2020 US General Election

[HCZ_Reborn]

I think you’re confusing proportional and representative. With FPTP, It’s a government formed of the party that more people have voted for than any one single party. The AV might be preferable only because it requires that each MP in each constituency requires a majority rather than plurality of the vote, but its no more proportional than First past the Post. In some ways it can work out less so.

You are represented in parliament whether it was the representative you chose or not. I’m a non voter technically, haven’t voted in a General Election since 2017 and haven’t voted full stop in the last five years. But I’m still represented, because the system means I can take my issues to my MP whether they are Tory, Labour or ZANU PF.

Under the proportional panacea you propose, you aren’t represented at all….you can just convince yourself you’ve had more input in what the parliament looks like in terms of party layout. But all these politicians are representing their party rather than their constituents (because they don’t have constituents)

As for calling other people stupid, I say the same to you as id say to anyone who contended they were more intelligent than the average person….people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. The only real difference between you and the average voter is that they aren’t labouring under any illusion of being an exception in anyway. Nor are they encumbered by any misplaced sense of self worth.

You think you’d do better in those videos ? Not sure i think I would. It’s like listening to yourself on tape…do I really sound like that? And it’s not just a failure to recognise your voice but the actuality that you come across as a mumbling dullard.

Being able to express my thoughts in writing is easy, doing so verbally? I find it very difficult…because it’s more spontaneous and you’re often struggling to put together the sentence you want unless you’re in company that is familiar

And remember in these snapshot incidents, they are the people being approached not the other way round.


Plus the smart people sure do seem to lose a lot, which then by your logic suggests intelligence has no practical application because it lacks the ability to overcome the tyranny of the cretinous majority, which seems a bit dimwitted

Plus in the same way you’ve conflated proportional and representative. You’re conflating educated with intelligence

Even in this day and age, there’s no sense in denying that how educated you are depends more on the financial means of your parents, rather than intellectual capacity.

[Letters]

I think you’re confusing proportional and representative

Not really. I think the government should be both. The idea of local representation is important, but I also think a government should represent the views of the population as a whole - which it can do better if its make up is roughly proportional. I'm struggling to believe the aims of representation and a more proportional system are completely contradictory.

With FPTP, It’s a government formed of the party that more people have voted for than any one single party.

Which may be OK in a proper 2 party system, but we don't have one. Sure, there are 2 big parties but there are enough smaller ones who get a high enough percentage of the vote that we always end up with a government which the majority of people didn't vote for and doesn't want. That doesn't feel right to me. Last time out the Tories for 42.5% of the popular vote and got a thumping majority.
Then you get quirks like the SNP who got 3.9% of the popular vote but because it's concentrated they ended up with 48 seats, whereas the Lib Dems have a low level of support across a wider area so got 11.6% of the popular vote but only 11 seats.
Again, that doesn't seem like a good system to me.

Under the proportional panacea you propose

Well hang on. I haven't actually proposed anything. I just think our current system is a bad one for the reasons I've outlined.

As for calling other people stupid, I say the same to you as id say to anyone who contended they were more intelligent than the average person….

You know that intelligence can be measured? If someone who is 6' 4" says they're taller than average then it's not a "contention", it's just a measurable fact. And if it is boasting then it shouldn't be. Height and intelligence aren't things one "achieves". I'm not "boasting" about having higher than average intelligence, I'm just stating it. Unfortunately it's against the societal rules to do that, it does come across as boasting. But false modesty about it is as silly as a tall person pretending they're short. When I was younger I was a bit arrogant about this but as I got older I realised that I wasn't particularly exceptional - better than average, sure, but that's 50% of people by definition. And it's not exactly something I've "achieved" any more than someone being tall is.

Plus the smart people sure do seem to lose a lot, which then by your logic suggests intelligence has no practical application because it lacks the ability to overcome the tyranny of the cretinous majority, which seems a bit dimwitted

I don't understand this sentence.
Maybe me not so smart after all.

Plus in the same way you’ve conflated proportional and representative. You’re conflating educated with intelligence

No, I was pretty clear in my last post that while I may be intelligent enough, I am not knowledgeable about certain things.
As I said I got a D in Economics, I just wasn't interested in it. So why are you asking me about whether we should join the Euro? I know what I'm good at and what I'm not. I can't do DIY for shit. You want someone to solve some quadratic equations then I'm your man, just don't ask me to put up a shed. My point is that people, on average, don't have the expertise or experience to decide about complex issues. Intelligence is a factor but it's certainly not the only one.
I didn't think it was a particularly contentious assertion that the general population doesn't have the expertise to make informed decisions about some of the issues they're presented with.

