The US Election, Australian politics etc.

[tcpip]

There has been a number of interesting correlations between state-by-state voting in the US elections. cptjohnc notes the votes on a
county-by-county basis. From rumplstimskin I've picked up a correlation between IQ and the states and the
states and university degrees, although some have questioned the IQ range (all within one standard deviation). I'm currently working on a distribution based on votes and high school graduation - at least the figures seem more precise for that one.

But in general, it is fair to say that one of Kerry's main points - that America is divided - is actually an
advantage to the Republicans. The Republican states are poor, ill-educated, Christian conservative, and rural. Whilst I wish to avoid the denigrating tone of John Stuart Mill, his comment on conservatives ("Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives") does seem to be an apt electoral strategy. As democracy can only survive through informed decisions, it seems that the ancient Greek idea that despotism follows a failed democracy may indeed be apt.

Meanwhile in Australia, the fundamentalist Catholic Tony Abbot had put fuel to the fire on the abortion "debate", and John Anderson says it's out of control. Of course, these self-righteous wealthy individuals would never consider getting an abortion themselves if they found themselves pregnant and without the means to support a child. Of course not. In my opinion, these are the immoral people. These are the people who think that they have the right to determine what you do with your body.

Mark Latham, having already promoted fellow incompetent losers (Wayne Swan and Stephen Smith) is now taking an "axe to dud poll promises", including the troops home by Xmas pledge. Asylum-seeker supporters will get no joy from the recent appointment of Laurie Ferguson, and his unbelievable ignorant and divisive comments. In other words, the conservatives in the ALP, having delivered us a Howard government, want to dump the few good reasons that people voted for Labor in the first place.

On a related note, Labor for Refugees had it's first post-election meeting on Saturday. As expected there was a great deal of anger of how the Victorian branch distributed Senate preferences and how the party failed by pandering to the "aspirational voter". Sadly the meeting witnessed the departure of Kevin Peoples, the hard-working Secretary of the organization.

Outside of all this political analysis, I continue, strangely enough to have a life - although a great deal of it at the moment seems to be caught up with problems relating to land tax, the distribution of wealth in Australia and NZ political parties. I'm having a weird experience at work trying solve an otherwise simple problem; connecting a Mac to a Windows network printer (some applications work, others don't). The ICT newsletter Red Friday is now into its third issue and the Ten Thousand Islands play-by-email roleplaying campaign has reached its
second major scene.

Last Sunday was the annual Unitarian Church fete (rather uninteresting) and the chosen speaker, a natural health/alternative medicine advocate, was a bit of a conspiracy theorist. His best points were the need to regulate natural therapy and integrate it into the university system and the systematic reasons on why pharmaceutical companies - and many doctors - are so much against to the practise. Still, one practical upshot was getting some plants for verylisa's housewarming in Altona Meadows. So far away! Deepest darkest suburbia, yet still in zone one for public transport. Spent a bit of time chatting with cvisors, fizit and, of course, caseopaya. The evening concluding with a few pints with severina_242 and friends at a dodgy faux-Irish pub (for the love of God, how many more must we have?) in Port Melbourne.

The arrival of that writing madness, NaNoWriMo reminds me that my rewritten and much reduced version of my thesis is due in by the end of the month. Better get on with it.

Comments

By whose standards?

[erudito.livejournal.com]

The Republican states are poor, ill-educated, Christian conservative, and rural.

Poor by whose standards? Lower average inicome sure, but poor? As I recall, the US State with the lowest GDP per capita is still higher than most EU states.

Ill-educated by whose standards? The US has the lowest proportion of people who have only attained juniour secondary of any OECD country. For those 25-64, the figures are:
USA 12
Switzerland 13
Norway 15
Japan 17
Germany 17
Canada 18
Sweden 19
Denmark 20
Austria 24
NZ 24
Finland 26
France 36
UK 37
Australia 41
Belgium 42
Ireland 42
Netherlands 45
Italy 57

Now, there are issues with the quality of US education, but, hey, they're not the only ones.

Since IQ and income are correlated, the fact that the Dems tend to do better in lower-income ranges and the Republicans better in higher income ranges suggests there are some problems with your stupid-people-are-conservative notion.

