POTUS Makes His Supreme Court Pick and the Trump Carnival Continues: Outside In podcast episode 5

Obama nominates Merrick Garland to SCOTUS, and Trump stopped being funny.

Outside In Podcast - Episode 3: The Tipping Point?

After the Democrat Nevada caucuses and the Republican South Carolina primary, have we reached a tipping point in the nomination process? And can the GOP get out of the bind it has placed itself in over the Supreme Court?

Is Bernie Sanders the Ted Cruz of the Dems?

I want to give Bernie a fair shout, so I went to his website to see what are his proposals for reforming Wall Street...

Inside Out Podcast - Episode 2: Iowa Analysis

Iowow! But what does it all mean, if anything? A look at the caucus results, with an eye toward New Hampshire.

The first Yellow Guard Outside In podcast

We're talking Iowa caucuses, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz in the first ever Yellow Guard Outside In podcast, where I cast an eye from New York over the landscape of American politics and current affairs even further afield.

Why the State Got Its Pistorius Prosecution Strategy Wrong

Why the State Got Its Pistorius Prosecution Strategy Wrong While the Oscar Pistorius trial didn't grab my attention, the judgment did, because to be honest I could not see how the judge could come to the conclusion she did based on the proper application of the law to the facts as she had found them, as I wrote about at the time. I was pleased then to hear this morning when I woke up that the State's appeal against the not guilty murder verdict had been allowed. The basis of the appeal was that Judge Masipa had erred in applying the principle of dolus eventualis - the very point that had troubled me about her judgment.

Man Bites Dog

As sure as night follows day, online disputes follow a mass-shooting or terrorist attack. They almost invariably follow a very predictable pattern of action and reaction, or statement and counter-statement that ends up focusing almost as much on assessments (or condemnations) of how social media have responded to the event in question, as it does looking at the event itself. The aftermath of the horrible events that enveloped Paris on an initially unremarkable Friday evening has not been broken this pattern. One of the main focal points of this discussion was Facebook’s decision to proactively offer a French flag filter to place over profile pictures. While it might be useful for Facebook to be more clear about what is the trigger for such an offering (is it subjective, or based on a ghoulish body-count or measurement of online mentions, for example), it offered people on Facebook the opportunity to do something, anything, in the face of scarcely imaginable horror. Putting a flag over your avatar is, of course, a largely futile and pointless gesture – it is not going to cause members of Daesh/ISIS, a jihadi death cult, to have a rethink about where they are going in life. But it does give people a tiny sense of control in the face of what is otherwise potentially overwhelming helplessness. And while I respect the right of those who choose not to adopt a filter/flag/photo to do so, it has been impossible not to detect a hint of superiority emanating from some who chose to exercise that right. When mass murder visited the streets of Paris earlier this year, I myself pointedly declined to adopt “Je suis Charlie” as my social media avatar. I explained my reasons in a blog post at the time, which related largely to the relationship between satire, religion and remaining united in the face of terror. Saying yes to the tricolore filter was less of a political statement than one of sympathy and empathy; it is the 21st-century equivalent of sending flowers and a card, except in the digital age many feel compelled to do so to strangers in far-off places. This then gets to a second complaint from the more churlish corners of the digital space: either that people are hypocritical for putting up a flag for country X and not country Y; or that it is unfair that the media is paying so much attention to Paris and not to Beirut/Ankara/Garissa or whichever outrage this individual feels went unreported. Except the problem is that whichever outrage the individual feels went unreported didn’t go unreported. They just weren’t paying attention. Did Beirut/Ankara/Garissa get the wall-to-wall rolling coverage on CNN, the BBC and Deutsche Welle that Paris did? No, they did not. But the reasons are not difficult to understand and are inherent in every human being: unfortunately, like Belfast and Sarajevo, Beirut is a byword for bombing and murder. A bomb in Beirut is, sadly, a “Dog Bites Man” news story. A bomb in Paris, on the other hand, is “Man Bites Dog.” And inherent in this dynamic of the news cycle is the fact that if bombs in Paris become commonplace, then bombs in Paris will too become “Dog Bites Man”. It will cease to be “new”s. There is also the question of empathy, which the begrudgers appear incapable of differentiating from sympathy. Paris is one of the world’s great cities, home to one of the world’s most instantly recognizable landmarks. It is one of the most visited cities in the world, with over 16 million international visitors annually. There is an extremely high chance that most of the people reading this have either been to Paris, or if they have not would like to. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s position: it is easier, for most people in Europe and North America, to imagine themselves eating in a restaurant in the 11th arrondissement, having a coffee at a sidewalk café, attending a concert by an American band, than it is to picture themselves attending a residential agricultural college in rural Kenya near the Somali border or shopping at a market in a Shia slum in southern Beirut. It is easier to picture yourself in a place you feel familiar with than one you have never heard of. And without the ability to imagine ourselves as a victim, empathy is difficult to rouse. Someone who has never been on a plane is going to struggle more to imagine the terror felt by passengers in a hijacked airplane than someone who flies on a weekly basis. Students in Kenya paid more attention to the attack on Garissa than they did to the bombed Russian plane in the Sinai. And they should not be faulted for it. Ironically, many of those who complain about the imbalance in how “the world” treats Paris versus Garissa/Beirut/Ankara etc. are equating European and North American media with “the world”, thereby exhibiting the very Euro-/America-centric worldview they complain about in others. And how many of them posted stories about Garissa and Beirut, or took some other act to express their solidarity with the victims of these horrible tragedies? Very few, for the same reasons as everybody else. The goal of many of these people is not to raise awareness of what happens in Beirut or Ankara or Garissa or Kunming or Ciudad Juarez or anywhere else – for if it were the tactic to adopt is not to condemn people and call them hypocrites for caring about Paris. It is an unconvincing attempt to demonstrate their own moral superiority and supposed worldliness. It says there is great pain in the world, so we should not care about one more than the other, as if time, place and personal experience are irrelevant. It’s like responding to an African-American who stands in front of you and says “Black lives matter!” with the retort “All lives matter!”, as if their own personal experience and feeling should be subsumed and rolled up into the greater tragedy of the world. Before the digital age, the media could set the news agenda through what they chose to cover and what they chose to ignore. That remains only partly true, but what drives coverage in 2015 is clicks, and likes, and comments. If the death of an 85-year old man in Tajikistan was going to drive web traffic to news sites, there would be a crowd of reporters outside his door with a live blog giving minute-by-minute updates. If people want to raise in others awareness of, and empathy for, causes and deaths that they otherwise may show little interest in, the way to go about it is not to castigate them for caring about the loss of life that they do, or at least claim to do. Is it unfair that it should be this way? Yes, of course, it is. But if life were not unfair, then there would be no need for Black Lives Matter or flag filters of mourning on Facebook.

