Several stations seem to be undergoing some kind of redecoration, which neccessitates the removal of all the adverts. The lack of colour gives the caverns an odd feel. I like to think it harks back to an earlier, more innocent and auster time.
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Posting here has been light due to a catastrophe that I cannot yet bring myself to discuss. Don’t worry, no-one has died, but its a bereavement of sorts.
The political crisis in Kenya, and the US Presidential Primary season, remind me of some old thoughts on the nature of democracy. First, is voting along ethnic lines really democratic? Apparently the Kenyan crisis has an ethnic element, with supporters of Kibaki and Odinga dividing along tribal, rather than ideological lines. As I said before, such voting seems to be nothing more than a count to see who has the bigger gang, and undermines the rationalism on which democracy is supposed to rest.
Meanwhile, a race row circles the Democratic Party like a vulture. “Is America ready for a black president?” squwark the commentators, comfortable with their cliches. Just under a year ago, I wondered whether a good indicator of a mature democracy is when someone who is not from the traditional ruling elite is elected. I admit this is a rather optimistic stance when Hillary and Barack are mudslinging, but I think there’s a kernel of truth here. Voting for someone who is different, be it gender, colour or ethnicity, requires a certain confidence in the system. It is an acknowledgement that you have certain things in common with someone from a different background (this is what the Dalai Lama calls multiculturalism). And of course, it means there is a high level of political equality.
The counter argument is that, in a democracy, we don’t get to set the terms on which people vote, and that a citizen can vote based on whatever criteria they choose – including racist or sexist considerations. Attempting to stamp this out would be ineffectual and illiberal. This may be true, but I think the point about the relative health of a democracy still holds. If you’re voting for someone purely on the basis of ethnicity or gender, then I’m sorry, but you’re not doing it right.
Other countries are not immune. I recently read that Jacob Zuma will probably become “South Africa’s third black president“, as if his ethnicity was politically interesting in that country, with its very particular history. A white president in modern South Africa is currently impossible, but that would be the more politically significant milestone, because only then will politics be blind to race.
Here in London, Rushanara Ali is the Labour Candidate for Bethnal Green & Bow, and therefore stands a good chance of becoming the UK’s first female Muslim MP. If she is elected, it may count as a contrived first, but I understand that the campaign against her is likely to centre around her religion and gender, rather than her ideas or achievements. Not very mature at all.
We all know that opinion polls are useful. Even in a representative democracy, the opinions, wants, and needs of the people should be known and taken into account, so that the ‘democratic conversation’ can make headway.But I question their usefulness at election time, when the settled will of the people will be known in a few days/weeks time anyway. The hysteria in Iowa and then New Hampshire, concerning the fall-and-rise of Clinton, and the rise-and-fall of Obama, are entirely driven by, and make no sense without opinion polling. Obama’s performance in the latter state was only considered a ‘loss’ because the pollsters had him up by 15%. Had the last polling been a few weeks earlier, the same result would have been a ‘win’.
It is because of polling that politicians change strategy, flip-flop, and say what they think the public want to hear, not what they actually believe. In turn, this duplicity insults the public and demeans the system.
The polling surrounding these Presidential Primaries is ridiculous, and not only because it appears to be so innaccurate. What is the point of calculating these pseudo-results, when a real plebiscite is only days away? Each Primary acts as its own, super-opinion-poll, asking an entire State of people what they think.
What would happen if public opinion polls are banned within one month of an election? Candidates and Election Monitors could still do their own, private polling if they wished, and a more even distribution of the Primaries would mean that the media had an unfolding narrative to report on. We would still have the highs-and-lows, winners and losers (both real and ‘percieved’). But these would be based on tangible results, not conjecture, extrapolation, falsehood, or hyperbole. The Bradley Effect, and insidious concept, would be killed off. Voters would vote for their preferred candidate on the issues, and not suffer the emotional blackmail of being asked to vote ‘tactically’ for what the media tells them is the most electable candidate.
Polling is like a lense, which often allows us to magnify and understand a political issue. But at election time, these lenses do nothing but distort, and the picture we see is uglier than it should be.
So, Obama lost narrowly in New Hampshire, an alleged victim of the Bradley Effect. This is the apparent phenomenon of White voters saying they’ll vote for a black candidate, but then actually voting for the white candidate when they get into the polling booth. People apparently want to appear liberal when they answer the pollster’s questions.
That Obama is the victim of such a phenomenon may actually be true, but it is an explanation that makes me uneasy nonetheless. It is not really a falsifiable assertion, and is therefore open to abuse.
Further, I think the previous arguments of the Obama campaign and its supporters precludes the use of the Bradley Effect excuse. The campaign rhetoric is all about how Senator Obama inspires Americans to look beyond skin colour, and unite. A main reason to vote for him is that he is able to transcend race and vault clean over any Bradley Effect. He cannot then claim that he has been tripped up by that same political phenomenon, without undermining one of the central tenets of his campaign.
A couple of ‘social networking’ stories have been in the papers recently. First, Bilawal Bhutto’s Facebook profile has been mined by journalists, and certain Guardian readers think this may be unethical. Reader’s Editor Siobhain Butterworth discusses:
The fact that information is more or less publicly available may not be a complete answer to all arguments about privacy. Privacy is about intrusion rather than secrecy and the question is whether you have a reasonable expectation that something is private, rather than whether you have done or said something in public. These concepts are not easy to apply to social networking sites where the point of the exercise is to share information with others.
Meanwhile, its actually Bebo that has been crowned best social networking site by Which? Magazine:
The magazine said Facebook had a simple interface which made it easy to navigate. But it warned that the site had been marked down because its security settings could be confusing. “Our expert felt it was confusing to find out and change who can see what about you,” it said. “Plus, it wasn’t easy to find out how to permanently delete our account.”
These privacy and security issues are being cited as complicated perils that have no easy solution. It is as if Pandora’s Box has been opened and we cannot rein in the dangers now released, or keep a lid on the invasions of our identity. But I wonder whether the whole thing is just a product of bad design. If the software were structured slightly differently, we might not be grappling with these problems at all. Via Michelle at The Hive, we find this comment from Matt Jones:
“I know I’m biased but I wish people would just ditch/rethink so much of the default language around YASNSs, e.g. Pownce’s “Fan, Friend, ‘you denied friendship’. It’s so autistic. My preference is to describe what is happening to the information, not your relationships e.g. ‘share messages with X’… A return to cybernetics, my “friends”
My emphasis. Michelle’s post makes some other interesting points about how Social Networking sites are constructed, so do read the whole thing.