Interesting Links for 21-02-2015

[andrewducker]

• Would you like 5 million votes and 4 seats, or 1 million votes and 56 seats?
  (tags: politics uk voting )
• Netflix : Netflix Long Term View
  (tags: netflix )
• This is what happens to your brain when you give up sugar
  (tags: sugar )
• Who wants to see otters chasing a butterfly?
  Spoilers: it's you!
  (tags: otters cute )

Original post on Dreamwidth -

Comments

[heron61]

Would you like 5 million votes and 4 seats, or 1 million votes and 56 seats

That article sounds like the single best argument I've seen for (at least in the current UK) keeping first past the post voting, because the alternative means both considerably more UKIP seats and the possibility of a UKIP+Tory coalition government.

Of course, the larger problem is that politics inevitably distorts badly when you have one or more of a small number (sadly in the case of the US, one of two) political parties are actually monstrous and is supported by moderately large number of people who are in favor of monstrous policies.

[andrewducker]

If you're arguing for a particular voting system because it keeps out party X then that makes you, from my perspective, one of the bad people.

Politics should be there to ensure that everyone in the country is represented. The answer to "People having awful opinions" isn't to deny them their representation, it's to educate them and improve their situation so they don't have them any more.

[heron61]

I rather expected that response and I definitely sympathize.

My perspective is very much shaped by both the fact that for anyone remotely progressive, the last decade of US politics has largely consisted of working to keep people with deeply monstrous views and goals from being elected to national office than it has been working to elect anyone you actually support - combined with the fact that while my two highest categories in Jonathan Haidt's morality sorter are fairness & avoidance of harm, the second is, for me, considerably higher than the first.

[andrewducker]

I can understand that.

I just think that the result of the good guys saying "It's ok to limit some people' political representation, because we don't like those opinions" is for the bad guys to revisit this on them, sevenfold.

(See also, when "good" politicians say "Yes, this law we just passed could be used to bad ends, but trust us, we won't use it that way!")

[heron61]

Actually, after thinking about this for a bit, one advantage FPtP voting has is damping all forms of extremism. As polls clearly show, fewer Green and fewer UKIP MPs will be elected than would be under other sorts of voting. It seems reasonable to me that damping extremism might be a useful feature for voting in any diverse democracy, if for no other reason than that failing to do so can result in governmental paralysis.

If the vast majority of the electorate decided to stop voting or crazy people, limiting extremism wouldn't be a problem, but when you have people vastly repugnant &/or utterly delusional views running for office, limiting extremism (even if it's only least limiting the success of parties that appeal to extremists and which are most likely to have extremist candidates) might not be a bad strategy.

[andrewducker]

Except that what's happened instead is that the extremists end up inside those parties, distorting them. There are plenty of Tory MPs with reprehensible views, and plenty of Republicans likewise, rather than the parties splintering into a moderate right-wing and an extremist party.

[heron61]

None of this applies to the US. The only remotely viable 3rd party in my lifetime was a billionaire's short-lived vanity project. You'd need to do a whole lot more than change voting methods to make 3rd parties work in the US and at this point I suspect nothing short of a vast national scandal involving both parties could manage this.

For nations with more than 2 parties, my point isn't that fptp will remove people with vile ideas from the major parties, I don't really see that changing regardless of the voting method being used. Instead, my thought is that fptp keeps helps reduce the numbers of such people in power.

[andrewducker]

It very-much applies to the USA - because it's exactly what's happened where the Tea Party has hijacked large amounts of the Republicans, rather than forming their own party.

[heron61]

I don't really consider the tea-party to have hijacked the Republican party - the (barely) sub-rosa Republican platform has been based on jingoistic racism since Nixon (with religious extremism added in the late 1970s) - the tea-party is just a populare expression of exactly the same sentiments, driven by the election of a black man as President and the changing nature of US demographics