From The Morgue

Yesterday, I linked to an analysis that says voting in the US Senate is almost entirely driven by the senator’s position on economics – not on social issues.
I want to unpack that a wee bit more, because just pointing at it and saying Oh! doesn’t get us very far.
If we assume that the analysis is correct (and I suspect it is), does this mean that senators campaigning for election on the basis of their stance on social issues are being disingenuous? Or even, deceitful?
It is known that a lot of voting behaviour is based on perceived moral congruity between the voter and the candidate. (The book ‘What’s The Matter With Kansas’ says as much in its investigation of why Kansas keeps voting in people whose economic policies are disastrous for the state.)
Isn’t it, therefore, crucial for the legitimacy of the democratic process that voters understand their candidates will almost entirely be voting economically, not morally?
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
I suspect the key to this behaviour isn’t ignorance, it’s in the weighting assigned to different senatorial decisions. Sure, only 1 in 10 senate roll calls will turn on the candidate’s moral opinions – but if the voter believes these are the roll calls that matter, then that voter will be largely satisfied with their candidate even if the candidate acts against their interest on the other 9 roll calls.
A secondary factor driving this is economic confusion. Check out the logic :

• Economic issues are seen as complex. (And, let’s face it, it isn’t just perception – economic issues are complex.)
• On issues perceived as complex, all voters tend to accept the word of trusted authorities.
• All voters tend to place trust in authorities who share their moral outlook.
• Therefore, voters entrust their economic welfare to morally congruent authorities.

Thus we have the powerful US right wing. They have married conservative morality to a wealth-entrenching economics, knowing that one provides unthinking support for the other.
Yet there’s a further step. Some analysts think it’s no mere strategic positioning that has led to this marriage. The claim is that conservative morality goes hand-in-hand with this economic approach. Lakoff, for example, argues compellingly that every aspect of conservative policy is ultimately derived from a unified metaphor of morality.
Does this mean that conservative morality creates its own economic punishment? Is the economic extrapolation of conservative morality inevitably to the massive detriment of the very people who hold that morality?
I suspect this is so. Which puts us in a very odd position indeed.
I’m not sure where to go with this – it’s a shallow analysis, because I have a bunch of other stuff on my plate, and I’m uncomfortable pushing further without checking to see if I’ve messed up some crucial step along the way. But the logic seems clear to me right now at least.
This analysis says that everything is economic; I believe that forces us more into the realm of morality than before.
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Stephanie has done some further reading and provided a good link explaining the assignment of senators to positions on that chart. It’s jargon-heavy at the start but gets a lot clearer as it goes along, so stick with it. Thanks Steph!

(again via Making Light)
A chap in the US named Ben Hyde runs a blog where stats and politics get combined. This post here is absolutely fascinating.
In it, Hyde charts all the US Senators on a graph, based entirely on where they generally sit on social issues and where they sit on economic issues. It’s just like the political compass.
Then, for each senate vote, a line is drawn to separate the senators who voted yea from those who voted nay. Usually it isn’t possible to separate the two sides entirely with a line, but most of the time very few senators end up stuck on the wrong side. This shows it’s on to something interesting.
(The charts on his site show the line for lots of senate votes- it’s a half-meg changing chart so may take a moment to load. The one on the left shows all the senators that fit the line division, the one on the right-hand side shows all the senators that don’t – there are hardly any senators on the right-hand chart.)
Furthermore, you can tell how voting split from the angle of the line. If it’s up-down, then the split was based on economic issues; if it’s left-right, the split is based on social issues.
Then it gets very very interesting indeed. Hyde says:

The model is extremely accurate; around 95% these days. Amazingly you don

Making progress on the deadlines. Yesterday was particularly productive. I am enthused. It pleases me that I can sit down and write game stuff to a hazy outline knocked up months ago, and have it come out as something that I think is a damn good resource and an amusing read to boot. I’m trying to push myself here, not settle for something I’ve seen before, and it feels like it’s working. (Although in six months I’ll be cringing at it; that’s how these things work.)
Likewise, other work – it’s becoming increasingly clear that I finish assignments at the moment I fully understand them, and vice versa. Which is a nice realisation.
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Further to the Conspiracy Guff posts of the last few weeks about the Exploding Shampoo Plot, in my web catch-up I’ve found a fantastic article at Making Light that summarises the whole kerfuffle with plenty of relevant outgoing links.
Highlights:

• El Reg points out the plot is technically unfeasible – liquid bombs are the stuff of action movies, not real world activity
• Paul Krugman in the NYT analyses how the Bush administration has used fear as a political tool throughout its existence
• Ned Lamont as target of three-minutes hate
• The Washington Post on the Bush admin increasingly avoiding all press contact and scrutiny (again, the story of this political era is the failure of the media)
• and a link to a followup article by Craig Murray, whose first article was the focus of my last post on this subject.

