As the news fromm Venezuela has become progressively worse – and let’s be clear, it’s still getting worse from this absolutely terrible baseline – there’s been some arguing around the Internet about politicians, like Jeremy Corbyn, who were very supportive of Hugo Chavez’s government there. My beef here is that someone like Jean-Luc Mélenchon went…
Read More Venezuela: it’s not just for ChristmasPeter Pomerantsev goes to Mongolia and meets the president, an all-purpose post-Soviet entrepreneur turned politician. Specifically, an all-purpose post-Soviet entrepreneur and martial arts champ who named his company after The Godfather. This isn’t just eccentric; in Codes of the Underworld, Diego Gambetta has a fascinating chapter on the role movies played in the making of…
Read More The Godfather, Trump, and PutinMatthew Goodwin is probably in hiding from people demanding that he eats a book, but I can’t help but notice that he massively buries the lede in this paper on the elections. In table 1, his multivariate regression for the change in turnout, Model 3, has the following result. What leaps out at you there?…
Read More Three waves of political mobilisation: the SNP, Brexit, and LabourI never knew until very recently that the standard National Readership Survey socio-demographic classifications – ABC1, C2DE etc – deal with pensioners by classifying them all as working-class unless they are rich enough to be considered independently wealthy and therefore bucketed in with the As. (The rival National Statistics classification doesn’t deal with the retired…
Read More NRS social grades are flawed but at least it’s not FacebookIf you want spare parts for Harman/Kardon audio equipment in the UK, don’t ring the number on their website unless you speak German. Even if you do speak German, all that will happen is that the nice lady in Austria will eventually give out a phone number for people who might be able to help.…
Read More Public service broadcast: Harman/Kardon spare parts in the UKI may be going to munch a few pages myself later on, but at least I don’t have this honking great phone directory to chew.
Read More Eating the bookNick Timothy so on Conservative Home: Ironically, the Prime Minister is the one political leader who understands this division, and who has been working to address it since she became Prime Minister last July. The Conservative election campaign, however, failed to get this and Theresa’s positive plan for the future across. It also failed to…
Read More The Election in Data and SoftwareJeremy Paxman spent a whole career interrogating and humiliating politicians over mistakes they made and very definitely over supposed transgressions in their private lives (eh). The BBC – that’s us, in other words – paid him a prince’s ransom for it. The TV programmes he worked on reported in detail on the phone-hacking scandal and,…
Read More Nobody Needs Privacy Except Me And My MistressIf you were looking forward to the talk at OpenTech I cancelled, this will give you about 60% of the content.
Read More Ersatz Alex OptionsThose of us who blogged through the Iraq War will of course remember the Friedman unit, a measurement of time defined as how long it will take until things are OK in Iraq, conventionally equal to six months, named for Thomas “Airmiles” Friedman of the New York Times. But I didn’t realise the unit has…
Read More The pre-history of the Friedman unit