Do you understand then the difference between law enforcement and vigilantism? — ssu

In legal terms, yes. How's that related? We're talking about what ought to be, not what currently is.

If the Allies had stopped at Germany's border, the regime wouldn't have collapsed. Hence it would be a real threat later, perhaps then armed with it's own nuclear weapons. — ssu

The existence of a threat to the state is not in question. The question is whether it's justified to use conscription to deal with that threat.

I think I've answered already that conscription is basically a manpower issue. If with a volunteer force you cannot create a force big enough to create a credible military deterrence, then you need conscription. If the population is big enough, then you can use volunteer force. — ssu

Are we having some translation problem? I'm asking you about justification, and you're replying with ability and requirements. Do I need to rephrase the question?

I can walk into a shop, shoot the cashier and walk out with my food. If I wanted free food, I would need to do something like that. This has nothing whatsoever to do with whether those actions are justified (I think we'd both agree they're not).

Im asking you if conscription is justified and you keep telling me how it's possible and would work. I know it's possible. I know a state might require it for defence. But is it justified?

If you think it is so unjust for the state to demand military service conscription, just a while ago you and I were quarantined to home and set a lot of limitations thanks to the pandemic. — ssu

I thought that was unjustified too, but that's on technical grounds. Let's assume they had the science right...

1. Being quarantined hardly compares to being shot at, captured, tortured and injured. The justification has to be significantly greater.

2. Being quarantined is (usually) scientifically proven to save people's lives. It's not a wild guess, nor is it a political opinion. The benefits of retaining one flag over another is not in any way the same quality of evidence.

So comparing enforced quarantine with conscription you have a monumentaly higher risk of harm for a much less well proven gain.

But states go to war. Individual people do not have the ability to declare a war. War is something that has been formalized and legalized between states. Not between individuals. Hence the idea of legal and illegal combatant, just to give one example. — ssu

I don't see how that has any bearing on the argument. I'm not denying that states go to war. That doesn't make states people or 'selves' so it doesn't make the self-defence argument any more coherent. States are not 'selves' so there's no such thing as self-defence for a state. State's defend states, not selves.

if you say that "I don't think it was unjust to go to war against the Nazis", then obviously defending from the attack of Nazi Germany (Poland, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium) was just also. — ssu

Yes, but not on the grounds of self-defence. It is not just simply for a sate to defend the state. There's no principle of equality, humanity etc inherent in a state. It doesn't have a right to exist. It was just to resist the Nazis because the Nazis were attempting to impose unjust laws on people. Not because our state had a right to defend itself tout court.

Otherwise you end up with the ludicrous result that the US, Britain and Russia had no right to push their advantage to Berlin. By the time they reached the German border, apparently, they should have stopped.

It was just even to invade Nazi Germany entirely because the Nazi state did not have a right to exist. It was a monstrous state, it didn't have a right to defend itself, and it wasn't just of it to do so.

I wouldn't say defending yourself from a violent attack is similar to improving yourself. Yes, if you don't defend yourself, obviously you can at worst get killed. But that isn't same as improving yourself, it's self preservation. It is quite different. — ssu

That's just semantics. The state of affairs where Russians are no longer bombing, murdering and torturing is an improvement on the state of affairs where they are doing all those things.

You've still completely dodged the actual question - Is it just to use conscription to defend the state? If so, on what grounds?

Those that think that they can and will improve the society by killing others are not good people. — ssu

So the Ukrainian fighters are not good people? It seems pretty self-evident they think they can improve their society by killing the Russian invaders. Weren't you just previously arguing for the justness of self-defense?

So the 'killing' is not the problem, is it? It's the reason. In the case of the defending military you agree with their assumption that killing the invader will improve their society. In the case of the revolutionary, you disagree.

What do you think in war would be just? — ssu

I don't think war is necessarily unjust. I don't think it was unjust to go to war against the Nazis, but I do think the bombing of Dresden was unjust. I base my ideas of justice on things like universal equality, humanity, social cohesion...

Self defence is usually thought of being just. — ssu

Countries are not people. There's no 'self' to defend. Self-defense is just because it's reasonable to want to live, and avoid harms. States have no such claim to reasonably want to continue existing. That you'd put a state on the same level as a human says a lot. Does a corporation have the same right to self-defense?

Why do you think that is an arbitrary preference? — ssu

Because it's unargued for. You just asserted it. Usually we do that with indubitable presuppositions, which are arbitrary.