Check it out.
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The artist formerly known as Comic Shop Andrew as a zombie. More pics elsewhere at the site.
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More airplane madness:
Dude in t-shirt with Arabic writing on it forced to change before being allowed on plane

Man, that week was crazy. Last Friday I was actually experiencing stress – I don’t get stressed very often – about the coming week and what I needed to get done by when. And it was, indeed, extremely demanding. And I’m not out of the woods yet, I have about twenty crucial emails waiting for replies, a major writing deadline to hit in the next couple days, another only-slightly-less major writing deadline to hit in the same time period, another key sekretproject deadline to hit the same time again, and a bunch of promises to deliver on too. Whew.
Mon thru Thurs I played tourist with visiting Gar and Jackie, which was quite marvellous, but actually very tiring. It was nice to wander through Te Papa yet again and realise that I still haven’t seen all of it, eight years after it opened. And experiencing the many delights of Foxton through foreign eyes was a treat.
I am in Karori now, housesitting again. Getting grumpy with the buses. They are not living up to their hype so far. I hate waiting for buses. It’s broken time, sacrificed waiting for something that might come in twenty seconds or maybe twenty minutes, impossible to relax. Really, really hate it. And there has been entirely too much of it lately. Nor am I excited to see that in a week, the price of the bus journey from where I’m staying to town more than doubles.
The train between Auckland and Wellington is being withdrawn on Sept 30. I am very upset about this. I have used it, and was planning on using it again. The rail system has been systematically run down across a decade of privatization, and now it’s in a serious financial hole. It’s a disaster for our national transport network. We can do better than this. My grandfather would be saddened, but probably not surprised, to see what has become of NZ rail.
NZ’s run in the basketball worlds is amply discussed by learned bodies in the previous post’s comments. Refer there for much insight. We didn’t, in the end, walk away humiliated, going out on our best game of the tourney, but it still wasn’t near our potential and to make it hurt more, Argentina’s performance made the game entirely winnable. Oh well. No point stressing about it. Will try and find time to watch more games, because it’s fun. The US look like they deserve to win, based on how they just played against Australia – which is a radical change from every major international event since the first Dream Team played waaaay back in the day.
I want to see Snakes on a Plane more than United 93.
I have lots of political stuff backing up that I want to blog about but I think it’ll all fade from my head before I get a chance to do so. Count yourselves lucky.

After the spooky Norman-Gregor-Malcolm convergence discussed on my LJ here, I’ve had a couple other spooky moments – both occasions where I was prompted by some random stimulus to think of someone I haven’t seen for many years, and wonder what happened to them, only to see them coming towards me moments later. Fun thing.
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Basketball world champs are on now! I am excited. The highlight of my sports-appreciation calendar, this. Four years ago the NZ team came in and shocked everyone, making its way to a fourth place finish. This year, that ain’t gonna happen, but judging by last night we’re not gonna disgrace ourselves either.
Minor grump for NZ player Mark Dickel being sidelined for three more games. He tested positive for cannabis after a match recently – apparently at a party five weeks prior to that (when he wasn’t under contract) he had a smoke. He ended up with a 2-game suspension and a serious warning from the NZ bball body, but then FIBA (bball’s international body) stepped in and imposed a further 3 games.
The grump has two sides – first, that using cannabis draws such penalties at all, it certainly isn’t performance enhancing (as the entirety of Wellington’s underperforming Saints side through the 90s could tell you, ahem) – and second, that FIBA felt the need to overrule the NZ body’s decision and slap on a further three games. Bah.
Still, as JB points out, it adds new meaning to the guy’s nickname, ‘Sparky’.
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Post of the week: d3vo explains how to cook rice. It begins:
Most instructions on how to make rice are crap. I am a computer programmer. I know how to write instructions.

Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbek who was turfed out for, among other things, standing up for human rights:
“I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.
So this, I believe, is the true story.”
Key quote: “In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot.”
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Just saw on the telly Kiwi expat (now Beeb announcer) Anita McNaught being interviewed about the kidnap of her cameraman husband in Gaza. Anita was always the most professional TV newsreader-person we had, unflappable and very sharp and mostly wasted in NZ. No wonder the BBC snapped her up.
All of which made it horrible to watch as she was interviewed (on the receiving end for a change), cool and calm and professional as she answered questions about her husband’s likely situation and what was being done about it. All under control – except for her hands. At the bottom of the screen, her fingers were furiously at work, twisting a pen in her hands over and over and over. She knew she was doing it, and clasped her hands together tight to try and stop herself, but the fingers kept twitching. Anita smiled and made sensible comments about the difficulties of the situation, looked tired and calm and on top of things, but there was no way she could stop her hands from betraying her. All that anxiety and fear was leaking out.
It upset me. I think it’s going to be an image I’ll remember for a long time.

I chanced upon Ellen Degeneres on TV the other day. Her talk-show is doing great guns, apparently, thus putting the lie to a limerick I composed upon her coming out; I took great pleasure in rhyming ‘lesbian’ with ‘has-been’, but it didn’t play out like that at all.
Ellen’s a bit too nice-nice to appeal to me, but I will always have a soft spot for her after her round of appearances on talk shows explaining that yes, her character on her sitcom was about to undergo a major shake-up: she was going to come out as Lebanese. “The clues have been there all along,” she’d say, “she’s always liked hummus…”
(Of course, Ellen’s character coming out, which went hand-in-hand with Ellen herself coming out, was a milestone in the identity politics of Western popular culture – at least the big chunks of it that are US-driven. It was a commercial sacrificial lamb but it sure got them there gays on the small screen good and proper!)
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Meanwhile, it’s been clear for a long time the only real question in terms of understanding the world is not, is there a conspiracy, but rather, how big and powerful and sinister is it?
Case in point: this terror raid in the UK. I’ve been reserving comment on the whole affair, after the last time when the big story (“potential subway bomber heroically stopped at the last second”) turned out to be something quite different (“innocent Brazilian electrician pointlessly executed by over-excited policemen”). Better, I thought, to wait until something solid was in.
And it still isn’t. But I have heard more than a few suspicious noises on the left that the raid, and subsequent unprecedented pushing of the US terror alert level into the red, was really stage-managed by the US government to deal with growing domestic dissent.
I didn’t pay too much mind to this stuff. If you start looking for conspiracies you see them everywhere, after all.
Well, turns out the noises aren’t baseless. Far from it. Apparently the raid happened when it did not because an attack was imminent, but because the US leaned on the UK to make it happen then.
Why was the US so anxious? Well, that’s the question. Did the raid happen when it did because:

• the officers in charge of the investigation decided it was the best time to conduct a raid?
• (as the story suggests) the US was just too anxious to allow one suspect to conduct a dry run, and insisted on moving before this?
• the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and war with Hizbollah has been a complete disaster for Israel and a strategic and tactical victory for Hizbollah, and something was needed to crowd it out of the news cycle?
• anti-war Democrat Ned Lamont was selected in a massive-turnout primary against pro-war Democrat Joe Lieberman, and something was needed to crowd it out of the news cycle?
• the stars were right, ia ia c’thulhu fthagn?

You picks your conspiracy, you rolls your dices.

So there’s this new haka the All Blacks are doing before big rugby matches, with a gesture at the end that is interpreted as ‘throat-slitting’.
Parents are complaining about their kids copying the gesture in a threatening way.
I’ve been trying to find out what my opinion is on this important issue of the day. But I’m stuck! I can’t figure out which side are the silly Politically Correct wooly woofters!
Are they:

• the people who make a fuss about the haka? (Everyone knows that trying to mollycoddle our kids is the worst kind of PC liberal tree hugging nonsense!)

Or are they:

• the people who don’t make a fuss about the haka? (Everyone knows that favouring “Maori values” over proper New Zealand values is the worst kind of PC happy-clappy idiocy!)

I’ve consulted a range of right-wing blogs and columns but they don’t seem to agree! Gosh! What a fix! Someone explain it to me please, or I’m going to start thinking *everyone* is a Politically Correct nancy!

August 2 – Billy re-posts something from the Victoria University BBS of the 90s, in response to a request from ex-BBSer Crosby. A lament for the BBS emerges in the comments.
August 3 – a post appears on NZMusic.com seeking information about iconic BBS-associated band Skwish
August 4 – I mention the BBS on my blog as part a wider consideration of online community – a couple of old BBSers identify themselves in the comments.
August 4 – Mike suggests the old BBS crew take over the Bar on NZMusic.com
Something’s in the air…