“Tim Dunlop”:http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/surfdomarchives/001739.php has a posted some reflections on compulsory voting in Australia. My hunch is that he’s probably right that a legal obligation to vote, backed even only by a minor sanction, would improve voter competence–however that is measured. There’s a good doctoral thesis out there for someone interested in sorting this out more systematically.
From the monthly archives:
December 2003
“Ken MacLeod’s”:http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_kenmacleod_archive.html#107076468337607417 long essay on the pro- and anti-war left. (via “Norman Geras”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_12_07_normangeras_archive.html#107088561122966260).
Normally thinking about either the monarchy or the English rugby team makes me nauseous, but I thought this story was quite amusing.
Scrum-half Matt Dawson revealed that the players had first learned of the invitation as a result of a text the queen sent to her grandson Prince Harry just minutes after Wilkinson’s drop goal clinched their final victory over Australia. Dawson told BBC Radio: “It was quite funny how we found out about it. Harry told us, ‘I’ve just got a text from my nan and she wants to give you a party’.”
By the way, I think if the ‘rules’ for punctuation made any sense there’d be an extra full stop at the end of the last sentence.
Via “PoliticalTheory.info”:http://www.politicaltheory.info/ I came upon a “report from a US think-tank called Demos on the disenfranchisement of felons in the United States”:http://www.demos-usa.org/demos/Pubs/punishing_at_the_polls.pdf (PDF). This varies significantly from state to state, and, unsurprisingly, blacks are far more likely to be denied the vote than whites. Just out of curiosity I took some numbers from the report and fed them into Excel to generate a rank ordering of states by the proportion of persons (from the total population rather than the electorate) denied voting rights on these grounds. The table is below the fold:
The Irish Labour Party has produced an excellent report on the flawed introduction of electronic voting in Ireland. Shane Hogan and Robert Cochran, both labour members and IT experts, show with elegant precision just what is wrong with how e-voting is being introduced in Ireland.
It is depressing that in Ireland we often wait till a public policy has been introduced and discredited/heavily criticised elsewhere, and then implement it ourselves, taking no heed of others’ criticisms and the obvious problems. Tower-block public housing in the 1970s and the current push for healthcare centralisation come to mind. So too with e-voting.
This is a little bit freaky. Right now if you do a Google search for Weatherson you get in the sidebar two ‘sponsored links’, one for Philosophy Body Care, and the other for Philosophy the Gingerbread Man. (No I’m not making this up. Not even I have that twisted an imagination.)
“Jim Henley”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2003_11_30.html#004769 has a nice post on his favourite cover-versions; “Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2003_12_07_atrios_archive.html#107083856368381294 has just chimed in too. Here’s a few more to add to the mix.
(1) Uncle Tupelo – I Wanna Be Your Dog. The Stooges classic is given a bluegrass work-over. And it rocks. (available on their recent “anthology”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000063CN9/henryfarrell-20).
(2) Cat Power – (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. Junks the cock-rock chorus to create a nearly unrecognisable, but extraordinarily compelling slice of loneliness and despair. Trust me – you’ve never really heard the lyrics of the song until you’ve listened to this version. (available on “The Covers Record”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004NHDY/henryfarrell-20″)
(3) The Blue Aeroplanes – The Boy in the Bubble. Takes a rather wuffly Paul Simon afro-beat number, and adds much urgency. On their (now deleted) album, _Beatsongs_ – good luck in finding it. The album also has the song “Cover Me,” which no-one has yet covered, to the best of my knowledge.
Update: Oh, and Outkast’s drum’n’bass take on “My Favourite Things” on “Speakerboxx/The Love Below”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000AGWFX/henryfarrell-20
For some of us, ’tis not only the season to get annoyed by some Christmas music. I’m wrapping up my 20s and planning a big 30th bday bash this coming weekend. I would like to play some fun/funny birthday songs and am looking for suggestions. I know there are some, I just can’t think of them.
Looks as though there’s a lot of “cheating”:http://wizbangblog.com/archives/001268.php going on in the Blog Awards. Various methods used – “Dive into Mark”:http://diveintomark.org/ seems to have employed a particularly cunning trick. The polls link directly to the websites of the nominated blogs, in order to allow people to check out the blogs that they’re voting on,. Apparently, the eponymous Mark set up a script to trap anyone clicking on the link to his website into voting for his blog automatically. Scroll down through the comments to see his justification for doing this – it’s a minor masterpiece of chutzpah. Fortunately, CT readers don’t seem to have been up to any mischief, either because you don’t have the skillz, or because you’re nice and honest people. Naturally, I prefer the latter explanation. (Via “Scripting News”:http://www.scripting.com/)
The new issue of Philosophy and Public Affairs contains a brilliant paper by A.J. Julius on the issue of the site of distributive justice. (Subscribers only I’m afraid). He argues against Cohen’s wide-scope construal of the basic structure, and in favour of a more limited scope construal, but does so in what seems to me a novel way — and also indicates that this construal is consistent with far less inequality than either defenders or opponents of the narrow-scope construal often suppose. Read it.
BBC Radio 3 is devoting the entire day to “a celebration of Hector Berlioz on his bicentenary”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/classical/berliozday.shtml. Some great music and much commentary on the life of a man who Ken Russell described (about an hour ago) as the most cinematic of composers.
Welcome to “Punishment Theory”:http://punishmenttheory.blog-city.com/ , a new blog on philosophy and the criminal law featuring some eminent scholars.
David Langford’s indispensable “Ansible”:http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Ansible/a197.html tells us about wirtiglugs, hwinis, and (my favourite) breekbridders.
Following Brian’s “post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000944.html below about voting in Australia, I thought I’d mention a paper that raises some interesting questions about the relation between compusory voting and voter competence. Dan Ortiz has an article called “The Paradox of Mass Democracy,” printed in recent book called “Rethinking the Vote”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195159853/qid=1070746724/sr=12-1/104-9058318-2257562?v=glance&s=books (OUP), in which he argues that democracies are supposed to meet three conditions: (i) near universal suffrage, (ii) equality among those granted voting rights, and (iii) some degree of thoughtfulness among voters. The problem, as Ortiz argues, is that we can’t have it all:
Extracts from a piece in today’s “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/international/middleeast/07TACT.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
bq. As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire. In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves in. …
bq. “If you have one of these cards, you can come and go,” coaxed Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman, the battalion commander whose men oversee the village, about 50 miles north of Baghdad. “If you don’t have one of these cards, you can’t.” The Iraqis nodded and edged their cars through the line. Over to one side, an Iraqi man named Tariq muttered in anger. “I see no difference between us and the Palestinians,” he said. “We didn’t expect anything like this after Saddam fell.” …
Underlying the new strategy, the Americans say, is the conviction that only a tougher approach will quell the insurgency and that the new strategy must punish not only the guerrillas but also make clear to ordinary Iraqis the cost of not cooperating. “You have to understand the Arab mind,” Capt. Todd Brown, a company commander with the Fourth Infantry Division, said as he stood outside the gates of Abu Hishma. “The only thing they understand is force — force, pride and saving face.” …
bq. “With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them,” Colonel Sassaman said.