Thank you for those analogies. Having lived, for most of my voting life, in electorates dominated by conservative people whose voting habits never seem to waver, I grasped at MMP as the way to make (one of) my vote(s) actually work for me.
But the commercially-led media have done a great job of ignoring MMP and convincing many that elections can only be a choice between good or evil. Naming those concerned about the common good as the ‘Red Feds’ in 1909 allows nasty connotations to still be used to stimulate fear.
Yep, by definition, if there is a Common Good, we actually have common enemies. The challenge is how many people are looking for them all around them (rather than looking up!) 😉
Thought provoking, Tim. And yes, there are some eXtreme cases of individual money buys everything and anything ... including our votes in some cases. Equally, powerful lobby groups sway government choices, and the people who voted them in. (Been part of a couple long ago and know how it works.) A giant issue may be how they manipulate truth. Not many of us believe there are lizard people in power, but a range of these trolled ideas do disenfranchise pockets of voters. Get enough voters sidelined and that enables more realistic half-truths to take care of many others. "We can sort out the economy. We know what we're doing because we've run businesses" and similar ilk... caught out NZ voters in October who desperately wanted a magic economic wand to make everything better. People craved belief in it ... I'd like leprechauns and fairies to be real too, but unfortunately they're only real in novels. I shall return to mine!
Thank you for those analogies. Having lived, for most of my voting life, in electorates dominated by conservative people whose voting habits never seem to waver, I grasped at MMP as the way to make (one of) my vote(s) actually work for me.
But the commercially-led media have done a great job of ignoring MMP and convincing many that elections can only be a choice between good or evil. Naming those concerned about the common good as the ‘Red Feds’ in 1909 allows nasty connotations to still be used to stimulate fear.
Yep, by definition, if there is a Common Good, we actually have common enemies. The challenge is how many people are looking for them all around them (rather than looking up!) 😉
Thought provoking, Tim. And yes, there are some eXtreme cases of individual money buys everything and anything ... including our votes in some cases. Equally, powerful lobby groups sway government choices, and the people who voted them in. (Been part of a couple long ago and know how it works.) A giant issue may be how they manipulate truth. Not many of us believe there are lizard people in power, but a range of these trolled ideas do disenfranchise pockets of voters. Get enough voters sidelined and that enables more realistic half-truths to take care of many others. "We can sort out the economy. We know what we're doing because we've run businesses" and similar ilk... caught out NZ voters in October who desperately wanted a magic economic wand to make everything better. People craved belief in it ... I'd like leprechauns and fairies to be real too, but unfortunately they're only real in novels. I shall return to mine!