I also can't see the article and I find that its best to ignore claims about broad cultural trends or differences. If they are true on average, you can't do anything about them, and they get in the way of understanding the individual unique man or woman or Ruritanian or Syldavian you are dealing with right now.
Like a lot of journalism, they are written for readers who want to pretend they are grand high poobah, when really readers have to persuade their strata council to trim those blackberries by the dog path before they tear their good running pants again. And the people they actually deal with in their community are not statistically representative of some national or global demographic.
Hmm, I think I broadly disagree with this: knowing what I should expect among a wider demographic does matter to me in terms of how I think about what I'm doing across a wide variety of areas, because I need to be prepared for what I'm doing and the world things are being thrown out into when writing, developing games, producing lectures, and so on to be going out into that world more generally. I don't just write things for a defined set of people I already know, nor do I expect that students and colleagues know and interact with the same set of people as me, so understanding more widely what's going on helps equip us to think about how creative or informative works might be received and helps us think about how we should produce them in light of that.
I do see the basis of where you're coming from - it's obviously also useful to understand the very large differences between the general public and the people who are most likely to interact with anything I do! And it's important to get depth into one's data where possible. Nonetheless knowing e.g. "is it the case that young men are trending towards the centre, or being split between a demographic trending hard-conservative and a demographic trending left which is averaging out to the centre" is actually quite useful if one then wants to think about how to get through to or improve the lives of any of those people, a talk I'm
usually doing indirectly through policy activism or talking to other educators or talking to creators whose content these people consume, and so on and so forth. There are understandings of cultural shifts that one can't get by anecdote. And I think even for people who aren't doing what I'm doing, thinking about that re things like voting behaviour can also be worthwhile.
News!
- Prabowo Subianto, a right-wing populist former general with a bad history with human rights abuses (notably kidnap & torture of pro-democracy activists in the late 1990s) looks likely to win the Indonesian presidential election with Joko Widodo standing down. Whilst Subianto was Widodo's rival in 2014 and 2019 and is from a different political party, he nonetheless served as Widodo's defence minister and Widodo's son Gibran is now running as Subianto's running-mate, so the perception seems to be that the outgoing president favours Subianto over his own party's candidate, Ganjar Pranowo.
- In Pakistan, it looks like the third placed party has agreed to back the second placed one to form a government. The PTI, Imran Khan's party, came first though it was nominally banned so all the candidates ran as independents: they're making a lot of claims of election tampering, which may well be true, and certainly major internet outages were deliberately put in place on election day.
- The Dutch coalition talks have half broken down in a weird way with the centre-right populist Omtzigt walking out due to a financial dispute.
- There have been some major scandals in Hungary after prominent Fidesz politicians have resigned over decisions to grant clemency to an abuser at a state orphanage (and presumably to avoid backlash hitting Orban himself).
I've also been doing a bit more reading about the Indian elections. Whilst India's government is currently struggling with big farmers' protests, they don't seem to be struggling in the polls particularly. Essentially the BJP have a dominant lock on several large states in the north of India, most notably the enormous state of Utter Pradesh (which if it became its own country be the world's sixth most populous). Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chattisgarh also strongly favour the BJP. The opposition coalition needs to make inroads into some of these big provinces to narrow the gap effectively, and probably to decisively flip the current swing states of Maharashtra and Bihar. The difference between state sizes is enormous: Mizoram only has a single parliamentary seat whereas UP has eighty. The opposition states are often smaller and further from the centre: in terms of seat totals, the strongest states for the main opposition INDIA coalition (the current iteration of Congress) are Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the south.
Part of what India's struggling with is its electoral system: the relative unity of the BJP means that instead of scraping majorities they can pile up enormous ones just by consolidating the vote in a few of the bigger states. This is of course the fault of the British - it would be a better timeline if besides horrifical colonial injustices we hadn't also managed to export first-past-the-post, one of the actual worst electoral systems in existence by pretty much any metric you care to judge by. I do worry that India as a whole will increasingly become a more authoritarian BJP-locked state.
