Location: London
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Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardodwyer/
Email: hn@richard.do
Expert level engineer with 15 years of experience. Available for contract roles in any timezone. Deep experience working in Health tech and within Data Science teams.
Do not hire this person, they literally posted ‘ Better to worry about the Africans running around raping our European women rather than if someone is recording you for 5 seconds while walking your dog.’ in another thread.
That's something created/accepted as a reasonable state of affairs simply because no one could imagine the resources needed to record and track every person everywhere (Or, we could - but it was fiction). Being in public was considered seen by others. Perhaps an occasional photo being taken.
Perhaps the old ideas that "you have no privacy in public" or "if you can be seen then you can be recorded" and so on just need to be revised? Should we reconsider what it means to be "in public"? Perhaps people should be granted some form of privacy protection also when "in public"?
Better to worry about the Africans running around raping our European women rather than if someone is recording you for 5 seconds while walking your dog.
Did you make a wrong turn? /r/asshat is over there ->
You posted a message in "Who wants to be hired" at almost the same time as you posted this. Do you think a potential recruiter would read your comment history?
Well it is because the judiciary smacked the secrecy side of it down pretty hard to make sure that it was done in public. That's a pretty strong indicator of a functioning democracy.
The judiciary is (thankfully) the most undemocratic institution in Britain. It functions well because it is undemocratic. It has no place being democratic. In no sense does its effectiveness indicate a healthy democracy.
It's not perfect of course. We might take a step back occasionally but this usually results in two steps forward. Some press like only to comment on the backward steps though.
Do you even know when our National Health Service was created? Or our social security net? When laws were repealed that suppressed minorities, when human rights were added to our legislation? National minimum wage? Freedom of information laws?
There are several ministers from the House of Lords, who aren't elected by the people.
I haven't checked for this Parliament, but for the previous one that included people who had LOST their election to be an MP, but got nominated to the Lords anyway.
we have a constituency based first past the post system.
we vote for a local MP to represent our constituency in the house of commons. first one past the threshold wins and represents our area in the house of commons.
each MP gets one vote. one vote in the house of commons for each constituency.
so yes. this is possible. because it’s not about total votes — it’s about representing the individual local areas and the people within those areas.
labour won a landslide of “areas”. that’s how our system works.
just because it doesn’t match what you think democracy should look like doesn’t mean it isn’t democratic. it’s just different.
plenty of criticisms exist about our system (esp house of lords). we even tried to have a referendum on first past the post about two decades ago. i voted for AV. but oh well.
I don't consider FPTP to be democratic, because it disenfranches large swathes of the population and means that you can rule the country with a massive majority despite only getting 34% of the vote.
Modern democracies moved on past creaky old FPTP and its strong tendency to produce two party non representive majorities.
The first-past-the-post election tends to produce a small number of major parties, perhaps just two, a principle known in political science as Duverger's Law. Smaller parties are trampled in first-past-the-post elections.
Novelty isn't inherently good. The word "modern" is the most overused word in the English language on this forum. Every new Javascript framework is "modern" and by implication good.
There is nothing non-representative about FPP. It has nothing to do with parties. It is a non-party-based system. There is no a priori reason why it is "more democratic" for the proportions of seats in Parliament when split by parti to correspond to the proportions of votes for candidates from those parties. You can declare that you define "democraticness" to be a measure of the extent to which that is true, but there is no logical reason for them to correspond and no good argument that they should.
It is assumed as axiomatically good and you work backwards from there. Party-proportionality is democracy, therefore list-based proportional representation is more democratic. Well only if you redefine "democratic" first to mean "proportional", which isn't what anyone understood it to mean in the past and isn't the way the term is commonly used in any other context.
Every voting system has flaws, no voting system is perfect.
FPTP has more flaws than other systems and almost inevitably leads to less representation in democracies by promoting two party blocs that barely differ over successive election iterations. It's a political form of Hotelling's Law coupled with discrete dynamics.
As has happened to the USofA despite a strong opposition to party politics by the founders and crafters of the current system who failed a few centuries back to understand the dynamics of a scheme that didn't scale well.
FPP doesn't cause less representation at the local level, it has more. Party list-based systems have no local representation at all. MMP has it, at least, but has the same kingmaker issue. They assume implicitly that democracy is about competition between unified ideological factions which is not inherent to the concept at all. There is more to life than ideology.
