The ultimate electioneering strategy

[member34258]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200705/s1938283.htm

[stui magpie]

He's pretty keen to get the top job.

[sherrife]

Neil Mitchell is further right than Howard... his opinion means diddly squat most of the time. This time however he has hit the nail on the head, Rudd is a pragmatic prick, and will do ANYTHING necessary to get into power. I just hope people see this and vote greens in protest, not return to Howard. Unfortunately I am pretty sure that everyone will vote Labor just to make sure Howard gets out, so the Greens vote will suffer a little.

In any case, the more right-wing the Labor party gets, the more concrete examples those of us that advocate overthrowing the whole system have at our disposal.

[Dark Lord]

To Hades with The Greens. They are an absolute joke of a Party.

[stui magpie]

[member34258]

Yep, Rudd wants it bad.
Almost as bad as "no gst, ever, ever"...."core promise" or "they were throwing children into the water"

Some have very short memories.

As for the greens, would be the biggest mistake we could ever make giving them balance of federal power. To misquote a famous advert, "Just DON'T do it"

[David]

Are you serious? Rudd's an ambitious man who will do anything to further his own career?

Welcome to the world of politics.

Unfortunately, these are the only guys we're allowed to vote for, so we've got to make the most of it.

Sherrife, how would you suggest replacing the system? It's not perfect, by any means, but I am certainly not aware of any viable alternatives.

To be honest, when I see Labor moving further to the "right", I see that as an acceptance that the majority of voters are on the "right". If this was not the case, the Greens would in theory right now have a huge chance of gaining government, which they clearly don't.

Whether you see conservative voters as less educated, or stupid, or whatever, the fact is it is a democracy, and their vote must be as valid as the so-called enlightened ones.

The only alternative I can think of is a Plato-esque (?) system of a group of wise philosophers who control everything. Sounds great in theory, but that opens the door for totalitarianism, and who decides who's wise anyway?

*BTW I put right (as in right-wing) in quotation marks because I believe such terms are very subjective, and often relate to how left or right you are yourself. I would never use such terminology to describe myself anyhow.

[member34258]

[HAL]

If you could have any kind of robot what would it be?

[Pa Marmo]

The greens and Bob Brown, are you for real Sherrife? Lets kill un-born babies but don't harm a tree lunatics with the balance of power would be the single worst thing to ever happen to this great land.

[sherrife]

[nomadjack]

I've read Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Weber, Godwin etc Sherrife, and while they all provide invaluable critiques of capitalism (particularly Marx), I've gradually come to the realisation that none of them go even close to providing a blueprint for a viable alternative means of organising productive and social relations in modern society. And this is coming from someone who accepts many of the premises of Marxism (dialectical materialism for example and to a lesser extent, his theory of surplus value) and whose personal outlook was fundamentally reshaped by being introduced to Marx during an undergrad degree!

I'm actually a big fan of Bob Brown and have voted Green in the past. However, i can't see myself doing so this time around. Firstly, and I base this on having quite a bit of contact with a significant number of Green party members and candidates - below the top 10% or so of candidates, their quality falls away dramatically. And I mean dramatically. The majority I have met, while honest and decent folk, have absolutely no clue about most public policy issues and the idea that they could exert any influence in government scares the shit out of me. This is not unique to the Greens, but is a problem faced by all minor parties. Secondly, because of their organisational model which is based much more on bottom up influence and censensus than the other parties, the Greens will always struggle to provide a marketable, unified, coherent face acceptable to a majority. They are organisationally inept, prone to splittering and notoriously difficult to deal with as a result. Despite this, they were still 30 years ahead of the game on climate change, and the fact that they were ignored on this issue for so long will prove incredibly costly. They are also one of the few parties which have taken a strong, consistent and principled stance on race issues over the last decade.

The single dimension left-right spectrum is basically useless for describing political attitudes now. Originally it was used to describe the positions of radicals (left) and moderates (right) in the french parliament during the revolution of 1789. It does not only refer to economic issues but is also still commonly used to describe things like attitudes towards social change, government intervention in non-economic areas etc, and any concrete measures you find will be suspect. For example, while you place free market advocates on the right, they should really be placed on the extreme left - given that they propose an absence of government intervention.

If you're interested in political psychology and attitude formation try Bob Altemeyer, he's a US theorist whose done quite a bit of work on right-wing authoritarianism.

[stui magpie]

Whoah, extremely deep discussion goin on here, and I'm not qualified to comment on most of it.

The only part I feel I can comment on is this bit by Sherriffe:

[David]