Even in this day and age, there’s no sense in denying that how educated you are depends more on the financial means of your parents, rather than intellectual capacity.

I don't think that's as true as it used to be. I mean, I didn't go to private schools or have private tutors.
I did go to Uni in an era where I didn't end up knee deep in debt. I've definitely benefitted from having a stable family growing up, and reasonable affluence - we weren't exactly rich but I didn't want for anything.

[HCZ_Reborn]

The distinction between proportional and representative is a clear one. Now if you say to me they are of equal importance fine, I don’t especially agree but let’s assume for the sake of argument that they are.



FPTP/AV are the systems that are the most representative

PR is as in the name the most proportional


There isn’t an all singing, all dancing electoral system that does both. And this is why in Germany you have the Federal Bundestag and the state parliaments. Even in America despite the fact that it’s a completely two party system they have that same federal model.
The UK is a unitary system, so changing the electoral system requires changing the system of government from top to bottom. Germany this is easy to do as its very founding was as a confederation of smaller Teutonic states. The UK started life as Briton became sub divided by the Romans chasing the Celts to the corners of the island and only the act of Union has brought us together again.

You’ve got a Scottish parliament and you’ve got a Welsh and Northern Irish assembly so the logical conclusion would be to have an English parliament. Your problem there is the giant distinction in population levels between England, Wales and Scotland. The UK is a population broadly of 65,000,000….at least 55 million of which are living in England.

Therefore regional parliaments would cause a vast disparity in representation levels. So then you’re left with the arbitrary decision to carve England up into roughly proportional population regions. It would be a giant mess, and would require a complete restructuring of our constitution as well. And for what…so people can get the false impression of genuine choice?

There isn’t an objective way to test intelligence at all, even with Intelligence Quotient testing these things are highly influenced by level of education and environment. Dont get me wrong there are clearly natural predilections that are indicators of cognitive ability. But there are so many variables and intelligence is such a fluid term - for example someone like Dianne Abbott was thought of as stupid because she made a pigs breakfast of basic arithmetic when on a radio show to discuss spending. But on an academic level, this is someone who made it to Cambridge university so her academic ability clearly surpasses yours or mine by someway, especially given unlike some people she did not have the advantages in life to get her there.
But it’s hard to discern, she says some incredibly stupid things that show a thoughtless arrogance, so it’s possible to have the capacity for academia and intelligence and be more than capable of saying and doing daft things

And then equally someone who came from a more privileged background could have been tutored to learn rote…


And that’s the thing, intelligence comes in so many different forms….im reasonably good at mental arithmetic but im terrible at Maths, I have a good vocabulary and I think a reasonably good turn of phrase but my technical English in terms of sentence structure and grammar are appalling.

There are people who can barely write their own name who have far more practical ability than you or I would ever have (and that’s clearly a form of intelligence where your brain can conceptualise shapes, dimensions and objects of things that until they’ve built them don’t exist in the physical world)


Applied knowledge which is a kind of intelligence test you could apply, a) doesn’t determine intelligence and b) is no greater indicator of the emotional and other biases going on that culminate in a decision. Brains are formed of biological algorithms that negate any sense of free will. But we are all products of both our genetics and our environment.

And there are just far too many variables to have an objective standardised understanding of intelligence. Saying stupid things doesn’t make you stupid….the most intelligent people have often made the most stupid remarks. Nor does it rule out making poor choices (and by poor choices I don’t mean like who you vote for which is subjective but whether you decide to inject heroin or not into your veins at a dose which risks killing you)

I’ve met a lot of highly intelligent and self aware people who because of substance addiction make the kind of choices a village idiot would roll their eyes at….but they are clouded by the wrong incentives.


And therefore frankly we don’t understand anywhere near enough about the brain to make the kind of objective determination you think we could

[Letters]

There isn’t an all singing, all dancing electoral system that does both.

Maybe not, but I'm I'm struggling to believe that our current system is optimal. You voted for AV so you obviously believe there are better systems out there.

There isn’t an objective way to test intelligence at all

Yes there is. IQ tests are designed to test problem solving and pattern recognition which are agnostic of knowledge.
I take the point that there are different kinds of intelligence. And actually passing exams isn't just about intelligence, some people are just better at exams than others. I've always been pretty good at them, I failed GCSEs out of laziness and a lack of interest, not ability.

And then equally someone who came from a more privileged background could have been tutored to learn rote

It's interesting you say that. Not long after I joined this organisation some colleagues went to India to set up a technical team there. They spent the first day interviewing people, had a standard set of questions and every person who came in trotted out the same answers.
In that region they do just learn the textbook answers and can recite them on cue. It doesn't mean they actually understand it or can do the job.

