Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Well, Labour's vote is growing anyway. That article is more about the Tories basically pissing away some votes, by alienating the elderly. The big surprise in the article was that the average house price in the UK is only $215,000 pounds. Way more affordable than NZ.
It’s not the moment for careful triangulation.
Can I ask a silly question? What does "triangulation" mean in the context of politics? I understand it to be usually used to find things, like heights or transmitter locations.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Except I’m not interested in changing anyone’s values, and I never enter any discussion intending to change someone’s values.
We're talking about politics, what progressives might be able to do better in that, what ideas might work well. There's going to be quite a lot of value discussion there, although naturally there's plenty of room for data and evidence. It will help in its way, but it's not the only thing that will work. It may not even be the most effective thing.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
It is unbelievably hard to get someone to change their value-based position.
The truth of this statement depends on basically every variable in it.
Changing people's values is a pretty big part of what education is about, and to a large degree it's the purpose of any discussion of values. Certainly there are times, people and subject combos in which no progress is likely to be made. The opposite is also true.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to linger,
The ability to combine analytical skills with plain speaking is regrettably rare (though there’s a fair concentration of such individuals among the regular PA contributors) .
I think it's a skill that means a lot more to others who also have good analytical skills. Which, as you point out, isn't that common. To many, such a talent actually makes people trust you less. The slippery lawyer, the doctor giving you the bad news, the judge summing up the case. If you inherently don't want to believe the truth, then counter evidence can strengthen your false belief.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to linger,
ETA: @Rob even though the link is to linger
Maybe it would be good if this was a question of evidence based policy-details. But it’s not.
Well, not very much, anyway.
But it’s not. It’s about values, and that means emotion.
To a large extent, but not entirely. Some arguing about values does come back to people reconciling their principles, which can possibly be done in a rational way, even if the principles themselves are based on emotion (or lets say on beliefs that are less well founded than scientific/mathematical evidence). To suggest that this impossible pretty much says “It’s either what scientists reckon, or it’s just prejudice”. There is an entire middle ground, the basis of almost all human behavior, which falls between these two extremes.
You can get very, very good at finding the way in which peoples emotionally based principles are contradictory, without it coming back to scientific evidence. Then they have to choose how to resolve this dilemma, typically by weighting one or other of their principles more highly, or finding in the dilemma some parameter that increases the strength of the “firing” of one of the principles.
But yes, there’s also a lot of scope for pure salesmanship – nothing else explains how Trump got elected.
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One of the difficulties with young people is that they are actually quite hard to poll in any way, including just basic opinion polls and studies of their wishes. Whereas we're awash with information about what older people want.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to Moz,
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.
Well none of those people are white women in their 70s, so the claim of a lack of representation is semi-true. And Bill English is an old white man, which is in some ways the next closest thing to an old white woman. His party has quite a few old white women in it, some having held very senior positions. Furthermore, they are voted for by a lot of old white women, so when they sit around talking to their mates about their grandchildren, there will be plenty there who think National is just fantastic, and that will rub off.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to Rob Stowell,
It’s a remarkable fact about our democracies – here, England, the US – that the electorate favours policies well to the left of what they appear to vote for
Yup. We can explain it all we like, but the fact remains that it is true. Our democracies don't deliver the policy we actually want. I hate to say it, but this kind of stupid is not entirely on the political system. I am at a loss to understand how anyone could not see Trump is not going to help the people who elected him. They'd only have to basically do any kind of inquiry into his past to see that no-one but an inner circle has ever profited from what he has done in his life. But clearly they're either not capable or not willing to do that inquiry. In that case, they are getting what they deserve, as possibly the only slightly good outcome. The electorate might learn something from Trump's School of Ripping off the Students.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But even then if you believe voting is purely tribal and policy is pointless then why don’t any of the parties actually present candidates who are part of the tribe to which young non-voters belong?
Well, I don't believe it's purely anything, tribal included. "Tribal" is not the same as "Demographically similar" either.
But why don't they put up young candidates? Without excusing it, I'd say there's at least 3 main reasons:
1. Young people don't vote so what's the point. Yes, I know it's circular. But it also happens to be true, and betting on a different outcome would involve taking a risk against the known trend.
2. Because young people might put old people who do vote off.
3. Because young people haven't worked their way through a party hierarchy, haven't proved they have leadership talents or party loyalty, or ability to organize their way out of a paper bag, or shown their discipline in presenting the partyYes, all of these reasons are inherently ageist, conservative, and 2 and 3 could easily be altered slightly to justify why every demography that isn't the usual masters of the universe shouldn't be getting representation. They're all part of the feedback loop of political disengagement. They show a total lack of vision and courage, but that's how our political system works. And it works that way because to some extent our society also works that way.
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It's true that youth vote is declining and also true that for the most part, no party aims at them. But they also never have. So something has actually changed and it's not just the fact that politics is dominated by older people.