Category Archives: Politics

Political alignment, as told by OkCupid

Stupid test.

Stupid test.

I did a political alignment quiz and came out as 70% permissive social liberal, and 81% permissive economic conservative. And that apparently libertarian. I’m sort of okay with that, but I would have rather been placed dead on the capitalist/liberal line.

As always though, some of the questions were dumb and I answered them wrongly. By that I mean one of the questions was:

Being poor and black is an advantage in getting into college.

And I chose “agree”. I realise now that the question was asking “do you think black people get life easier because they’re black?” Which I would have answered “disagree” to. Other questions like that had meanings which weren’t clear, so I answered the question “wrong”.

Anyway, go do the test.

You are all mindless sheep. Yes, even you.

In Ender’s Game there’s a subplot wherein Ender’s older brother and sister decide that there’s something wrong with the world, and they’re too smart to sit by and watch humanity edge its way to another world war. They jump onto the Internet and start talking on message boards using the  pseudonyms Demosthenes and Locke, just passing their views around. Both children — who’re barely into their teens at this point — start to amass followers, slowly at first, but then they’re invited to write for professional, upstanding establishments. By then, Demosthenes and Locke have built up their own cult groups, with polar opposite politics, and either one could say something no matter how outrageous and their followers would accept it unquestioningly.

(Please go and read the books.)

I wondered if that was possible today. Could two single people take to the Internet and split the entire populous of the globe into two separate groups. No, was my initial reaction, surely people can’t be that dumb, and sheeplike, that they can’t make their own minds up.

I mentally retracted that thought immediately. Manipulating people to your point of view isn’t that hard.

I’m a fairly intelligent person so figured I wouldn’t be bought around to someone thinking blindly, but I guess I over estimated myself. If you’ve been following my blog you’ll know that I’ve been playing with objectivism, and it actually fits into my political philosophy and general ethos really well. And then the whole health care thing kicked off in America and I felt like I had to pick a side. Yaron Brook – head of the Ayn Rand Institute – has so far been the guy I turn to for arguments and ideas which have always nicely fitted into how I feel.

So, this time I just decided to assume his stance without doing much research. National health care would enslave doctors, give substandard care, make patients spend years in queues just to be refused care because the government doesn’t think they’re worth saving. All things I agreed with (and some still do) and just accepted because Brook has always been a good source for me before.

But because it’s been such a large issue over at reddit, I’ve heard hundreds of arguments most of which I could just wave away. But some really hit home, and I couldn’t justify the capitalist system much longer. Only after a few days research into stuff (and a huge push from watching Sicko), I reluctantly started to realise that maybe universal health care isn’t that bad.

But most people won’t bother, or aren’t smart enough, to go and research how I did. They’d have just followed their mentor’s lead unquestioningly, like I almost did.

“I’m voting Labour because my parents voted Labour, and I’m working class, so there’s no one else I can vote for,” is something that I hear all the time. Regardless of their policies, people will stick with the party that’s gained their trust with catchy motos that sound cheery enough. Labour could unleash Three Waters, admit to it after most the population has been killed, and they’d still get votes from those loyalists.

You can get the general principle for this from watching The Real Hustle, or any heist film. You do something that makes your mark trust you, something honest, or even just something they want to hear. Your mark can be one person, or an entire country. Demosthenes did this by reminding the country of the imminent threat from Russia. Using fear to make them trust him. “You have to follow my ideas, because they’re the only way we’re going to avoid another world war in which you’ll probably die.” Locke did the same by being logical, calm, and rational. People ended up trusting both of them.

Shortly afterwards either of the pair could have said literally anything, and their followers would follow.

Today, I don’t think it would work out the way it would in the book. Once someone is hailed as a celebrity, they quickly generate circles in which they’re infamous, where people hate them just because they’re well known. My Chemical Romance aren’t  bad band, but when they blasted to success out of no where people started hating on them. Twilight isn’t an awful book, but it’s hated by people who have never read it for similar reasons.

This is the age of celebrity, where people are fickle. And so a two-party system will never work. There are far too many demographics that need to be heard and, yes, manipulated. So maybe not just Demosthenes and Locke, but throw in a Galiani, and a Lysias and I think it would work.

The moral here is that you need to actively disagree with everything you hear. It’s your moral obligation to question and judge things (there’s a little Rand for you). Find your own views and don’t just sit in labels like “socialist New Labour”, or “Christian”, or “Republican”. When our Shadow Work Secretary says, “Worklessness has become a generational problem” don’t just agree with her and then immediately go out and vote for the Conservatives. Go and research if she’s telling the truth (she obviously is in this quote), and then go and check their other policies.

