Don't bother with the legacy news-media's pontificating political analysis: It's all revealed here, above: "All is said and all is revealed!" Did I mention already, it's all here, everything is explained.
People are too easily impressed: Just start wearing a funny-looking hat (or a red scarf) and you're now a recognizable celebrity with a distinct "style". Maybe even talk "funny" and you'll be hailed as a football master tacticien. Now if you're a political analyst, you can slide over the Polls and "voila/ici" you're in business: In fact newspapers and politicians can even just not bother with the polls and make a claim and it's as good as, "I checked the tea leaves - they never lie because they can't lie!"
Actually the tea-leaves are not necessarily very different from the polls on people. Both seem to be useful within their respective scopes. And what is that? I think it's an external mechanism to remove the internal anxiety loop that afflicts decision-making. The mechanism allows a process of making a decision to begin.
Looked at that way, it's actually fairly useful for psychological reasons, even if for accuracy reasons it's completely useless. For example sometimes a choice can be made merely by choosing to toss a coin: Head -> X or Tails -> Y.
In fact, I think what we're talking about when talking about these types of mechanisms to make a choice is "A Low Information Environment".
In the previous blog, The Political Nexus: Turning Governance Into Garbage, it was considered that in such an environment of complex systems for politicians, interacting with people in democracy who operate their own voting decisions in a low information environment, the trend is inevitable: A gap between Noise and Signal widens in the decision-making basis. It's inevitable because the lack of useful data to use dictates the decisions made which become institutionally more geared to "Blame Risk" and all the associated features of that listed: Rigid, Opaque, Disconnected etc etc.
I think at the moment there's a great deal of "blame" searching going on post-Brexit: 48% of voters "backed the wrong horse" while 52% of voters some of whom probably backed an imaginary horse!!!
Let's look at this in a simple way:-
Post Referendum Fallout
A reversal or roles between remain and leave pre and post result, between honest and possible criteria, oddly enough. Of course the "common wisdom" peddled is that "no-body knows" if remain or leave was the better choice. The tendency is that economically it was better to remain but politically this was not so and hence the referendum which was reckless to give to such low information people but democracy and on and on "ad stupidium". "But no-body is really sure" is probably the "last word" to shut everybody up! Much is made of the dishonestly that Vote Leave promulgated hence the "zero" score. If people were a bit more careful they could probably work out a lot of very interesting things about that result... too bad.
So without going down that rabbit-hole, how is the above possible to resolve? I think it's clear that the groups themselves can be broken down into 2 sub-groups each for ease of communication:-
The common conception has been that Leave is dictated by the "extreme branch" of Brexit and the "will of the 52%" will therefore dictate all of the 100% via that extreme group of people. Too often commentators have bitched about "why should 48%" be dictated to? WRONG! "Why should a measly 10-20%, if that, dictate the other 80%? Hmm lower the percentages and you'd almost land up with a General Elections for Representative Democracy which is apparently norm people are apparently more at ease with!! But, b-but "experts" though...
Why this mistake? Let's look at a well-known phenomenon in communication at mass scale:-
Remember there's various elements going on here:-
- A Referendum IS more likely to arouse the dissatisfied who want to "pin the blame" somewhere on someone.
- Blame is a combination of a perception of lack of clarity/honesty involved in a negative outcome and tracking back the source of this. Hence the search starts with "naming" so that "blaming" can occur to eventually lead to "claiming" in this case Brexit the prize of consolation.
- The legacy news-media appears to thrive commercially on "conflict narration" and always jumps at a chance to blame or credit someone. For example just look at the England Football team: From Hero to Zero faster than any other substance known to man. They'll look for the hero of the team or the scape-goat and pile questions on this angle. Hideous.
- People are incredibly low information on the politics of the UK and worse the EU politics of the UK (it's complement Brexit). This has the likes of Tim Farron in the extreme remain vs the Farage or Fox or Davis in the extreme Leave. Each is going to haggle the other with extreme bidding to catch the attention of the low information public.
- If we do look at polls as Roland Smith of the ASI has done: Sizing the ‘Liberal Leave’ position...
You can read the poll summaries at your leisure. This may seem a contradiction of the introduction to this blog, which was fairly critical of polling, comparing it to "reading tea leaves" and now uses the evidence/data compiled above to prove an assertion (ie popular = 1= marginal remain + leave = Liberal Leave).
Well intuitively or using common sense, and calming down a bit, a lot of people were dissatisfied with the EU's outcome or goals achieved (the signal behind the noise) yet the option or risk against changing this was perceived to be too great to change. Or to be even simpler: The LACK OF POLITICAL OPTIONS available for solutions appeared to absent. Why make a decision when there is no clear solution but high risk? That is imho a very sensible decision by marginal Remain voters. We could get all analytical concerning the Leave position on solutions, and I won't bother because this blog is a running record of the work of FLEXCIT which has survived the test of time against all the other dismal plans or solutions. What this tells you without bothering to deduct or derive the conclusion is that the data or signal here is fairly accurate to predictions of the future possibilities.
So what do those tea leaves tell us? We'll see the middle merge in this argument and it will reconcile views when broken down into constituent features or modules that they BOTH SHARE IN COMMMON for example head of the list:-
- Single Market MEMBERSHIP OF
- list.......
That leaves two different groups: The extremes. The Remain Extremes will have a result that they can belong to: The next Fiscal New Treaty of the Eurozone. Good luck with that! That will make clear that group's horrible dishonesty. And the extreme leavers? Again the impossibility of options makes it null and void whether or not their preference is the best Brexit in the whole wide world. They're not so much creating a rod for their back (they're on the winning side) as much as creating a lightning rod of themselves for the other groups to blame for all the unnecessary confusion and conflict!
Thus we'll see the beginning "punit square" above merge and become domestically compatible between what has to be or needs to be done and what people want to be done. The quote of Harold Wilson: "Politics is either a question of presentation or timing (mostly)."
Yes, Representative Democracy probably is something like that. It might one day be a quote from someone else that "Real (direct) Democracy is mostly a question of (voter) information and timing."
On that last note:-
There's other and I'd assert stronger ways of "voting" than merely scratching a "X" on a piece of paper x1 every 5yrs or 41yrs (!)... A more "informative and actively participating" way, since 1969.
Both The Campaign For An Independent Britain and EUReferendum.com provide:-
- High quality information
- Various services and organizations
- Direct donation facility
