Posts by BenWilson
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Isaac Freeman,
I believe it also has a practical side-effect: it makes your position stronger, because it connects it with values that are harder to dismiss
Tricky question there. Marketing messages have to be short, by their very nature. They must capture attention, hit emotion, be easily remembered, etc. More sophistication in discussion, I fully agree with. But when it comes to translating that into pitch, it's always going to be generalized. And there's the rub.
As with marketing products, there's always going to be a conflict between the extent to which marketing itself should take priority over development. A great product dies if no-one knows about it. But too much marketing of a bad product can collapse the organization too, because the truth will come out about what owning the product is really like.
Also, there have been many cyclical waves over the years of diversification vs cutting back to core competency. Both ideas have appeal at different times. Typically, when one stops working, you go back to the other. So you're pitching at a wide mass market, but getting outcompeted by a bigger, better financed corporation on price. So you cut back the number of products, cutting back the number of people you're selling to, and work out what it actually is that you do best, and then intensively hammer that market segment, totally dominating it, at which point you can start setting your own prices again. Meanwhile the big competitor hits the wall of overexposed debt fueling their huge product range and massive advertising budget, and a rising perception of low quality products, and then a downturn in the market turns a giant into a bankrupt quite suddenly, and it's torn apart by it's receivers, if it hasn't managed to do that with its own chainsaw consultants first.
I think this happens with political parties. When entering government, they're always in a phase of broadening their appeal, reaching out with the policies that have been clamored for but denied by the previous incumbent. They get stronger for a while, as they grab the lowest hanging fruit.
The losing team goes back to the drawing board, working out who they appeal to and why, and what core of new policy can they possibly create to distinguish themselves from the dying juggernaut they were, without losing absolutely everything they were about. Why did their policy fail to connect to the masses? Why did the economy tank, despite all of their fiscal brilliance? Do they actually have a philosophy at all, is there any real "industrial complex" of worth, or did they outsource everything so much they're actually just 30 directors in a company, with a vast array of contractors who might have seemed great when they were easily squeezed, but don't seem like such a good idea now that they're shipping product to the other crowd.
This is what Labour is emerging from now. They have done most of their soul searching and the new product line is coming through. It can and should expand, but even fixing those products in the minds of the marketplace without actually getting the sales has been important, the brand building exercise. There is widespread support for their economic ideas even amongst those who vote National, and most certainly amongst people who voted for anyone else, barring ACT (on the party vote. Epsom voters are not actually ACT voters at all).
What is missing from Labour's product range is enough for the sharply rising unemployed, underemployed, exploitatively employed, criminally employed, and in-training. I don't have hard facts on this, and will happily eat my words at some point if they become available, but I think those were the non-voters. They look at policies like CGT, compulsory savings, tax-regime adjustments, etc, and think: <see next post>
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Isaac Freeman,
Perhaps you don't mean "define" as literally as I'm taking it, but I think this is precisely where we've got to in popular political discourse: Left is what Labour says and Right is what National says (insert two largest parties for other countries). Thus we get the kind of confusion we've had in this thread.
In that sentence, I was using it literally. As a line through the heart of the Labour and National clusters, and extending beyond them in both directions, capturing up all the other assumptions and points of difference in a giant cliche that forms a single line to describe a term, as it applies in this country, at this time. I do not know, however, if the average position along this line of every individual would necessarily render a halfway point that lay between the National and Labour clusters. My guess is that it's some way into the Labour cluster, but I have never done the exercise, which is vast, and subject to the problems I already mentioned. I'd also expect there to be a lot of overlap between those clusters, that the Labour/National clusters might actually look like one elongated cluster, and the Green one would probably overlap almost entirely with the Labour one using this dimension alone.
It's one way of defining the term, probably closest to the way I personally use it. But you're totally right, it's a term that isn't greatly helpful in itself, due to vagueness, and more specific dimensions shed more light (and take proportionally longer to explain, depending how many you use). I'm certainly not stuck on my definition. To argue over the meaning of such terms is as useless as all arguments over what random collections of sounds "mean". They mean nothing except what we intend them to mean, and if argument ensues about the right to use one term, the only way forward, really, is to use a new term, one devoid of existing connotation preferably, so that it has a strict meaning that can be agreed on. That is if we really wish to have debates that are somewhat scientific, about which statements with a high probability of truth and falsity can exist.
However, this is not how the kind of political discussions that we usually have go. So everyone brings a different meaning to the table, and angry fights happen over which is right, because discussion will continue, using these terms, whether it is a good way of doing it or not. It's the way we're stuck with, unfortunately. Indeed, there's a strong argument that moving the language is one of the most powerful ways of controlling the thinking about it that makes up the bulk of political discourse, so Gio is well within his rights to seek to battle over it. In a Marxist sense, the country has moved to the right for my whole life. In the dimension of individual freedom, it's become much less conservative. So the average is indeed somewhere in the neoliberal camp, if that is to be defined by the rhetoric of parties like ACT rather than their actual actions, which are usually totally hypocritical, culminating finally in their only representative being a homophobic racist law and order nut seeking to hand public funds to private schools, elected almost entirely by National supporters seeking to reduce the proportionality of our democratic system.