I think defending your country from an attacking other nation is just. — ssu

Care to attempt an argument, or are we at the stage of exchanging arbitrary preferences?

Oh and the argument was whether using conscription to defend your country from an attacking other nation is just, not whether defending your country from an attacking other nation is just. Your efforts to avoid the question are remarkable.

Do you think using chemical and biological weapons to defend your country is just? Do you draw the line anywhere, or is anything acceptable when it comes to flags?

a democracy can use this tool more effectively — Olivier5

....

Hence conscription features among the tools that may be necessary — Olivier5

Obviously, the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. That it can be a useful tool doesn't in any way imply that it is a necessary one.

I wouldn't know. — Olivier5

We then perhaps you can spare us your asinine commentary on this subject you've clearly no real opinion on.

a self-governing people can muster, through conscription, a stronger military force than a dictatorship can. It is doable, — Olivier5

Right. And what point in the thread confused you into thinking anyone needed telling this? Who was it you thought was making the argument that conscription was not possible?

a democratic government ought to find ways to optimise the public good in their country, while implementing the will of the majority most of times. — Olivier5

So who decides what the public good is?

And why implement the will of the majority only most[/] of the time? Why not all the time?

it appears to be necessary to protect Ukraine from invasion and transformation into "Malorus", whence the public good element. — Olivier5

...which is the question right at the beginning that you're still dodging.

Why does this public good override the very obvious public good of not being shot?

It's not like picking sweets off a shelf, where the only decision is which ones are nice. To gain the public good of "not becoming Malorus" the public have to submit to the public bad of long drawn out war. Why does gaining the former outweigh avoiding the latter? And don't say 'democracy' because we're talking about the public good here, a point you listed separate to democratic will.

Great question! — Agent Smith

Not my question.@_db asked it in the opening post. It's only being reiterated now because of @ssu's and @Olivier5's Herculean efforts to deflect attention away from such a question lest the answer reflect badly on Ukraine (which is apparently now some kind of eighth deadly sin).

The solipsist can claim to know that he exists, that he is happy, that he sees a tree, that the square root of four is two, that modus ponens is a valid rule of inference, and that knowledge of other minds is impossible. — Michael

My post wasn't really about what the solipsist can claim. I mean, I can claim to be the king of Spain.

We're engaged in philosophy here and like any other game, there has to be rules of engagement. Otherwise we're just writing unconnected posts at each other, which seems pointless.

So, although vague, we examine claims made in this game using rules like 'coherence', 'consistency', etc.

The point is that the reasons the solipsist uses to argue against other minds apply to those other claims equally, so they cannot make those claims and remain consistent, which is (vaguely) one of the rules.

Of course they can make them anyway, but they'll just no longer be playing the game of 'making a rational argument', they'll be playing some other game.

It's different in that it doesn't make such a claim? — Michael

I mean why pick it out? Do we have epistemological hat-denial, where I make the claim that we can't have knowledge of hats?

'Other minds' has been picked out as a thing we can't have knowledge of, but the case you're presenting just seems to be a generic case against knowledge of any sort.

To which the counter argument would be that you've misunderstood the meaning of the word 'knowledge', since we use it quite felicitously on a daily basis.

He's saying that knowledge of other minds is impossible. — Michael

How is this any different to saying that knowledge of anything is impossible?

Oh, and... Bollocks. A self-governing people did, in the past, in France muster, through conscription, a stronger military force than a dictatorship has ever manged in the past, in other countries, to.

This neither proves, nor even constitutes robust evidence for your theory that "a self-governing people can muster, through conscription, a stronger military force than a dictatorship can" because it is a sample of one. No population yields a sample size of one as a statistically significant data set.

a self-governing people can muster, through conscription, a stronger military force than a dictatorship can, everything else being equal. — Olivier5

So what? Who cares?

The question (the one you keep dodging) is "ought they?", not "can they?".

I am not making an historicist argument. — Olivier5

...[proceeds to make exactly the historicist argument]...

Of course it could have happened differently. — Olivier5

Then bringing it up is irrelevant to the discussion. It's insufficient justification to say "conscription helped there, then" since that's not evidence that it will help here, now, and this thread is about justification.

That carries a lesson relevant to this thread: a self-governing people can muster, through conscription, a stronger military force than a dictatorship can, everything else being equal. Whereas a dictator would be liable to be toppled by an army of conscripts, a democracy would be less prone to that. — Olivier5

Firstly, you've completely missed (or more likely ignored) the argument against historicism. That it happened once is not sufficient evidence to support a theory. Never was, never will be.

