The ongoing train wreck in British politics that is their effort to decide how they're going to split from the European Union doesn't affect me personally much, but I've still been following it with some interest. A parliamentary system such as theirs doesn't usually develop the sort of gridlock which is paralyzing it now.
For anyone that's not familiar with it, normally a prime minister whose proposals lost by a wide margin (i.e. what just happened to the Brexit deal) would expect to lose a vote of no confidence shortly afterward. The entire point is that the prime minister is supposed to command majority support in the parliament, after all. In this case, though, Mrs. May's Conservative Party doesn't particularly like the deal in question, but is still willing to support her as prime minister over other alternatives, and so the normal consequences aren't happening.
Which leaves the British government unable to function in the normal way, and without any other obvious means to either get back to that normal or find a new standard. Not reaching any deal at all by the deadline is a real possibility, as is a deal passing with mostly the opposition parties' support instead of the majority parties. It depends on exactly how much those opposition parties want to avoid the no deal scenario, how much they're willing to help out Mrs. May's government, and what they can get in exchange for their support.
I'm calling those answers "probably a lot", "not much at all", and "who knows; making deals with the opposition isn't that common", which isn't as helpful in actually predicting the future as we might wish. Hopefully they'll still manage to avoid the worst case scenario.
Thursday, January 17, 2019
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
Democratic Coalitions
FiveThirtyEight continues to do an awesome job with their coverage of US elections; they just recently posted several articles analyzing the candidates for the Democratic presidential primary.
... It's all still quite speculative, of course, and as the article warns, there's a lot of stuff in it that will probably look a bit questionable in retrospect. But for an analysis conducted a full year and a half away from the nomination, I think it's decent. It's a pretty good way to think about what the primary candidates have to do and how they could go about doing it, if nothing else - and it's a chance for the Democrats to start thinking about which groups they belong to and what coalitions they'd accept.
I find myself mostly in agreement with the idea that the "mainstream" or "most likely" candidates (e.g. Biden and Sanders) are probably weaker than they look, although I don't know if I really think that means one of the others will take it instead, given how low the name recognition is for everyone else. Then again, there's plenty of time for that to change.
... It's all still quite speculative, of course, and as the article warns, there's a lot of stuff in it that will probably look a bit questionable in retrospect. But for an analysis conducted a full year and a half away from the nomination, I think it's decent. It's a pretty good way to think about what the primary candidates have to do and how they could go about doing it, if nothing else - and it's a chance for the Democrats to start thinking about which groups they belong to and what coalitions they'd accept.
I find myself mostly in agreement with the idea that the "mainstream" or "most likely" candidates (e.g. Biden and Sanders) are probably weaker than they look, although I don't know if I really think that means one of the others will take it instead, given how low the name recognition is for everyone else. Then again, there's plenty of time for that to change.
Tuesday, January 15, 2019
Political Shifts
I do feel a bit weird commenting on internal debates among conservatives, since it feels like that shouldn't really be any of my business (given that I'm not particularly conservative). However, the various ways that some conservatives are responding to Tucker Carlson's recent comments (plus, of course, the monologue itself) offers not just some interesting thoughts on how conservatism might develop from here, but also some food for thought on what's going to happen to liberals in response.
Part of that is because there are parts of Carlson's piece (in between ridiculous misrepresentations of Democrats' priorities, some faulty logic about how we ended up here, and a frankly horrifying vision of how we should fix it) that I am generally able to agree with regarding the degree to which government should be trying to affect our society. If this is the sort of thing we can expect more of from prominent conservatives, there's a world in which they end up drifting to the left as far as government intervention in the economy is concerned. Possibly to the point of actually teaming up with the sort of liberal that cares more about reforming the economy than they do about social justice, although that's a bit of a stretch.
That would, though, leave a lot of mainstream left and right wing people out of that group, and if they wanted to exert any useful opposing force, they might find themselves teaming up as well. That would most likely involve the liberals abandoning some of their efforts to exert control over the economy (perhaps by reasoning that social pressure on companies to do the right thing could make up for the lack of government involvement), and involve the conservatives giving up on some of their opposition to socially liberal ideas.
Basically, we'd shift from a horizontal split on the Nolan Chart to a vertical split. Still a two-party system, but different coalitions and splits between them.
Now, do I think that sort of shift is actually likely anytime soon? Nope.
In the end, I think a lot of conservatives, even if they agree that government policies need to be designed to address various social problems, will still mostly argue that government involvement is what screwed things up in the first place, and simply removing government from as much of our lives as possible will fix the problem eventually. Carlson's piece might convince them to think more carefully about the limited ways in which they are willing to use the government, but I don't think it's going to get them to start turning to government policy so much that they can find common ground with socialists. Similar things can be said about the liberals here; even if they continue to use free market arguments regarding the economic dominance of big cities and pressure on corporate decisions, I don't think we're going to see them abandoning the idea that the government has a major role to play and drifting towards libertarianism.
