A few fires started in 2011 that absolutely have not been put out yet, more or less across the entire gamut of “stuff that matters”. Our local mainstream media may have made it look like my fellow New Zealanders were living in some sort of stupor where the only thing that mattered was that John Key had a nice smile and that Dan Carter couldn’t make the footy finals, but that certainly wasn’t what was on the minds of *my* friends. So here is a really quick overview of a few interesting things that are (still) going on at the moment, that you may or may not be aware of.

Media: It’s increasingly clear that you can’t trust what you read. Anyone paying attention has known this for years, but the fact that more people are becoming aware of it indicates things are in for a bit of a shakeup. Or more of a shakeup. 4 more arrests in the Murdoch empire today. And I expect more in the weeks to come. And the impact of the internet on media, both news and entertainment, and increasing hybrids inbetween, is a subject for more books and blog posts than you can possibly imagine. Check out Jeff Jarvis. Or Clay Shirky. Or my friend Richard’s awesome ReadWriteWeb. But one thing I’ve noticed recently is the absolutely hopeless [1] coverage, particularly from the business press, on the world of..

Modern Finance and Macroeconomics: I read economonitor.com fairly often. These people are serious, hard core macro wonks, and they have been saying for months that the entire global economy, excluding more or less nobody, is on the rocks, for a list of reasons that goes on as long as my arm, and so far nobody has convinced anybody that they can see a way out of it. My opinion is that the way out will come from….

Technology: Technologists are making more magic happen every day. Kinect hacks are bringing reality modeling to the masses. 3D printing is bringing computer models to the real world. The internet gets faster every day. Smartphones that cost $1000 a couple years ago now go for less that $100. A smartphone has the sort of sensors on it that would have cost $10,000 or more not very long ago. I could keep on going on this subject for a very long time. But one under reported aspect, I think, is the impact technology is having on …

Politics: The US Congress has about a 9% approval rating. The Arab Spring continues apace. #Occupy are hunkering down for the northern winter but absolutely have not gone away. Incumbents worldwide are under the gun for having apparently failed to do anything at all useful for years, perhaps decades. What people define as “useful” of course, differs. But the key two things, I think, are that

(a) technology is transforming media, and those changes are transforming politics, and politicians who never got around to thinking about these changes are completely out of their depth.

(b) the technologists are making everything vastly more efficient, and that means that there is no way we are ever getting back to having enough jobs for everyone to do their 40 hours a week. It’s bizarre how little everyone talks about that. Perhaps it’s because the people in a position to know are having too much fun playing Angry Birds or marveling at the new advances in such areas as:

Physics. My friend Cathy Neil tells me we’re entering a golden age of Cosmology. This is apparently unrelated to the fact that Einstein may or may not have been wrong, and despite many many pre-prints on the arXiv since the initial OPERA experiment, no one has really ruled out the existence of FTL Neutrinos.

Anyway, I could go on about what 2012 may bring in the areas of Cognitive Science, Climate Science, Energy Efficiency, Sustainability, Eco-Housing, and so on and so forth, but in reality, I have work to do, and will be trying to stop thinking about all this as much as possible for a bit!

(Time to write this post: 30 minutes. Not bad. Maybe I should blog more often.)

[1] Ah, yeah, so my actual views on the business press would take at least another 30 minutes to explain clearly, and to some extent, I know, it’s about the audience. And so on. I may get around to explaining further. Apologies if anyone was offended, and it probably goes without saying that if you got as far as reading this blog post, you’re not one of the journalists I’m complaining about

In truth, I think too much. And read too much. And write too little. Or rather, I write rather too much in all the wrong places. My digital notebooks are crammed past capacity, I have project wikis with many, many words of my (un)wisdom in them, but this blog here remains more or less empty.

Rightly or wrongly, I’ve felt that, although we’re more or less drowning in an ocean of inanity and disinformation, the best way for me to help with that issue is probably not by attempting to dilute the ocean with what I hope might pass for wit or even wisdom in some circles, and hopefully appear as less than complete inanity in others.

Of course, one person’s inanity is another person’s deeply personal and touching remarks, and the debate over what qualifies as “disinformation” will probably go on forever, although arguably it’s something worth debating, and I may have a few words to say on that subject at some stage in the future.

Now, apart from having so many other things I need to do, the reason I’ve been so quiet here is that I felt if I was going to say anything new, it ought to be something important, which is why I’m a little ashamed that my only post since the Feb 22 quake that (quite literally) upended our existence, which was already in a somewhat unstable state it has to be said, was about Unthink, a start-up hoping to capitalise on the perennial outrage over the privacy problems that plague most consumer focused websites, and of late, Facebook and Google in particular, as the largest incumbent aggregators of our collective inanity and disinformation.

