Postal Voting Par Avion
After giving the matter much thought, some weeks ago I decided to apply for a postal vote so I could vote in the general election in the constituency of Cardiff West where I still (for the time being) have a house. I couldn’t vote in person owing to work commitments in Ireland on Thursday 12th December. Teaching term doesn’t end in Maynooth until 20th.
The postal ballot paper was sent to my address in Cardiff because I wasn’t confident in the post between the UK and Ireland. (It takes over a month for my copy of Physics World to reach Ireland. Last night I flew from Dublin to complete it and this morning I put it in the mail, so it should arrive in time to be counted.
In case you’re interested, I voted for Kevin Brennan (Welsh Labour).
I fear this will turn out to be a futile gesture, and that this election will put liar and charlatan Boris Johnson in Downing Street with a significant majority. The prospect of a government headed by this creature appals me, as does the thought that so many people don’t care that he’s so demonstrably dishonest and untrustworthy. As far as I see it, anyone who votes for the modern Conservative Party must be either a simpleton or a sociopath. Or possibly both.
Update: relevant advice from today’s Financial Times:
(It’s actually about dealing with cold callers, but is in my opinion more widely applicable..)
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In the Dark 
December 7, 2019 at 12:42 pm
I share and understand your frustration. I especially share your frustration given that I left Ireland 25 years ago to live in the UK but don’t have the option at the moment to escape the clutches of that buffoon.
And, as you know, I’m not the least argumentative individual.
But…
As far as I see it, anyone who votes for the modern Conservative Party must be either a simpleton or a sociopath. Or possibly both.
This gets us less than nowhere. Telling those who don’t share our politics that they’re stupid and/or evil may well rack up a few more “likes” and “follows” among our tribe on social media but it’s not going to convince anyone. And we’re not going to change anything unless we can sway opinions in the right — sorry, left — direction.
Not every Tory voter is evil. Not every Leave voter is scum of the earth. That “People’s Front of Judaea/Judaean People’s Front” in-fighting that characterises the left is born of an obsession with purity-checking and assuming we always have the moral high ground. Even if we do, telling those who don’t share our voting convictions that they’re sociopathic is not just useless, it’s entirely counter-productive.
Until the left becomes a lot more cognisant of “optics”, PR, and messaging, we’re not going to convince anyone.
December 7, 2019 at 12:43 pm
…and, indeed, as George Monbiot consistently pointed out in the run-up to the referendum (and long before), there were good reasons for those of us on the left to seriously consider a leave vote.
December 7, 2019 at 1:12 pm
This election is about far more than leaving the European Union. I didn’t mention the EU at all in the post. The Leave Campaign was just the start of a right-wing onslaught, not the end. It is a tragedy that so many on the left couldn’t see it, but they’re now going to find out.
January 12, 2020 at 11:07 pm
As I mentioned in my post entitled “The Quotation Fallacy” at http://soundeagle.wordpress.com/2017/10/18/the-quotation-fallacy/, George Monbiot also has the following to say about the constant assaults on reason, intellect and integrity as well as the dilutions of idea and substance, which are brazenly stoked by the chronic inducements of consumerist ethos, pop culture and tabloid mentality in the unrelenting cult of celebrity and hero-worship saturating the mass media and contemporary living:
December 7, 2019 at 1:08 pm
My statement was about people prepared to vote for a proven liar. People who simply don’t care about honesty or truth. We see exactly the same thing with Trump supporters now and in various episodes throughout history.
It’s not really about politics or voting convictions. It’s much more fundamental than that and it won’t be defeated by “optics”.
I notice that you appear to attribute a number of other opinions to me that I didn’t express.
December 7, 2019 at 1:22 pm
Peter,
The precise quote from your post is As far as I see it, anyone who votes for the modern Conservative Party must be either a simpleton or a sociopath. Or possibly both.
That’s entirely about politics and voting convictions. “Anyone who votes for…”
It would be ironic (given my Judaean People’s Front comments) if you and I, who share the same politics and worldview to a very large extent, ended up arguing re. the semantics here.
A *lot* of people are convinced by Johnson. As you surmise, probably the majority of those who vote are convinced by Johnson, for whatever reason. That may make them gullible in our eyes but it doesn’t mean that they’re either “a simpleton or a sociopath”.