But I think it's possible enough to speculate on, even if it is quite unlikely to happen soon.
Part of that is because there are parts of Carlson's piece (in between ridiculous misrepresentations of Democrats' priorities, some faulty logic about how we ended up here, and a frankly horrifying vision of how we should fix it) that I am generally able to agree with regarding the degree to which government should be trying to affect our society. If this is the sort of thing we can expect more of from prominent conservatives, there's a world in which they end up drifting to the left as far as government intervention in the economy is concerned. Possibly to the point of actually teaming up with the sort of liberal that cares more about reforming the economy than they do about social justice, although that's a bit of a stretch.
That would, though, leave a lot of mainstream left and right wing people out of that group, and if they wanted to exert any useful opposing force, they might find themselves teaming up as well. That would most likely involve the liberals abandoning some of their efforts to exert control over the economy (perhaps by reasoning that social pressure on companies to do the right thing could make up for the lack of government involvement), and involve the conservatives giving up on some of their opposition to socially liberal ideas.
Basically, we'd shift from a horizontal split on the Nolan Chart to a vertical split. Still a two-party system, but different coalitions and splits between them.
Now, do I think that sort of shift is actually likely anytime soon? Nope.
In the end, I think a lot of conservatives, even if they agree that government policies need to be designed to address various social problems, will still mostly argue that government involvement is what screwed things up in the first place, and simply removing government from as much of our lives as possible will fix the problem eventually. Carlson's piece might convince them to think more carefully about the limited ways in which they are willing to use the government, but I don't think it's going to get them to start turning to government policy so much that they can find common ground with socialists. Similar things can be said about the liberals here; even if they continue to use free market arguments regarding the economic dominance of big cities and pressure on corporate decisions, I don't think we're going to see them abandoning the idea that the government has a major role to play and drifting towards libertarianism.
But I think it's possible enough to speculate on, even if it is quite unlikely to happen soon.
Monday, January 14, 2019
Changing Capitalism
One of the random posts that went through my news feed with the new year was a nice little thing about what we'd remove from the world if we could change one thing. A fairly innocuous and unsurprising post for this time of year, all things considered... except for some of the answers, of course.
A number of people used it as a nice way to talk about things that were holding them back and things they'd like to do differently in the future. However, a number of people also used it to make statements about some significant things they'd like to remove from the world - greed, capitalism, money, or oil were all named as things by some of them.
Which immediately attracted my attention, because I actually don't agree with the notion at all, particularly as it applies to the specific resources which are often sources of conflict.
Here's the thing: Many of these things, particularly the actual resources, have provided great benefits. There are entire regions of the world that would not be easily habitable without gas-fired heating and electrical systems, for example. Capitalism itself turns out to be an okay way to allocate resources and a better way to self-correct that allocation when something isn't useful or desired than most other economic systems.
The caveat, of course, is that the above doesn't mean these things are an unalloyed good. Over-committing to one specific solution or helpful resource can put us in a bad situation when it comes time to change to a better one or try to address problems with what we have, for example. And while there are a lot of ways in which capitalism is self-correcting, there are a lot of circumstances in which it isn't (monopolies and limited definitions of value being the most prominent examples to me); those situations can't be fixed by purely capitalist solutions. That would be why the vast majority of successful societies have some form of mixed economy instead of pure capitalism, and believing our economic and societal structures are flawless and shouldn't be (or even can't be) improved further seems like unjustified confidence verging on stupidity to me.
But we should be aware of what we've already got and do the best we can to ensure our changes are actually improvements. That's not easy to do (or to agree on), but it's worth the effort.
A number of people used it as a nice way to talk about things that were holding them back and things they'd like to do differently in the future. However, a number of people also used it to make statements about some significant things they'd like to remove from the world - greed, capitalism, money, or oil were all named as things by some of them.
Which immediately attracted my attention, because I actually don't agree with the notion at all, particularly as it applies to the specific resources which are often sources of conflict.
Here's the thing: Many of these things, particularly the actual resources, have provided great benefits. There are entire regions of the world that would not be easily habitable without gas-fired heating and electrical systems, for example. Capitalism itself turns out to be an okay way to allocate resources and a better way to self-correct that allocation when something isn't useful or desired than most other economic systems.