Now, it’s entirely possible their startup adventure began with noble intent, and I hope it ends that way, but I do not see much chance that it’s actually going to work out for them. Facebook is the world’s best example of a “network-effect” start-up. People log into social networks because their friends are there, and all the privacy and control in the world isn’t going to interest anyone unless there is a sufficiently large audience of friends and family there to treat our inanities as deeply personal and touching remarks.

Meanwhile, on the monetization front, the merchants of disinformation are really not interested in advertising to people who care so much about privacy and control that they’re willing to switch to a site that at least initially, will have almost nobody on it. The idea that being a “brand ambassador” (as opposed to another pair of eyeballs for the advertisers) will somehow be sufficiently appealing to people that they’ll switch over and bring their friends also seems a little hopeful if you ask me.

And of course, the people who really do care about such things have other alternatives they already find more appealing – such as Diaspora nodes, which add such interesting adjectives as “distributed” and “open” to the promises of privacy and (one hopes) proper personalization.

I must admit, I found Unthink initially appealing, as did, apparently, Mr Fry. But I imagine that he, like myself, eventually decided that as in the parable of New Coke, a sip test is an insufficient indicator of an audience’s underlying desire for a bold and brash new flavour of an otherwise familiar product.

My best wishes to the Unkthink crew in their attempt to prove the doubters, such as myself, absolutely wrong, and eventually rise up to replace our current over-centralised consumer-grade conversation hub(s) with something newer and shinier at their own URL, but for me at least, the shine has worn off before I even get around to logging in, which I may or may not do at some time in the near future.

As, according to comments on Techcrunch today, they are finally into limited beta, and the rush to see what US$2.5m in start-up capital and some well deserved resentment towards the status quo can buy you in terms of traction has already crashed their servers, or at least, timed them out.

So instead of joining the Unthinking masses I’d best get back to my own little start-up, which managed to raise about a fiftieth of their pre-launch investment before we lost steam trying to build an IE6 version, and had to switch to bootstrapping in order to pay our bills (want a website? Or a browser add-on? We actually build pretty good ones..), in the hope that if we hang in there we’ll finally turn our often appreciated and occasionally acclaimed free (and eventually, freemium) products, with well over 3m downloads between them now (did I mention we have the 21st most popular Safari Addon according to extensions.apple.com?), into a sustainable business, which sometimes I feel ought to be inevitable, but for some reason I keep on inventing and innovating away on new ideas in private rather than doubling down and delivering on our existing products in public, and that really does have to change.

So I hope I’ll be back to blogging more often sometime soon, and with some worthwhile changes to announce. I think know we’ve got some serious potential, and despite the moderate irony you might have detected in my use of the words “hope” and “change”, I nevertheless still have hope that we, and for that matter the much maligned Obama Administration, can deliver you up some sustainable and successful innovation in the years to come, despite the obscure, and occasionally more obvious obstacles we all too often face, often of my own making, that are usually of not much interest to anyone, but real enough for us.

Er, ok, if you’ll bear with me, before I damn them with feint praise, I feel I should point out that the Obama Administration probably have more hidden accomplishments than you might have previously imagined, but with a congress that finds some way to block almost their every move, and in a media environment where the majority of viewer attention still goes to the “news” station that is somehow still saluting, and in some cases, even employing, the has-been salespeople for arguably the biggest foreign policy disaster of all time, you know, that one with projected costs of well over 3 trillion at this point, which, of course, turned out to be cheaper than their colossal failures on the domestic policy front (you know, the ones that have led to people occupying Wall St lately) – I think you all know what “news” channel I’m referring to here – is currently casting considerable doubts on the merits of the latest implementation of the Obama doctrine, you know, that multilateral mission that cost no American lives, didn’t require torturing anyone at all, created no new reasons for masses of Middle Eastern people to turn into potential terrorists (at least, that I’m aware of), has cost well under a thousandth of the price of another Iraq style operation, and arguably delivered more hope for the Libyan people than the Iraqis ever got from Team Bush, well, you’d have to say any hope team Obama might have had for an appropriate level of appreciation in next year’s elections must now be somewhere between modest, and minuscule. Which is unfortunate, in my opinion, anyway.

They’ll keep on trying I’m sure. And so will I. Double down. Deliver. I’ll do my best.

