Too Tired to Write, part 3 of N

So I just had a very very very long day. As evidence, I present the current time: 01:53. It’s already tomorrow and has been for nearly two hours.

On a day like this I would normally not bother to write a blog post, but as it turns out this I kind of had my shit together today and wound up accomplishing absolutely everything I set out to do. Except write the blog post.

So unlike most very long days, if I can just string together a few syllables for the blog I can call this a Perfect Day.

And I guess that was it.

Goodnight.

Coin Toss

Just a little addition to yesterday’s post, regarding voter apathy. There was just an election in PEI that came down to two votes. And on the recount, it was a tie! Which means it came down to a coin toss.

The loser of the coin toss is considering taking it to court. But although the results weren’t final until the recount, I think the results are final now, which means that the newly elected member will sit in legislature during any court case or appeals. Kind of a fait accompli.

Now granted, this was in PEI. The most overrepresented province in the country, where there are three times as many representatives for the population as you’ll find in BC or Alberta. That election might have had only a few thousand votes cast. But still. A tie.

There are probably a lot of people in PEI who regret not voting today. And hopefully the story spreads widely enough that people throughout the country are more likely to vote.

Fair Vote

Tonight I went to a presentation from Fair Vote Canada on proportional representation. It featured a talk from Professor Wayne Broughton, followed by a Q&A with representatives from three local political parties. Norah Bowman, Kelowna / Lake Country Candidate from the NDP; Wes Forgione, Outreach Director from the Liberals; and Robert Mellalieu, Financial Agent for the Greens.

No representative from the Conservatives. But that’s not really a shock.

So, I voted for the STV when it was proposed in 2005 and 2009. But I didn’t really think it was explained well, and I was mostly just voting against the current First Past the Post (FPTP) system rather than for a particular alternative. So I knew going in that I had half-baked and uninformed opinions, and I hoped I might learn a little.

The basic problem with the present system is that it gives enormous power to parties that have only marginal pluralities rather than majorities. Only a handful governments in Canadian history have had majority support, the last was 30 years ago. It’s much more common for a party to eke out a plurality of 40% to 45%, which FPTP translates into a majority of Parliament.

The most egregious examples of this are the 2005 Liberals, 2011 Conservatives, and 2015 Alberta NDP, which got their majorities with less than 40% of the popular vote.

Another problem, albeit less common, is that when the seats aren’t well distributed it can sometimes enable a party to form a majority of seats when it lacks even a plurality of votes… when one of their opponents has more popular support. At the provincial level this happened in BC in 1996, in Quebec in 1998, and in New Brunswick in 2006.

Wayne described several different systems of proportional representation, with examples of countries where they are used. Single Transferable Vote, the system from the BC referendum, seemed needlessly complex, enough so that I can’t really describe it here. So perhaps that deserved to fail. It’s sole advantage seems to be that it could keep the current districts.

Mixed-member proportional looked a fair bit more favourable. This is where there are fewer, larger districts, with multiple representatives from each. For example, a district with 5 representatives. A party with a slim majority in that district might get 3 seats, with 2 going to their rival. Or perhaps a party with the plurality would get 2 seats, and each of their rivals might get 1 seat. It’s a system that gets increasingly proportional as district size increases, offset by the decrease in local representation… so a balance has to be found somehow.

Once the lecture was done the party representatives came out for an extended Q&A session. It will probably not shock you to hear that I liked the NDP and Green reps the most. The Green and Liberal reps had the disadvantage of not being the candidate, but the Green rep held things up OK well the Liberal rep wasn’t willing to commit to anything on his candidate’s behalf. He made it through the whole Q&A without saying anything substantive at all.

There were a few standout questions. At the start someone asked why the STV referendum failed… it turns out that the bar was too high. It needed 60% support, and only got 58%. I’d known that already… but I hadn’t realized that the 60% threshold was chosen by the sitting government, specifically to be an unattainable goal. Knowing that it’s amazing how close it came.

Someone asked about the timeline for the change. All parties were planning to address the issue if victorious in this year’s election. None could commit to succeeding, of course.

Several people asked about issues of voter apathy… all representatives offered some platitudes about increasing youth engagement and political awareness, Norah offered some specifics about having student clubs and the like. All seemed to distrust the Australian model of mandatory voting, except for the Liberal rep who didn’t seem to have ever heard of such a thing.

The Q&A was derailed several times by people trying to deliver polemics rather than asking questions. Luckily the microphones were positioned so that they had to at least try to face the speakers. A few spent their whole talks addressing the audience, and we couldn’t really hear them.

I’ve never seen these sorts of non-questioning questioners dealt with effectively, but I think maybe the award show model could work. Start playing them off at 10 second, if they hit 20 seconds send someone up to wrestle the microphone out of their hands.

All in all, a decent evening. Very informative. Didn’t really change my mind at all about anything. Hopefully that means that, rather than just being set in my ways, I actually had better opinions going in than I gave myself credit for.

Conspiracies

The new episode of LUEE just came out, and they're talking about Moon Landing conspiracy theories. It owes a pretty big debt to the Mythbusters episode, which they acknowledge a few times. But it's well worth listening to even if you've already seen the Mythbusters cover it.

