Excited Delirium

Stories about Excited Delirium, the Shock Economy and a little fiction here and there.

Daily Archives: October 6, 2008

Understanding the “Long Tail” of Politics

I’ve just finished reading "The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine.  If you’ve got the time, I strongly recommend it.

If you’re not familiar with it, the snapshot argument is that we no longer live in a world of top ten or best hits.  As a population with a wide variety of interests, the people of the world are moving away from mass and more towards niche and unique.

Anderson applies the Long Tail argument to pretty much everything, including politics.  In the context of the Canadian election, it means that a number of fallacies need to be addressed in order to fully satisfy Canadians’ desire to select the right voters:

  1. Debates:  having a single debate with the leaders is nothing short of an insult.  Where is the feedback from the public?  How do people submit questions and make instant requests of their ‘leaders’?
  2. ‘Leadership’:  since when should a single voice represent the collective opinions of thousands or millions of people?  ‘Leadership’ is about letting go and let educated and informed people acting without influence from others.
  3. Voting:  why should I have to make just one vote when I vote?  Why can’t I choose my first three options to ensure that the Conservatives don’t win.  My heart might be with the NDP, which I should be able to choose, but maybe I should have the Greens and Liberals as my second and third choices.
  4. ‘First past the post’:  Obviously a complete failure in the context of ‘choice’ and ‘The Long Tail’.

I’m sure there are lots of other examples.  Feel free to post your own suggestions.

What it all comes down to is a solid reinforcement of why our ‘democracy’ is a disaster.  It fails Canadians in its (in)ability to represent a broad base of opinions and beliefs.

Stephen Harper: $500 Billion Man (PDF)

In a Department of Defense document (warning:  PDF), Stephen Harper and Peter Mackay lay out the plans for spending nearly $500 billion on the defense industry up to 2020.

YIKES!!

Obviously, another reason to ensure that the Harper Republicans Conservatives do not win unless, of course, you’re into killing people on a massive scale.

Now, let’s try to imagine what we could do if we had $500 billion in disposable cash:

  1. Solve world poverty
  2. Give nearly $100 to every single inhabitant of the planet at least once
  3. Completely pay off our outstanding debt
  4. Have zero tax rates for all Canadian citizens
  5. Bail out the entire US financial infrastructure
  6. Buy a pretty solid chunk of the top ten companies (by market capitalization) on the planet
  7. Convert the Canadian economy from fossil fuels to 100% renewables

Where’s the opposition to this?  Is anyone else astounded by these kind of figures?

What are your suggestions for what to do with this kind of money?

Post script:  Linda McQuaig wrote an article on this yesterday:
http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/512832

Vote for Environment: We are the majority

I’ve changed this article, thanks to feedback from ‘jamthebruce’ (see comments below).

I actually thought that Avaaz was started in Canada, but I stand to be corrected.  More importantly (thanks to Jam’s insights), it’s apparent that the notion of ‘vote splitting’ and ‘voting strategically’ is a bit of a tempest in a teapot that does more harm to NDP and Green voters than it does Liberals.

Obviously, this is disturbing to me because it reinforces the notion that you simply have to finally and absolutely vote with the party that you favour and would prefer to see in office.  Strategic voting ceases to make sense when things like party funding formulas are concerned.

For those who are curious, here’s my original post:

I’ve been wrestling with this issue quite a bit andlike what I see with this site:

voteforenvironment.ca

Even if you disagree with what they have to say, they do provide a substantial amount of information that I haven’t been able to get elsewhere, including the most recent and hopefully accurate polling data (although calling poll data reliable is a stretch).

(PS:  for those of you who posted links to this site, thank you).

Canadian Election: Vandals Scaring Voters

This is the most despicable show of cowardice I’ve come across in a long time and certainly tops and rhetoric that we’ve seen so far in run up to the Canadian election.

Full story here .

It’s hard to refrain from naming names, but I don’t see supporters of the Greens or NDP taking this kind of juvenile action against people that believe in democracy.  If Stephen Harper has some of the leadership that he claims he has, he would request a full investigation into this nonsense to ensure that his name or that of the Conservatives doesn’t get dragged into this spree of vandalism.

Treatening the lives of people because they put little placards on their lawns or paste bumber stickers on their cars is reminiscent of brown shirt fanaticism that must be stopped.  If we don’t and we get bullied into removing our voice from the crowd, we have lost democracy.  We might as well hand over the keys to our houses and cars and everything else we’ve got if we tolerate this garbage.

$700 billion bailout or micro-credit?

Many of you will know that I’ve already been ranting about the fallacy of handing over a blank cheque to Wall Street.  To this point, I’ve completely omitted a viable option related to this kind of infrastructure and one that sits squarely amid the whole concept of the Long Tail :  micro-credit.

Kiva.org is celebrating its third aniversary this fall and they’ve been extremely successful with leveraging the desire to help each other out in small rather than massive ways.  Its structure was inspired by Mahammed Yunus of Bangladesh, who coincidentally, won a Nobel Prize becuase of his ground-breaking efforts to lift the poorest people out of the mire of international high-finance.

Kiva and micro-credit programs represent strong participants in what I call "the New Market".  They bypass all of the traditional structures that we’ve put in place to control who gets money, how they get it, why they get it and when.

In its third year of existence, Kiva members donated more than $40 million in funds that went to more than 90,000 entrepreneurs across the globe.

This is the kind of infrastructure that the Internet has enabled and that a bunch of stuff shirts on Wall Street of Pennsylvania Avenue in the US simply can’t comprehend.  Where’s the kickback?  What’s in it for me?

In Canada, we need something like Kiva, but something that would support local businesses here, preferably without government interference.  If anyone knows of something that exists that might be of interest to readers, please post a link in comments (please note that you’ll have to separate the syntax because this blog has limits on outbound links).