Ali's Journal

EU’s deal on restoring natural sites is a huge progression. Green activists clearly want to see more such moves around the world. Understandably, the Green Party distanced itself from Sunak due to his anti-environment policies. It’s predictable that green activists will prefer to work with people such as Skidmore and Sadiq Khan (although Khan isn’t a cabinet minister) to expand green policies because these types of policies shouldn’t be specific to one party.

UPDATE 1:

In every country, there should be people who facilitate collaborations on green policies between different parties. Consistency toward green policies is vital and this is clear now more than ever before.

In a game, team A wishes that the chance of winning for team B is minimized. However, spectators prefer games where teams A and B challenge each other and build up good strategies throughout the game.

This is actually clear to everyone.

I work on math topics these days but sometimes other topics should be discussed too. I shouldn’t talk about politics in specific countries but, as a social experiment that researchers around the world can study, the UK election can be an experimentation for testing new ideas. All elections are labs and new things are learned from each election.

In election campaigns, people should be involved in social programs. It’s not good to give people a booklet of policies some days before the election so people can study and decide which policy set is better. There should be programs where people are actively involved and influence plans and policies. This way people don’t vote for some other species called politicians, they are, in fact, voting for plans they’ve been involved in as well. Social gatherings for political purposes aim to blur the line between those who vote and those who are being voted. People feel they are part of a team and they vote for that team. But this is a basic approach. There are more effective ways to do that.

The idea is that different parties introduce projects to the public where people actively participate in shaping them. For example, COVID-19 exposed deficiencies in the government machine. In COVID enquiry Cabinet ministers and advisers blame civil servants and civil servants blame advisers. The solution is always something in between. Conservatives who were in charge during the pandemic are the right people to reshape the government machine based on experiences learnt from the pandemic.

On the other side, Labour and Lib Dems can work on another project. AI provides tools for large-scale social debates. They can help develop this project.

Green can develop a social ad project that aims to reshape customer/service provider connections and push them toward Green policies. In all these projects people actively participate in forming and shaping the projects. These projects don’t aim to address issues that influence the elections, things such as the cost of living, etc. The aim is to establish an environment where people are involved in shaping policies.

Of course, these are suggestions for academic research purposes and nothing more.

UPDATE 1:

AI is based on math formulas. For example, in LLMs based on evaluations of tokens (points in n-d space) and distances between them next words will be selected. These are mathematical operations. In large-scale debate, these math formulas should be replaced by social patterns. The distances between different ideas and viewpoints are determined by social patterns. For example, after some incident, a society might lean toward certain viewpoints and relate tokens that would otherwise not be connected. So the main aim of the large-scale debate project should be to replace math formulas with simple social patterns.

The question people ask is: what is the plan? A long and difficult operation that highly risks the lives of hostages will turn Israeli people more and more against the war (support for ground operations has declined enormously in Israel and it is easy to predict it will keep declining). So it is not a politically correct move for Netanyahu anymore because it will no longer present him as the hero of the war and the one who destroyed Hamas. The situation has changed. He can’t go on with his old plan as if nothing has changed. He might sacrifice Israel’s public opinion for the long-term benefit of igniting anger among Palestinians to make sure there will always be an organization like Hamas and so the necessity for far-right in Israel’s politics will be felt for a long time. Again this is a wrong calculation. It unites more Jews and Muslims and all other people around the world to find a practical solution to the conflict (Netanyahu has lost the world’s public opinion sooner than expected). He doesn’t plant the seed of future tensions, he is paving the way for peace-seekers around the world to gather and find a solution. So one asks what his plan is. The answer probably is that he doesn’t know himself either. He is in the middle of chaos and tries to do whatever he can to save himself.

Then the question is why some world leaders side with Netanyahu’s show to “irreversibly damage Hamas”. They know very well this is merely a show. Destroying tunnels and infrastructure will not stop the ideology but still, they fail to stand against him. The answer is that there are two elections next year. Netanyahu is confident these two countries will remain cautious for their own sake.