GOP Truthiness on Syria

I don't know where to begin with this, though a warning that it was going to be tripe was contained in the rhetorical flourish at the end of the opening paragraph: >"Whether it’s in Ukraine or Syria, the Russian president seems always to have the upper hand." I respectfully suggest that's because Russia borders Ukraine and is acting in support of the Syrian government (whether you like it or not) and not a disunited and weak opposition movement. Geography and political reality give Russia "the upper hand." No amount of [truthiness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness) is going to change that. Basically, the argument is that the United States needs to ramp up its military intervention in Syria and confront Russia until it can force regime change. Won't these people ever learn?

Single Transferable Vote 101 (or, why no-one in Britain knows how to report it properly and what they can do about it)

I am a fan of the Single Transferable Vote as a voting system. Being from Northern Ireland and having lived in the Republic of Ireland, I have voted using STV more often than I have first past the post (FPTP).

Naturally, then, I was pleased to see it introduced in Scotland for local elections, which helped some way to break Labour's hegemony over local politics in the Central Belt by ending the one-party state that existed in most councils in Scotland. (It also probably played a role in giving greater force to the SNP wave in recent years, in the Holyrood, Indyref and Westminster 2015 votes, by enabling the SNP to have a vastly increased number of local representatives on the ground.) It will also likely prove to be a life-support machine to the Liberal Democrats, and prevent Labour councillors going the same way in 2017 that their Westminster party colleagues went in 2015.

![2007 local election results]

However, the mechanics of STV are not that well known to many people, and it has been frustrating for me to read/listen to coverage of STV elections and by-elections as if they were the same as FPTP elections. This ranges from the terminology used to focus on the wrong elements to drawing erroneous conclusions.

A prime example was today when Mike Smithson (someone for whom I have enormous respect) from [Political Betting](http://www.politicalbetting.com) tweeted this:

How one of Scotland's leading political sites reported the SNP loss of a by-election in the Highlands pic.twitter.com/9VNpteamEL

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) October 9, 2015

With all due respect to Mike, there is absolutely nothing wrong in an SNP supporter reporting the result in that way, because from an SNP perspective it is actually more important than the fact they lost the seat.