Just finally, let me point out that, by contrast, Karl always delivers, and generally in double quick time. If you need some great HTML5 work done fast, or a brilliant browser add-on that more than lives up to your expectations, well, his time is currently available and at a very fair price – at least until I finally figure out the 500 other things you need to make a successful start-up function properly – starting with focus, focus, focus.

Well, if you’ve made it this far you deserve more than a penny for you thoughts, and although I can’t promise to pay you back immediately, I’d be very eager to hear them.

A great tradition died recently. The fellowship exam for All Souls College, supposedly the “hardest exam in the world”, no longer includes the infamous “one word question” – a one word question demanding an essay length answer.  I find myself wondering if they ever selected the word “Protest” – because that’s a word I think I could write an essay length answer to at the moment.

On the other hand, I’ve never been much of a protester.

I went to a Peace Protest while I was in Wellington last year, the first I can remember going to since university days. The turnout wasn’t huge. New Zealand is the most peaceful nation on Earth (according to a recent global audit), and in that context one might think a peace protest makes no sense here anyway, but it was the start of a year long “global peace march”, and in that context, starting in NZ makes perfect sense. They’d also chosen to start on Ghandi’s birthday – which means it was my birthday as well, albeit many years later. The other reason I was going along was because I’d heard Richard Stallman was going to be there, and I wanted to ask if he remembered me from a certain 48 hour party we were at in Christchurch about a decade earlier (random factoid: the dude can dance). Anyway, as I said, there wasn’t a huge turnout at this protest. Maybe a couple hundred people. It was a workday, and they hadn’t done much advertising (it even took me some time to google the details of the march once I’d figured out it was happening)

Yesterday I went to a much larger protest – over 3 thousand, according to National Radio (vs “hundreds” as reported  elsewhere, a good example of how the media coverage of a protest impacts its impact!), in our local Cathedral Square, to protest the recent disbanding of Ecan (our regional government) by the national (National) government. I turned up late (this isn’t exactly unusual) but somehow ended up being the representative “protester” quoted in the press (The Press) this morning.

“Protester Seth Wagoner, of Christchurch, said he was shocked at how quickly democracy was taken away and he was showing solidarity with the environment.” (link)

Which I figured would sound better than “Well, my friend was going, it was only a couple blocks away, and I wanted to see how many people turned up“, when the reporter asked me “Why are you here?”

But thinking about it in retrospect, I’m glad I was there, and I shouldn’t have been so ambivalent it. People should protest more often, even those of us who arguably have “more important things to do”.

I could ramble on about this for quite a while, but the truth is I do have quite a lot of important things to do, so I might come back to this later. After all, I’m not trying to get into All Souls College here. But if I was, here are a few threads I might try to weave into my narrative:

1) The reasons people choose names like “National” for their political party, or “The Press” for their newspaper, and whether we should let them do that.

2) The nature of ECan, a “regional council” that many people barely knew, and how the rights of hundreds of thousands can be appropriated by a few people who actually care, and understand what they need to do.

3) How the power change at Ecan – swapping out an elected “council” for an appointed “commission” may or may not effect the civil servants who actually do the real work – with a somewhat dubious analogy to the recent power changeover in Britain, particularly with respect to:

3.1) transitions of power in a democracy, and how the week long decision making process from the LibDems caused the media to condemn them for leaving Britain without leadership, even suggesting that the Queen should step in and do something about it, how the reporters from Europe laughed at this notion given the occasional 6 month coalition forming process they have to put up with, potentially diverging into a discussion of

3.1.1) the role of the Monarch in (a) Britain and/or (b) New Zealand, past, present, and or future.

3.1.2) advantages and disadvantages of different types of “representation”, with respect to:

(a)  in the case of ECan, replacing a “democratic” council elected mostly by local landowners, with a technocratic “commission” appointed by a government that was chosen nationally by everyone – both in general and in this specific case.

(b) in the case of Britain, the upcoming referendum on the AV “Additional Vote” , how the various stakeholders appear to feel about it, how the question of (more) proportional representation affected the coalition forming process, and why the referendum will (probably) be a historic moment in the world’s oldest surviving democracy.

(c)  in the case New Zealand, our upcoming referendum on the retention of the MMP electoral system

4) How Local Government ‘parties’ have formed in some cities that have only a loose affiliation with parties at the national level. In the legislatures of the USA, it is republican vs democrat all the way down, so far as I know. In NZ it is much more diverse. How affiliations between National, Regional, and Local government parties, and the movement of personal between the ranks may or may not affect how the votes go and the policies we end up with as a result.

