Your net is no longer neutral buddy!

[laklak]

Meanwhile, in the EU, internet filters will be imposed on everybody.

https://newint.org/features/web-exclusi ... yright-law

But that's different, right?

[Rum]

What a load of bollocks and you know it. If you had two constituencies one with a 1000 voters and one with 10. Do you think that is democracy? So you dont like democracy never mind majorities just get one mob into power even though it has only 30% backing from the electorate? Go ahead. Enjoy Brexit.

You get aggressive when your opinions are challenged don't you? A sign they are under threat perhaps.

Here's an excellent article about constituency makeup - they ar not a 100 to 1 difference in size as your hyperbolic argument suggests. The boundary commission says they should have the same number of registered electors, within plus or minus 5 per cent of the national average. The article goes on to suggest that the constituency breakdown as it is has much merit.

The article is the one you almost certainly got your chart from - and it makes the opposite point that you do - LOL! If you had read it properly you would have read that the proposed boundary changes result in an extreme shift towards requiring a level of equality in constituency size that no other country in the world attempts. As it happens the writer doesn't like the idea very much, but it is coming.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolic ... o-problem/

[Rum]

Meanwhile, in the EU, internet filters will be imposed on everybody.

https://newint.org/features/web-exclusi ... yright-law

But that's different, right?

Well it is - and we don't know if it is coming yet.

Plus the UK is leaving the EU - so fuck them and their supporters right!?

[laklak]

I've no stake in Brexit, that's y'alls business. Sometimes the stupid wins, sometimes it doesn't. It's the way of the world.

It seems the opposition to the copyright laws focus on large corporations screwing the little guy. If it looks like collusion between big corporate interests and the government, walks like collusion between big corporate interests and the government, and quacks like collusion between big corporate interests and the government, then it's probably collusion between big corporate interests and the government.

[Rum]

Not in Europe Scott Dutchy will tell you shortly in no uncertain terms.

[laklak]

[JimC]

What a load of bollocks and you know it. If you had two constituencies one with a 1000 voters and one with 10. Do you think that is democracy? So you dont like democracy never mind majorities just get one mob into power even though it has only 30% backing from the electorate? Go ahead. Enjoy Brexit.

That is a huge exaggeration, and you know it. Of course ideally you would have all constituencies equal in population, and also with boundaries that are not cherry picked to support one or other party (a vastly bigger problem in the US than in Europe or here). However, you are not going to get the numbers perfect. It is not a question of black or white, democracy or no democracy. Of the countries with a reasonably corruption free popular vote, some are going to be slightly closer to the ideal than others, but together they are all vastly different to a dictatorship or a one party state like China.

[pErvinalia]

Do I have to explain again how a coalition isn't what people vote for. They vote for a SINGLE candidate/party, not a group.

Once again your Anglo-Saxon mind cant comprehend. We vote for a party knowing full well that there will be coalition talks.

But they don't know what parties the coalition will end up being. So by definition, they aren't voting for the government they end up with. Once again, your Dutch mindset can't comprehend simple logic and reasoning.

You can easily see that all votes in a constituency system are not equal; just look at the number of voters in each constituency. They are never even closely equal. The urban constituencies have far more than country ones which always favours the tories.

Here is a small example:

Are they all the same? No. Therefore no democracy.

Your Dutch mindset seems to inhibit you in understanding plain English and reasoning. What you need to provide authoritative evidence for is not that each vote varies minutely in strength, but that that means that what the UK has isn't democracy. Where is your authoritative definition of democracy that backs up your opinion that the UK isn't a democracy?

[JimC]

The coalition system seems to work very well for the Dutch, so I'm not going to criticise it, only the idea Scot seems to have that if you don't have the Dutch system, you don't have a democracy...

[pErvinalia]

I've no stake in Brexit, that's y'alls business. Sometimes the stupid wins, sometimes it doesn't. It's the way of the world.

It seems the opposition to the copyright laws focus on large corporations screwing the little guy. If it looks like collusion between big corporate interests and the government, walks like collusion between big corporate interests and the government, and quacks like collusion between big corporate interests and the government, then it's probably collusion between big corporate interests and the government.

That's your Floridian/Zombie mindset getting things wrong, Lak.

[Hermit]

When the opposition leader is openly a socialist, then I think it's fairly safe to call the UK left leaning.

When the opposition leader is occupying the role of the loyal opposition while the conservatives are in government, cutting social services, instituting austerity budgets and selling the assets of the government owned hospitals and getting away with it, the UK is definitely not left leaning.

