Woodstock Jag

Vinny missed a penalty?

Uh, no. You said that there were 4 people in the constituency. You prefer SNP, Your wife prefers Labour, neighbour one prefers Lib Dems and neighbour 2 prefers Labour. Under First Past the Post, that would give Labour 50% of the vote. They win. End. Under AV, that would give Labour enough to win. End. But the two problems are separate. What we're saying is that it is fundamentally wrong, whether the turnout is 2% or 100%, for someone to be elected without at least half of the votes in that single-seat constituency expressed, in some way, in their favour. AV almost always guarantees that, whereas FPTP does not.

Steven, the ARE recounted. That's just a fact! Edit: who you prefer is linked to who you agree with the most. AV is an intelligent vote: it works out who you agree with most in any given head-to-head match-up. In the example you provide, the result would be exactly the same under First Past the Post as AV.

But all of these sporting analogies are simply not credible. An election is not just a competition. It is about representation. That's why a plurality isn't enough. A party can win a seat not because they have appealed to as many people in their constituency as possible (which is an MPs... job) but because there is a big core vote they've latched onto that does not, in any way, represent the constituency as a whole, but which beats the views of the mainstream majority because their vote splits among a number of candidates.

No, first preferences count again. Indeed theoretically they count more: they have guaranteed that the candidate even has a right to participate in the second round of the instant-run-off. That's a stupid way to run POTY voting though. If you have 3 people who love Fox but think Doolan is shite and Erskine is a "good shout", 2 people who quite like Doolan but think Fox is shite and think Erskine is a "good shout" and 2 people who think Erskine is the ******* business and don't care about any other players, clearly the best consensus is that Erskine should win player of the year (indeed he would be the second preference of Doolan voters to give him a majority over Fox. But under FPTP, Fox wins the POTY even though more than half of the fans either think he's rubbish or otherwise don't especially rate him.

I think you're doing a disservice. The devil has charisma and the deep blue sea isn't a complete push-over.

No you're not. A transferable vote is not a multiple vote. If you regard the second preference as a "second vote" then the first preferences which are not eliminated must, by definition, also be a second vote.

Why was this the case? I'd have thought that machines trying to work out which number had been put down ought to be a lot more difficult for a machine to compute than to work out which box has a mark in it?

I don't think the entire home support would fit very neatly into a conventional photo.

Who were the other candidates? Nicol Stephen is an alumnus of my old school. He gave a speech at Founder's Day in my S1 and asides the Second World War veteran who spent half an hour talking about trips on his "cycle" he was the most boring out of the 6 in my time there.

Exactly. This doesn't seem to have been especially well explained to people though. Under AV you could, if you really wanted, still just put an X in the box of your first preference and leave it there. It would just mean that you'd have no influence on any instant-run-off if your candidate has already been eliminated. If you like, it simulates a situation where your candidate never stood. If you truly didn't have a second preference, then under FPTP you wouldn't have even gone to the polling booth.

Beware the escape goat. They're baaad ass.

Psycho.

There should be an exclusive interview on the Jagscast within the next few days. We'll only give away a spoiler as to the details if the number of people listening to the End of Season Jagscast breaks 60. Now get listening!

Get your bahookeys over to the Jagscast site We're joined by Jagscast founder Ian Hepburn (chapwithwings) in addition to the usual rabble to look back over the season, make some frivolous suggestions about what to change at Firhill, eat some cracking pizza, assess the season ahead of us and induct a new member into the John Lambie Hall of Fame. LISTEN.

Indeed. I wasn't suggesting anything to the contrary. The age of consent is always an approximation by a society of the point at which people are capable of true consent, and some get it spectacularly wrong.

Children are not considered to be capable of consenting to a number of things for precisely this reason. That is why paedophilia is unequivocally wrong.

As Allan has explained, I'm challenging the notion of how we approach incest as a moral issue. I'm not necessarily "advocating" it or arguing that it is desirable, or necessarily even that it is permissible. What I'm questioning is our pre-conceived notion of what incest is any why people think it is "wrong". What you have engaged are several "emotive" arguments. Invoking contexts of child abuse, whilst persuasive to an anecdotal gallery, fails to acknowledge that whilst a lot of incest cases involve pressure, rape, paedophilia etc, the components at which people are really morally outraged (at least in their reasoning) is everything around the incest, and not the incest itself. It's like saying that sticking a knife into someone is always morally wrong. Whilst undoubtedly in the immediate context you think of, sticking a knife into someone is wrong, what about the surgeon who is cutting open someone on the operating table? What about the woman who is battered and bruised and under threat of her life from her abusive husband? It's not the sticking the knife into someone that is the thing that is wrong; it's the context: the motive, the intention, the consent of the person into whom the knife is inserted. Incest is conceptually the same. People are instinctively revolted by the concept: by the idea. What I argue is that this is a product of social conditioning, harking back to both historical religious authorities on the matter and a historical lack of understanding why incestuous relationships produced, statistically, a higher number of deformed offspring. What I want to know is why social taboos like homosexuality, transexuality etc have been fundamentally challenged in and of themselves, yet in many respects, the incest taboo has become more ingrained.

No need to egg them on.

The red card was a joke, because the thread was about to descend into a series of puns.

But that's what we have the age of consent for. That's why rape is a crime. It doesn't follow that this makes "incest" itself wrong any more than child abuse makes sexual intercourse "wrong". Fair point.

Spot on Allan.

Sorry, I don't follow this at all. No one's saying they should! Well exactly! So incest is clearly distinct from in-breeding!