Secondly, it has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the thread which is about the justification of conscription, not whether (and where) it works.

But then you know that, it why you're so desperate to swamp the thread with anything but a discussion about justice.

this is exactly what Yuval Noah Harari argues in Sapiens: apparently, racism and eugenics were discredited because the Nazis lost the war. Shit book — _db

Yeah, the "this is the way it played out once so that's how it must be" argument is pretty poor.

If I tried to produce a paper supporting a theory based on a sample of one I'd be rightly ridiculed, yet this is what historicism does all the time. We've had one go at this.

If you have more links/sources I'm happy to look into them as well but I will admit it might take some time the more I have. — dclements

I should imagine you've better things to do with your time! Personally, a company with that many flagrant derelictions of its duty of care has lost, for me, it's place in decent society. I highlighted it, because sometime we can forget the role of ostracisation in maintaining decent standards of community behaviour.

So, having established in what circumstances conscription works. In what circumstances is it just?

Regardless of the outcome you acted morally. — NOS4A2

Then morality is just an arbitrary set of rules.

If the outcome isn't relevant, then why act that way. You might as well say it's 'moral' to put a pineapple on your head.

We don't know outcomes with certainty, but the whole point of moral behaviour is to have a guess. Otherwise, why?

These are links, not facts. — Olivier5

Pathetic.

In other news you'll be delighted to hear that in addition to slaves, Zelensky is bolstering his army with convicted torturers and rapists...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy has freed from prison fascist militants convicted of some of the most heinous crimes the country has seen since World War II.

According to a July 11 report in Ukrainian media, Ruslan Onishenko, commander of the now-disbanded Tornado Battalion, was freed as part of President Zelensky’s scheme to release prisoners with combat experience. Along with an unwavering commitment to fascism, Onishenko is known as a psychopathic sadist who was involved in sexually assaulting children, brutally torturing prisoners, and murder.

Onishenko’s release follows a February 27 order by Zelensky to free other convicted former Tornado members like Danil “Mujahed” Lyashuk, a fanatic from Belarus who has openly emulated ISIS and boasted of torturing captives for sheer enjoyment. — https://thegrayzone.com/2022/07/30/zelensky-militants-convicted-child-rape-torture-military/

But it's alright boys and girls these are healthsome, heroic, Ukrainian torturers and rapists, not at all like the evil nasty torturers and rapists in the Russian army.

What facts are you talking about? — Olivier5

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-index-by-country

https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights (several different measures available)

https://www.humanium.org/en/rcri-world-ranking-by-countries/ (children's rights is a particular interest of mine, so this one's specific)

https://uhri.ohchr.org/en/countries (you have to select Ukraine and Russia, they have just over 1000 active recommendations each)


So what data are you working from? We can compare sources perhaps.

Edit - I realise a lot of that data is from reputable sources like the UN. Not very balanced of me, so, for balance here's some contrary data from an alternative source you'll be more familiar with.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/17775238/ukrainian-heroes-fight-to-death-with-russian-invaders-kyiv/

I doubt it. — Olivier5

Of course you doubt it. Your Facebook feed tells you all Ukrainians are superheroes and anyone denying that is a Russian propagandist. Hang the facts.

Historicist bullshit. — Isaac


It is a historical fact. — Olivier5

It isn't.

Really? Have you looked at some actual data? — Olivier5

Yes.

If the majority is fine with conscription, what human right is being trampled, pray tell? — Olivier5

Article 3

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 2

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion

Article 4

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude

Article 5

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 13

Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

So without conscription, there might be no such thing as human rights. — Olivier5

Historicist bullshit. You've no alternative non-conscription history with which to compare so there's no argument there. You might as well say "without Nazism there might not be any human rights, since that's the way history played out".

Ukraine might not enjoy its human rights for long if the Ukrainians fail to defend them against the attacks of the Russian empire. — Olivier5

What human rights? Look at Ukraine. Actual real world Ukraine. Not the adolescent comic book version you get from your TV. Actual Ukraine had virtually the same record on human rights as Russia. Pretending they're some bastion of freedom is just bullshit, not an argument worth taking seriously.