Well in a plurality, that's what you get. The same here. It's not like half the country is left and the other half right. Most people are in the centre and swing around depending on what handout they get at a particular election, or how scared they are of brown people. But when you survey the voting public outside of elections, they usually support policies that people like Corbyn, Sanders and The Greens here in Australia have. So I think most people are more left than what they end up being scared/bribed into voting for.

It is who the majority or the plurality of the people votes into government that determines whether a country is left, right or somewhere in between. Everything else is irrelevant.

It determines whether the government is left or right. It would be ridiculous to claim that a country was left, then 4 years later was right, then 4 years later was left, etc etc. The views of people and the population don't swing that much. In a two party system there are only two parties to vote for. One is left, the other is right. There is no choice for left and left, or right and right. By definition.

We'll just have to disagree on that. When the Australian people dumped Kevin Rudd in favour of Tony Abbott in 2013 it represented a lurch from moderate to the right by the people, and this was reflected in the change of Australia's government. It was of course an incremental change, but a significant one just the same. The pricks attracted half a million more votes in 2013 than in 2010. That was enough to gain them 90 seats (up from 72), while Labor only held on to 55 (down from 72). To say this has nothing to do with a swing in the voters' views is ridiculous. How many people have told you at the time "Yeah mate, I voted for Abbott because my views are to the left of him"?

[pErvinalia]

I didn't say voters' swinging views have nothing to do with which side wins the election. What it means is that a small percentage of people need to swing (particularly in our representative democracy) to change government. The majority of people probably voted for the same lot as they did the last time.

There's no doubt that the Anglo western democracies have been moving to the right generally in the last 4 decades. Maybe NZ and Canada would be outliers in that they haven't moved as much and with their current governments they are pretty left wing relatively speaking. I was just having a debate with some friends on facebook the other day about the fact that Labor is probably the leftest it's been since Gillard got the reins, and that was the leftest it had been since early Hawke days. I think Labor is finally moving in the right direction (i.e. back to the left). It's not enough, of course, but I think that's the reality of a two party system. It's safer to fight battles at the centre than at the extremes. Abbott showed us why battling at the extremes is likely to fail.

I don't hold out much hope for Australian politics. While it's good that Labor is moving back towards the left, it's a lumbering beast which has too much internal party faction fighting to get a coherent broader position/ideology. Although, one of the best things Rudd did was to give the membership 50% vote at the party conference, instead of how it was previously with the factions solely slugging it out for their own personal reasons.

[Hermit]

I didn't say voters' swinging views have nothing to do with which side wins the election. What it means is that a small percentage of people need to swing (particularly in our representative democracy) to change government. The majority of people probably voted for the same lot as they did the last time.

Agreed. That's why I called it an incremental change. What I regard as rubbish is saying, as you did, that "most people are more left than what they end up being scared/bribed into voting for". It's not that it is actually false. It's rubbish because you can also say "most people are more right than what they end up being scared/bribed into voting for" whenever Labor wins. The salient point is the swing of the voters. Not many do, but in so far as it does happen, it does represent a swing - left or right - of the population. You do not get a change in government without it, or as you put it, it determines whether the government is left or right.

[pErvinalia]

When you put the next sentence back in that you removed, it's no longer rubbish, it's fact.

"But when you survey the voting public outside of elections, they usually support policies that people like Corbyn, Sanders and The Greens here in Australia have."

[Scot Dutchy]

What a load of bollocks and you know it. If you had two constituencies one with a 1000 voters and one with 10. Do you think that is democracy? So you dont like democracy never mind majorities just get one mob into power even though it has only 30% backing from the electorate? Go ahead. Enjoy Brexit.

You get aggressive when your opinions are challenged don't you? A sign they are under threat perhaps.

Here's an excellent article about constituency makeup - they ar not a 100 to 1 difference in size as your hyperbolic argument suggests. The boundary commission says they should have the same number of registered electors, within plus or minus 5 per cent of the national average. The article goes on to suggest that the constituency breakdown as it is has much merit.

The article is the one you almost certainly got your chart from - and it makes the opposite point that you do - LOL! If you had read it properly you would have read that the proposed boundary changes result in an extreme shift towards requiring a level of equality in constituency size that no other country in the world attempts. As it happens the writer doesn't like the idea very much, but it is coming.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolic ... o-problem/

FFS it is still not democracy. It is gerrymandering. Artificially moving boundaries and admitting that the boundaries were not fair. Own goal. If you used PR it would not be needed.