I think I've lost track of what we're arguing about now, but my general point is that I do not believe the EU Referendum was voted on by a well informed public who understood all the issues at hand. And while I am a Remoaner, I think I'd still say that had Remain won. I mean, look at the level of debate in the run up to it. And I'd say that about any complex issue. When it comes to General Elections, I don't think the principle of people demonstrating a basic understanding of what the parties stand for is unreasonable. I'm not talking about anything complicated, certainly not an intelligence test. But if you didn't know basic stuff like Boris Johnson is the leader of the Tory Party or that he was promising to "Get Brexit Done" then on what basis are you voting? I don't expect people to have read the manifestos cover to cover. Who the hell does that?

[HCZ_Reborn]

I didn’t say passing Exams was about intelligence, actually in many cases it’s about rote learning

But no I’m sorry even the biggest champions of IQ tests will tell you they aren’t an objective measurement of intelligence. They’ve even found that Age is a big determinant of score. Is someone with an IQ score of 160 likely to be more intelligent than someone of 80 or lower…yes but apart from big deviances like that you’re not really able to have a particularly sophisticated and detailed way of measuring intelligence.

You don’t know what we were arguing about? man you really can’t fall on the whole bored at work excuse anymore…there’s candy crush for that. You have what we call a need to be right, and I know this because I have a need to be right…there’s a few others on here that fall into that category (Mac76, Niall_Quinn) which will ultimately make us go down a cul de sac than give an inch.

It’s a personality trait and like all personality traits it can have its positives and negatives. One of its negatives is that it can cause you to make what others may see as objectively bad judgement calls. And it doesn’t matter how high you score on an IQ test…it’s not going to make you any less likely to make irrational or stupid decisions.

Ultimately whatever we claim to the contrary, a lot of the decisions we make in life are gut calls rather than informed decision. Informed decision making isn’t necessarily a sign of intelligence it’s largely a sign of interest. I know a fair bit about politics and history because the subjects interest me.

This kind of thinking that we can purify democracy by getting rid of irrational stupidity is similar to the mindset behind Eugenics or even earlier Plato’s The Republic that we all have predisposing attributes that lend themselves to a permanent role in society.

I’m going to make another gut judgement call here, if people in this country didn’t know who Boris Johnson is or that he was promising to get Brexit done, they most likely wouldn’t have voted to begin with

The people most likely to vote in the UK are those 60 and over, possibly because they have a more ingrained sense of civic responsibility but also they have a shrewd idea of incentives especially given that despite the cuts that the Tories have made you’ve had triple locks on state pensions and the vast majority of welfare spending in this country is done to cater for the over 65.

Of course very stupid people seem to think that once they die out that you’ll have a progressive utopia, not really understanding that people tend to become more conservative as they get older as values change generation to generation.

And that the correlation between youth and progressivism isn’t always the case. Marine Le Pen probably got more of the under 25 vote in France than Macron did. When the Nazis stood for elections they were very popular amongst the young who felt their futures were being destroyed by the punitive reparations placed on them by the winners of the First World War.

They also bought heavily into Hitler’s betrayal narrative

The fact is if you want a more informed electorate, you make it so political campaigns have to be more honest in the way they campaign to begin with. But even then you won’t change the fact that for certain people they project all their individual hopes and aspirations on a person even if that person hasn’t made any specific pledges of that kind.

Human beings are an emotional species, and History tells us the happier they are the more they are going to vote for moderate politicians and policies and the more unhappy they are the more they are going to think they have nothing to lose

[HCZ_Reborn]

The desire to change things or the need to see Demons in the system is a result of feeling dispossessed.

And ultimately the desire to restrict the franchise is a way of tipping the scales in your favour

The Remain campaign lost because it was terrible, it learnt none of the lessons of the near failure of the Better Together campaign in Scotland. It had no realisation that in a lot of the what we now call Red Wall seats being told how much economic hardship Brexit would bring, would likely fall on deaf ears because these communities had known nothing but hardship since the late 1970s.

Immigration may have won it but why? If you see jobs in your community being taken by EU nationals…and then you’re told they are being used as cheap labour to keep wages low (and that’s not entirely untrue either) you might be inclined to think ending freedom of movement would force companies to employ British workers at a proper wage.

I spoke about the prevalence of voting amongst the Elderly and a lot of them stated that they voted leave because they felt things like globalisation (they didn’t use those words) were affecting negatively the futures of their grandchildren. Ultimately there is some level of truth to this and this is why we’ve seen Brexit like narratives globally.

Maybe just maybe, the mainstream needs to look at itself and its own failures (myriad that they are) before blaming people for embracing the likes of Trump, Le Pen, Farage etc. They don’t do that shit when they are happy

[Letters]

The desire to change things or the need to see Demons in the system is a result of feeling dispossessed.

