Posts by tussock
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Wait, is Winston saying the changes to the system are undemocratic because people haven't had a chance to vote on them (an undemocratic process of change) or undemocratic because they reduce the democratic nature of our future electoral system (an relatively undemocratic outcome)?
Because you can have either one without the other. People can vote for the establishment of a dictatorship, and dictators can implement a superbly responsive representative democracy without asking anyone.
I want the latter one. Where parliament ignores what the majority wants and gives them a better democracy, so that what everyone wants is thereafter represented better in parliament. I know most people might decide to vote against that idea, but that really shouldn't matter at all.
We shouldn't be allowed to vote for a dictatorship, it's undemocratic, no matter how large the majority.
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Hard News: The question of Afghanistan…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Um just because some European drew a circle around that bit on a map and called it a single name does not mean it was a single country. The people within that circle still considered themselves mortal enemies of their neighbours.
Rubbish. Go educate yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_AfghanistanIt's almost always the centre of a large state covering it's current ground and some extent of the surrounding nations, all the way back into pre-history, and Afghanistan just happened to be strong enough to tell the British where it's own borders were in the 19th century, at least for a while.
It was at war? Really? You might also like to compare with the History of Germany (which has been a country now for all of 20 years).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_germanyMany tribes, languages, civil wars, genocides, and ever-changing borders that have only very recently been settled on, for now.
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ODT editorial, you'd have to ask for their sources I suppose. Electoral Commission by the look of it, I haven't read all their stuff so don't know.
http://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/editorial/221747/mmp-review
Non-voters gave largely the same reasons as in 2008 for not voting: "other commitments" (14%), "work commitments" (9%), "couldn't be bothered" (14%), "could not work out who to vote for" (11%). The number of non-voters giving the response "it was obvious who would win so why bother" as a factor influencing their decision not to vote increased from 19% in 2008 to 31% in 2011.
But I see now that's "a factor", so presumably one of many. Otherwise (0.31*0.26 = 0.08) * 120 = ~10 seats. The first ones are 4 seats "other commitments", 3 seats "work", 4 seats "not bothered", 3 seats "who was what now". That's enrolled voters not voting, though realistically it's not often got over ~85% so more like half that all 'round for people who might normally have voted (and 5 seats of "Duncan said don't bother", which is still the balance of power one way or another).
Oh, and they did kick all the convicts off the roll last time too, I've no idea how many that disenfranchised, but enrolment seemed high despite that so not too many (noting that it is a 1 seat majority).
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Hard News: The question of Afghanistan…, in reply to Russell Brown,
But I guess we can agree it’s clear that not all Taliban are the same, and any remotely orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan will require negotiation with the “good” Taliban.
At some point the US will "declare victory" and withdraw, as they could have done any time since about 10 days into this thing. The people who they leave in charge will be whoever can apply the greatest breadth of military force, which will be the same guys who ran the country before the US got there, the Taliban. The US will pretend to "negotiate" so they can sell it to the people at home, not because it's anything other than a failed attempt to produce another client state around Russia's borders.
It’s actually very hard to find any research that shows majority support for the Taliban amongst Afghans.
Really? The last decade of constant anti-Taliban propaganda doesn't give them glowing references? I'm shocked. You know we're at war with them, right? That embedded journalists don't actually get both sides of the story?
Though they are a very poor government, so that's probably true anyway. The National party here doesn't have majority support, and they're an incomparably superior government to the Taliban. The best choice available is not always going to be a nice one.
@Angus, I often forget to reiterate, but the Syrian government are also very bad people, with the mass murder and so on, though civil wars have always been pretty horrific like that. Either way, insurgent is not a synonym for "bad guy". At all. Just like resistance is not a synonym for "good guy".
There really aren't any good guys in war time. They give you medals for killing more people than they expected you to, and going crazy and killing a score or two civilians is just one of those things. Dresden? Hiroshima? Medals! Well planned, well executed, murder of tens of thousands in a day.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Kracklite,
They’re not insincere, hypocrites, social climbers and cowards and neither are they idiots.
