Every single Labour politician who voted on this bill voted against it.
Peter Kyle was one such MP, and now he's making statements like:
> I see that Nigel Farage is already saying that he’s going to overturn these laws. So you know, we have people out there who are extreme pornographers, peddling hate, peddling violence. Nigel Farage is on their side.
It's maddening. The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.
> The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.
I've come to believe that is the point of forcing people to choose between extreme polarizing positions. It makes disengagement feel like the only moderate move.
”The lesser evil” is the essence of any two-party system. Which I would somewhat facetiously classify the UK system as. Abolish ”first past the post” and introduce proportional representation now!
It is far, far more likely that you can get most of your opinions represented in a parliament with 8 parties than one with 2 or 3.
In Sweden, in the past 50 years, people with ”new” or fringe opinions have successfully started parties, and won seats in either the national or EU parliament, on these issues:
- Christianity
- Environmentalism
- Racism/populism
- Internet freedom/privacy
- Feminism
- Racism/populism, again
Most of these have had their issues adopted by larger parties through triangulation, and thus shrunk away to nothing, while others persist to this day (christianity, environmentalism, racism).
I think if you tried to start a new labor party in the UK today, you should not expect to win any seats. Likewise if you attempted what the Swedish Feminist Initiative did. But I hope I’m about to be proven wrong on the first point.
I don't think the racist label applied to Ny Demokrati is clear cut. It turned out that some of their elected representatives acted this way, but it was not part of their message or program as they won their seats. I see it as more a side effect of quickly populating a party with members without proper wetting.
As background, this party was founded about 8 months before the election in 1991, almost like a fluke. It was not a grass roots movement, but by charismatic founders that quickly had to build an organisation around some hollow ideas about less bureaucracy and lower taxes.
My point being - i might agree with SDs migration policy and not much else. I might agree on Ms taxcuts etc. etc. But I still have to pick and chose the lesser evil.
Maybe 8 parties narrows the lesser evil down a bit.. But they all end up in coalition anyway so I'm pretty sure i get the same amount of evil as in a 2-party system.
the problem with proportional representation is that nothing gets done, it's a permanent logjam with conflicting ideologies attempting to block or outdo each other.
Admittedly there is a bureaucratic logjam in the UK that hampers any progress but I don't see that going with fptp, I'd anticipate it getting much, much worse under prop-rep.
The christianity party in Sweden could have been classified as "rascist" because that is how they voted many times, but they also had a humanist streak which took over in a lot of issues they engaged in.
I find these changes in tides between parties interesting. Populism is only applicable on specific takes issues not parties.
But wouldn’t you agree that both NYD and SD were both founded on populist principles? Apart from racism, neither had any clear cut policies when they started, yet they both got pretty massive boosts from their populist streaks. I think the populist label on them is pretty well established by policy researchers. It’s in the first sentence on both parties’ Swedish Wikipedia pages.
Disagree. If the society is essentially "broken", with little sense of everyone working together to build and secure a positive future, then two-party systems can degenerate into "but they're even worse!" races to the bottom.
But in better circumstances, there is enormous social pressure (at least on mainstream parties) to be much higher functioning, and willing and able to lead the nation toward a positive future.
(Yes, I think that political reform could be of some use in the UK. Some. The underlying problems would mostly remain.)
> But in better circumstances, there is enormous social pressure (at least on mainstream parties) to be much higher functioning, and willing and able to lead the nation toward a positive future.
No, there isn't, and comparative study of democracies has shown that there is a pretty direct relationship between effective degree of proportionality and a wide range of positive democratic outcome measures, as well as producing a richer national dialogue.
A two-party system doesn't just break down into an us-v-them negative dialogue in bad conditions (it pretty much gets permanently stuck there because it works in a two-party system, and it is consistently easier than deepe discussion of issues), it also narrows the space of of potential solution sets that are even available for discussion to an approximation of a one-dimensional space. Multiparty proportional systems leader to a search space with greater dimensionality, as well as making “well, they are worse” politicking generally ineffective.
I would say that what you wrote in the first two paragraphs is all equally true of a system with proportional representation. But you’d avoid a lot of problems:
- people in ”safe” constituencies being permanently represented by an MP from an opposing party, with no recourse except for moving
- policies that constantly pander to voters in ”swing” constituencies
- the two major parties constantly triangulating their policies around the center, rather than voters moving their votes to the party representing their opinions, which ensures that government is always centrist or near-centrist
Etc — these are just my pet peeves about the US and UK systems, I know there are more.
Plus, I think it’s good if a system is more robust against loss of trust that you mentioned. You could argue that in the UK, society hasn’t yet been broken, but looking at the US, don’t you think it’s better not to have that vulnerability?