That may sound a bit odd, clutching at straws even, but it's not, and here's why.

Wikipedia

As you can see, in 2012 the SNP won one of the four seats available in the ward. They won it on the first count, with Drew Hendry getting 840 votes, which was 31 votes over the quota of 804. (The quota is, where n = number of persons to be elected and v = number of valid votes cast) (v/n+1)+1. So in this case, where four members are to be elected, you need to get 20% of the vote plus one vote, ((4044/5)+1) which in this case was 809). The SNP's second candidate got 7.1% - about a third of a quote. So all in all , the total SNP vote was a little shy of 28%. This is equivalent to 1.4 quotas or just over a quarter of the vote. This would, in pretty much any circumstances, be enough to get one of the two SNP candidates elected, but a long way short of enough to get two elected.

In the by-election to replace Drew Hendry, who took Danny Alexander's Westminster seat at the General Election, there is only one seat to be filled, therefore the quota is going to be 50%+1 vote. As you can see, this is rather a lot more than the 28% the SNP got in 2012. In FPTP by-elections, if a party got the same share of the vote as it did at the main election, the party would retain the seat. (For all its problems, FPTP is, unarguably, simple). Under STV, however, if the SNP had matched its share of the vote, it still would almost certainly not win the by-election, because of the likelihood of unionist parties to favour each other in transfers. To have had a realistic shot at retaining the seat, the SNP would probably have had to increase its vote share to over 40% (a 12 percentage point or 40% increase over 2012). That isn't impossible, but it is unlikely. Therefore, for the SNP to have increased their share of the vote, and still lost, is very respectable.

In short, it is very difficult to win by-elections under STV (which is one of the reasons in Northern Ireland councillors' and Assembly members' replacements are co-opted members of teh same party, rather than elected through a by-election that is highly likely to see the incumbent party lose a seat, even if they outperform themselves compared to the previous election).

And since I am on the subject, another pet peeve is the focus, when reporting results, on the "majority" over the first candidate not elected (i.e. the runner-up), either on the first or last count. This is a largely useless statistic, as it tells you very little about how the parties performed, and gives undue importance to something that tells you very little about the election. This should be obvious from the fact that the candidate who leads after the first count may not actually win a seat. So if the candidate who is second after the first count goes on to win the seat, do they have a negative majority? Nor is there any point in reporting, as [this](https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/inverness/719115/shock-libdem-win-highland-election/) does that
>She was the winner at the fourth and final stage of the count. She gained 1,511 of the 3,076 valid votes.

This information is pretty useless, unless we know what the quota is. Also, saying she won on the "fourth and final count" is like saying "she found her keys in the last place she looked." Nor would this phraseology make much sense when there was more than one member to be elected, and would therefore require reporting STV by-elections and general elections in different fashions, which is clearly undesirable. A more useful re-write of these sentences would be to say
>She was deemed elected on the fourth count, without having reached the quota of 1,539.

The most important information is the First Preference Vote (FPV) share (by party and individual), with a comparison to the previous election. Next in importance is how many quotas each party and individual has on the first count. And finally, transfer patterns are important, the patterns for which will vary from constituency to constituency and ward to ward because, well, people are weird and vote on all sorts of criteria that you often couldn't possibly imagine.

Also, it is the norm to talk about the "first count, second count, third count, etc.", even though technically they are "stages", but stages sounds boring and technical, whereas count gives a better flavour of what is going on.

British political reporters really need to get to grips with the intricacies (not "vagueries" - there is nothing vague about it) of STV and stop falling back on what they know (FPTP) when interpreting results. Otherwise they are doing a disservice to the public. A trip over to Northern Ireland or the Republic to observe how STV elections are covered and analyzed by people who understand the system well would probably be a good idea.

The UK's Trident "debate"

Very quickly, because it is not very difficult.

The new British Labour Party leader has sparked off a row over comments that he wouldn't use nuclear weapons as Prime Minister. The row/debate is totally and utterly pointless:

The UK is in NATO; the Americans have nukes; the British wouldn't use nukes without Washington's approval; under any circumstances where a British PM might use nukes, if he didn't the Americans certainly would.

Simples. Next manufactured controversy please.