5) “Headlines”, with respect to:

5.1) how this post started out with the title “Protest”, switched to “Democracy. Use it or lose it”, and then “Democracy. It’s complicated.”

5.2) the rarely mentioned role of newspaper sub-editors (who write the headlines, among other things) in the democratic process.

6) The media and their role in reporting on protests, other ways they affect public opinion, and their resulting power over both elections and sitting governments.

6.1) How the ownership of newspapers and other mass media affects the editorial positions taken, delving into the relationships between the owner(s), the owner(s) other media and non-media companies, the editor(s), sub-editors and reporters, giving examples such as:

6.1.1) Fox News, and their supposed disconnect between “News” content, which is supposedly fair and balanced, and “Talkshow” content, which clearly isn’t.

6.1.1.1) The phrase “Fair and Balanced”, how Fox tried to trademark it, what that would have meant, and how the EFF  stopped them.

6.1.1.1.1) A potentially lengthy diversion into the relationship between intellectual property law and representative democracy, by which time the essay markers would I’m sure have already decided to give me an “A” or an “F” depending on how they felt about indented intellectual diversions, but given that they’re expecting one to write an essay length response to a one word question, intellectual diversions are clearly something they are looking for.

6.1.1.1.1.1) Yet *another* potential diversion onto the subject of how one can clearly have “too much of a good thing”, for instance:

(a) “Freedom” in Market Economies, as demonstrated by the recent global financial maelstrom (with at least a footnote relating to the nature of the words “Free” and “Freedom” and how they are leveraged into new roles, eg by the “Free Software” movement started by Richard Stallman (mentioned in Paragraph 2 above) and also in respect to our new “Free (as in Speech) Beer” brand, which of course started out just as an opportunity to take the piss (hur, hur) but evolved into something approaching an actual business model, with it’s own domain name(s) and the beginnings of a new “open” licence  (but then I got distracted, which as you can see in my case, isn’t very hard) or;

(b) intellectual diversions, potentially enlightening but ultimately leading one further and further away from the original topic under discussion.

6.1.2) The venerable Wall Street Journal, recently purchased by the same media conglomerate that owns Fox News, has, as with most papers, different standards for the “News” parts of the paper, which tend to stick, roughly speaking, to reporting the known facts, versus the editorial pages, on which, particularly in the case of the Journal, the most absurd nonsense has often been printed, quite regardless of and often in direct opposition with the known facts.

6.1.2.1) This separation of policy as regards fact checking, at the world’s largest newspaper, is well known to sophisticated consumers of news content. However, to unsophisticated or inexperienced news readers, comprising perhaps 95%+ of registered voters, the imprimatur of the Journal, with it’s long history and imposing credentials, gives an undeserved advantage to said editorial content, no doubt fooling many readers into accepting as fact what is merely opinion…

6.1.2.1) Furthermore, when one considers the (relatively recent) co-ownership of Fox News and the WSJ…

6.2) A more general diversion into how consolidation of media companies, their ownership by other companies, or ownership by people who own other companies, may have an effect on their editorial policies, their news sourcing, etc, and by extension, have an effect on the “constituency” they share with the politicians.

6.3) Perhaps something about the fact that most printed news is sourced from only 3 big networks – the AP…(nuts, I’ve temporarily forgotten the other two…one is french…)  and suggest that editors should take a look at Allaboutthestory.com [disclaimer: owned by some Kiwifoo friends] and www.project-syndicate.org to freshen things up a bit.

6.4) And perhaps even attempt to drag in Chomsky & Herman, “Manufacturing Consent: The political economy of the mass media” which is really compulsory reading for anyone who’s serious about this sort of thing. I read it over a decade ago and was highly impressed. One key takeaway for me was that you really didn’t need some grand conspiracy to control the media and/or popular opinion, the economics of the situation pretty much ensured the ‘elites’ would stay in charge (these days I’m a bit more sanguine about that, and not in any hurry to try Chomsky’s desired experiments in Anarcho-syndicalism thank you very much). I haven’t seen the more recent documentary, which I expect was a bit less detailed. How relevant is it to the modern day media situation or countries other than the US? Not sure, but it’s worth reading anyway.

7) A personal connection. My friend’s dad lost his job when ECan was disbanded. He’s an interesting chap, as is my friend.

