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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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I submit there are often differences between immediate self interest and long term self interest and that the difference between how one votes and how another votes -- within a given socio-economic demographic -- may correspond with how well each is able to defer immediate gratification.
Many studies link low IQ both with poverty and with the inability to defer immediate gratification. This alone may be sufficient to explain the voting habits of the lowest-ranked of the voting classes.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This may or may not be true but the purpose of the MJH Challenge is to flush out reality. If nobody can be found who admits to naked self interest then it has to be doubted. I stress the nakedness however since I assume generalised self-interest is the wellspring of all actions.
| Many studies link low IQ both with poverty and with the inability to defer immediate gratification. This alone may be sufficient to explain the voting habits of the lowest-ranked of the voting classes. |
Alas not. Many studies have demonstrated that thickoes (like the poor) can be found supporting all parties in generous numbers. Though of course this is only to be expected since no study has ever been able to show which parties actually benefit either the thick or the poor.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Alas not. Many studies have demonstrated that thickoes (like the poor) can be found supporting all parties in generous numbers. |
Parties. Not policies. That's the key. Parties are an adulterous amalgam of ever-shifting programs. What one needs to do is match up voting habits with policy positions, regardless of advocate.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | You completely miss the point, Grant, and make my own. The Establishment is left wing to rightists and right-wing to leftists. By definition. |
Speaking as someone who began his political life on the left (having been raised in a social-gospel believing family) this statement does not accord with my experience.
I don't recall thinking of myself as holding the minority opinion when, as an early adolescent, I parroted the propaganda of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Toronto Star (as did my parents). Though I could not have articulated it at the time, I believe I viewed the few right-wingers of which I was aware as stogy old fuddie-duddies who refused to get with the enlightened program every good-hearted and right-thinking person knew was correct.
That, I believe, is how every leftist I have ever known has viewed me: As some kind of ultra-conservative dinosaur destined to die out with the remainder of my species.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Parties. Not policies. That's the key. Parties are an adulterous amalgam of ever-shifting programs. What one needs to do is match up voting habits with policy positions, regardless of advocate. |
I don't grasp your point. Since it is presumably established amongst ourselves that there is no such class as "the thick" or "the poor" (intelligence and income being simple gradients insofar as either quality exists or is measurable) then it is not possible for parties to appeal to either group with any prospect of success. If it were they would do so and win every election.
It is true a party could make a simple play for a slice of the poor cf the Lib Dems in our recent election ("No income tax for anyone under 10,000 a year") but rather more would have to pay for it, including the even-poorer who pay no income tax at all. It is, I hasten to say, a perfectly proper policy proposal on various grounds.
It is significant that no party in the election actually did appeal nakedly to "the poor" by proposing raising benefits. The poor, let us not forget, are always unpopular and rewarding them is therefore always unpopular. They have to be helped anyway because otherwise they become a nuisance but all parties understand that.
The Establishment is left wing to rightists and right-wing to leftists.
this statement does not accord with my experience. |
Your memory, significantly, plays you false since you cannot believe what a dickhead you used to be now that you are a dickhead of the opposite persuasion. However we solve the problem in the usual way with a Harper Challenge. Would anyone who thinks they are currently on the side of the Establishment, please write in.
| That, I believe, is how every leftist I have ever known has viewed me: As some kind of ultra-conservative dinosaur destined to die out with the remainder of my species. |
Yes, another standard position. Everybody believes the other side is on the point of dying out as the Rays of Enlightenment slowly illuminate the backwoods (or the east coast). North American liberals (and it is somewhat the same here) cannot believe how the Right keeps on stealing elections decade after decade. They have been coming up with excuse after excuse since the Secret Ballot Act was passed in eighteen something because people were being intimidated into voting Tory because the landlords' agents were monitoring their behaviour....cue twenty more years of Tory Government.
The real lefties did die out in Europe when the Commies went belly-up and we are still waiting for their next incarnation.
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TelMiles
In: London
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| Grant wrote: | | Those areas which receive the least state aid voted for the party which on past experience is most likely to give them tax cuts. |
Surely this is too general and somewhat wishful? My family have always been considered amongst the poor, and for years lived in Penge in South London. My parents have always voted Conservative, regardless of what they were offering. (my brothers and sisters tend not to bother)
_________________
Against all Gods.