The caveat, of course, is that the above doesn't mean these things are an unalloyed good. Over-committing to one specific solution or helpful resource can put us in a bad situation when it comes time to change to a better one or try to address problems with what we have, for example. And while there are a lot of ways in which capitalism is self-correcting, there are a lot of circumstances in which it isn't (monopolies and limited definitions of value being the most prominent examples to me); those situations can't be fixed by purely capitalist solutions. That would be why the vast majority of successful societies have some form of mixed economy instead of pure capitalism, and believing our economic and societal structures are flawless and shouldn't be (or even can't be) improved further seems like unjustified confidence verging on stupidity to me.
But we should be aware of what we've already got and do the best we can to ensure our changes are actually improvements. That's not easy to do (or to agree on), but it's worth the effort.
Thursday, January 10, 2019
Townspeople and Politicians
The Wall Street Journal ran an article earlier this week about how Congressman Will Hurd (R-TX) managed to win reelection in one of the closest victories the Republicans managed in 2018. There's a lot of interesting stuff in that article; a lot of it makes me question whether very many other Republicans will actually be willing to lean towards the center in the same way. I think the answer is "not many"... but that's not actually the point I want to focus on.
To be fair, that doesn't rule out the idea that both groups are stuck in their own bubbles - and politicians not capable of understanding what their constituents are going through is definitely a worse problem to have than the reverse. But it's important to remember that the voters can have that problem too, particularly if we want to have politicians that can help lead the country rather than just blindly following the currents of public opinion.
The one detail I am going to focus on is from this quote:
One lesson of such tours is that Capitol Hill is a bubble. At a taco joint in conservative Castroville, Mr. Hurd asks a breakfast group for their thoughts on the Saudi killing of Jamal Khashoggi, and the table gets pretty quiet. That subject is remote compared with a future bypass on U.S. Route 90. “What people talk about in D.C. is different from what people talk about here,” Mr. Hurd says in the car afterward. “Man, Khashoggi has dominated Washington, D.C., for a month. None of them brought it up.”
While I can see the point the author's going for, that reads a whole lot to me like "these people are too deep into their own bubble to realize or care about what's going on in the wider world". It's kind of ironic that they have exactly the same problem, in that sense, that we're complaining about everyone in Washington DC having.
To be fair, that doesn't rule out the idea that both groups are stuck in their own bubbles - and politicians not capable of understanding what their constituents are going through is definitely a worse problem to have than the reverse. But it's important to remember that the voters can have that problem too, particularly if we want to have politicians that can help lead the country rather than just blindly following the currents of public opinion.
Wednesday, January 9, 2019
Speedrunning for Charity
Every time I can, I make a point of watching the events that Games Done Quick puts on. Usually I only remember to look for it after the event is already mostly over, so I'm doing fairly well to have caught on relatively early in the week this time.
... But I'm getting ahead of myself. For anyone that doesn't know, Games Done Quick is a charity organization which raises money by gathering volunteers to play games as fast as they possibly can, stream it and their commentary online for people to watch, and using various incentives to solicit donations from the viewers. They're doing this 24/7 for the entire week, and the donations are going to benefit the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
Also, "as fast as possible" usually turns out to be downright ridiculous; watching these people complete games that took me tens of hours to complete normally in two or three is always amusing to watch. It's best when I actually am familiar with the game they're playing, but even unfamiliar games are fun to watch (and sometimes that ends with me deciding to play it myself).
If you like gaming, or like seeing people spend a ridiculous amount of time and effort to do fun and interesting things in new ways, it's probably worth a look. And if you can, it's definitely worth a donation.
Wednesday, January 2, 2019
New Year's Post: 2019
Happy (belated) New Year!
I've never really been one for resolutions, so I'm not really going to list any here. I like to make sure the goals I set are achievable, and most resolutions I've seen aren't. I suppose I could try to fix that by making sure I set achievable goals - there are some things I would like to do, certainly - but I'd rather just be more private about them.
Anyway, I'll just get back to listening to some of the music I found over my break - including some from NHK's Kohaku Uta Gassen (紅白歌合戦), which I am actually kind of embarrassed I didn't know about earlier given how much I like Japanese music. Definitely worth listening to some of it for anyone else who likes Japanese music!
I've never really been one for resolutions, so I'm not really going to list any here. I like to make sure the goals I set are achievable, and most resolutions I've seen aren't. I suppose I could try to fix that by making sure I set achievable goals - there are some things I would like to do, certainly - but I'd rather just be more private about them.
Anyway, I'll just get back to listening to some of the music I found over my break - including some from NHK's Kohaku Uta Gassen (紅白歌合戦), which I am actually kind of embarrassed I didn't know about earlier given how much I like Japanese music. Definitely worth listening to some of it for anyone else who likes Japanese music!
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