World Politics and Elections 2023

[Jubal]

We move away from Europe for Oceania to take up the baton of providing depressing voting results: Australia's Indigenous Voice referendum failed, which whilst there were left-indigenous arguments against it I think will basically be taken as vindication for the much larger right wing No campaign which was campaigning against "dividing" Australians by having a formal body to consult indigenous views.

And New Zealand will now have a fully right wing coalition after two Labour governments, it's a sharp rightward swing that will probably mean a bunch of tax cuts that will do nothing to fix a set of cost of living problems mostly imposed by exogenous economic issues.

I feel like it's a bad time to be an incumbent government, but PiS in Poland may prove me wrong tomorrow as I suspect they're going to outperform the polls given how grimly embedded in much of Poland they now seem to be. I also actually genuinely want to run some numbers on political incumbency across Europe to see how much it changes over time - a simple scoring system with rolling averages for changes of government would make interesting reading re incumbency.

[Jubal]

PiS did not prove my thesis that it's a rough time to be an incumbent government wrong, and appear to have lost their majority, which is excellent news.

Comparison 2019 to 2023, main opposition in orange, PiS authoritarians in blue:




And this is a proportional system so the flipped districts look fun but the lightening of deep blue in the PiS stronghold regions is just as important in hacking back their majority. It looks like the exit polls have, unlike in Slovakia, been pretty accurate: we should have official results tomorrow. It's expected that President Duda, who's PiS aligned, will give PiS as the largest party the initial mandate to form a government, but they'll fail  and then it'll pass to the opposition to make an agreement.

[dubsartur]

Does anyone have sources for world news these days?  I find that statistics are useless without understanding how they are collected and reported.  I am curious about the world but I don't know where to look for information any more.  I think the only news sources I could really recommend for other than local news lately are:

• Perun (YouTube) https://yewtu.be/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q current military affairs with a structural and policy rather than event or person focus
• Kyiv Independent https://kyivindependent.com/ old-school newspaper journalism (ie. you can probably mostly trust it for facts, for love of Ghu be skeptical of the analysis; they even have missing or poor maps in stories with lots of place names like an Anglo paper!)
• Molly White's newsletter on the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/

Al Jazeera is supposed to be good old-school journalism but I don't check them frequently

I have reservations about the following.

• Canadaland has some good journalism from other parts of Canada mixed in with talking about what talkers talked about


• The Guardian has some reporting mixed up with inane opinion pieces (and its Canadian news is often recycled CBC pieces so I have to ask how deep its reporting on other countries outside the UK is)


• The Economist has its known strengths (its interested in places other than the UK) and quirks (very confident articles by very young, inexperienced reporters shilling for capital)


• Amy Castor https://amycastor.com/blog/ and David Gerard's https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ commentary on the aftermath of the crypto collapse is detailed but I have trouble following it and as I have said, Gerard says things which he must know are not strictly true

Can't recommend any social media accounts on the RU-UA or Hamas-Israel wars or the ongoing COVID pandemic any more.  As independent information on the RU-UA war became scarce, the analysts retired or became partisan hacks.

Edit: there have been lots of important global stories like the Iranian unrest, the Burmese civil war, the Yemen war, and the Tigray War where I have very rarely seen any old or web media coverage that go beyond the odd anecdote

[Jubal]

I read a mix of things. I often read the BBC just to get a basic idea of what's happening, it's not good for depth and you have to know its leans and problems but I guess I'm used enough to it that I feel like I can mentally correct for the "BBC balance" issues a bit. I also look at the Kyiv Independent. Politico is my main source for European polling and lobby politics, they have a reasonable ear for the interpersonal dynamics in Brussels though I think their wider scale analysis misses as often as it hits. I think with the Grauniad (as it's often known in the UK due to a long-running joke about the quality of its copyediting) it's good with UK and US stuff but its coverage of anything else is going to be UK or US lens views of those places, and also it very much represents the views of the sort of 60 year old centrists who vote for centre-left parties but do not necessarily understand the views of younger people, minorities, etc.



In Bulgarian local elections, despite lagging a bit in the polls nationally, the PP/DB coalition of broadly centre-liberal parties captured the mayoralties of Varna and Sofia.

The Dutch election is looming and according to some polls a right-coalition (NSC, VVD, PVV, BBB) is one of the more popular options among Dutch voters, but whether they could actually negotiate a coalition isn't awfully clear. NSC will probably be the largest party and its leader still hasn't said if he's running to be the Prime Minister with two weeks to go before the election which is quite a take.

[psyanojim]

I mainly rely on Google News and make sure I'm reading articles on any issue from a cross-section of the political spectrum.