7.1) For instance, my friend put a footnote in his doctoral dissertation (on the geopolitics of the Patagonian toothfish, for what it’s worth), promising a bottle of scotch (I can’t recall if it was a malt or a blend) to any of his three examiners who actually read that footnote, for his feeling was that in general examiners rarely bother to read the footnotes, meaning they were likely to miss potentially vital details, such as the reason my friend had brought three bottles of scotch to his oral defence – none of which were claimed. Given the growing length of this outline of potential threads in a hypothetical answer to a demonstrative example of the question no longer being asked in a fellowship exam at a college I never plan to attend, I will attempt a similar wager. A pint of most excellent ale awaits the first three people who read this sentence and let me know they have done so.
Realising the end of the exam time period was drawing near, I would then valiantly attempt to draw several of the preceding (sub-)points into something approaching a conclusion.  Perhaps something along the lines of “In conclusion, protests perform a vital role in a representative democracy, a mechanism for the populace to display their displeasure with the actions of their leaders. Active suppression of street protests by police, or at worst, the military, is a sure sign of unhealthy democracy. However, the impact of a protest, its ability to spark ongoing debate, further protest action or to actually bring about the changes sought by the protesters relies crucially on the role of the media…

8.x) Democracy. It’s complicated.

————–

[1 week passes...]

Hmmm. Well in light of the fact that I haven’t managed to get back and actually finish this off, I think I’ll post it unfinished for your amusement. At least, I hope some of you will be amused. If there’s anything in there you’d like me to follow up on, let me know in the comments. I may come back and re-work this later, and add more links. I had at least a dozen more random threads to weave into the outline; here are the ones I’d actually started to write down:

The ongoing transition of power from Newspaper owners to aggregators, search engines, and now social media, why this matters

How I hadn’t seen so many people in the square since the funeral of Rod Donald, co-leader of the NZ Green party, a great man taken well before his time.  Of course, had he still been alive, Rod would have been a speaker at this event, and he ties into the themes of this blog post all the more greatly for his involvement with electoral reform and the nationwide MMP campaign, and also the transition to STV for our local government!

How a brilliant part of this particular protest was the cairn of rocks. What a great symbol. Top marks to whoever came up with that one.

The friend I came along with, who felt more strongly about the protest than I did, felt that she had let herself down by not wanting to go on the record (which is why I ended up on the record) out of (I think) concern for her current work in the public sector. Frankly I think she was doing more than her share  just by showing up, but there’s certainly a potential diversion there on the potentially chilling effects of a large public sector, and one might also be tempted to talk about the power of the public sector unions that are apparently now in negotiations around the entitlements that states in the USA can no longer afford…

Somewhere in the middle of writing this post I got a call from The Press’s tech reporter, clarifying a few details for an article mentioning my company’s products due to be published next week. So I was tempted to try and fit something in around chilling effects wrt work within the private sector as well – ie if a company director or CEO posts something that might be interpreted as critical a media organization (fortunately, in this case, The Press is a non-Murdoch owned newspaper!) , or any institution with the potential to affect the health of the company, are they in jeopardy of breaching legal or moral obligations to company stakeholders?

Social aspects of protest, why they’re important for reasons other than just the policy changes they seek to bring about…

Some other interesting protest examples:

* During the Bush years, whenever Bush spoke anywhere they set up “First Amendment Zones” - corrals where the police kept the protesters separated from the govt supporters and the media.

* Contrasted with: the people who showed up with guns to anti-Obama protests and were allowed to keep them because that’s the sort of state they were in.

* The protest Flotilla delivering humanitarian supplies to Gaza suffered the tragic loss of 9 lives, but it caused a media storm world wide that might actually lead to the human rights being partially returned to 1.5m people living in poverty in the Gaza Strip

* The protests around the time of the Coalition negotiations where they were attempting to force Clegg to stay true to his word, how this may or may not have helped the LibDems get such a great deal in the negotiations, whether Sky News reporters berating the protestors in their interviews was appropriate….

* The photos of the Christian “million man march” that ended up being re-purposed by right wing blogs and media as supposed pictures of tea party protesters.

A rationale for protest:  Use it or lose it.

Representative Democracy has a lot of problems – the main one being that the public really only gets to hold their politicians accountable every 3 to 5 years.  In between elections, one of the few ways you can exercise your democratic rights is getting out on the street in a mass protest. Plenty of people will tell you that this is largely a waste of time – the media will downplay the incident and the government will ignore it. Millions of people out on the streets didn’t stop the Iraq War.

How important is being on the streets vs more modern forms of protest, eg, tweeting and blogging? You can of course, do both at the same time…just so long as they’re not jamming outgoing signals from the area as they tried to do with the #flotilla.