It's the essence of any representative democracy - you'd need as many parties as there are citizens for everyone to be able to vote for one that truly represents their views on all relevant topics.
No, in practice I don't find that. In practice I find people actively voting against their interests because no matter who they vote fore the party is going to push for something they don't want.
You talk about the lesser evil here, well, it is exactly what is written there.
Some parts quoted:
> Democracy suffers from many more inherent contradictions as well. Thus, democratic voting may have either one of these two functions: to determine governmental policy or to select rulers. According to the former, what Schumpeter termed the “classical” theory of democracy, the majority will is supposed to rule on issues.[23] According to the latter theory, majority rule is supposed to be confined to choosing rulers, who in turn decide policy. While most political scientists support the latter version, democracy means the former version to most people, and we shall therefore discuss the classical theory first.
> According to the “will of the people” theory, direct democracy—voting on each issue by all the citizens, as in New England town meetings—is the ideal political arrangement. Modern civilization and the complexities of society, however, are supposed to have outmoded direct democracy, so that we must settle for the less perfect “representative democracy” (in olden days often called a “republic”), where the people select representatives to give effect to their will on political issues. Logical problems arise almost immediately. One is that different forms of electoral arrangements, different delimitations of geographical districts, all equally arbitrary, will often greatly alter the picture of the “majority will.” [...]
See the italic bit ("we must settle for the less perfect").
He talks about IMO the greatest contradictions after this part:
> But even proportional representation would not be as good—according to the classical view of democracy—as direct democracy, and here we come to another important and neglected consideration: modern technology does make it possible to have direct democracy. Certainly, each man could easily vote on issues several times per week by recording his choice on a device attached to his television set. This would not be difficult to achieve. And yet, why has no one seriously suggested a return to direct democracy, now that it may be feasible?
The whole thing is worth a read with an open mind.
One of the biggest problems with a lot of the modern theory of democracy is that it sees democratic mechanisms as being not just necessary but sufficient to justify any action undertaken by the state.
Another major problem is the lack of clear bounding principles to distinguish public questions from private ones (or universal public questions from public questions particular to a localized context).
Together these problems result in political processes that (a) treats every question as global problem affecting society an undifferentiated mass, and (b) uses majoritarianism applied to arbitrary, large-scale aggregations of people as means of answering those questions.
This leads to concepts like "one man, one vote" implying that everyone should have an equal say on every question regardless of the stake any given individual might have in the outcome of that question.
And that, in turn, leads to the dominant influence on every question -- in either mode of democracy Rothbard refers to -- being not the people who face the greatest impact from the answer, nor the people who understand its details the best, but rather vast numbers of people who really have no basis for any meaningful opinions in the first place.
Every question comes down to opposing parties trying to win over uninformed, disinterested voters through spurious arguments and vague appeals to emotion. Public choice theory hits the nail on the head here, and this is why the policy equilibrium in every modern political state is a dysfunctional mess of special-interest causes advanced at everyone else's expense.
Democracy is necessary, but not sufficient. And I think the particular genius of the American approach has been to embed democracy within a constitutional framework that attempts to define clear lines regarding what is a public question open to political answers and what is not. The more we erode that framework, the more the reliability of our institutions will fray.
> Feels utterly demoralizing when you have to vote for lesser evil and not for someone you feel will be better for the future.
Always go for your gut feeling, not for what people are blaring. Especially populists will, as the name suggest, crave for people's attention and a cheap "Yeah, they are totally right!". That's how they win elections. And three months into the new period, they will show their real intentions.
And that is exactly how someone like Trump could win (there are worse people than Nigel Farage). I'm amazed people have not thrown out these two parties in the UK already. Yes, the voting system makes it hard, but not impossible. It happened before.
However, I think the key reason why Conservatives and Labour are so entrenched is that people make their voting habits a part of their identity. I had a number of face to face conversations about politics with people born and raised in the UK. Every single one agreed with me about many stupid things the back then conservative govt pushed (the idea to ban encryption and more). And every single one of them said they will continue voting Conservative. Why? Because this is who they are. It's a part of their family identity (being quite well off financially, having expensive education etc). And they only see two choices, with the other being much worse.
This is how democracies die. They even agreed with this being far from optimal, but they see no other option.
That was true until recently, but in the last 12 months it's all cracked wide open.
Reform are leading in the polls, the lib dems are picking up disaffected tory wets, new left wing parties are threatening labour from the left on gaza etc.
A long time until the next election but right now it's all to play for
But this essentially has to collapse down to 2 or 3 parties unless these preferences are for graphically concentrated. Which they don’t seem to be. Reform might wipe out the tories with Lib Dem’s cleaning up the scraps, but that doesn’t really move us forward. In fact it’s likely to entrench the moderate left into holding their nose and voting labour?
