I have, of late, been rather critical of Labour, and the reason for my critical tone is at least partially because the sort of Pollyanna bullshit exhibited by certain partisans on this thread (and elsewhere) is eerily similar to the rah-rah-it’s-all-good campaign of 2008, in which the True Believers grossly underestimated John Key and National, attacked him on his weaknesses and derided him as less than credible and not a proper threat, and got soundly and deservedly whipped at the polls for doing so. I don’t want to see that happen again, so I say: stop just assuming the electorate will come to their senses and vote Labour because they know it’s right, or because Labour’s policies will objectively benefit them. They won’t; that’s not enough. You have to convince them to do so; you have to make them want to support you; you have to lead them. So IrishBill’s advice is a good generic communication strategy; it’s also critical that it also be backed by a credible policy strategy (which, I hope, is brewing at present).

To all the True Believers: you don’t help your chosen party by being uncritical cheerleaders; you feed the echo-chamber. Stop it. Loyalists should be a party’s harshest critics and strongest agitators for change when things aren’t working – which, absent deep changes within Labour since the 2008 election, they aren’t. Good supporters ask hard questions, expect good answers, reward rigour, punish prevarication and do not live in awe of or aim to preserve the precious disposition of their representatives. They do not deride those who do so as traitors or try to hush them up for fear of giving the impression of disunity, killing any hope of dynamism in the process.

So far I see precious little of this on the left in NZ, and that does not fill me with hope for the future. The glimmers of hope I see are from the Green Party and the māori party, who have had the good sense to cut themselves loose from the drifting hulk of Labour, at least until its people start to set things to rights again.

L

Over at The Standard the aptly-titled Mathemagician has been snapped trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat to prove that the government’s student loan carrot is in fact a stick.

This is fundamentally the problem with True Believers – they’re so committed to an ideological position (in this case, that National are trying to rip everyone off) that they’re credulous to the point of naïvete. Skeptic founder Michael Shermer lists this as one of the five core reasons Why People Believe Weird Things in his book of the same name: if it suits people’s worldview to believe something, they don’t bother to examine it too closely for fear they might prove themselves wrong.

The most cursory bit of critical thinking about this topic ought to have revealed it was all smoke and mirrors, but there wasn’t even that – in this sense it’s sort of like Schneier’s Law, viz:

Any person can invent a security system so clever that he or she can’t imagine a way of breaking it.

Since they’ve deleted the old table showing the original calculation, here’s a screenshot. Good work, Pat.

L