May 2011
2 posts
Deprecated
This Tumblr is now deprecated.
I have a blog at the imaginatively-chosen URL of www.ariehkovler.com
I may still use this Tumblr for very short updates. But I probably won’t.
See you at my place. Also please tell me if I’ve missed you off the blogroll.
-Arieh
AV final thoughts and strategic voting
I’ve been in the USA since Wednesday, for work. Because my work has a political aspect, I always end up having to explain the UK’s political system to Americans. This is difficult, because the US political system was designed by lots of clever people meeting over a period of a couple of years, based on defined values and principles.
The British constitution, however, has evolved from...
April 2011
4 posts
De Do Ron Ron Ron
I wrote in my first blog on Av that I’d voted, campaigned and stood in more than a hundred individual AV elections. Those elections were for roles in Jewish youth organisations, my Student Union, the National Union of Students, trade unions and voluntary groups.
Despite the fact that these elections happened at different times in varied forums, one candidate appeared on most of the ballot papers:...
AV, Safe Seats, Selections and Primaries
As I said when I first blogged about AV, both sides of the campaign are using weak, wrong and misleading arguments to advance their cases. A perfect example this week was Lord Ashdown’s Sky News interview, where he manages to squeeze at least four incorrect claims about AV in a couple of sentences. He said:
“…no more safe seats, ever; politicians will now have to fight harder to...
Creative uses of AV
Tomorrow is the first day of the National Union of Students’ annual Conference. It’s also five years since I last attended an NUS Conference myself, either as a voting delegate or as a balcony-based observer.
I went to my first NUS Conference in 2003. I was elected by the narrowest of margins in an STV election and joined eight of my fellow Bristol-university students on the trip to...
Misunderstanding AV
I have no particular view about the AV referendum. I haven’t decided which way to vote yet, but it’s not ambivalence as much as non-valence. I don’t feel strongly either way.
But weirdly, I still want to explore the arguments anyway, especially as public debate on both sides has been pretty poor.
One reason for this may be that lots of the people leading the debate don’t actually know what...
March 2011
1 post
Getting round Facebook's one-paragraph limit for...
Changes to Facebook comments today took away the ‘Post’ button. Instead, pressing Enter posts your comment automatically. This means your comments can’t have paragraph breaks, which is ugly and annoying, especially if you have a lot to say.
As a Twitter user, I know that short can be beautiful. But it’s not the only way. Often, long well-reasoned discussions on Facebook...
August 2010
1 post
Senior NUJ Activists plan BBC protest against...
Leftlist is a private mailing list for NUJ members. Its members are not happy about the recent BBC Panorama programme on the flotilla to Gaza.
So what do members a Trade Union dedicated to journalistic freedom and independence do when they see piece of journalism they don’t like?
Well, the NUJ’s Vice President Donnacha Delong calls for NUJ members to protest outside the BBC, and for...