Yes, with first past the post it will probably get pretty messy. Right now Reform are polling so well they would get a majority, but I'm not sure they'll sustain that until 2029, and whether they'll actually fix anything is questionable.
My gut sense is labour have pissed off people (including or perhaps especially the left) so badly that they are toast at this point. Those left wing votes are up for grabs by anyone who makes a decent case for them
Oh no not Trump. We wouldn't want that, better vote for the other extreme who will end up passing largely the same kind of laws but with slightly different excuses.
They're all using it to virtue signal their hatred of child porn. It's basically religious at this point. You stray from the line and someone just shouts infidel and you get stoned to death.
Unfortunately the atheism movement of a about ten years ago didn't go far enough in making people aware that religion isn't just about big men in the sky who are the same colour as you. What it actually is is a deficiency in human ability, a bypass for the logical centres of the brain and a way to access the animal areas that can get people to do terrible things to each other. Some of them, like Hitchens, definitely understood this, but nobody seems to be talking about it any more and we didn't learn to be vigilant of this deficiency.
That's not necessarily a position you have to fight. You can also take the standpoint that if the UK government can't protect your private data, then how can a data provider. There are many such cases:
The only time a labour majority voted against this bill was when an amendment to make category 1 sites have optional controls for users (something that would have prevented this).
I’m going to guess that our MP’s are tech illiterate enough as it is, that when an opaque term like “what is a category 1” came up, someone hand waved over it and said “think Facebook or Twitter”
I genuinely thought that Farage would finally fuck off after brexit happened. I hadn't really figured that he's in it for the attention rather than the politics
UKIP was dead when BoJo was in power. But of course, the Tories under May, BoJo and Sunak amped up immigration to record levels, so now there's a stronger case for Farage to contest. While UKIP was largely about Euroscepticism, Reform has openly racist undertones in their pitch to voters.
Do you have any sources for that? I'm genuinely interested. I've heard it mentioned before as fact, but a quick search of Hansard[1][2] only turned up one very vocal Labour politician (Alex Davies-Jones).
That's politics/democracy for you. It's broken. It's just a popularity contest and it is this way because people vote for political parties like they're sports teams, rather than voting based on policy.
I feel like during an election, policies and election promises are what should be presented, make it illegal to vote for a specific candidate, or for specific candidates to say what their policies are; they can only register policies with the election process.
Then people vote on the policies/promises they'd like to see implemented and whoever made those then gets in.
If policies and promises are not upheld during an election cycle, then that is illegal and those involved get charged and sentenced, though allowing for mitigating circumstances (say if the Tories promised x houses built in the last cycle, the pandemic would be mitigating circumstance for fewer houses built - but not _not_ houses built).
But meh, nothing will change and I really cannot be bothered with many people out there. Nothing will change the way people act, how apathetic they are.
True but all the other parties are currently saying that they 100% will not reconsider this stupid law[1].
I don’t like Farrage. At all.
He’s also currently the only MP questioning this law and he’s making fair points about it.
The government response is not a clever rebuttal but Jess Philips and Peter Kyle making ad hominem arguments comparing him to one of the nastiest people in our country’s history.
This is government overreach and they know it.
1. It’s stupid not because of its goals but because it doesn’t protect kids but does expose vast numbers of adults to identity fraud just to access Spotify or wikipedia.
> Don't like Farage. At all
I love the way folk feel they have to apologize to HN users (guess which way the majority lean) when they recognize someone like Farage has a point.
Spotify has my PI already. Wikipedia I was using today as normal.
The only people moaning about this are the ones ashamed of jerking off. Just own it, and this issue goes away. Who cares if a random company has your mug shot to do an age estimation, they know you jerk off, so what?
Just keep porn away from your kids please and let's hope we do better for the next generation.
> The only people moaning about this are the ones ashamed of jerking off. Just own it, and this issue goes away. Who cares if a random company has your mug shot to do an age estimation, they know you jerk off, so what?
Sorry but that misses the point. This isn't about porn or being embarrased about it. It's about having to present identification to gain access many different types of site.
We now have the situation where a site, any kind doesn't have to be porn, can look legitimate and ask for required personal identifcation but actually be a run fraudsters.
You might personally have an issue identifying sites like that many adults will and once they're handed over a copy of their passport or drivers licence they are in for a lot of trouble.
Peter Kyle was one such MP, and now he's making statements like:
> I see that Nigel Farage is already saying that he’s going to overturn these laws. So you know, we have people out there who are extreme pornographers, peddling hate, peddling violence. Nigel Farage is on their side.
It's maddening. The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.