I can only go by my personal experience, which is that religious people are at best genuinely confused to meet a good person who is not religious, because they are taught from childhood that goodness comes from their faith. They really do look on everyone else as hell-bound tempters to sin and damnation.
Now, they're human beings, so they're massively intelligent by default, but they do share a delusion that's been deliberately crafted to benefit the church and it's ministers by limiting their charity to within the church system.
The Salvation Army does a lot of good work, but they do it because they want to turn us all into God's warriors and thereby attain a high rank in heaven's army come the apocalypse. For reals. They're not kidding.
The folk in Chch had to de-consecrate the church before knocking it over so as not to offend God and thereby burn in hell for eternity. Not kidding or "personifying the universe" or anything rational at all.When the Catholics have crackers at church, they really do think they're eating a little piece of God. Mormons really do jump through a bunch of hoops in their life to avoid owning computers and phones so that God doesn't torture them for eternity in the afterlife like He will do to the rest of us sinners. For serious. It's a full on proper delusion.
If you’re going to discuss faith, then figure out what faith is first. It’s not just a subscription to a very literal ideology or franchise. It is – as I see it (admittedly as an outsider) – a means of articulating one’s relationship with the cosmos.
But that's not my experience at all. The religious people I've known truly do believe in a literal heaven, eternal torture for homosexuals, that letting gay people get married is a sign of the imminent end of the world and coming of the apocalypse, that global warming is hell coming for the unfaithful, big lists of arbitrary sins that have nothing to do with our modern world, and they absolutely do treat unbelievers poorly if anyone from their church asks them to.
Despite being otherwise nice and well-adjusted people. I've had plenty of religious friends, I've got religious family, they're not substantially different in how they go about life, they're just deluded about a whole bunch of stuff because of their religion, and I've seen that show itself as suddenly abandoning friends and family at the behest of their church, because they don't want to burn in hell. For reals.
I can’t say that I agree, but I try at least to assume that people who think differently from me are not always fools or swine.
Wow, so not all religious people are infinitely stupid sub-humans. Nice argument, for someone who just got done calling mine a straw-man.
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OK, good reasons to dump the threshold, even if you don't like the small parties.
1: They totally take power off each other, the more of them are in there. Part of Winston wanting less parties is he has the most power when there's only one of them, his, and he doesn't want to be there with just 3 MPs specifically because he can't get much done that isn't forced on him by the big parties.
2: Because the "balance of power" tends to dilute among many small parties, none of them can push their idealism too hard. If National or Labour need to agree with four or more splinter groups to pass something, that can't be too offputting for any of those parties.
Who it (no threshold) hurts most is basically the ones that sit in the middle like Winston does now. If you have National able to grab a majority with any two of Peter, Winston, Tariana, Colin, Outdoor Rec, or ALCP, they're simply in a much weaker each than if National can only get 61 votes with one of them.
But we've done this, they've done this, it's pretty basic stuff, and I guess no one fucking cares. They're actually going to make it harder to get a small party in compared to the past, so we'll have more extremists holding the balance over time, and people are mostly complaining about how you get the best people standing for your electorate vote. Mass insanity, I guess, hardly uncommon.I guess it's nice we get to keep MMP at all, given the very serious threat it just faced. Still, what a waste. /sadface.
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Hard News: The question of Afghanistan…, in reply to Russell Brown,
But it’s delusional to imagine that the Taliban are some high-minded freedom fighters. Their record in power was truly hideous.
It was much better than the guys that came before them, who it’s difficult even for me to talk about in polite company. The support for the Taliban then and now is because there’s worse things than medievalist religious nutbags to live under, which includes our occupation.
But what in the hells does being high-minded have to do with being a resistance fighter? The French resistance to Nazi occupation were cold murders of anyone who so much as looked at them funny, and the Polish resistance was much worse. The communist resistance in Vietnam murdered a whole lot of innocent people. The Chechen resistance are flat out suicide terrorists.