Then stick to that. Human rights and constitutions are different issues which I did not evoke and which are irrelevant. — Olivier5

If you suggest that whatever the majority think is right gets to override the minority, then you, by necessity, deny the authority of something like human rights. If a majority decide that one race ought have fewer rights than another, that is wrong. It is contrary to Article 1 of the UDHR. According the the maxim that you've espoused here, the majority would be right to enforce their preference.

Alternatively, you agree that there are rights and there is justice which supersedes simple majority rule. In which case your argument that a majority of citizens in Ukraine want to fight for their sovereignty is insufficient to demonstrate that it is either right or just that they get to impose that will on those who disagree.

Stop inventing straw men. — Olivier5

Your entire response was...

You've heard about the concept of democracy, and how it functions? The majority usually trumps the minority. — Olivier5

There's nothing to straw man there. You've literally said "The majority usually trumps the minority" that's a word-for-word quote.

If your answer to the question "what justifies imposing a massive risk of harm on a minority who don't see the risk as worth it" is "the majority usually trumps the minority". How is it a straw man to suggest your argument is about majority rule? You literally gave it (and nothing else) as a counter argument. It's not like I picked that part of your argument out of context. You said nothing else but that majorities trump minorities.

You've heard about the concept of democracy, and how it functions? The majority usually trumps the minority. — Olivier5

So your idea of democracy is that absolutely anything the majority decides to force upon the minority is morally justified?

No human rights? No constitutions? Might makes right, yes?

It is pretty obvious that a majority of Ukrainians are in favor of the current resistance. — Olivier5

When you read the word 'unwilling' what happens in your brain? Does it just go blank? Does it struggle for a bit before giving in? I'd love some insight.

Hostomel and Bucha bear witness that there is a huge difference between the two. — Olivier5

How do those atrocities have any bearing whatsoever on the relative ability of citizens to influence peacetime governments?

Honestly. You can't just answer every single question about Ukraine and Russia with "look Russia did a bad thing". It's puerile.

to defend an independent polity, free to make its own collective choices. — Olivier5

For which you'd need evidence that the polity would be less free to do that under the threatening government than they would under the defending one. And that this difference is significant enough to risk unwilling lives for.

Evidence you lack.

All this talk about "the leadership of a country trying to hold on to their positions of power" applies squarely to nations of slaves, such as Russia. — Olivier5

Yes. It does. So? Russian conscription is also immoral.

the case is more complex for democracies, that may sometimes (in war times) impose stringent obligations such as conscription, that may appear undemocratic, for the purpose of safeguarding their democratic system from an aggressive dictator. — Olivier5

Again, if you want to present anything other than your comic book fantasy version of reality, you'd need to show some evidence of the peacetime difference between the two nations involved in terms of the interests of the unwilling population (those who don't want to fight).

It might work on Facebook, but here I'd like to think we expect a higher degree of evidence than the crap you pick up from the telly. If your argument is that the unwilling conscript's interests are so much better served by peacetime Ukraine than by peacetime Russia that they'd best risk their lives to retain it, then I think at least a modicum of evidence is the minimum requirement.

Almost every single metric of human well-being that's so far been devised puts the two nations about the same. So what's your evidence for an improvement of such worthiness that even the unwilling must be forced to fight for it?

If the government were concerned about something other than its own survival, then it would not need conscription — Isaac


Why not? — Olivier5

Read the next paragraph.

It's not sufficiently in the interests of the people themselves the exact group of people who run the place to be forced into risking their own death to preserve. — Isaac


And in English? — Olivier5

The make up of a government (Zelensky or Putin, to put it simply) is of little relevance to serving the population's interests relative to their ability to influence what that government does. Turnout at elections, for example, is often very low.

A government justifying conscription purely to preserve sovereignty on the grounds of public good is claiming that the people's interests are served by who is in government, not how that government relates to them. Not only this, but that this is so strongly true that young men must risk death to preserve it.

But the claim is false (or mostly so). It is of very little relevance to an individual's interests who makes up the government, only how that government exercises its power.

So, Starling swarming behavior is chaotic? How exactly is it so? They give me the impression of syncrhonized events/sports, the kind you see in the Olympics. — Agent Smith

Sure.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11721-015-0103-0

https://hal-lirmm.ccsd.cnrs.fr/lirmm-01598654/

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Simulated-Flocking-Behavior-Travers/2433bc091e90ca87c5589482cce437261ae183e4

It's always peculiar to me when one handwaves away and downright neglects several different arguments, examples, and lines of reasoning while gratuitously asserting the opposite only to later act as if no justification has been given... — creativesoul

Perhaps you may want to re-read the exchange I had with Janus. — creativesoul

Where? I just checked back over the last few pages and can't find any such exchange. I don't always read the whole thread, if there's points you've made relevant to the argument, you can just cut and paste them into your response to me, or link them.

