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To be fair to jtbayly - I do agree I came across as presumptuous and paternalistic to state people are voting against their personal best interests. While I

To be fair to jtbayly - I do agree I came across as presumptuous and paternalistic to state people are voting against their personal best interests. While I cannot, at all, claim to know what's in someone's interests, let alone their best interests - it is possible to reasonably determine when someone is voting _against_ their interests - especially when there is evidence of emotional manipulation or misrepresentation of the facts. (Though I assume we won't enter into a "debate" over specific facts here on HN). The best example are the rural, conservative, voters in states that didn't expand Medicaid, who voted for representatives who campaigned against the ACA - and who who various reasons (unemployment, hard luck, etc) are now left without any feasible options for healthcare coverage: it's demonstrable that they did not vote in their rational best interests, even the most staunch Libertarian can agree with that statement (though the Libertarian might argue it was still their free choice to make and that should be respected - which I can agree with because at least they're being honest about it).

kd5bjo 7y ago
> it's demonstrable that they did not vote in their rational best interests Actually, it's not. You're reducing the whole spectrum of things that they may care about to the single axis of healthcare costs, and not performing any analysis of the opposition position. It may be that the representative these people voted for aligns significantly better to their values than any other choice that was available.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  It may be that ... but it's not. Either you're being very naive or rather deceptive. People aren't paying for £millions of political advertising because it doesn't work, Boris wasn't stupidly echoing a 3-word slogan because he's an idiot with nothing else to say. It's wide-scale mental manipulation, the sort Coke does with brand advertising all the time. The people running Boris aren't messing around, he doesn't tousle his hair before every public event because he's an actual moron: but so so many people think he does. It's calculated and computed to the n-th degree. Boris's team did some incredibly inciteful things, learnt through the success of Trump's campaign in part. One of their genius moves was not having him appear in debates - everyone knew he couldn't really handle himself and would lose voters, even he can't lie so bare-facedly. But having him not appear gave the BBC/Media excuse to always talk about him but never say anything of substance. He did have to get in a fridge to avoid having the negative stories make billing that day, but the TV folks were happy to naively play along, ...

kd5bjo 7y ago

> it's demonstrable that they did not vote in their rational best interests Actually, it's not. You're reducing the whole spectrum of things that they may care about to the single axis of healthcare costs, and not performing any analysis of the opposition position. It may be that the representative these people voted for aligns significantly better to their values than any other choice that was available.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
It may be that ... but it's not. Either you're being very naive or rather deceptive. People aren't paying for £millions of political advertising because it doesn't work, Boris wasn't stupidly echoing a 3-word slogan because he's an idiot with nothing else to say. It's wide-scale mental manipulation, the sort Coke does with brand advertising all the time. The people running Boris aren't messing around, he doesn't tousle his hair before every public event because he's an actual moron: but so so many people think he does. It's calculated and computed to the n-th degree. Boris's team did some incredibly inciteful things, learnt through the success of Trump's campaign in part. One of their genius moves was not having him appear in debates - everyone knew he couldn't really handle himself and would lose voters, even he can't lie so bare-facedly. But having him not appear gave the BBC/Media excuse to always talk about him but never say anything of substance. He did have to get in a fridge to avoid having the negative stories make billing that day, but the TV folks were happy to naively play along, ...