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It seems to me that in Britain and here in Australia, everybody knows that the politicking of the parties is for the major part just a political game: that our lives will go on in more or less the same way and that society is not going to be turned upside down by anyone (except possibly by the Greens if they got their way).
In the US, however, (and Ishmael seems to me to reflect American attitudes rather than Canadian ones) there are large numbers of people who genuinely do think that society is really going to be turned upside down in some unspeakable fashion by what to the rest of the world looks like a little bit of social amelioration.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Would anyone who thinks they are currently on the side of the Establishment, please write in. |
I will grant that your challenge is unassailable. I don't anticipate anyone writing in - if only for the leftist veneration of the underdog.
But I do know which side of the political spectrum within my socio-economic demographic is likely to express absolute shock upon encountering a specimen who fails to echo their enthusiastic public utterances of political sentiment. Is that not telling?
And I know well enough to keep mine secret if I wish to get anywhere in the business world. I bite my lip or risk losing my job.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Ishmael wrote: | | I will grant that your challenge is unassailable. I don't anticipate anyone writing in - if only for the leftist veneration of the underdog. |
Giving this more thought, I am now second-guessing my acquiescence.
Here in Canada we are forever hearing about "Canadian values", which apparently include hostility to Christianity, guns, the USA, men, free speech and free markets, and the veneration of immigration, education and western white guilt. I could go on. Might be a fun game.
Those who would posit their values are synonymous with the national agenda are explicitly laying claim to the establishment. And they are legion.
I have no doubt that, in Canada, the left views itself as hegemonic (and properly so of course). The right is considered extreme and marginal (though for some reason always capable of suddenly taking over).
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Grant
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| I'll give you a tenuated version of the MJH Challenge then. Ask around among your friends, relations, milkmen etc and then give us the name of one of them who voted because it benefited them financially. |
The problem with your test is that only a tiny percentage of the population understand their own motives. Human beings lie about motives, not just to others but to themselves. If you went to a town in which 90% of the population have always voted Labour and asked them why, you would probably not find many who said "they give me more benefits." If you went to Weybridge and asked why they always vote Tory, few would say "because I want lower taxes."
We always dress up our self-interest to hide it from others and ourselves. Why? Because lies are so much stronger if we actually believe it ourselves.
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Grant
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Mick wrote | This assumption of yours is quite untrue, by the way, since nobody has ever been able to show that one party is better growthwise (or anywise) in the long run. Unless you have a secret statistical report...do you? |
It's certainly true that there is no evidence in Britain. I've always thought it amusing that when Thatcher was supposedly transforming our economy we grew at only 1.5% a year, compared with post-war average of 2.5%. But this is only one country in a short period of time. If you look at the entire world there is clear evidence that countries with lower taxes and smaller government are more successful than more socialist economies. (Don't bore me with exceptions, which doubtless exist.)
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| I'll give you a tenuated version of the MJH Challenge then. Ask around among your friends, relations, milkmen etc and then give us the name of one of them who voted because it benefited them financially. |
Barack pays her mortgage.
Remember. In AE, there are no special cases.
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| Grant wrote: | | If you look at the entire world there is clear evidence that countries with lower taxes and smaller government are more successful than more socialist economies. (Don't bore with me exceptions, which doubtless exist.) |
Grant's Law of Economic Growth might be applicable (more or less) to the developed world but it doesn't work universally.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| berniegreen wrote: | | The top three countries in the world in terms of economic growth at the present moment are China, Indonesia and Laos all of which have a large percentage of state capitalism and state direction. |
Growth rate is not a useful measuring stick (and don't ask me what is). Economic growth is much tougher at the leading edge than it is when one is starting from near zero.
Perhaps authoritarianism is better when one needs to play catch up? It does seem to be the system of choice in all historical instances I can recall where catch-up was required.
On the other-hand, the dramatic growth that occurred in these countries only came about when their economic systems were freed of more severe economic controls. I would suggest that the authoritarian model will reach its maximal growth limit at which point it will need to give way to even more liberal governing structures.
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Has anyone got anything to say about this idea that the Pictish carvings are a writing system rather than... er... pictures? (Essex University mathematicians say so).
I am hugely unconvinced but I'd love to hear some AE ideas.
Do the Picts need to have had a written language for them to have dominated Central and Northern Scotland from an AE point of view?
Last year I invented a game in which people had to distinguish Pictish drawings (or "writing") from contemporary Scandinavian drawings (writing?) and shall we say the difference wasn't obvious.
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