This obsession with (benevolent) despots is (psychologically) most intriguing, wouldn't you agree? — Agent Smith

To a point, yes. The benevolent despot thing is just about the conflict between individual narratives and the slightly chaotic effect of peer conformity when group size is large enough.

Consider a flock of starlings (if you have such creatures where you live). Each starling is simply trying to follow the others, staying close to minimise predator risk. But in trying to copy the location of their neighbour, each will make tiny mistakes, they'll slightly overcompensate for a bank to right, pull up slightly too early. You see the same in traffic jams, for instance, if you want a more human example.

Cultures are like this too (goes the theory) we have a drive to conformity, but we make small errors in conforming, we overdo some things, under do others, not because we decide to, but just by error in our attempts at conformity.

This makes large groups slightly random in their net behaviour. They can end up behaving in a way that no individual actually wants, but is, like the starlings, the result of multiple errors piling up into strange attractors.

We know this, I think think, from experience. So part of us is wary of giving power over to the group, we still have this notion that a benevolent dictator would represent interests of each individual within the group (individuals like us) in a way that the group as a whole might not do due to this accumulated error problem.

...at least, that's one theory.

There is no evidence that this diagnostic applies to Ukraine. — Olivier5

The use of conscription constitutes the evidence. That's the whole point of the OP (@_db will correct me if im wrong). If the government were concerned about something other than its own survival, then it would not need conscription. Getting a government to behave the way you want it to is done by voting (if you're fortunate enough to have both a democracy and a majority), protest, unionising, lobbying... It doesn't matter who that government is, by and large. It's not sufficiently in the interests of the people themselves the exact group of people who run the place to be forced into risking their own death to preserve.

What's in the interests of the people is the means at their disposal to influence that government, the freedoms and benefits that government offers. And literally every single metric there is on measures of human welfare shows little difference between Ukraine and Russia on that score.

There's little to choose between them, many Ukrainians see this and don't want to risk their lives for the sake of it. Forcing them to is inhumane.

Refusal to cast one's vote can be, inter alia, because one has lost faith in the process (rigging, poor quality candidates, and so on) or for the reason that one prefers/advocates for getting rid of democracy for a more authoritarian alternative. — Agent Smith

The latter is extremely unlikely. When non-voters are surveyed, either apathy or disillusionment are cited. A preference for dictatorship is vanishingly absent.

As I've argued, worrying that we don't know what the 40% non-voters might have voted for is quite ridiculous. We know with a great deal of certainty what they would have voted for. The problem is that most people are drawn in to the micro-scale battles between the two/three main parties and so consider uncertainty about which of those would gain the vote to be a meaningful scale of uncertainty. It isn't. The bulk of the 40%, if forced to vote, would vote for one or other of the two main parties who are virtually indistinguishable from one another in terms of long-term societal change. We know this with a very high degree of certainty and therefore we don't really need them to cast a vote in order to find out.

It's like me claiming to be uncertain about the contents of the delivery from my local bookshop on the grounds that I don't know exactly which cover this version will have.

Now you're contradicting yourself. — creativesoul

It's an analogy. I thought it might help. Clearly not.

what's below does not follow from what's above...


There's not a thing in the world which is not brought into being, from the heterogeneous soup of hidden states, by our conceptualizing, and constant reconstruction of it.


So much for discovery huh? — creativesoul

Whether 'discovery' is the act of finding a new pre-existing object, rather than the act of christening a new otherwise non-existent grouping, is the question at hand. Just claiming 'discovery!' is begging that question.

Besides which, there's not even any need to resolve this in this thread because we're talking about human experience and what it consists of. If you agree that some things are 'groupings' christened by the act of grouping, then it is on you to show that 'human experience' is not such a grouping (like 'cell') so as to support your claim that it's contents (both internal and external) is a fact of the world and not a fact of our language use.

Even if we were to accept your argument that there are macro-scale objects as simples, you've yet to show that human experience is one of them.

