2015 UK General Election

[Napoléon]

Russell Brand strikes me as a man who has a natural intelligence, but who has had a shit education.  This makes him sometimes perceptive, and sometimes very extremely and utterly wrong, wrong in ways that would be easy to be right about, if only he had proper instruction.

He comes across as a very impressionable kind of person who latches onto one idea then flits to another as soon as it takes his interest. The guy was an addict and he certainly displays very 'addict' like behaviour IMO.

He seems to be somewhat clever but I do think he's far less intelligent than he likes to portray himself as. Often times I find he uses words in his vocabulary that would make him seem intelligent but are often unnecessary, or just to make him sound like a pseudo-intellectual.

Couple years ago with all his "don't vote" stuff, I was actually on board and agreeing with him.

However he gets one visit from Ed Milliband a week before the general election and he's suddenly urging all his followers to vote Labour? What an absolute sellout and hypocrite. The sad thing is, a lot of morons will follow his advice.

I knew after I saw some of his more spiritual bullshit videos he was a bit of a deluded mess, but I still wasn't expecting him to be so brazen as to make a video urging people to vote Labour, all the while trying to contort reasons in his own mind trying to justify why doing so would still be in the purpose of 'revolution' like he had been banging on about for the last 3 years.

All in all, I think the guy is a cunt. I had respect for him, but since making his youtube channel, appearing on political programs and then getting up his own arse about religion, I think all the attention has gone massively to his head.

[Pyrrho]

Yes, Russell Brand seems to have a massive ego (perhaps, though, it is a cover for self-doubt and insecurity?).  He seems to think he is more intelligent than he really is, and does not appear to realize that he does not know enough to be pontificating the way he does.  Well, it usually does not stop others from pontificating, so...

To be fair, most people seem to have a hard time with self-evaluation, exaggerating their abilities in some instances, and thinking they are worse than they are in other ways.  Usually, just about the last person you want to ask about a person's intelligence and abilities is the person himself (or herself).

His feud with Fox, some of which I have seen, is pretty funny.  And he is certainly smart enough for that.


I just took a look at the Wikipedia article on him.  It seems he did have a poor education, and a rough childhood.  I wonder what he would have become if he had had a good childhood and a good education.  It seems to me that he had more potential than how he turned out.

[Minimalist]

So how's the election going?

You do the whole thing in 6 weeks so you must count the votes in 15-20 minutes.

[Saxmoof]

Everyone hates all the parties and we've known for months what the outcome will be

I think apathy is the natural, healthy way to view politics though, i'd definitely take that over current American politics

[Tiberius]

I remember that and blogged about it at the time. Basically we were given the opportunity to decide whether we wanted to keep the present first past the post system or the shiny alternative vote one. The result would be tallied and the one with the most votes would win.

You know - first past the post.

Yes, but first past the post is a fair method of voting when there are only two options, as was the case with the voting referendum. It was a choice between two voting systems, the one which got the most votes won, and even if the vote had been 50.1% to 49.9%, we can all agree that most of the voters got their way.

However, when there are more than 2 options in a vote, strange things can happen. You can have a vote where one option gets 33.3%, another gets 33.3%, and the third gets 33.4%. Under first past the post, the third option is the winner. Like the previous example, they got more votes than the other option(s), if even by a small number, however unlike the previous example, they did not get an outright majority. In fact, 66.6% of voters voted against option 3. This doesn't mean that option 3 shouldn't win, but it does mean that in order to have a fair vote and properly represent the majority of the people, another voting system is needed which takes into consideration that fact that there can be more than 2 options.

This is where AV would have been great. It solves the problem of candidates winning despite not having the majority of the vote by allowing people to vote for multiple people, ranking them in the order they wish to be counted. In the first round, everyone's first preference votes are counted and tallied up. If one candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, huzzah, we have a winner! If not, we move to the second round of voting.

In the second round of voting, the candidate with the least amount of votes in the previous round gets eliminated, but the people who voted for them don't have their votes discarded. Instead, their second preference votes are counted and distributed between the remaining candidates. If one candidate now has more than 50% of the vote, huzzah, we have a winner! If not, you move to the third round of voting...and the process continues, until either one candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, or until there are two candidates left (which can happen if people limit their preferences), in which case the candidate with the most amount of votes wins.

Is it perfect? No. But it's a hell of a lot better and a hell of a lot fairer than first past the post. It's also the system that the parties use internally for voting their leaders! It's good enough for the main parties, but apparently it's not good enough for the people!

Oh, and before someone accuses me of being pro-AV because it would help certain parties, that's not the reason I support it. I did the math; it's a fairer representation of people's preferences. I also voted Conservative in the election the referendum was in, and AV wouldn't have benefited the Conservatives much at all (probably why they were against it).

[Fidel_Castronaut]

I was a supporter of AV top up over PR. Falconer's report back in the early naugties really got me on board with it and I think it would have been good.

Oh well, that ship has sailed for now.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

So how's the election going?

You do the whole thing in 6 weeks so you must count the votes in 15-20 minutes.

Should know the final result by about 9 GMT tomorrow morning.

[Cyberman]

Yes, but first past the post is a fair method of voting when there are only two options, as was the case with the voting referendum. It was a choice between two voting systems, the one which got the most votes won, and even if the vote had been 50.1% to 49.9%, we can all agree that most of the voters got their way.

You're quite right; it was just the apparent irony that tickled me.

[Tiberius]

I was a supporter of AV top up over PR. Falconer's report back in the early naugties really got me on board with it and I think it would have been good.

Oh well, that ship has sailed for now.

I don't like people comparing AV and PR as if one is better than the other; both are good in certain circumstances. AV is good if you want to select one overall winner out of 2 or more candidates. PR is good if you want to select multiple winners based on the proportion of votes each party gets (e.g. party A got 80% of the vote, whilst party B got 20%, so party A selects 4 people as winners, whilst party B selects 1).

Since the UK parliament has a fixed number of seats based on constituencies, and each party only puts forward a maximum of 1 candidate per constituency, PR doesn't make any sense. If that changed, and UK parliament was made up of a flexible number of seats, distributed amongst constituencies to match their population, then PR would work fine.

Anyway, now for something lighter and funnier:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THy2031TA0o

[Cyberman]

So how's the election going?

You do the whole thing in 6 weeks so you must count the votes in 15-20 minutes.

The polls don't close for another hour, so the first result won't be expected until about an hour after that (the Houghton and Sunderland South constituency is traditionally the first to announce).  We should probably know for certain by about 6am, with the last result predicted to come in around 1pm tomorrow from St Ives. This is a particularly close election, so the actual result might not be clear until towards the end; and the post-poll arguing and dissection could go on for a while.

Not sure what the exit polls are saying.