And if we’re not going to convince those who vote for Trump and Johnson by “optics” and messages that resonate, just how do we do it? Or do we throw the towel in, demonise The Other, and retire to our separate camps/FB pages…?
December 7, 2019 at 1:32 pm
As far as I see it, there are two possibilities.
1. Knowing Johnson’s lies are lies and not caring anyway.
2. Believing Johnson’s lies are true despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
If there is another alternative I’d like to know what it is.
In the interest of full disclosure the first draft of my post did not say “simpleton or sociopath” but simply “knobhead”.
January 12, 2020 at 11:44 pm
To answer your question, we can do it by empathy, inclusion, (de)conversion, understanding, compromise, and some wit and humour with double or multiple meanings, such as the one at https://soundeagle.wordpress.com/2017/10/18/the-quotation-fallacy/best-quotation-to-win-an-exclusive-loyal-contract-to-make-pig-boss-company-great-again/
December 8, 2019 at 4:54 pm
I think there’s a difference between disparaging the opinions and actions of a group of people with whom you disagree, and disparaging their characters. When the dust settles on the politics of the UK since 2016 we are all going to have to get on with one another.
December 11, 2019 at 9:57 am
Of course I agree with you. It’s got into mathematics too, which is more surprising or less surprising according to your view of the universality of mathematics through abstraction, and its construction via internal consistency rather than consistency with observation.
The Seattle Public Schools Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee (ESAC) has determined that math is subjective and racist. In a draft for its Math Ethnic Studies framework, the ESAC writes that Western mathematics is “used to disenfranchise people and communities of color.”
https://freepressers.com/articles/math-is-racist-according-to-seattle-public-schools?
On the contrary, math is used to empower such communities by giving them the best mathematical tools that other communities have made available – and guess what, we don’t grumble that it is cultural appropriation either. If Rochelle Gutierrez doesn’t want it, she doesn’t have to have it. Here she is lecturing on her ideas:
At 40 minutes she shows a slide saying that one should “Refuse to privilege abstraction over context”. That undoes the first of the great ancient Greek mathematical insights, the idea of abstract number. Pure “three”, as what three sheep in a field, three boats in a harbour, etc, have in common. By doing this you can adapt the abstract mathematics to a huge variety of situations.
The other Greek development was the idea of step-by-step proof of a result from axioms. This idea is valuable for checking an intuition and for teaching the subject. It greatly facilitated mathematical development – as in Euclid’s Elements – because results could be built upon systematically. When this idea was shown to Chinese court mathematicians a few hundred years ago (by the Jesuits, in fact), it impressed them instantly and deeply.
You can get away with the sort of bullshit we are concerned with right up to the moment you have to tackle a real problem in the real world. So what is Pi equal to outside Western civ?
December 11, 2019 at 4:17 pm
Whether or not this is a war inside the Left, much more traction would be gained if mathematicians and physicists who were female and/or from minority communities were to stand up for real physics and mathematics.
This is going to turn into a very serious war against our subjects within the universities in a couple of decades.
December 13, 2019 at 12:08 pm
This is a clash of worldviews between the postmodern Left and the older, ‘modern’ (in the formal philosophical sense) Left. Peter has commented on schisms within the Left here before and I believe this is the root of it. The silence of the modernists in the face of the postmodernists in relation to science is, I suspect, due to two reasons: complacency (“science is objective, innit”) and distaste for finding oneself in agreement with the Right.
I believe that modernists won’t win the clash of worldviews. That is because, ultimately, the modernist view that science deals with objective truth derived from the religious worldview in which science matured: the view that the world we observe is real because it was created by an omnipotent deity. If you think that that is an arbitrary huge jump, notice that according to certain eastern monist views espoused by entire human cultures all differentiation between things is mere illusion. Science could never have got going where that was believed. Secular modernists, being secular, can’t appeal to the doctrine of creation, and in postmodernism they are up against a monist view.
But science might be able to hold its own in the coming university wars by invoking pragmatism, ie it underpins technology, which everybody agrees is useful.
Quite possibly we shall see ,more places like Caltech and MIT that are science-only, while some universities become places of exclusively postmodernist studies – which I am fully prepared to call crap.
