have. How anyone can look at the spectrum from ACT/David Seymour to Maori/Marama Fox to Greens/Metiria Turei and say "none would be better than Bill English"... I am lost for words.
Especially when I have just spent two days hearing about grandchildren and babies and who is having the babies and has the grandchildren and aren't babies wonderful and isn't it sad that X's marriage broke up before they had babies and your second cousin and her wife had a baby and .... endlessly for two days. But then they will do nothing to make sure the babies can survive to adulthood. NOTHING. Oh, but they're of flying to Europe again to see the grandchildren. They have grandchildren in England, isn't it wonderful.
ARRRGH!
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Access: What Your Child Needs To Know…, in reply to Sacha,
there are some areas I'm not going into, no. Sorry, inquisitive child at the mall.
"Be nice to me or I will answer your child's questions. In full".
Thanks for the reminder that nzonscreen is accessible from Oz.
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Access: What Your Child Needs To Know…, in reply to TracyMac,
"Yes, I am a lady, and sometimes ladies do have very very short hair.
That reminds me of one of my favourite interactions-with-child:
* you're wearing a dress
* you're a boy
* boys don't wear dresses
(repeat points 1 to 3 several times)Eventually the child wandered away, to the relief of both of us.
Some ladies don't have any hair at all!"
Alopecia is weird. In the particular context I met someone with it I was invited to stroke them and yeah, weird. It's not the bald head, it's the smooth skin. I hadn't really realised before then just how subconsciously normal the fine hairs on people's arms are. Take them away and "wut?" I suspect you'd get the same effect from a full body waxing, but I don't think I know anyone who does that.
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Russell Brown,
New Zealand's tourism boom has propelled the industry past dairy as the top export earner
So, is that better or worse for global warming and the NZ environment? And is tourist excrement in our picnic areas better or worse than cow excrement in our rivers?
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Speaker: Britain: the crisis isn't…, in reply to Alex Coleman,
There was no rule saying centrists couldn't sign up members
I suspect that the existing MPs are mostly committed to the same system as we have in Australia. They want a small group of local party members who all have close social ties to the MP, and rules to make it hard to join the party and influence anything. That way the MP can get on with the business of governing and representing his local party members. When there's only 30 of them they can all get a fair bit of personal attention. In Oz both Liberal and Labour do this, and if you look at the numbers reported in the branch stacking scandals they are indeed scandalous - sometimes fewer than 50 new members are required to roll an MP at pre-selection.
Momentum broke that model quite savagely.
The Greens don't do this, FWIW, which is one reason I like their model. They tend to fall for the opposite trap, anyone who turns up to meetings regularly becomes "known" and will often get to speak and influence the local group, even if they "forget" to actually become a member of the party. But geez, you need to do that with 2-5 local groups in electorates where The Greens are likely to win, and you need persuasive agents because they prefer consensus and only fall back to voting when that fails. It would be an awful lot of work to grab one extra vote in the senate... and it would all be public. "we quietly changed this policy" except that all policies are public as are the deliberations.
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Brexit may mean tough times ahead for May’s government, but for now the crisis of truly historic proportions belongs purely to the left.
Yes, it's very much a "dog catches car" moment - the left have got the Labour leadership, now what are they going to do with it? The evidence so far suggests that not only do they have no real ideas, their opponents in the party don't either. My feeling is that the entire reason Corbyn was elected was that no-one had a better idea. Which tells you an awful lot about the calibre of his opponents in the Labour leadership elections. Even after the dismal losses you talk about, the start of the scandals, the campaign by the PLP, Corbyn won again.
I think the lesson here is that if you're going to give the members a say you need to be very careful that the members are aligned with the organisation, and in this case that the MPs are also aligned with the members. The problem of campaigns joining the party to subvert it is not special to Labour, it's been done repeatedly both inside and outside politics (branch stacking, anyone?). A bunch of anarchists joined BicycleNSW at one stage and elected their own chaircreature - it took about 50 people. The Greens here are very aware of that and have a bunch of restrictions on who can vote and when. I trust that Labour have something similar.