Gosh, dammit people, think.

Competition in services and employment

Although I usually talk myself back into objectivism by the end of it (and I’m sure that’s how this post will turn out), I do always think about the consequences of various things. A truly free market, for instance. An article about Google Maps being sued in France because they’re offering their service for free, so competing services can’t charge.

I think this small company has a point. The two offer pretty much exactly the same services to businesses, only Google does it for free. Google’s able to do it for free because they’re okay with making a loss, even massive losses if necessary. Bottin Cartographes, the guys suing, say that Google just wants to kick everyone else out of the market and then maybe they’ll start charging once there are no alternatives. Which’ll give them a monopoly.

Much like if Asda decided to give away all their products for free, paying for it out of their past profits and reserves, until every other supermarket decides they just can’t compete and go under. Then Asda could start charging £100 for a can of beans to start making their money back. You’d pay it because there’d be no where else.

Of course, they’d never do that because they’d just lose too much money far too quickly. But for Google giving away their data in an API only costs them a bit of bandwidth. For a company that makes billions of pounds a year from advertising, Google could probably go forever before they’d run out of money and have to start charging for their services.

That’s not a possibility though. There are other companies that too can give away their maps and data for free. Yahoo, although faltering, can still offer the same service. Bing maps, Maps.com, Mapquest. I’d say there’s enough competition in these waters. All of them giving the same service and all of them embracing revolutionary business models.

So, once again, I guess an unregulated market seems to stand on its feet. And it looks like Bottin Cartographes are going to go the way of every other business that refuses to innovate.

Another problem though is exactly that, how do the innovate? You need fresh blood that isn’t afraid to try quirky things. No discredit to the people at Bottin, I’m sure they’re good at what they do, but maybe they just don’t understand how things work around these parts. So they have to go job hunting for those people, and the prime place to get their from is universities.

Therein lies the problem… It’s no secret that Google and Microsoft, and more and more so Apple, try to get as many graduates as they can. Google especially, with them hiring more engineers than they actually even need, just so they have the whole ‘class of 2009′ set, I guess. Students know that when they actually get to Google they’ll probably get mundane customer service jobs, and maybe not see any code for a good few months, but who cares? It’s fucking Google! The enticement is just too much for them.

And that leaves none left for the smaller start-ups, or people like Bottin that really need a new a revitalising wave.

My first though to combat that was that maybe businesses that need the graduates could sponsor them, paying for their tuition fees on condition that when they graduate they come to work for them for a reasonable rate (considering they just paid for your schooling) for a certain number of years or something. Free tuition and a definite job at the end of the course would be something I’d snap at.

But at $38,925 a year, I doubt a start-up could afford that much for one kid, who could fail horribly and not be able to work for you or even pay the money back. It’d be a huge risk that no one but these big companies could afford – and they’re exactly the opposite of the people that should be getting these graduates.

A lesser investment could be something strongly advertising jobs around campuses. Or even just being in close contact with the university’s employment centre. I don’t imagine that a cool company like Twitter or Tumblr, even though they’re not big high rollers, would have a problem getting the right employees. But not all businesses can be that cool. There needs to be professional businesses that maybe just inherit a boring reputation. How would they entice students to work for them when they’re competing for them with Google?

Twitter and politics

John Prescott decided to write an article commenting on how politicians use social media, off the back of Cameron’s “twat” remark. He said that having to get your point across in 140 characters forces them to be concise and to have an actual opinion, not avoid the question.

One of the comments to his article was

Yeah, more empty sloganeering is exactly what the country needs.

–thaumaturge

And I can see their point. The example that Prescott gave – “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” – was a bad one. That’s not really the use of twitter.

Cameron apologises for saying offensive 4 letter word on radio – TORY? http://tinyurl.com/mtd6sj

–@johnprescott

That’s more like a twitter usage. It’s not a party policy message because there’re better places for those to go. The limited characters really isn’t enough for those. But a quick quip, off the cuff, makes the politician more human. Someone we can relate to better and get to know on a more personal level.

I want more politicians to be using the Internet like this. You can have an actual conversation with them on twitter and sometimes they even reply. People have to remember, and respect, that you’re voting for an actual person, not a party. Just because a person is a member of the Labour party, it doesn’t mean they back national ID cards, for instance. Voters need to know who the person is, not just what party they’re in.

As always where politics is concerned, people are idiots. The comments to that article could have been a nice debate about the uses of the Internet within our executive, but instead they turned mostly into people complaining about Labour. The damn article had nothing to do with Labour. STFU.