But to speak of Labour, National, Greens, UF, ACT, Maori Party, and NZF collectively as the Right will only confuse most people in a discussion. That leaves exactly 1 seat that is officially to the left. If that is the case, then a leftist coalition is not going to happen in this country in any foreseeable future.
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Of course Left/Right is a very broad brush, that omits huge detail. It's one way of broadly partitioning the space of voter positions, and the scale is very difficult to define without surveying the opinions on the same questions with the same sampling methods right around the world.
There are many dimensions along which difference can be ranked. As many as you can make questions for, which, absent a limit on the length of the question, is infinite, and even with a small length limit, is still extremely large. With a selection of n questions, each person answering gets a point in a n-dimensional space. The clustering of the points in this space can indicate broad agreement between large groups, and could define the positioning of various parties in this space. But the selection of questions is still going to be problematic, people could be very close to one another in your choice of questions, and yet consider themselves opposites, when it comes to the unasked question that pits them as mortal enemies. It could turn out also, that differences in basic understanding of the terms in the question could lead to people who disagree with each other very much answering the questions the same way.
So even with extreme precision in your questioning, and sophisticated mathematical analysis of the results, you could find the terms left and right very hard to clearly distinguish.
I think, for instance that analysis saying the Greens are moving to the center both correct and misleading. On one dimension, left/right, in very broad sweeps, and defining the left/right dichotomy by the relative positions of the two GOPs, that is a correct assessment. Add other dimensions, and it might not look like they are passing through Labour's cluster, but passing around it, striking off in a different direction to both Labour and National. NZF might look like they are in between Labour and National, but I would actually believe they are quite distant from both in two dimensions, the racist dimension and the monetarist (they're profoundly against). Peter Dunne might appear to be pathologically centrist, and yet his position on cannabis reform is far more anti than the national average would seem to be. I don't even know where to put the Maori party, I never really have. ACT would be very hard to place clearly too, because there is a vast gulf between what they say and what they do. The party that claims to be tough on crime has had a rather high number of criminals in high places. Mana might actually be entirely within the Labour cluster, simply attracting people who have stopped believing that Labour actually stands for them, with differentiation mostly coming in the human rights dimension.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I appreciate where you're coming from, but no, not even one tiny little bit.
I hate speaking for you, I'm always wrong.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Damian Christie,
when it comes to our values, politics, etc, I can't understand how things can get so snarky.
I posit that it's because of mutual respect. Someone from Kiwiblog calling me every name under the sun means nothing at all, and indeed could lead to amusing insult trading until I grew out of it. 3410 saying I talk more than I listen hurt a hundred times more than being called a depraved liar by any troll.
Which makes things tricky. How can you have robust debate if the least slight causes real disquiet? Are we becoming like the Elves in the final chapters of LOTR, who Tolkien describes as having lengthy conversations without speech, so much meaning could be conveyed by the least glances and millenia of shared knowledge, and pretty much knowing what they mutually thought anyway, so that speech was barely necessary? No wonder they left Middle Earth.
The answer is what Russell has always said. Remember that it's just another discussion thread, and another one will come along tomorrow. Sometimes we have to resay things. Or even apologize and just get over stuff. That this is even possible in this community is very valuable and rare on the internet.
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Hard News: The Public Address Word of…, in reply to Rich Lock,
What to do with my last month of life....?
Eat, drink, and be merry! Zum Wohl!
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Rich Lock,
Well put, Rich.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Ben I'd be just happy with policy that hadn't been proven to fail elsewhere. Not making other people's mistakes would be a great start.
Which ones are you bitter on?
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Damian Christie,
It reminds me why I don't hang out here much these days. And I vote Green, FFS.
Ya great big Flouncer, harden up. If you can't handle the kind of tongue lashings delivered on the most polite of sites in nearly the whole of Christendom, how do you get through one minute on TV?
Gio's a bit sorry, I'm sure. Just a bit. But he made a valid point - to claim that there is no difference betwixt the two GOPs is something that ignores the existence of people at the fringe of both groups, who either stand to make millions, or stand to be evicted and freeze in the streets, on the minor differences between them. That's why I'm to the left of Labour myself, because it drags them away from ignoring the casualties and prioritizing the mega rich. If they simply move their blob the other way, it's not a win for the "left", it's a loss. And it's silly, because there are so many votes to win that don't need to come from moving around at all, but simply working out what it is that the 33% who didn't vote actually want. I think what they want is a real choice, one which has a real upside potential for them.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Islander,
What most of us need is untrammelled time.
Nice phrase. So true.
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