No it isn't. It's a result of looking at the way people vote and then seeing the government that results. Seeing the number of people disenfranchised by the current system. These things are measurable, they're not subjective.

And ultimately the desire to restrict the franchise is a way of tipping the scales in your favour

No it isn't. It's an attempt to make people think a bit before they vote and demonstrate they understand what they're voting for. Why is that a bad idea? Implementing it may be problematic of course, which is where the whole thing may fall down, but the concept seems reasonable.
And if the system was more proportional then more people would vote and they'd vote for what they believed in because you wouldn't need tactical voting or protest voting. You could vote for the party which you feels best represents you and know it would count. At heart I'm a Lib Dem, I think, but I never vote for them because in my constituency there's no point.

I don't care how people vote - I didn't want Brexit to happen but if that's what the majority of people wanted then so be it. My issue is I don't believe people on either side really understood the issues. The Remain campaign was lamentably poor, just saying the sky would fall in if we left. But the Leave one wasn't better, full of empty promises and downright lies.

People say that voting is a right - but it also carries a responsibility. As I said earlier in this exchange, we don't let children vote because the theory goes they're not mature enough to make an informed choice. But the cut off is arbitrary - as it is with many things, till recently someone could get married at 16, with parental consent but couldn't vote. We don't let prisoners vote - I guess the reasoning being they've broken the societal contract and therefore have lost that right. So the concept of voting not being an inalienable right is not revolutionary. I think in practice implementing a test in a fair way would be impossible.

[HCZ_Reborn]

The fact that you use Brexit as your paradigm case also suggests heavily that you think a better informed electorate would have rendered a different result.

And if you tell me that’s not the case, I have to ask what in fact are you trying to remedy? You take exception to my suggestion that the demand for change comes from the dispossessed. But that’s just a fact, people only want to change things if they see a problem.

The fact is the electorate of Europe is no greater informed or more intelligent than the British. Yet although there is growing Euro skepticism in countries like Italy on average there is far more positive feelings towards the EU even though as an organisation it’s been far more punitive to them than it has been to us.


And the fact is, it’s a mindset difference. The 1975 referendum which was intended to ratify or overturn Heath’s decision to take us into the Common Market (held by the Labour government which defeated the Tories the previous year) was far more akin to The Single Market that people are trying to push us to join now. The move towards political and currency harmonisation was not for another ten or so years.
The Major government never held a referendum on Maastricht (which included The Social Chapter containing the working time directive, the minimum wage etc) because he knew it would be rejected by the public. Not because the public were against the social chapter (which wasn’t even adopted until New Labour came in) but because the British people on the whole were against the idea of greater integration with the continent.

Britain is an island nation, we don’t have the French, the Germans etc as neighbours….we culturally have more in common with Anglosphere countries. And more importantly we hadn’t been getting into wars with countries with who we shared a land border for centuries….there wasn’t that desire amongst the British people to use economic cooperation to prevent war because most of our wars up until the 20th century were fought on the water or in far away lands and rarely came to our doorstep.

You simply cannot dismiss a mindset shaped through that historical perspective

Another problem with using Brexit is because it was a public plebiscite that the government chose to hold, it was never obligated to do so.

Well Cameron was obligated to do so as most likely would have faced a leadership contest within his own party if he had not. But thats not the same as a legal/democratic obligation.

[HCZ_Reborn]

Voting is a right, just as freedom is. And when you’re in prison you forfeit those rights. Unlike in certain states in America the suspension of that right is only for the duration of your incarceration. Florida however purges convicted felons from the voter roll which I think is an outrageous attack on civil liberty, once you’ve paid your debt to society your rights should be returned.
And then only if you’re given a life sentence where you are deemed to great a threat to society to ever return to it do those rights get permanently expunged. But then if you’re no longer part of society, you don’t really need a say in how it’s run.


Much earlier in the argument, you stated that it’s no more controversial to mandate intelligence tests than it is to have tests for driving. The implication being is that both have similar potential to cause harm to other members of society

People can only vote that which is available to vote for, if something is a choice on the ballot and the system decrees that it’s legitimate enough to allow people to vote on it…it’s not for me inclement on the voting populace to prove their responsibility. It’s up to those who maintain the Democratic institutions to make sure that responsible choices are being offered.

But more importantly The freedom of choice is crucial in a liberal democracy, we rightly set the standard very high for when intervene against those who are considered to be lacking capacity to make decisions. We don’t suspend someone’s purchasing rights because they keep paying more money for an inferior product.

We don’t need this authoritarian invigilation which cannot be seen as anything other than an attempt to render a certain result.

[Letters]

Fun fact. This person can vote.