Trends, the Horserace, and Random Numbers
Possum Comitatus teaches a lesson about the folly of overreacting to the random noise around polling numbers. Featuring some nice graph work such as this:
Worth also re-posting a quote from Nate Silver at this point.
Political news, and especially the important news that really affects the campaign, proceeds at an irregular pace. But news coverage is produced every day. Most of it is filler, packaged in the form of stories that are designed to obscure its unimportance.* Not only does political coverage often lose the signal—it frequently accentuates the noise. If there are a number of polls in a state that show the Republican ahead, it won’t make news when another one says the same thing. But if a new poll comes out showing the Democrat with the lead, it will grab headlines—even though the poll is probably an outlier and won’t predict the outcome accurately.
Dissecting Rundle on SlutWalk
I really didn’t want to do this, but it seems I’ve been given little choice in the matter. I couldn’t resist.
So yeah, this is pretty much a BAM in my book. So thankful someone spent some time to do this and now i wish i had done pretty much this and/or written a comment to Crikey myself.
However i found one part of Squishie’s analysis i disagreed with, but i’m pretty sure it’s Rundle’s fault because his piece was just generally so incoherent. Specifically this:
There was no way to watch Reclaim The Night and feel like, or be, a voyeur, and there was no way that it could be subordinated to the process of being spectated. When it received media coverage at all, it was often met with mild hostility, which is not a bad thing to stir up if you’re trying to interrupt basic social assumptions and prejudices. Whatever media coverage it did receive did not consume the event. It remained at the time, and in the memory, a little bit separate, a little bit frightening.
Saying that the value of Reclaim the Night was basically because the women who participated and the statements they made were only mildly disruptive and — an observation he makes later — Reclaim the Night was about ‘ugly women’ and SlutWalk is about hot chicks hating on them, therefore Reclaim the Night was harmless because it bought into the perception that feminists are feminists because they’re too ugly to do anything else like ‘catch a man’.
I actually read that paragraph from Guy the other way around, that Reclaim The Night is more effective than Slutwalk because it did receive mildly, read “at least partially,” hostile coverage i.e. evidence that it’s proving a challenge to some people. This in contrast to Slutwalk being an event that is an easy option for commercial media and that could attract voyeurs and thus the event would be rendered a spectacle for derpy men rather than being a challenge to them.
Now if we assume that’s what Rundle is saying i think he’s approaching some of the reasonable concerns i’ve seen about Slutwalk, but as Squishie points out later on, he’s really wide of the mark and full of shit. Here he represents a stopped clock more than anything else.
And as an aside, i think it’s perhaps most telling that Guy remembers Reclaim The Night as “a little bit separate, a little bit frightening.” Seriously, what is frightening about a protest march? Maybe there was something about it at the time but mostly i can’t help but think that Guy was/is one of the “greasy men in vinyl jackets” only seeing Reclaim The Night as a chance to verbally harass women in public.
Many observers might think a more ‘sensible’ way to handle the emergence of groups such as the Brocial Network is not to take potentially compromising photographs, and certainly not to put them online. But people should never be forced to modify their behaviour to indulge those who refuse to respect them, and it’s equally abhorrent to couch this coercion in patronising terms including ‘sensible’, ‘careful’ and ‘prudent’.
The added pwnage of Guy Rundle is pretty sweet too.
The Australian’s media coverage: seriously, why bother?
…for a media industry journalist, Caroline Overington seems uniquely ignorant and uncurious about current media industry debate. As a media professional, why would I bother reading Media Diary?
This is excellent, pulling apart Caroline Overington’s bizarre Crikey obsession.
Crikey’s Bernard Keane interviews Lindsay Tanner about the issues raised in his book Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy
Bernard and Lindsay are respectively one of my favourite journalists and politicians and on these issue they both bring considerable expertise and experience. None of the horse fluff you get from too many others on this.
Osama Bin Laden's death: President Obama confirms Bin Laden dead | Crikey
Think Bernard Keane’s pretty spot on in this piece that’s non-paywalled.
Also in Crikey today…
Assange should now cop it sweet. Whatever you might think about Sweden, it is a democratic country with an established and well functioning rule of law. With a British court now having determined that the Swedish request for the extradition of Julian Assange was lawful then the time has come to let that law take its course. The fact that we might not like that law or that it is different to what would apply in some other country is surely irrelevant.
When we choose to visit another country we accept that the hose country’s laws will apply to us. And as for thinking that Sweden would allow Julia Assange to be shipped out to Guantanamo — or that Barack Obama would allow his government to even try to do so — that is just ridiculous.
“More than 1 in ten Aussies self-identify as racist, while only 1 in 21 million self identify as adorable, yet sneering, dog-based cartoonists.”
#OhFirstDog
(Source: crikey.com.au)
Now, to echo some points by m’colleague Keane, we live in a profoundly individualist and atomised society, in which people build identity through media and markets. Everyone now realises that this creates a cultural crisis of meaning. The Right deals with that by fusing free-market individualism with conservative ideals — patriotism, etc — which free-market individualism undermines.
Labor offers a pallid version of this. Sooner or later it will have to come up with something else — a genuine program which posits new ways of putting society together to respond to human needs and desires that atomised market life cannot offer.
Guy Rundle on the Labor Party strategic review | Crikey
(behind a paywall, can be read if you sign up for a free trial) So this has helped me to clarify where i diverge from Grundle and others on the left who use this kind of rhetoric.* I don’t think we quite have “a cultural crisis of meaning,” i think there is a general inability to fully articulate the meaning of contemporary culture and events but that’s more an issue for ideologues (and others) who have a need to define and tie down ideas into various camps. Yes we’re going through a period of dramatic change but that change is infused with all kinds of meaning and fascination beyond people being “atomised” because of teh markets. Hindsight is pretty well a requirement for the best understanding of meaning, although we can give it a pretty good shot without it. I also disagree with the implicit notion that we’re in a world, so devoted to individualisation and, once again, teh dreaded markets, that we are left in a mindset where there is almost no such thing as society left but people “building identity through media and markets.” Firstly I agree with a comment here that that is a bit of a straw argument made by those on the left, although one which i have some sympathy with given the rhetorical emphasis of the right. Secondly, i don’t wander around during the day, lamenting that society only values me as a consumer of products. I’m pretty sure most people don’t think like that, and those that do wouldn’t think that way all the time. I am on the left and a significant part of why i say that is because i believe in many collective solutions to problems, e.g. Medicare. I acknowledge that the last two to three decades have seen a movement away from these kind of solutions towards more individualisation and less intervention by governments, and i acknowledge that a political climate geared in that direction makes it harder to advocate for collective solutions, but i think the general thrust of these reforms in Australia has been a net positive, even though i really can’t be sure in many respects, because of my age and experience (or lack thereof.) Finally, i read this statement, “a genuine program which posits new ways of putting society together” and i’m left thinking that, sure, a government may look to re-arrange society in some ways, but they don’t actually have to put society together. Society does that itself. And it actually does it reasonably well by its own accord. *Although now i have written out this response i’m also left with a lot more of questions of myself. Hmmm.