How the flotilla protest was an interesting case as it was international in nature and the resolution came in international waters, and without trying to get into the details of that particular case (which could be time consuming and potentially hazardous!), attempt to put in some points about how democracy is constrained or enhanced by international treaties, the role of the UN, and yada yada, and perhaps also mentioning Sir Geoffery Palmer, the rumour that he might be asked to head an international inquiry into the flotilla affair, and why he would be well qualified.

[update: Well, I was wrong! But I think this is still an interesting read, and there are a few aspects I intend to follow up wrt proportional representation, how the coalition deal was a great political "hack" (and how the unexpected hack destroyed my analysis and just about everyone else's), the highly Liberal nature of this new "Conservative Led" government, and a few interesting things I noticed in the ongoing (mainstream and social) media coverage.]

Here’s the (much) longer version of my three tweets from yesterday.

I have been watching the UK election with some fascination since the results indicated a “hung” parliament. My knowledge of British Politics is scant – it simply hasn’t been all that interesting up till now for those of us with no British heritage (unlike the majority of my countrymen, my closest non-Kiwi relatives are Americans). But things have become very interesting indeed now that there is chance for massive political reform in the oldest democracy in the world.

I speak, of course, of the potential for the Britain to switch to Proportional Representation, which is, to quote Joe Biden, a big f’king deal.

The difference between “First Past the Post” and true Proportional Representation is like Dawn and Day. The Tories are right to fear PR – it’s a massive step towards ending generations of electoral injustice that have traditionally worked in their favour, and will do so even more if they get a chance to re-gerrymander the electoral map (Note, the British gerrymandering in recent elections has been far less egregious than it used to be long ago, it’s not a super-partisan process as they have in  the USA). To do so is actually one of their election promises, although their phrasing of that particular promise is something along the lines of “cut the cost of Westminster on the ordinary citizen by reducing the number of MPs”.

Even if it is done 100% fairly, redrawing the electoral boundaries won’t end the structural unfairness for long, and neither will it end members of the Duopoly suppressing 3rd party chances in the more obvious way: by warning the voters that a vote for a 3rd party is effectively a vote in favor of the other half of the Duopoly – thus compelling voters to vote tactically for the lesser evil, rather than strategically for the party they actually want to support.

The LibDem leadership surely knows this. They are not stupid. In fact, although I’d never even heard of him before, five minutes of listening to Lord Menzies on the BBC website this morning was enough to convince me that he is probably one of the smartest guys in the house.

Meanwhile, their deputy leader, Vince Cable, appears to be an economics wizard – he probably has folks like Stiglitz, Roubini, Summers, Geithner and Volcker on his speed-dial already, just waiting for his chance to get stuck in and help save our global macro-economic petard from the misdeeds of the last decade (or arguably, the last century).

And of course, Clegg himself appears to be pretty sharp. I am going to go out on a limb here, and extrapolate that the rest of the LibDem front bench are also highly competent.

So, as I said, these guys are not dumb. They know that a Lab-Lib coalition is going to be best for their party and best for Britain, and hence their A-team is likely in the midst of negotiating as good a coalition deal they can get from Labour and the rest of a required “rainbow” / “traffic light” alliance/coalition, while their B-team also negotiates in good faith, for a Lib-Con deal they believe Cameron can never follow through on – because his party would rather hang *him* than accept it.

Cameron himself would probably give the LibDems almost anything they want in exchange for the keys to Number 10, and presumably his front-bench would too. Their problem is that if they give the LibDems too much they risk of being given the boot by their own caucus in very short order – perhaps before they even get to the Queens Speech bit (this is one of those areas where a days worth of surfing the UK intarwebs, interspersed with updating my about page, and believe it or not, some actual work, is quite inadequate, I have no idea how fast the Tories could stage a backbench revolt).

Anyway, and this is a guess, the Achilles heel that will keep Cameron from number 10 is this: the common or garden unreconstructed Tory backbencher has ideological blinders so big he can barely see his chauffeur if he sits on the wrong side of the Jag.

Furthermore, his core constituency is likely similarly impaired (minus the Jag…) – or they wouldn’t have elected him.

I could be wrong on both counts. Maybe Cameron can overcome his own party and come up with an acceptable deal. But I wouldn’t bet on it, because any deal is going to have to get past not just Clegg but *his* backbenchers, due to the triple lock clause.