Besides the usual suspects, they address a conspiracy theory I hadn't heard of before... the "That's No Moon" theory, from David Icke, he of the reptilian overlords fame.

And there's a fascinating discussion at the start covering conspiracy theories more generally. In particular, why some people believe them despite the lack of evidence. They did a great job of covering all the bases... confirmation bias, the feeling of superiority, that sort of thing.

But there's one obvious reason for believing in conspiracies that they didn't mention. Perhaps of was too obvious to mention.

Sometimes the conspiracy theories are right.

Oh, not reptiloids, and not the moon landing hoax. Nearly all conspiracy theories are untrue. But there are also a few things that were conspiracy theories until they turned out to be true.

Take this list, for example: 10 Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out To Be True. It crossed my Facebook feed this morning... that's convenient. A little too convenient, perhaps...

I can't personally verify that all of those really did turn out to be true, of course. And for some of the well established ones, like the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, I don't know if there were rumours circulating before the facts became public.

The last one though, the mass surveillance, that hits home. Because back in the early 2000s I really did think that those people talking about emails and phone calls being intercepted were just conspiracy theorists. It turned out to be true... not just a little bit true, but more than anyone had imagined.

And there are others not mentioned in this article, that have come out in court cases or declassified documents. Like Reagan arming the Contras, or Nixon sabotaging the Paris Peace Accords, or Stalin spying in embassies. Or so many others... things that are never considered conspiracy theories anymore because they are just a part of history, as obvious in hindsight as anything done openly.

There's a risk of coming off endorsing the conspiracy theorists here... "They Laughed at Galileo, but he was proved right in the end!" But I think it's important to remember that behind all the wacky conspiracy theories you can sometimes find some reasonable conspiracy hypotheses.

And the wacky theories can feed off of reality. There would probably be a lot fewer 9-11 truthers if a staged Casus Belli wasn't one of the oldest tricks in the book.

The Thrill Is Gone

Happy Victoria Day! Be happy because it’s a day off. Be happy because it’s now summer… except here, where it’s raining, which doesn’t count.

But whatever you do, don’t be happy because of Victoria.

I’m not a big fan of monarchy. In fact, I think I’ve been a member of Citizens for a Canadian Republic for over half my life by now.

There are a lot of perfectly good reasons to distrust monarchy. Some are universal, some are limited to the present system. For example, there is the “they aren’t really Canadian” argument. But I think I’d be opposed to a local monarchy just as much. And there’s disliking one particular monarch or heir, but I can’t think of anyone I’d like all that much.

More generally there’s the basic principle of not entrusting anyone with political power unless there are ways to get rid of them. With elected officials, you can vote the bums out, at least eventually. Even those positions that aren’t term-limited have to face the music eventually. With monarchies the traditional way to remove a disliked ruler is by decapitation, but I don’t think that would work very well these days. Plus I’m generally against the death penalty anyway.

The counterargument to that last point is that our monarchs don’t have any real power anyway… but all you need to do is look at Charles’s declassified correspondences to disprove that. Actually, you don’t even need to read them. The simple fact of having classified communication channels to high levels of government is proof enough. A truly powerless monarch would be treated by the government in exactly the same way as the King of Pop or B.B. King (RIP).

I think the only monarchy I’d accept is one where I’m the king… and as long as there’s at least one other person with the same opinion that makes it poor system.

Coming Out of the Woodwork

The Tsarnaev sentence has come down, and it’s death. I wrote about this back in April… I find it very disappointing, but not surprising. It appears that since then the opinions of Massachusetts have not turned in favour of capital punishment.

I’m not surprised by the verdict, but I have been surprised by the some of the reactions. It has been a very polarizing verdict. People I otherwise respect are cheering the verdict, and generally for terrible reasons.

There seems to be a trend of people who dislike with capital punishment in general, but want it in this specific case. What they should realize is that every case will look like this if it’s known in enough detail. Everyone personally affected will have that emotional reaction to a case.

This is where you need to examine your reasons for being for or against capital punishment. If you are against capital punishment because of one specific case you know of where it was a bad idea, that’s not a very good reason to oppose the general case. If you are for capital punishment because of one specific case where it was a good idea, that not a very good reason to support the general case.

There are other reasons that can work better, though. Things like whether you trust or distrust the government with that sort of power… and if the answer is trust, whether you trust or distrust the next government with that sort of power.

Things like whether you think the police and prosecutors are acting in good faith… and whether you would support the death penalty for prosecutors who got it wrong.

Whether you think it does or doesn’t act as a deterrent. And how much evidence that conclusion is based on, and what you would do if new evidence came to light.

And if that doesn’t work… well,  I guess at least it’s good for pruning the dead wood out of the social media accounts, in much the same way as Baltimore and Ferguson have been.

Thinking Too Much

I could have spent today writing a blog post… researching, compiling sources, trying to come up with some sort of original thought… but it was too sunny. The UV Index was 4, the Fire Hazard Index was High, and the Ennio Morricone Index was “Il Deserto”.

Plus, thinking is getting a little too dangerous these days. Apparently it can cause cancer! I'm keeping that link handy for every day like this. Today I decided to reduce that risk, and spent the day outside. There’s no way to get cancer from outside, right?