FPP prioritises local representation and majoritarian results: if constituencies are arranged properly, then swings in voter sentiment are amplified. Relatively small changes in voter satisfaction can produce hundred seat majorities at Westminster. That is on purpose. It is part of why governments are accountable.
If you compare it to Germany, where there is enormous dissatisfaction with the government, they held an election, and mostly the same parties will be in government again, because of coalition politics.
The alternative to Germany is the situation here in New Zealand. Culturally still two main parties, but instead of voter sentiment deciding which of them wins, instead it is the choice of a minor kingmaker party that can pick a winner based on who gives it the most concessions. That is arguably better, but still not a good situation compared to a simple majoritarian system. We had one of those. The country was better-run under FPP than under MMP.
Westminster proves quite wrong the common claim that the system encourages two parties, by the way. The main parties have a lesser percentage of votes between them than they have ever had. It is just not true that two parties inevitably dominate.
One's vote physically being counted is not the same as having any representation in Parliament, let alone government. It's a system of artificial consensus. Managed democracy, in other words. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's very arbitrary.
An MP represents everyone in his constituency regardless of whether they all voted for him. That is his job. He represents the constituency. It is quite false to say that someone lacks representation in Parliament because his preferred candidate was unsuccessful. Everyone's preferred candidates obviously can't all be successful! That wouldn't be democracy.
>let alone government
The idea that everyone is entitled to have his preferred local candidate become a minister of the Crown is truly absurd.
> The two-year study by the Home Office makes very clear that there are no grounds for asserting that Muslim or Pakistani-heritage men are disproportionately engaged in such crimes, and, citing our research, it confirmed the unreliability of the Quilliam claim.
white males end up as defendants in CSE cases more often than any other ethnic group
oh you edited your post to add more anti-muslim rhetoric.
let’s dive into the detail a little
> A pre-sentence report will normally be considered necessary if the offender belongs to one (or more) of the following cohorts:
> at risk of first custodial sentence and/or at risk of a custodial sentence of 2 years or less (after taking into account any reduction for guilty plea)
> a young adult (typically 18-25 years)
> female
> from an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/or faith minority community
> pregnant or post-natal
> sole or primary carer for dependent relatives
> Or if the court considers that one or more of the following may apply to the offender:
> has disclosed they are transgender
> has or may have any addiction issues
> has or may have a serious chronic medical condition or physical disability, or mental ill health, learning disabilities (including developmental disorders and neurodiverse conditions) or brain injury/damage
> the court considers that the offender is, or there is a risk that they may have been, a victim of:
> domestic abuse, physical or sexual abuse, violent or threatening behaviour, coercive or controlling behaviour, economic, psychological, emotional or any other abuse
> modern slavery or trafficking, or
coercion, grooming, intimidation or exploitation.
> This is a non-exhaustive list and a PSR can still be necessary if the individual does not fall into one of these cohorts.
1) i dont see the word “muslim” mentioned anywhere
2) i see about 10 other societal groups listed that have nothing to do with religion
but sure, let’s keep blaming the muslims for everything, that sounds like a healthy approach to life.
—
second edit because fuck it.
i grew up in an affluent part of the country, a quiet and mostly white countryside town. went to posh schools. most of my first 20 years i didnt spend much time around people of other ethnicities.
i get it man. i get that you might be afraid of losing your “identity”. or maybe you’re afraid of the big scary bogeymen on the news.
but you don’t have to be afraid. you dont have to be afraid of the bogeymen. the bogeymen are mostly made up stories. you don’t have to be afraid of change. life becomes a hell of a lot more fulfilling without fear.
You cited a study that is widely criticized for being poor. Using data selectively and by their own admission data with the potential for being biased and inaccurate.
It's infuriating how often people take "the police have been a disaster at investigating these rape cases" as an excuse for racism rather than trying to fix the police, such as the incidents committed by a serving metropolitan police officer.
It's actually kind of impressive how racists can take literally any issue, in this case a legal battle over encryption, and make it all about their own racism.
We just replaced the government responsible for the first issue with a moderately competent one. I expect there to be some progress now. In fact there has been. And it turned out to be mostly bollocks.
