Posts by Moz
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to Alfie,
Britain has always led the world is satire
I thought for a second you were accusing May of satire with the appointment. The idea of Trump and Boris having a diplomatic meeting is definitely satirical.
Stross also has a take with Case Nightmare Blond
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Polity: Australian election: Dust and Diesel, in reply to mpledger,
(I am assuming that) in Australia if I dislike A and like B from the same party I can rank B high and A low
In the senate you can, but then you're committed to voting below the line and realistically you will probably need to number way more than the minimum 12 boxes to avoid the "exhausted votes are a vote for whatever everyone else wants" problem, because the excess distribution rules mean that even stopping at the first major party isn't enough. It's not impossible, just work, and if you follow politics enough to have that sort of opinion it's very likely something you're willing to do (and more likely absolutely committed to doing). It's when you suggest that everyone else should have to do it just so you can that I think you're being unreasonable. Join the party, change it to be more democratic, vote for what you want. Don't make everyone else suffer.
There's some amusing reporting going on of The Greens NSW post-election analysis (New Matilda) where some people are complaining that the NSW Greens are "too democratic" and really need a firm guiding hand from a dominant central committee, the way Victoria has. I can see both sides, and I definitely think a few more permanent campaign staff would be useful, but I really, really, want them to be firmly bottled up in the "you work for us" cage, rather than running the show. It's worth noting that I support the "pull the greens greenwards" efforts of microparties like "Save the Planet", rather than the Di Natale push to claim the small centre role from The Democrats (remember them? Why you'd want to emulate them is beyond me).
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Polity: Australian election: Dust and Diesel, in reply to Craig Young,
I oppose any reduction of the five percent threshold on the basis that it might let such extremist elements into our Parliament. For example, I found the Conservative Party's anti-Treaty stance and climate change denialism
Yeah, like I said, in Australia that isn't an issue because those policies have both major parties backing them. The threshold only works if you keep changing it depending on which way the wind blows. In NZ if you think climate change denialism is kept out by the 5% threshold I invite you to look at the National Party.
Democracy has to include all the voices. That's what differentiates it from even more awful systems. I remain convinced that two of the best things about NZ are MMP and allowing permanent residents to vote.
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FWIW I'm not happy that we elected multiple competing groups of explicit racists, several theocrats and a great many extremely unpleasant people (what do want? More torture! Where do we want it? Offshore!), as well as re-affirming that 85% of the voters want more climate change, sooner. It's the old problem - 60% of voters tell pollsters they think AGW is real and someone should do something about it. When it came to actually *DO* something, 85% of voters did not think it worth changing their vote to make that possible.
My analysis goes like this: on issues like climate change, refugees, aboriginal Australians, mining, inequality, economics, housing, etc etc et bloody cetera there is almost 100% bipartisanshp. On the importance of parents beating their children even The Greens agree! I disagree with all major policies of at least 90% of the 30+ parties who ran for senate seats in NSW, including the three who have won power (Liberal, National, and LiberalNational - yes, really, the two have combined in Queensland to form one party so now "The Coalition" has three members) and the ALP.
So my voting choices were very, very constrained. In the end I voted just on climate, because otherwise finding even 6 parties to preference in the senate would have been impossible (that's the minimum). For my local member I had to rank all of them, even the racist nutbags.
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Automating voting is a whole different topic, and one which Australian voting is almost uniquely unsuited to (because final results may depend on the order in which votes are counted proving that software produces the same result is ... best left as an exercise for the reader). It's also worth noting that Australia uses at least 8 different voting systems, and any given voter is likely to see five of them (council, state lower house, state upper house, federal lower house, federal upper house). Territory voters may not get as many, but they also get different systems.
Having scruted and handed out "how to vote" cards at almost every election since I arrived here, I still think the Australian system is great, in theory. But in practice it's awful. Not just because of the above sensitivity to counting order, but specifically because it's complicated and a great many voters don't want to, or can't, understand it. The change this year to requiring more than one box be numbered caused an increase in the number of invalid votes.
