What worries me about the referendum is the trust. Every poll I can think of shows people on the Leave side claiming they trust no-one. At the same time, Nigel Farage says smoking is just the best for your health and the official Vote Leave campaign issues maps suggesting Iraq and Syria are candidates for…
Read More Leave: the biggest 419 e-mail everOne thing the referendum campaign has cheered me up about, paradoxically, is the social acceptability of outright racism. One thing it’s profoundly depressed me about is the social acceptability of outright bullshit. Consider the Leavers’ arguments about immigration. If you’re not going to make some essentialist argument that foreigners are just bad – i.e. to…
Read More The public rejects racism, but sadly you can’t say the same for bullshitMartin Kettle is all worked up to learn that Michael Gove is either a cynic or an extremist, now his extremism, or cynical pose of same, affects an issue he cares about. Where was Kettle when Gove wrote a whole book about the secret rulers of the world’s scheme to hand Europe over to the…
Read More Yes, Michael Gove is an extremist and has been for yearsThe Monkey Cage has an interesting post on how British political parties spent their money in the 2015 general election. Specifically, they plotted spending as a percentage of the short campaign limit against how marginal each seat was. The more marginal a seat is, the greater chance you have of picking it up – or…
Read More How to win a general electionHere is a really superb paper on the 50 cent party, the Chinese Communist Party’s army of loyalist Internet trolls. The researchers scraped literally millions of below-the-line comments and Weibo posts, hired Chinese students to identify the 50-centers in random samples and classify the posts by subject, checked that the students, who worked independently, agreed…
Read More This is what the mandate of heaven looks likeIt’s pretty depressing that British politicians are shallow enough all to glom onto the same risible fad at the same time: It’s a thing. It’s definitely a thing. Someone is telling them to stand like this. pic.twitter.com/RcvelFujVa — SimonNRicketts (@SimonNRicketts) June 2, 2016 It’s even more depressing that the risible fad in question is also…
Read More This one weird trick will completely fail to replicate the previous experimenter’s results