Posts by David Hood
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Without actually going and looking at any of the data (so putting in considerably less work than Graeme) I would focus on
Although I suspect it gives lie to Transparency International’s outline of the results as shocking because so many countries score below 50
It does not give lie- It is going to depend on how skewed the data is (where the commonest range is and if there are extreme values), but this seems to be further complicated by the difference with 2012 as well so what I am about to say is a bit of a simplification. If you have a few extremely (score near 1) countries and the vast bulk of countries with low levels (rating in the 50s) you could have a mean of 45 and few countries with high corruption. Similarly you can have a lot of countries with badish scores (30s) and a few extreme well behaved countries and also have a mean of 45.
Rather than that, the reason it is not shocking is that it is basically the same as the past few years. For the percentage of countries that scored below 50: 2016 = 69%, 2015 = 68%, 2014 = 70%, 2013=70%
(OK I went and looked at the data for the last part)
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The language around the day does seem to be very Trumpian though.
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I see Donald Trump has presidentially decreed Jan 20th, the date of his inauguration as "National Patriotic Devotion day"
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lets be clear, Trump scrapped it and announced that the US will do individual deals that are worse for small countries.
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In 1967 the modern formulation of the Trolley problem (ethical thought experiment) was made. Now, fifty years later, the Trolley problem is pretty thoroughly talked out, and instead we have the "when is it ethical to punch a Nazi" problem.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
USA has never been invaded
or indeed
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to Tom Semmens,
It is ridiculous that a black female university lecturer in New York on 120K can claim she is oppressed by an angry “racist” white male unemployed factory worker in backswoods Virginia
Does the ridiculousness of the claim lie in it being an example that the entire statement is a straw man appeal to divisiveness that does not represent the strength of voting coalitions?
Winning a third term is hard in the US. Clinton was less unpopular than Trump. The polls, based on a state level, were closer than most media could numerically understand. Close enough that the poll changes associated with the FBI announcing they were investigating Clinton while remaining silent on the now known Trump investigation was enough to shift the numbers, as were many other events had the election happened at that moment.
The republican vote is just as identity politics. The Clinton coalition was not identical to the Obama one, and the next Democratic coalition will not be identical to the current one. Just like the Republicans.
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This was the article on the Austrian election I was thinking of
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I read an article about the liberal left presidential campaign in Austria, which resulted in an increased victory for the greenish candidate over the far right one. That said the lefts campaign had been all about shared values and common decency rather than parties- hence the lefts candidate running as an independent.
In an intersectional view, I think that approach has a lot of potential for bringing people together. -
For the lack of significance of the policy- that you have to argue about how and why it might be compared with other things that have been going on, I think it illustrative to look at Australian state comparisons-
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/44E7066A7D173A95CA256BDC0012241F?opendocument
If you assume that Australia, as a federal aggregation, is setting a generally similar approach among all the states that call themselves Australian, and then look at the amount of variation that crops up between states, to make any strong statements about the effectiveness of anything, that effectiveness needs to be high in relation to the kind of variation we see within a country kindred to New Zealand.