Oh dearie me, Jack and mini-J really are living in bubbles they’ve blown themselves, convinced everyone else they think they’re speaking for thinks just like them.

Nabakov’s the one to talk about self-inflated bubbles. This is the guy who congratulates himself for overseeing a “$200 billion dollar economy”. Way to go for delusions of grandeur.

Nabakov says:

No matter how you crunch the data for the last four federal elections, whether by primary or two part preferred, you’ll find that at best the winning margin has barely broken 7% of the electorate and 4% of the overall population. Even if those percentages really represent people for whom cultural wars/luvvies/wets etc ad nauseam are the key issue, it’s not at all the kind of sea change that seems to gives youse guys a stiffie when stimulating yourself online.

You get points for venturing a substantive comment and more for coming up wit a fact. Unfortunately you are clueless about reading data, let alone building a theory from same. Still, simple error makes a refreshing change to pretentious skites, catty remarks or cringe-inducing literary self-indulgences.

Psephologists have known for a long time that partisan re-alignments are “moveable feasts”, so to speak. That is because competitive parties in healthy polities tend to shamelessly chase the “median voter”, the lucky fellow who best represents the civil norm. This chap typically holds out for the best deal from competing parties. But occasionally he crosses the middle of the road.

These changes in psephologic function are analagous to changes in economic functions. One can say that “normal politics” follows a fairly predictable cyclical movement along the function ie the pendulum-swing. Whereas “exceptional politics” involve an unpredictable secular movement of the whole function ie the sea-change.

A cliff-hanger may still betoken a massive cultural “sea change”. 1972 revealed a tipping point had been reached in cultural sentiment. Those were the awful days when “with-it” LN/P politicians wore polo necked skivvies. Mercifully they left the safari suits to the ALP.

And a landslide may merely imply that one party is “on the nose” with the electorate for quite prosaic reasons – scandals, incompetence or simply official staleness – without any great ideological cleavage or techtonic shift in the populus. 1975 is an example of this cyclical movement in the pendulum. Fraser followed with “politics as usual”.

Of course sometimes a party may stick to principles and get caned. 1996 has burned itself into the memory of ALP numbers men, the year that Keating tried to define himself as the avante garde of progressive culture. It triggered a landslide victory for the consciously conservative LN/P. Which suggested that “the times were a-changing” at that moment, contrary to your selective memory.

That, and the fact that Keating-Hewson have been replaced by Howard-Rudd. That brute data may be a little too bulky for your sensitive cruncher to process.

Since then the ALP has steadily been moving to the Right on cultural policy. A conclusion that you would have known earlier, if you were paying attention.

Nabakov says:

See Jack, that’s how to turn quantative data into qualitive conclusions without all the handwaving, ludicrous leaps of logic and general clutching at straws to build strawmen.

What I see from you is a fairly transparent attempt at intellectual bluff, holding a very poor hand. I am not so much impressed as embarassed on your behalf.

Spare us any further the buzz-talk about “number crunching”. Just point to any correct predictions (of the harder, futurer kind) that you have made regarding federal politics.

In short, put up or shut up.

Whatâ??s with the â??mini-Jâ?? thing?

Jack Strocchi’s tiny, excitable and dialogue-challenged clone.

No matter how you crunch the data for the last four federal elections, whether by primary or two part preferred, you’ll find that at best the winning margin has barely broken 7% of the electorate and 4% of the overall population. Even if those percentages really represent people for whom cultural wars/luvvies/wets etc ad nauseam are the key issue, it’s not at all the kind of sea change that seems to gives youse guys a stiffie when stimulating yourself online.

See Jack, that’s how to turn quantative data into qualitive conclusions without all the handwaving, ludicrous leaps of logic and general clutching at straws to build strawmen.

And honestly mini-J, if you really think being a parrot is your chosen on-line vocation, at least find an owner with lines worth repeating.

At least it shows I am paying attention

If you really were, you would never have to had to write that.

If you do not think the culture war has not resonated in Australia, then we get yet another insight into why Howard has won four on the trot. The 1996 drubbing of Keating was a referndum on Keating’s flicking of the switch from vaudeville to culture warring. It has taken Labor 12 years to finally wakeup.

Satirical online site Crikey.com said the video was clearly an inside job and had led to friction between the company’s producers – a claim an Endemol spokesman was quick to deny.