It gets quite amusing reading about the same issue through the lens of both the Guardian and the Daily Mail (or even more extreme, Morning Star and Daily Express).

I wouldn't recommend this approach for the faint of heart, however. Maybe take up meditation before attempting

[Jubal]

It gets quite amusing reading about the same issue through the lens of both the Guardian and the Daily Mail (or even more extreme, Morning Star and Daily Express).

I wouldn't recommend this approach for the faint of heart, however. Maybe take up meditation before attempting

Yes, I sometimes read articles from "the other side", though only if I think I can put up with the brain-rot, given there's often enough frustration reading takes from the sort of outlets that are clearly meant to be angled toward people with my set of experiences and biases.

When I was in high school and organised a small protest against county council bus service cuts in 2011 I think we got mentioned in the Morning Star's "resistance around the country" section, which was quite amusing.

[dubsartur]

I mainly rely on Google News and make sure I'm reading articles on any issue from a cross-section of the political spectrum.

It gets quite amusing reading about the same issue through the lens of both the Guardian and the Daily Mail (or even more extreme, Morning Star and Daily Express).

I wouldn't recommend this approach for the faint of heart, however. Maybe take up meditation before attempting

I think that could have been a good strategy for local news in the 20th century where the main issue was not agreeing about facts but how to interpret them and which to mention.  But it can't deal with a lack of facts in the first place.  If none of the news organizations in a country have resources to keep one monolingual person in a national capital talking to rich English / French speakers in the lobby of their hotel (the bad old system), but just  reprint press releases and social media posts, what can you get?

To pick one example, I can't remember reporting from a Canadian news organization which let you understand a war better than "there is a war in country A and countries B, C, and D are fighting."  They just don't have the expertise or the time to see which facts are important, ask the right questions, and arrange things into a story that communicates what is happening and why,  They were not able to place the convoy protests in context as part of a global far-right which wants to overthrow democracy either, although the ones which were not on the right communicated a vague sense of unease about them.  I used to read Gwynne Dyer the columnist (not reporter) that way, but he rarely communicates his sources of information and interpretation, and I don't trust him any more after some things he has said about the RU-UA war and the ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh (the fact that he is about 80 and reduced his world travels may have something to do with that).

And this is despite 25% of the population of Canada being immigrants.

The whole concept of "news" is deeply flawed because it focuses on events over structures and processes, but news in Canada has not been able to communicate events outside the country and possibly the US for a long time.

[psyanojim]

On the contrary, I think we have access to more facts than ever before.

The difficulty is the signal-to-noise ratio. We also have access to more gibberish and nonsense than ever before.

[dubsartur]

On the contrary, I think we have access to more facts than ever before.

The difficulty is the signal-to-noise ratio. We also have access to more gibberish and nonsense than ever before.

We have access to an unlimited flood of unverifiable words and images from social media, that nobody puts their reputation behind.  Those are not the same as facts, which are the output of a process and a social system, and especially not agreed-upon facts.

All the money and attention are in communicating feelings not in establishing "what actually happened?"

(And also, like, resources in news organizations to translate and contextualize things in other languages are basically gone; we have gone from "talk to the local factory owner in the lobby of the local Hilton" to "listen to the professional propagandist's message for Anglos on social media").

[psyanojim]

Hence my point about 'signal-to-noise' ratio.

'Unverifiable' is not the same as 'incorrect'. There will be plenty of true, factual statements buried in the deluge of gibberish. The difficulty is in identifying them.

[dubsartur]

Hence my point about 'signal-to-noise' ratio.

'Unverifiable' is not the same as 'incorrect'. There will be plenty of true, factual statements buried in the deluge of gibberish. The difficulty is in identifying them.

To clarify, psyanojim, are you saying that "if news organizations in my country don't pass on facts about happenings in other countries (or build consensus about what those facts are) it does not matter because I can do my own research?"

[psyanojim]

To clarify, psyanojim, are you saying that "if news organizations in my country don't pass on facts about happenings in other countries (or build consensus about what those facts are) it does not matter because I can do my own research?"

Something like that, but with fewer binaries/absolutes.

Does it 'matter'? Sure. But less so than in the past, given that we live in an era where we have more access to vast quantities of global information than at any time in human history.

How we process and filter that information overload and awful signal-to-noise ratio is the critical question.

And that is also one of the key reasons that I enjoy reading a variety of biased sources. Learning about those biases themselves is fascinating information to me, even if (or especially if) they obscure the underlying story.