This is the sort of situation you end up with in an FPP electoral system where the electoral lines are redrawn only rarely – or worse are redrawn by the legislatures, as in the US Congress (and State congress) redistricting, in which incumbents always seek to feather their nest with a few more acres that match their demographic niche, while trading away the acres that have switched sides to neighboring incumbents of the opposing party, who are usually only too happy to receive them.

In a properly designed PR system, this sort of thing just doesn’t happen – the parties can gerrymander all they want and it won’t change who gets into power the next time around, so they don’t even bother trying, and the electoral needles gravitate back towards the center, eventually resulting in honest, centrist MPs who really care for their electorate – partly because their electorate really has a shot at turfing them out the next time around.

Perpetuating FPP, along with slow or biased redistricting, and backroom deals done with the usual suspects, is how a two-party duopoly maintains its power – for decades or even centuries. Chances to overthrow such a Duopoly and introduce Proportional Representation (AKA: Actual Democracy) come along less than once in a generation – and this is Britain’s big opportunity.

The LibDems have waited 90 years for this moment, and I refuse to believe that Clegg’s team are going to risk waiting another decade or three before it comes along again – regardless of what Cameron offers them in “other” inducements. They also know that to accept a Tory offer will require overcoming the “triple lock” voting formula that gives their backbench, and members, even more power than the Tory equivalents.

They will negotiate in good faith regardless, it puts more pressure on the A-team and their counterparts to come to a deal quickly, and regardless, it’s keeping an election promise from Clegg, and it’s important to start building up trust with the electorate. But eventually they will almost certainly follow the logical path from here into….

…a Rainbow “alliance” comprising: (1) a Lab-Lib coalition, (2) “anyone but Brown” in Number 10, and (3) as many minor parties as possible providing confidence and supply (for which they will rightly demand concessions, but coalition partners in theory get to pick and choose between a few competing offers, and given the urgency of the moment, sane voters from minor parties are likely to understand that a bird in the hand as big as Proportional Representation is worth a dozen in the bush, and thus they should not risk overplaying their hands.

Ideally, the coalition should bring as many of them as possible into the “big tent” in order to ensure continuity in the event of by-elections and greater legitimacy in the eyes of the voters (and as they say, better that they’re in the tent, pissing out of it…)

That’s how it gets done in New Zealand, and so far, it’s actually worked out pretty well – even with the oddest of parliamentary bedfellows. Of course, there are extremists on all sides who will swear blind that it’s been a complete betrayal – which is how you know that they’ve done the right thing.

She’s everybody’s sister… she’s symbolic of our failure… she’s the one in fifteen million who can help us to be free.

“Watching TV”, from Roger Water’s amazing album “Amused to Death“, contains surely one of the more poignant statements of the value of mass media in evolving peaceful democracy that you’re ever going to hear. Given the events of the day, I suggest giving it a listen. (And if you haven’t already, you might want to buy the album, and listen to it on a good sound system, it really is awesome. )

Roger’s Yellow Rose was a student of philosophy. So was Neda Agha-Soltan. So was I.

And I grieve for my sisters.

I’ve made a few updates to my Technoprogressive page. It’s always been little more than a half-baked collection of thoughts, I should really tidy it up properly one of these days. Still, a few interesting nuggets in there if you’re into that sort of thing.

While recently the precise definition of “torture” has been a hot button issue in the USA, I have just been reading about another form of cruelty that will hopefully one day be abolished by the Supreme Court, and that is the sentence of “Life without possibility for parole”. Having read the harrowing tale of Kenneth E. Hartman, it seems clear that the death penalty is probably a more humane sentence, which is really saying something. This isn’t a short blast of utter terror like an execution or being waterboarded, but rather an unending daily misery that lasts for decades.

Personally, I’d rather be waterboarded, despite having also recently read the harrowing tales of Mancow Muller and Christopher Hitchens, two pro-Iraq-war commentators who stepped up to the plate and found out for themselves exactly what Waterboarding is like, afterwards reluctantly declared they were in no doubt that it is torture, and although they certainly didn’t say it, effectively concluded that certain members of the Bush administration are liars and war criminals.

There are unlikely to be any conservative pundits imprisoned for life without the possibility for parole anytime soon, but I’m sure if there were, and they still had the ability to get published, they would be arguing just as vehemently that this much slower form of torture must also be abhorred and abolished by any decent and humane society.

The only good thing about LWPFP, vs actual executions, is that it leaves a small chance that these individuals may eventually be released and rehabilitated by a more enlightened America after a change in the law, which surely seems a little more likely now Obama is the one nominating replacements for the Supreme Court.