If nobody resisted the invasion of Ukraine, this would likely only encourage more bad Russian behavior - if nobody resists, then they're gonna take everything they can for themselves. — _db

True.

the problem then is that the Ukrainian power structure took it upon itself to decide how the resistance would happen. — _db

Yep. Exactly. Not to mention the fact that they had their hands tied in that decision by the constraining circumstances placed on them by other institutions of power.

At the end of WWII, Hitler & Co. ordered children and the elderly to defend Berlin, tooth and nail. That's obviously just a total waste of human life - the corrupt and evil leadership were just throwing away their own citizens so they could cling to power for a few more days. If the same thing were to happen in Ukraine though, there would be worldwide sympathy, the media would portray the child soldiers as martyrs, etc - yet it would largely be the same thing, just the leadership of a country trying to hold on to their positions of power for as long as possible, regardless of the costs. — _db

Yeah, the media have managed (largely by some fairly extreme censorship and swamping) to fortify this fairly weak idea that Ukrainian sovereignty is some kind of moral good, that fighting for it is like fighting for freedom, or democracy, or human rights... It's clearly not. Ukrainian sovereignty is the ability of a particular power structure to determine the laws in a particular geographical area. There's nothing especially noble about it and it's certainly not worth risking such monumental death, pain and destruction over. Ukraine wasn't even that great a country, worse that Russia in some measures, marginally better in others. All in all much of a muchness

I think a lot of Ukrainians recognise this, and I think conscription is the government's answer to that problem.

My suggestion is that compulsory voting, especially in combination with proportional representation, leads to greater diversity within parliament, and that this is an overall good. — Banno

Proportional representation I can totally get behind, and I think a lot more people would choose to vote if we had it.

Mandatory voting isn't something I care much about either way. I think it's completely unnecessary, but it's not much of an imposition, so I wouldn't kick up a fuss about it.

My point in this thread really has been against the lazy argument that voting is one's civic duty par excellence and to avoid it is some act of freeloading/neglect. Voting, especially in a first past the post system, is largely pointless and of all the political acts one could (ought to) do is certainly the least important. Help a neighbour with their shopping instead (metaphorically speaking).

I don't vote (and never have) mainly because of the first past the post system in the UK, I probably would if we had PR, but I still would object strongly to any deification of voting. It acts, when treated that way, like an opiate, allowing people to think they 'done' politics by ticking a box once every five years, and can then rest on their laurels for the intervening time. Rather politics is the intervening time because its in that time that it's decided who will vote for whom. Once that intervening time it up, the rest is just bureaucracy, the taking of a census. The political dye is already cast by then, and voting (as a duty) is simply increasing the accuracy of an already accurate summary of where we got to.

That 40%... who are they? If they did "turn out", how would the vote change? What is the systemic bias here? — Banno

That's what I meant by looking out of the window (metaphorically). I'm not a hermit, we don't live lives insulated from politics. If there were 40% of the local population keen environmentalists, keen socialists, it would manifest in society, in our day-to-day interactions. I don't need an election to discover the political viewpoint of the 40%. I live in the society they have a 40% stake in.

The two main political parties here only managed to garner about a third of votes each. Because of proportional representation, a third of the Australian Senate consists of minor parties, with whom the government must make deals in order to pass legislation. They actually have to talk and negotiate. — Banno

There are definitely better ways than the English system, for sure. And better systems make voting more worthwhile, I wouldn't deny that.

That 40% makes a huge difference to who has the cross-bench seats. — Banno

Maybe, but again the difference they might make is not a mystery because we inhabit the same world as that 40%. There are not large sections of the population holding seriously progressive views but not bothering to vote. If there were, society would already be the better place their votes might make it because of their consumer choices, their neighbourliness, their concern for their environment, their care for those less well off than them.

Politics is about so much more than voting and if it's not working, if communities are dysfunctional, then voting becomes irrelevant. All it's going to do is record that dysfunction for posterity. Like a photograph. Personally, I'd rather it was blurry.

I'm not suggesting there isn't a worse way.

Do you really go about your daily business, read the newspaper, look at the world around you and actually wonder if a majority of the population might consistently vote for an environmental, socialist government?

Maybe you live in some kind of communal Utopia (good on you if you do), but here in rural England I need only walk to the shops to gain a pretty robust notion that an environmental, socialist government is not going to get into power.

We have about a 60% turnout, that's thousands. A really, really good sample size.

So given that I've already got a really good guess at how successful my preferred candidate will be, and I've got a very good sample already if I wanted that confirmed statistically, what would be the point of an even more accurate election snapshot to confirm this?