So while I personally like and enjoy the ranking system, and find the enormous ballot paper amusing (135 candidates to rank!), for most people it's annoying and stupid. My preferred extension of making every electorate multi-member would make that worse, not better, for most voters.
This is where proportional systems win, hands down. MMP where you tick two boxes, party and MP, the end. One of the few political choices I think Israel got right is their voting system, where there is no local member, it's purely one of the folk casting one vote for one party. Having the threshold be one MP would be even better.
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I'm somewhat annoyed that no-one has submitted an ethanoloid drug for consideration (are there such things? Which effects do you focus on?). It'd be worth doing and I'd happily contribute to a crowd fund for it, purely to see the "it's less harmful" argument being discussed.
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Polity: Post "post-truth" post, in reply to despud,
I wonder if some of the attraction of Trump is that he's prepared to stand up and
... lie like a champion? Trump is almost the definitive post-truth politician, at least in the west. We're all used to the Communist menace telling the most unbelievable whoppers while everyone involved pretends to believe them. Now we have the same thing happening here. "Our five year plan for Auckland's housing market has been achieved" "yes, your worship, the peasants are crying tears of joy".
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This piece on Corbyn seems fair to me, basically saying that he seems good in many ways, but he's had 9 months and done very little - he still seems like that guy who wanders on stage, blinks at the lights, looks around and says "oh, everyone else has left so I'll try to entertain you" except in this case he's apparently supposed to be the leader of a political party.
That said, here in Oz we're about to vote for which is least awful, where our version of Corbyn seems to lack the UK versions basic decency but is also without a lot of the support that Corbyn has. And he's even more handicapped by the "centrists" pathological loathing for their coalition party. In Batman (Melbourne) they've somehow replaced a coal-powered dinosaur (M'arn Ferguson) with a right-wing gaffe factory "I forget how many houses I own" (Feeney) in an electorate that's moving from Labour to Green... helped by installing the wrong candidate. Closer to me In Grayndler (Sydney) the left-wing rump of the ALP is represented in an even more green-left seat by Albanese but he seems fairly safe simply because he is actually green-left himself.
I am terrified that Australia is about to re-elect a RWDB government presided over by a former merchant banker with a nice smile (you may find that discomfortingly familiar in NZ). There are rumours that the far right of his party will roll him and install a genuine far-right dingbat like Abbott after the election. Since they're promising to gut the state to fund tax cuts for business, and have already trashed the CSIRO, arts, dometic violence and indigenous budgets, it's not looking good. Unfortunately Labour in return are promising much the same, but less so.
No-one other than The Greens is talking about climate or poverty or torturing refugees... no need, bipartisan support for more of all of those. Media especially are on-side, and the ABC has been successfully cowed to the point where they use Liberal talking points against other voices.
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Yeah, him! Thanks for that link. It's also on youtube if you're not so into failbook:
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An MP was MURDERED during the campaign by a right wing fascist
You may have chosen to skip over Nigel Farage saying he has won Brexit “without a single bullet being fired" but I think that also bears on the whole "there's two sides out there today, and only one of them is playing cricket" problem. The Brexit campaign wasn't bound by facts or truth.
The problem for Scotland is that leaving for the EU is not necessarily a useful choice, since they're almost certain to be forced to join the Euro - look at other peripheral states to see how well that works. Economically, German is treating them as fiefs rather than partners. They would, I think, be better off to follow Norway etc into the free trade deals while staying separate. Which means not being the UK successor state. I saw an interesting rant on youtube but can't find it now to that effect.
Until the Blairites followed NZ Labour into the "I would rather die than see Labour move left" suicide pact, my real hope was that this would kick the left into an "all or nothing" coalition to wrest power from the far right as they imploded over this issue. Now is an excellent time to stand up and say "we want living wages, public services, end tax havens yadda yadda, and since the people have spoken, we will try to do that outside the EU rather than inside. I've also read that the UK was a huge obstacle to fixing the tax problem since the various UK microstates are mostly tax havens, and to a significant extent the City of London as financial centre relies on and facilitates wholesale tax evasion. Without the UK the EU may well move on that issue, and quickly (as soon as the section 50 trigger is pulled the UK loses its ability to block EU legislation).