Approaching electoral politics from the notion that there is something inherently wrong with people who vote differently is just not a good way to be persuasive. As for the notion that people voting differently means democracy is on the path to failure, that leads to very bad places.

By the standards of 'programmatic NE liberals' Kerry actually did quite well; much better than McGovern in 1972, Mondale in 1984 or Dukakis in 1988. And if the hot 'morals' issue is gay marriage, the debate has actually moved a long way. Indeed, the proportion of people citing some form of 'moral values' as the most important issue is actually much lower in the 2004 election than in the previous 3 Presidential elections.

People really need to calm down.

Labor

[erudito.livejournal.com]

I don't think you can really claim that Latham and Labor failed to provide a genuine choice against Howard and the Coalition. It just wasn't a majority-persuasive choice.

I have a lot of sympathy for the notion that Oppositions need to be something other than the Government-lite. After all, why not simply go for the real thing in that case?

But the Australian electorate are small c conservative. You're not going to win by moving even further away from where the majority is at.

The ALP has a genuine problem in cultural politics: there are a range of issues where the private views of Coalition candidates are not only closer to the Coalition voters than the private views of ALP candidates, their closer to ALP voters. Which means, when up against a Coalition leader prepared to play cultural politics effectively, the ALP is going to either have to concentrate on those issues where that is not true or fine some way of dealing with the problem directly.

(Of course, where the Coalition doesn't manage to be anything other than Beaut Bookkeepers, then, absent a financial crisis, the ALP has the definite inside running -- see 6 States and both Territories).

[caseopaya.livejournal.com]

Ten Thousand Islands play-by-email roleplaying campaign has reached its
second major scene.

Yes, I'm avoiding the politics again, I'm slack. But to get to the point, you REALLY should proof read your game play before you put it up on the web *cheeky grin*

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

although some have questioned the IQ range (all within one standard deviation).

That is perfectly reasonable. With normally-distributed data (which IQ scores are for purposes of this), you'd expect one-third of *individuals* to lie more than 1 SD off the mean. If the numbers given were ratings for 50 individuals, it would be very suspicious indeed that there were no outliers. But they're *not* individual ratings - each of them are averages across a large population.

However, from that page: I originally posted this to a few friends on a forum, using information from a list just like this created after the 2000 election. The list was carried by the St. Petersburg Times and the Economist, amongst others. The IQ data was originally attributed to the book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations", though I checked and couldn't find them in the current edition... The Economist could not independently verify the IQ data and the retraction can be found here.

In other words, it's even less credible than most things that rely on IQ scores...

[excessivepurple.livejournal.com]

I'm currently working on a distribution based on votes and high school graduation

Please post when you're done! Not that high school graduation == intelligence, by any means, but it would definitely make that correlation more persuasive. "Democracy can only survive through informed decisions", I do like that.

(I'd question whether or not IQ scores == intelligence, either. But that's another kettle of educationally disadvantaged fish.)

And 'troops home by Xmas' wasn't a "core promise" after all...

[greg.livejournal.com]

Why do you think I'm expating mate!

This is pretty in an eerie sort of way... http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/2004/11/06#286

[smilesnspiders.livejournal.com]

Just wondering if you had heard of the Given the Chance program run by the Brotherhood of St Laurence's Ecumenical Migration Centre offering employment and education pathways for refugees?

I think you would make a great mentor...

www.bsl.org.au/giventhechance if you wanted to know more.

(-:

[severina-242.livejournal.com]

I'll have you know that dodgy faux Irish pub has been around years longer than most AND thankfully doesn't have old farm implements on the wall and/or bad paint jobs. In fact the other room is filled with James Joyce stuff. And the occasional instrument ;-)

off topic from this thread

[military-chic.livejournal.com]

You Do Rock,Mr Lafayette
thankyou for adding me(you have, i hope??)
the comment you left in my LJ. appreciated. but, "please explain"> does this guy sound like a T-Bag?Danke

States

[erudito.livejournal.com]

When you're listing categories of Republican-voting States, don't forget also being more philanthropic.