We are less than three months out from Election Day. Like me, I know a lot of you feel pretty uncertain about this election, and it’s only our first, second, or third election we’ve ever voted in. I’m going to be dropping a series of articles focused on the options for who to vote for in 2023.
I’ve of course already done some, such as my amateur journalism going to political meetings and telling you all how it goes. There will be more of those. The series will also include directly addressing the audience about the pros and cons of voting for each option, explaining possible outcomes and the general political system, and just informing you on how to vote.
I typically just cover the success or failure of the parties as though it’s a competitive sport slash comedic farce. This is different. I’ve been covering political meetings without any kind of journalistic credentials; I’m now also offering myself as a source to trust on who you should vote for. That makes the role of this blog worth talking about.
I figured it was better to get the disclaimers out the way here than in dribs and drabs through other articles. This makes articles cleaner to read. Doing so also minimises a common pain in the online era - authors constantly hinting obliquely at insecurities and deflecting from the value of their own conclusions.
Two questions worth answering about whether you can trust what I say. One: are the facts I’m stating true? There’s no guarantee of that. I don’t have anybody else fact checking me and I am repeating secondhand information from news websites and Wikipedia. You wouldn’t cite me on your thesis. I may say things that are just wrong.
That being said, I try my best. I sincerely have no interest in making things up. Aside from the obvious good reasons to not knowingly lie to people, I am one of those people who is blessed with feeling like the things I tell the truth about will be picked apart as lies. In short, I haven’t got the guts or the capacity to fake it. Not trying to centre facts would also just long-term warp my effectiveness. People don’t come back to sources that are warping the truth unless they’ve been sucked in by it, and I am not interested in seeing if I can run a mini Newsmax on Wix.
Two: will political bias inform my arguments? Yes and no. Yes, I sometimes advance my opinions here. Do note my opinions on what would be best for the country rather than just amoral good strategy are mostly angry rants on rainbow matters and the like, which I pretty heavily caveat. You know with those you’re not necessarily getting my soundest, most balanced reasoning; it’s a vent.
Aside from that, I am not interested in presenting the best case and only that for my “side”. It’s an enormously common practice to do so and I think it’s self-defeating. Acting like your side is unambiguously obvious and correct does not engage with the more sceptical view opponents hold. That means your case cannot be persuasive to those people who are actually persuadable (i.e don’t already agree). An argument cannot get better from ignoring challenges to get better.
Thus, when I slip in things I believe, I will try my best to engage with why people criticise those beliefs to point out where those criticisms are valid and where they don’t stack up. I’m a doubting tomboy. I rarely feel secure in my ideas and I focus on exploring why my ideas or views I agree with might be wrong. I am not comfortable with blind faith. All of this is known to me because I’ve dealt with lots of irritation over the years of trying to gain understanding out of reading the thoughts of others, and being stopped too frequently by distortions and misrepresentations of the truth in service of personal agendas. Here we come to the core discussion of this article.
I go back and forth on whether to disclose my political biases more explicitly. If I did, you’d certainly know where I’m coming from more often. I am more biased than the average journalist or commentator on news websites. They may more strongly and unambiguously hold some views, but you know where commentators are coming from. Journalists generally conduct themselves professionally and set their priors aside. There might be value in disclosing how that affects information I provide.
The other thing is to acknowledge the political climate we, as young people, live within. A lack of openly held political values or any claim to be a centrist or otherwise not that strongly opinionated, while often coming from a place of insecurity or not wanting to make uninformed comments on others’ lives, is sometimes the opposite: a concealer applied for bigotry, classist attitudes and so on. In short, saying “I don’t have many views on how things can be better” can potentially be a proxy for “I don’t care about how bad things are for you, and if I make them worse, yah boo sucks to you”.
I don’t want to make anybody feel like I would be unempathetic to them or am another hater. Yes, I have like 10-20 readers, but the scale doesn’t affect the fact that some mean words could ruin somebody’s day. Particularly as an older figure in the NZ debating community and so on, I want to be approachable and not an enabler to any kind of discomfort people are going through in figuring out their own views and positioning. The blog can definitely come off as reserved or closed off to intersectionality and that is not the intent.
Having said that, I hope that covers that side of things. Let me explain now why I currently stick with neutrality. One, when I write articles from a perspective that I am actively challenging myself to remain neutral and not get too partial, it makes me more effective. I have to force myself to consider alternative perspectives more and I can more accurately deconstruct them.
Two, a lot of people who know me are some combination of the aforementioned politically disengaged and/or more on the other side of things to me - that’s just life, you’ll come across lots of different perspectives and, like I said, young people are often not comfortable embracing a political worldview. As I have mentioned before, there was a big social pressure early on in the blog not to give too much away - that’s mostly dissipated; I trust people to give respect over to me and that my worldview is not my whole personality.
I figure that if anybody flicks over to check the blog out, I’d like to be able to try to convince them to give other perspectives the time of day. I personally think that that’s a lot easier to do from this walking-on-a-tightrope approach than it is if it’s a fairly doctrinaire, by-the-book elucidation for one side or another. What I ask in return is just what I mentioned - give some respect over to me that I can’t say everything I mean in the space of blog articles, and that I can have more free-ranging discussions in person (and respect people’s desire not to talk pols all the time lol).
I hope that clears things up! Feel free to get in contact if any facts are just wrong, or if you have concerns that I’m perpetrating any kind of insensitivity et cetera on the blog and I’m happy to allay them. I know I am writing for a tiny audience here and this is a lot of pixel ink spilt on methodology while nobody is holding me to scrutiny. I’m fine with being plankton in a big pond. Every reader’s experience matters. :)
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