Sunak has proved he is a man who is willing to do whatever it takes to be elected. If he is told to destroy the entire environment to boost his chance in the election, he doesn’t hesitate. One wonders why Starmer doesn’t take advantage of it and doesn’t present himself as the one who stands by his principles. When the other side is very eager to do whatever to win the election, the opposite side should naturally move toward more moral stances. Elections are supposed to be a choice between two different mindsets. Those who distrust politicians of the main parties should have a representative in the election. It is difficult to understand why Labour doesn’t try to win their trust in situations like this by supporting Jews and other peace activists. I’m not labour or conservative. I’m wondering why both sides make politically and morally wrong decisions.

Yesterday I watched a series called This England about the government’s response to Covid. Cummings thought the slow response was due to the government’s structure. I would certainly be in the Remain camp and think eventually the UK should rejoin but I found some of Cummings’ ideas interesting. On the other hand, some of his other ideas are really bad. For example, the Leave camp also ran an ad camp about saving £350 million weekly for the NHS by leaving the EU. It was again proved to be a mere slogan, an effective one to persuade voters and nothing more.
He sometimes connects the dots to the simplest and nearest solutions. For example one of the main reasons he supported the leave camp was immigration. He said leaving the EU would reduce the problem to a less critical issue. It’s now clear that the root causes of immigration are much more involved and complex. During the turbulent time of the Iraq war, he again connected the simplest dots and concluded the entire Islam was to blame and published a cartoon in The Spectator. The root causes of extremism are much more complex than that. I’ll be very glad to convince him he was wrong about Islam.
His experience with the government’s functionality and response during COVID-19 can be very valuable for fixing structural issues to tackle future problems.

UPDATE 1:

When I wrote this post I wasn’t aware of today’s gatherings in support of Palestinians in the UK and elsewhere. As mentioned before, the solution is not to side with any of the two parties involved. Instead, there should be a third front that moves toward sustainable peace.

UPDATE 2:

Delay in the ceasefire generates more and more anger which will make achieving the future sustainable peace more difficult. Ordinary people are paying the price and they are the ones who will develop peace. Years of conflict have shown that the war between the two parties involved will never end. It is wrong to think delaying the ceasefire will cause irreversible damage to Hamas. It will only cause profound emotional wounds in ordinary people. Freeing hostages in return for an immediate ceasefire is the only solution.

I saw a clip of Harari’s HardTalk interview. He said democracy doesn’t imply the majority has the power to do whatever it wishes. This is correct. The Constitution makes sure laws passed in the parliament are not against the fundamental building blocks of the political structure of a country. In Poland, people voted to move away from populism. that was possible because the foundation of democracy in Poland was intact and populism could be rejected by vote. Netanyahu’s judicial reform is an attempt to change a foundational part of Israel’s political system. That’s why it is dangerous. In all countries, governments pass laws and some ignite social protest, some are blocked by the court and some are overturned by the next government. These are natural political battles. But trying to change the foundation of a country’s political structure is dangerous. If a society realizes that it needs foundational change there should be very detailed and cautious methods to achieve that.

A while ago I mentioned Un’s idea to ban jeans. This is a ridiculous idea in a country with a well-established constitution. However, it mustn’t be limited to the borders of a country. In the same way the majority cannot pass laws to deprive minorities of their basic rights, a country cannot randomly carry on land-grabbing plans for other territories, by means such as forcing locals to move away from their homes, etc. International laws are in place for this reason. Any country should abide by international laws.

UPDATE 1:

The negation of “all countries should abide by international laws” is “not all countries should abide by international laws”. The negation of Guterres’s statement is that “the incident occurred in a vacuum”. A statement and its negation cannot be true simultaneously. If one condemns Guterres’s statement it means they support the other version: not all countries should abide by international laws.