I R SERIOUS JAMES

[jamesq]

And I'll answer serious questions. Maybe.

Think of it was an interview or an opportunity for me to pontificate (god knows I love that) on a subject. Note: subjects I'm unfamiliar with my have a high degree of arm-waving and facts-pulled-from-my-ass.

But that's normal.

Comments

[oblivions.livejournal.com]

This looks like fun... except that I will inevitably end up chewing on my foot so I shall refrain.

[jamesq]

It's not a meme - you don't have to answer questions of your own.

[oblivions.livejournal.com]

No i get that. What I mean is that I will likely a) ask something really inappropriate b) word it poorly or c) just be a retard. Or possibly some combination of all of the above.

[jamesq]

Sounds like me on a date. I generally go for "all of the above".

Thinking to self: Ok, you want to impress this woman. Don't say anything inappropriate. Wait. Are you really likely to do that. I mean, what's the worse that could happen? Talk about horrifying pictures from the internet that have caused irreparable damage to your soul?"

Blurts out loud: "Don't you just hate it when someone posts goatse to a lolcat thread?"

Thinking to self: Fuck.

[oblivions.livejournal.com]

ROFL

That made me, as your comments often do, strangle on my coffee. Well done.

:D

[thekillerb69.livejournal.com]

Let's see where this goes. What are your thoughts on people trying to push "Intelligent Design" into the school system as a way of circumventing the inability to teach Creationism?

[jamesq]

Obviously, I think ID/Creationism and their ilk are bad ideas and the people pushing them are reactionary fools. Hypocritical too, because they're pushing a religious agenda while claiming not to be. I'd have less of a problem with it if they were up-front and honest about their intentions. "God created the world in seven days and want that taught because the Bible is good enough for me and tell hell with you're 'sceince'". They recognize that that's not going to fly though, so they try to dress it up.

The sort of mental gymnastics it takes to do this simply baffles me. How do you get from "We have to be morally pure to stay in God's grace" to "But we can lie and cheat - even after swearing an oath to God on the witness stand - as long as it's in the cause of pushing our agenda"? I couldn't do it - it would strike a discordant note in my mind so loud it'd drown out everything else.

But lets suppose that they'll succeed. If they do it'll be because we try to show how open-minded we are by giving both sides on any issue, even if those two sides are "knowledge" and "ignorance".

Succeeding could lead to a positive feedback loop where ID pushes enough science out of the classroom to make the average person even more prone to supporting ID. The culture wars become for polarized as you get regions where ID is in the classrooms and regions where it is not, and they talk to each other less and less. Certainly non-ID region universities are not going to accept ID region high school biology classes for credit, further polarizing the two sides.

On some of the groups I frequent, there's descriptions of Dominionist "parallel communities", so the process may well be well on it's way.

I certainly hope that doesn't happen, but I can easily imagine it. There's certainly a faction of the US religious right that would like it. Hopefully they won't gain any traction in other countries.

[conejita-diabla.livejournal.com]

What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of a party-based political system?

[jamesq]

Well, I'm not so sure it's advantages vs. disadvantages - I think it's more "fact of life" and "unintended consequences".

Political parties are, I think, an inevitable result of a representative democracy. Beyond a certain amount of population, you can't determine a candidate's character through first-hand knowledge, or even through trusted second-hand knowledge. At that point you have to use something else. Brand recognition, and "brands" in politics are political parties.

Basically, since we can't know the person, we trade in for knowing the party. We focus on the "celebrities" in the party. They become a "tribe" to most people so that it becomes less and less what the party represents in terms of policy and more that the party represents "us" vs. "them".

Pros:

• Allows one to quickly categorize candidates.
  
• Allows candidates to work together quickly without having to "negotiate" every single vote".
  
• Provides cohesiveness throughout the tenure of the government.

Cons:

• Leads itself to "us vs. them" thinking.
  
• Hamstrings more independent-minded candidates.

There are many more.

It's all because we're social animals. Brain-wise, we can handle roughly 150 social connections, past that we don't really know a person well enough to do any good. This is great if you're in a bronze-age village - you know who the boss is and can probably talk to them directly. Past that and the only way to organize is with some kind of artificial bureaucracy. Political parties are one way of doing that.

Do we absolutely have to have them? No, there's no technical reason why a party-less system couldn't work. I just think it'll get out-competed by people who organize. That's social evolution.

[conejita-diabla.livejournal.com]

"I just think it'll get out-competed by people who organize. That's social evolution."

