![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Me lose brain?
Nov. 9th, 2006 11:59 pm
Currently at UW: 4.3. High today: 14.9. The bottom fell out of the air sometime between five and six, which is to say sometime while I was in a Sobey's store, this being the second unfamiliar grocery store I've been to in the past week on account of its being in the neighbourhood of a place where I had to go to pick up a piece of mail, rounding up the constituents of pasta salad, and also cat-feesh!, and mushrooms. I had cat-feesh! and mushrooms for dinner. And a lot of butter. And then, a Guinness. While I was in the Sobey's, I overheard a stock-guy saying to another stock-guy that his doctor told him he should drink a Guinness a day, for the iron.
Which reminds me that last night--by which I mean tonight, which I have just deduced from the fact that this occurred on the way home from the Sobey's, but it was a long time ago already--I stopped in the 7-11 next door, because I didn't want to carry milk home all the way from the Sobey's (which is approximately two miles from here, as the mapquest lies), and I heard some snippets of conversation between the cashier and a group of three or four 20-ish women, that went something like "we went over this before ... there are only apples and oranges ... that wouldn't work with Corona ... " and then the three or four 20-ish women went and stood just outside the door, such that when I left I heard one of them say something like "maybe we should try the oranges." I dunno, it seemed funny at the time. Why I laugh?
So, the municipal elections are four days away, and so far we have received information about four candidates for the--if I understand correctly--eleven positions we can vote for. HELLO? DEMOCRACY?? ARE YOU THERE??? I'M GETTING WORRIED!
Thus: my project for the night, or rather my project for the late night, after the pasta salad project for the early night (which in turn followed the cat-feesh! and mushrooms project for the, uh, late evening), which extended itself into my project for this very early morning, has been finding out who the hell is running and what they think they're all about. I have to say, it sure is easier when the M&Ms come helpfully colour-coded. (Although a leaflet showed up yesterday for someone with an endorsement from Elizabeth May, which is close enough.) I now know something, or at least I have written down something, about approximately two dozen of the approximately 28 people I could potentially vote for. Mostly what I have learned is that two of the three people out of those 28 who I might actively want to vote for are running against each other, and that I don't want to vote for anybody for school board trustee or mayor.
Here is an odd thing that's starting to make me wonder about myself: I seem to have settled into an inclination to vote from the left and govern from the right. Not that I'm governing anything right just now.
One thing about not having colour-coded M&Ms is that it compounds the vote-splitting problem, which got me around to thinking about the old first-past-the-post business today, and the thing I got around to thinking about, which I'd never really thought so much about before, is that FPTP at least has the virtue of giving you the person that the most people want the most. Which is obvious, but I'd never really thought about the implication: run-off systems can tend to give you someone who not that many people actually like. Like, the last Toronto election: Miller probably couldn't have won in any kind of run-off, but he would probably have still been the better-liked candidate, by a significant margin, over any of the others. You get this kind of thing in leadership votes all the time--"anybody but x" candidate y wins, because more people would rather have not-x than x, despite the fact that nobody really likes y that much, and a lot of people like x quite a lot. That's how John Turner became prime minister ... probably.
And then somehow I got around to thinking about NDP-Liberal vote-splitting, and I thought, given that the Liberals are always splitting votes with the NDP, and the Conservatives have mostly never been splitting votes (in any significant way) with anyone, it seems like some kind of miracle that the Liberals win so much--but then I realized, the existence of the NDP on one side, with the Conservatives on the other, leaves the Liberals more or less smack in the middle (except that the NDP takes up less space to the left of them than the Conservatives do to the right, which is what allows the Liberals to keep their identity as a "centre-left" party), so that the NDP, far from hurting the Liberals, ensures that they almost always win! And, moreover, despite the fact that the existence of the NDP ensures that people relatively far to the left are entirely excluded from Canadian government (in a way which they're not in the States, given that the Democrats collect people from the entire range of the left-of-centre), because its small size leaves more space on Natural Governing Party's left than on its right, it ensures that Canadian government will, over the long term, lean more to the left than it would if the NDP were either non-existent or bigger.
Which I think are some pretty unexpected results.
Which reminds me that last night--by which I mean tonight, which I have just deduced from the fact that this occurred on the way home from the Sobey's, but it was a long time ago already--I stopped in the 7-11 next door, because I didn't want to carry milk home all the way from the Sobey's (which is approximately two miles from here, as the mapquest lies), and I heard some snippets of conversation between the cashier and a group of three or four 20-ish women, that went something like "we went over this before ... there are only apples and oranges ... that wouldn't work with Corona ... " and then the three or four 20-ish women went and stood just outside the door, such that when I left I heard one of them say something like "maybe we should try the oranges." I dunno, it seemed funny at the time. Why I laugh?
So, the municipal elections are four days away, and so far we have received information about four candidates for the--if I understand correctly--eleven positions we can vote for. HELLO? DEMOCRACY?? ARE YOU THERE??? I'M GETTING WORRIED!
Thus: my project for the night, or rather my project for the late night, after the pasta salad project for the early night (which in turn followed the cat-feesh! and mushrooms project for the, uh, late evening), which extended itself into my project for this very early morning, has been finding out who the hell is running and what they think they're all about. I have to say, it sure is easier when the M&Ms come helpfully colour-coded. (Although a leaflet showed up yesterday for someone with an endorsement from Elizabeth May, which is close enough.) I now know something, or at least I have written down something, about approximately two dozen of the approximately 28 people I could potentially vote for. Mostly what I have learned is that two of the three people out of those 28 who I might actively want to vote for are running against each other, and that I don't want to vote for anybody for school board trustee or mayor.
Here is an odd thing that's starting to make me wonder about myself: I seem to have settled into an inclination to vote from the left and govern from the right. Not that I'm governing anything right just now.
One thing about not having colour-coded M&Ms is that it compounds the vote-splitting problem, which got me around to thinking about the old first-past-the-post business today, and the thing I got around to thinking about, which I'd never really thought so much about before, is that FPTP at least has the virtue of giving you the person that the most people want the most. Which is obvious, but I'd never really thought about the implication: run-off systems can tend to give you someone who not that many people actually like. Like, the last Toronto election: Miller probably couldn't have won in any kind of run-off, but he would probably have still been the better-liked candidate, by a significant margin, over any of the others. You get this kind of thing in leadership votes all the time--"anybody but x" candidate y wins, because more people would rather have not-x than x, despite the fact that nobody really likes y that much, and a lot of people like x quite a lot. That's how John Turner became prime minister ... probably.
And then somehow I got around to thinking about NDP-Liberal vote-splitting, and I thought, given that the Liberals are always splitting votes with the NDP, and the Conservatives have mostly never been splitting votes (in any significant way) with anyone, it seems like some kind of miracle that the Liberals win so much--but then I realized, the existence of the NDP on one side, with the Conservatives on the other, leaves the Liberals more or less smack in the middle (except that the NDP takes up less space to the left of them than the Conservatives do to the right, which is what allows the Liberals to keep their identity as a "centre-left" party), so that the NDP, far from hurting the Liberals, ensures that they almost always win! And, moreover, despite the fact that the existence of the NDP ensures that people relatively far to the left are entirely excluded from Canadian government (in a way which they're not in the States, given that the Democrats collect people from the entire range of the left-of-centre), because its small size leaves more space on Natural Governing Party's left than on its right, it ensures that Canadian government will, over the long term, lean more to the left than it would if the NDP were either non-existent or bigger.
Which I think are some pretty unexpected results.