[Jubal]

I think I see both points here - I broadly both agree that it's true that people need to build up much stronger mental systems for assessing bias (and that's a critical problem in the modern world). I don't think the problem of information verifiability and the difficulty of finding trusted sources is a new problem: I think we've moved away from a relatively consensus-media period in western countries with a stronger localist element to reporting, but I think translation and good contexualisation in news media was probably always worse than we imagine and was a bit papered over by some of the consensus-building side of mid to later C20th political life in the west. So all of that means that I don't think news being strengthened can substitute from trying to strengthen everyone's skills at signal-to-noise filtering and assessing different biases. However, I do also think that news organisations are still important and that we need to rebuild a more functional news system somehow.

That's in alrge part because part of the issue of signal-to-noise is skill and whether I can work out what is factual, but part of it is also that even if I'm good at working out the most plausible narrative from the facts, even if I'm better at doing so than someone nominally professional (and on certain matters I actually might be), I also will never have the time to assess all the material on every topic that it'd be helpful for me to be informed about. The thing a trusted news organisation needs to provide for me isn't really information snippets, I can get those anywhere, it's an assessment of veracity and a system of information-trust. And I think that system, essentially news sources as a professional bit of outsourcing for filtering misinformation and overload, is something that matters and that I'd like to see strengthened.

One organisation we haven't mentioned yet is Bellingcat, and I'd sort of like to be listening to more investigative explanatory work like that on certain issues: their focus of course tends to be war/security etc, but having orgs taking similar methodologically transparent but deep investigative approaches to things like social security policy, environmental policy, or health policy would be of interest to me. And I'd generally like to see more diversity in media funding models etc as well of course.

[dubsartur]

To clarify, psyanojim, are you saying that "if news organizations in my country don't pass on facts about happenings in other countries (or build consensus about what those facts are) it does not matter because I can do my own research?"

Something like that, but with fewer binaries/absolutes.

Does it 'matter'? Sure. But less so than in the past, given that we live in an era where we have more access to vast quantities of global information than at any time in human history.

How we process and filter that information overload and awful signal-to-noise ratio is the critical question.

In my experience, "do your own research!" does not work.  Some of us can do it for one or two topics that we are interested in and relate to our expertise, contacts, and experience, but nobody with responsibilities can do it for every topic that might be relevant.  And even then, nobody can both attend the Tuesday night city council meeting and see if the hospital emergency room was really overflowing that same night.  So a long time ago, we started to hire teams of professionals to do the investigating and the summarizing, grouped them into a few news sources, and interacted with that for most of the topics relevant to us.  Humans are pretty good at understanding the strengths and weakneses of a handful of sources we have known for a long time.  We are not good at sorting through thousands of disconnected claims from people and sources we don't know well, and we obviously can't process things in languages we don't know or from cultures we are not familiar with.  Especially since its so easy to just plain make things up across a keyboard or in selected and edited photos and video.  It is easier emotionally, and its easier because if you control the camera angle you can control what people see. And most importantly, I do not know of any Canadian media organization whose reporters pass on facts about events in other countries which would let anyone understand them in a sophisticated way.

Every good information system which I know creates strong barriers to inserting information into the stream of information-to-consider.  They don't rely on filtering the BS for a lump of gold (or rather, any people who do that create summaries and surveys which are exepnsive to insert into the information steam but then get very close attention).  If you listen to the open-source intelligence analysts who retired recently, they explain how much time and expertise it takes to sort information out of social media.

Remember that time and concentration are the ultimate scarce resources.  Any time you say that people should pay more attention to something, you have to have a plausible answer to "what should they spend less time and attention on?" And it had better not be "they should spend more time on things I find fun and important, and less on things I find boring and unimportant."

Writing this reply cost 2 or 3 hours of concentration.

Another issue has been showed clearly by the UK-American response to COVID-19.   After the arrival of vaccines, these governments and their fellow travellers rejected the concept of public health, and focused on information control to convince people that they were safe and the government was handling the pandemic.  And they had massive powers of information control, because who decides whether to measure the number of people who test positive, the amount of COVID in sewage, or the air quality in schools?  The government.  So they launched a concerted and mostly successful not to collect the data which could show that their vaccines-only strategy was failing.  The rest of us can use what evidence is available, but we can't argue from data that is never collected.

[psyanojim]

At no point anywhere did I suggest that everyone must do their own research on all topics and discard all other sources of verification. I really don't understand such a binary and extreme way of looking at things.

Writing this reply cost 2 or 3 hours of concentration.

I'm not sure how to reply to that. Writing my replies have taken me no more than 5 minutes apiece. Its no wonder we seem have such a dramatically different perspective on these things.