Christ. I am, if anything, even more depressed than before reading about that. Because as far as I'm concerned, the party system is doomed and holds no hope in hell of actually working well and for the public good.

Ugh. I'm growing less and less sure of how to function...

[jamesq]

There's nothing wrong with parties in general. I think the trick is to have then be a certain size: Small enough that there are multiple parties (More then Canada, less then Italy) and two-party coalitions are the norm. This keeps the government from running roughshod over the country.

They should also be large enough to have their own internal checks and balances, so that the party mechanism isn't taken over by a small group with an agenda.

I think if you got it just right, parties would be able to change to meet new social realities, but they'd do it slowly enough that you lose the "brand recognition". This would take constant effort to prevent them from either going to a two-party state, like the USA; or a so-many-parties-nobody-can-keep-track-of-them, like Italy.

[thekillerb69.livejournal.com]

In all honesty I don't think it's the party system that's the main problem, it the "First past the post" system. Canada really needs to implement a representative system that allows more than the big kids on the block a chance to play. Just some numbers here (and keep in mind they were gleaned from the intertubes so they need to be taken with a grain of salt).

Below are the main parties, followed by the percent of seat they held at election time, followed by "popular opinion" percents (how much of the vote each group actually got across the country)

Conservative: 40% seats held, 36% popular opinion
Liberal: 33% seats held, 27% popular opinion
The Bloq: 17% seats held, 6% popular opinion
NDP: 9% seats held, 16% popular opinion
Green: 0% seats held, 11% popular opinion

Pretty drastic at the lower end of the field, eh?

[jamesq]

That gets beyond whether parties are good or bad and into, "parties are a reality, how do we handle them now".

I would like to see a system where half the seats are proportional representation and half are geographical first-past-the-post. evilscientist describes a good one on his blog (Jason - do you have a URL for that?).

I don't think it's going to happen for the simple reason that the big parties benefit from the status quo.

Besides, it'd be nice to have my vote count for more then just a voice in the wilderness.

[ladyerwyn.livejournal.com]

What do you think will happen if for some reason Obama doesn't win our presidential campaign and we get stuck with McSame and Palin?

[jamesq]

Some reason? I don't think Obama's position is so strong that winning is inevitable - I thought Gore would win in 2004. The Democrats can still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. See Adlai Stevenson for why.

Ok, so hypothetically, McCain wins the presidency. What next.

There are three wings to the Republican party. They each grab a piece of the pie:

The corporate/kleptocratic wing continue to work towards there being no barriers to business. That's worked out so well with the banking industry and the environment. The rich get rich, the poor get poorer and more of the middle-class join them. The country, currently trembling on the edge of a depression, plummets in.

The hawks want to continue in Iraq. I don't think they'll go after Iran as well, but that's only because it's so screamingly obvious what a bad idea that is. On the other hand, Iran has been sabre-rattling, and they have powerful friends - they might accidentally provoke McCain into a fight when their intent was merely to rally supporters in their own country.

Note that a war with Iran is likely to cause China to react (they get a lot of their fuel from Iran) with an economic backlash.

The religious-right want control of the Supreme Court. Until now, they haven't had it because several of the justices have been hanging on for dear life (Thanks to lihan161051 for pointing that out to me). Roe v. Wade gets dragged back out into the national spotlight. It becomes a "states-rights" thing and suddenly women can't get an abortion in most of the "red" states. Other dominionist wank-fantasies get expanded to, like restricted access to birth control.

Now the thing about McCain is, he seems to be 2/3 hawk and 1/3 corporate, so the biggest danger is continued war. This is bad for America, but not as bad as a depression.

The nightmare scenario is McCain wins and then dies early in his term to leave Palin as President, with enough time to really fuck things up. She's big in the religious-right, so that will be her focus. She's also nowhere near politically astute enough to keep the other two factions from doing whatever the hell they want. Basically, you get a helping of war and depression with a double serving of state religion. Whee.

The best you could hope for would be a McCain that is mentally healthy who acknowledges (to himself at least) that everything he did, he did to win. But now that he's at the prize he'll tell all the devils he bargained with to go hang. This includes Palin, who he (hopefully) shuffles off somewhere where she can do the least harm.

But I'm not that hopeful. I think the USA is in for a repeat of the thirties, with the added benefit of easier access to guns.

[thekillerb69.livejournal.com]

On that note of Palin becoming President...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anxkrm9uEJk