Note that I didn’t say “The Great Redeemer”. The reality is that Obama hasn’t redeemed America – it largely redeemed itself by electing him in the first place, which is not to say that his ability and willingness to lead the country along the right path is not worthy of the highest praise – but he didn’t get there alone, and he knows it: “This election isn’t about me.” – how many times did you hear that during the campaign? I don’t think it was false modesty, he knew the American people were desperate for Change, and he was willing to offer it in no uncertain terms.

Still, after re-electing Bush, America has a lot to make up for. I cried that day back in 2004, and I suspect so did half the politically aware people on the planet (and we all cried again 4 years later, but for a different reason).

Realistically speaking, a huge leap has been made, but solid incremental improvements towards a return to international norms and good faith multilateral agreements, as well as strong leadership in progressive, non-military areas, followed by a public affirmation in the form of a re-election in 2012, are going to be required before the real skeptics, of whom I know plenty, will accept that America has truly redeemed herself and may deservedly claim some sort of leadership in the “free world” again.

Personally, I’m sold. The tenor being set by the first few days, along with the quality of the people going into key positions (more on some of them later perhaps) is going to make a significant difference to America’s standing in the next 4 years (heck, in the next 4 months), and I even believe they can sort out the economic crisis without the huge inflationary crash being predicted by some (probably some more on that later as well).

NB: This post grew from a comment I made on Jimmy Wales’ blog (which is currently in moderation but that may have changed by the time you read this).

The ’08 US election has re-drawn the American Political Map, put tears in the eyes of many (myself included), and surely changed the world. My father was pretty sure it couldn’t happen, and I think most Americans his age would probably have agreed, right up until the first results started coming in. Dissatisfaction with American politics was the major reason my parents ended up here in the early 70s, a year or so before I was born. History was made on the 4th of November, there’s no doubt about it. But enough has been written about Obama’s victory to stretch from hear to Mars if you printed it in 8 point Helvetica, so I’ll refrain from going on about that in this post.

In contrast, New Zealand goes to the polls tomorrow in what has to be described as a bit of an anti-climatic mood. Few seem to see a lot of difference between our two major parties – largely because John Key decided to adopt most of Labour’s policies, on the grounds that (a) they seem to be working and (b) the public seems to like them. The NZ public appear to have simply gotten bored of Labour, and frankly, I think they’re a bit daft because “boring and predictable” is about a thousand times better than what we saw from all the other NZ governments in my lifetime. But after 9 years everyone has managed to find at least one or two things they don’t like about Labour people or policies (Recent copyright legislation is a biggie for me and anyone else who cares about freedom and the internet), and since minor quibbles become more important when the other side isn’t promising to do anything much different, well, I can see how Labour is unlikely to get through this time. I’ll still vote for them, because they earned it, and I think in years to come we’ll probably look back at the 4th 5th Labour Government as one of the best we ever had.

However, one other notable point of difference lacking between our two possibilities for Prime Minister is their religion – or rather, their lack of one. In the last leader debate “Both said they did not believe in God or in an afterlife” – I quote from a report of the debate I read, because I missed the debate myself. Recently I’ve been regretting the lack of a TV at the office! So perhaps what they actually said was a bit more nuanced.

But if not, my assertion that this too is an historic election. I haven’t had time to research it, but it seems to me that Helen Clark vs Jenny Shipley was probably the first time two woman had fought for leadership of a western democracy, and this might be the first time that the fight is between a pair of atheists.

The reason this is possible is that the role of religion in NZ culture has been depleted to the point where no one really seems to have thought about the significance of such an election. Our separation between church and state is very much a “done deal”, and any talk of bringing the two back together is electoral poison. The fact that the last leader of a significant Christian party in this country is currently doing time for sexual abuse of multiple girls under the age of 12 probably may have something to do with that.

In America, on the other hand, it is almost impossible to win office, even at the state or local level, where they elect almost everyone from the local judge to the local tax collector, if you openly declare that you do not believe in God. It is a tragic, broken state of affairs and explains much of the pain that the country has gone through in the last few decades – through deliberate manipulation of their “flock” and of their favored politicians, the leaders of the religious right have prevented anyone from getting into power who was (a) smart enough to have decided there probably isn’t a God, and (b) honest enough not to have hidden their decision. And when you can’t elect a huge number of smart, honest people into even lowly positions of power, and it’s impossible for them to get into those particular positions of power through merit alone, well, what would you expect to happen?