Resistance fighters are not, and never have been high minded. That would get them all killed, especially against modern tech. But the resistance to our (US-lead) occupation is what we’re fighting in Afghanistan, and it pisses me off when people try and reserve that for people on “our side”, particularly the US military propaganda machine. Syria is an insurgency, Afghanistan is not.
The people in each region view themselves as distinct from people in other region.
In that they speak different languages and such, yes. But Afghanistan has been functionally united since at least the 18th century and had it’s current borders since 1823, which is longer than, say, Germany at 1918, or most modern nations on earth really, certainly our own.
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Legal Beagle: MMP Review: Trusting Voters, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
The second is debateable … the Sante Lague fomula used to apportion seats amongst those parties that cross the threshold slightly favours smaller parties over larger one. So one could argue that the Greens and NZ First actually get more benefit (in terms of the amount of representation they get in Parliament) out of having a 5 or 4% threshold than does National or Labour.
No. Sante Lague only "favours small parties" in comparison to D'Honte, which screws them. Our system reallocates wasted vote proportionately, and most of the proportion is held by the two biggest parties. Four seats worth of votes in this election went to Colin Craig and the ALCP. Those seats were instead allocated 2 to National, 1 to Labour, and 1 to the Greens, as the last four seats allocated (117 N/118 L/119 G/120 N).
As an aside, post-election polling showed 10 seats worth of people didn't vote specifically because the election result was so certain there was no point to it. TEN SEATS. Reporting on pre-election polling is beyond fucked up. Gods-damned Duncan Garner telling everyone lies.
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There's an atheism thread here? Cool.
People who think there's a giant invisible flying elephant following them around who will slap them with its trunk if they think bad thoughts are delusional. Everyone agrees on this.
People who think a bearded old white guy watches them from another dimension who will burn them forever after they die if they think bad thoughts are religious. Everyone also agrees on this.
Some people don't like it when you point out how similar those things are. Dawkins mostly just narks on people who don't read his books but like to comment on them anyway. He never called religious people insane, he just said that religion is not noticeably different to a socially acceptable delusion.
OK, I know, most New Zealand religious folk (outside the smaller cults) don't really believe that sort of thing at all, they're only religious in the sense they don't want to say they're not in case something bad happens. Which is also a delusional thing to think, except for how your "friends" are just church friends and won't talk to you any more.
Which means local religion is a meaningless social clique where membership demands only that no one mention the emperor has no clothes, and even the church officials don't actually believe in God as anything more than a large common mythological story you can cherry-pick to fill in a sermon.
Religious extremists are just people who really do believe God is real, and all those old bronze-age laws about being careful and timely about who you murder for Him are His word and must be followed. Dawkins says soft-religious people are a problem precisely because they enable those true believers every time they refuse to call bullshit on the whole God being real and the ancient stories being correct thing.
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Legal Beagle: MMP Review - The Proposals, in reply to tussock,
Hey, tussock, stupid. Try the actual formulae, not rounding on percentages, same end results though, for the most part.
(our alt.history MMP with no minimum)
Other than Labour/Values winning in '72, Social Credit has held the balance of power since forever. Labour wins again for one term in 1984 with a New Zealand Party coalition. Social Credit again hold the balance of power until 1993 with the one-term Labour-Alliance coalition.
Shipley's 1-term 1996 government is hamstrung by Peters and Capill, there's no way the Nats can steal 10 votes of NZF's 13 to go hard-right while keeping the CC happy.
1999 is no change, Labour/Alliance/Green, just a tighter majority and more options for Labour.
2002 adds Outdoor Recreation's 2 seats to the narrow majority, with again more options for Labour.
2005 is no change either, but still more options.
2008 probably eliminates Dunne, as the Māori party hold the balance of power and United's 1 vote is worth nothing.
2011 it's up to Conservatives if they prefer Dunne or Banks for the slim majority, though National would have about 10 options for passing any vote.What amazes me about United is they don't take a few more seats. It should be fairly easy to create a properly corrupt centre that always holds the balance of power and feeds big money to its electorates. They could even bargain based on who gave them the most easy seats. Voters too honest to take it up I suppose. Wonders never cease.