December 13, 2019 at 5:07 pm
I of course agree that it is possible to do science without being religious. I am talking about the roots of the Western scientific tradition and whether it is ultimately possible to defend that tradition without acknowledging those roots.
Not all non-Western cultures are monist. Some have creation myths not that far removed from that of the Bible (indeed, the Bible incorporated some of them)
It might be more accurate to say that these and the Bible’s creation account have common ancestry.
December 7, 2019 at 1:31 pm
This election is about far more than leaving the European Union. I didn’t mention the EU at all in the post. The Leave Campaign was just the start of a right-wing onslaught, not the end. It is a tragedy that so many on the left couldn’t see it, but they’re now going to find out.
On this, I largely agree. My only quibble would be that I don’t think the Leave Campaign was the start of a right-wing onslaught. I think that particular juggernaut was trundling along long before the Leave Campaign via, for one thing, the austerity programme. (And the Lib Dems should forever hang their heads in shame for facilitating it).
December 7, 2019 at 1:40 pm
Indeed, but the assault on workers rights etc that is coming needed the UK to leave the EU.
December 7, 2019 at 3:14 pm
Closing paragraphs of Frankie Boyle’s latest in today’s Guardian are rather pertinent…
“I don’t want to end on a note of pessimism. Instead, I’d like to share with you my two favourite quotes. The first, is a really famous one. Kurt Vonnegut asked his adult son what he thought the meaning of life was, and his son replied: “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”
The second is what David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, said about the ending of the final episode:
“Well, what Tony should have been thinking, I guess, and what we all should be thinking – although we can’t live that way – is that life is really short. And there are good times in it and there are bad times in it. And that we don’t know why we’re here, but we do know that 20 miles up it’s freezing cold, it’s a freezing cold universe, but here we have this thing called love, which is our only defence, really, against all that cold, and that it’s a very brief interval and that, when it’s over, I think you’re probably always blindsided by it.”
Twenty miles up, it’s a freezing cold universe, we only have the human connections we make here, nothing is permanent, and love is our only defence. I suggest we all vote accordingly, and try to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”
December 7, 2019 at 3:28 pm
Many of those prepared to vote Conservative don’t believe Johnson, and are ready to accept that things are about to get worse,. However, they believe that Corbyn will be even worse. The drip-drip poison of much of the mainstream media, together with a reluctance to look objectively at Labour’s manifesto, has closed their minds to voting Labour. There’s no easy answer to it.
December 10, 2019 at 1:51 pm
There isn’t a two-party “system,” as anybody can found a party. The system is representation by constituency plus a first-past-the-post system in each constituency.
I am interested in the logic by which that system leads to two dominant parties, as is observationally the case. Labour supplanted Liberal as the major alternative to Tory in the first three decades of the 20th century.
More generally, I am interested in what features of voting systems give rise to two dominant parties. I am not considering what system “should” be enacted, but how systems function in practice.
December 10, 2019 at 3:25 pm
Why it happens is clear: people don’t want to risk wasting their vote.
Please fill in the gaps!
December 8, 2019 at 7:31 am
Morning, Peter.
Re. the update…
Sometimes “playing nicely” has much more influence than one might expect. The following is taken from a NYT review of Eli Saslow’s “Rising Out of Hatred”, which I can’t recommend enough (both the book and the review)…
“Today, in the upside-down world that is Trump’s America, where anything seems possible and nothing is off limits, we’re seeing the emergence of a new type of redemption story: that of the white supremacist turned antiracist crusader. In defiance of antifa radicals who support “punching Nazis” to shut them up, and free-speech absolutists who think it’s enough to ignore them and hope they’ll go away, “formers,” as many ex-white supremacists call themselves, teach us from their own experiences about the complicated roles empathy and exclusion play in conversion; about the addictive nature of hate; about how encounters with “others” can be transformative. “
(https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/books/review/eli-saslow-rising-out-of-hatred.html)
And if empathy and constructive encounters with “The Other” can influence members of the far-right to this extent, moderate Tory voters might even respond favourably to being credited with some intelligence and moral fibre.
January 15, 2020 at 11:03 am
[…] everyone with whom we disagree politically is, as some would have it, a sociopath or a simpleton (https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2019/12/07/postal-voting-par-avion/). It is refreshing to see that Jeff — whose politics, like my own, are very firmly left of […]