OFF: Re: HW: Tour Shirts

[M Holmes]

Paul Mather writes:

> On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 07:18:32PM +0100, M Holmes wrote:
>
> [[Observations about the UK political parties and UK election.]]

> I guess I wasn't thinking about UK politics in specific, which is why
> I used "Party A" and "Party B."

I'm moderately aware of US politics and modern history and I wouldn't
say that your average yank needs to spend much time trying to
distinguish elephants from donkeys. The Democrats will tax and spend
while the Republicans will borrow and spend, and tax you to pay the loan
and interest. Seems to me it comes down to which rights you'd rather be
shafted over: First or Second Amendment.

Now if someone who could win were advocating abolishing income tax, or
repeal laws sneakeed through under the Interstae Commerce clause, then I
could get seriously interested.  However, in a good year, the
Libertarian Party would just about get enough Elephant votes to see Bush
juniour go back to Baseball.

OTOH, if we have any yank politics experts here, I may have questions.
I'm designing a board game based on elections there.

> (I realise I should have generalised
> it to "Party 1 ... Party N.")  But, I agree with you that if you can
> be guaranteed that the parties do not differ appreciably from each
> other in their policies, then it doesn't make sense to spend time
> becoming informed about them, and a random choice is about as useful a
> strategy as any.  (That raises a chicken-and-egg problem: how do you
> arrive at that state of knowledge that there are no essential policy
> differences.:)

Trust me: there are only a handful of people who do this by reading the
manifestoes and those documents are lies for the party faithful more
than anything.

> But, I would caution against using appeals to the "average" in such
> logic, especially when directed towards natural/sociological
> phenomena.  Such distributions are often not Normal (i.e., Gaussian),
> which aligns naturally with our popular notion of "fairness" and
> "balance."  With a statement like "assume the average wage is 20K," I
> would be much happier if you'd at the very least used the median.

Fair point sir, but it wouldn't really make much difference to my argument
in this case.

FoFP