{"id":534,"date":"2010-05-04T09:59:56","date_gmt":"2010-05-04T09:59:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/?p=534"},"modified":"2010-05-04T09:59:56","modified_gmt":"2010-05-04T09:59:56","slug":"politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/uncategorized\/politics","title":{"rendered":"Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just two days to go to the UK general election. I’ve already voted (postal vote), but I’m not going to tell you who I voted for.<\/p>\n

Look, I’m very happy to debate politics down the pub, but on my blog it’s a different matter. It’s because people’s political\u00a0allegiances can be highly personal, and people have a tendency to group into rather partisan tribes around this topic.<\/p>\n

In the UK, there has traditionally been a division into right and left – Conservative versus Labour. [Now we have a third party that, while they stand to gain only around 80 seats out of the 600 being contested, look like taking an equal share of the vote to Labour. This is an interesting development.]<\/p>\n

For many people, being Conservative or Labour is part of their identity. And there’s little room for constructive dialogue here: the followers of one party will interpret the same information differently to the followers of the other. It’s called confirmation bias<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I value the readers of this blog. I realize that while many are able to discuss a subject such as politics without taking offence, others find this quite difficult, and would think badly of me if I were to speak in favour of any single political party. (I have actually voted for different parties in different elections, so I’m a bit of a floating voter.)<\/p>\n

It’s because of this that I’m going to leave the subject of politics well alone, although I will be taking a keen interest in the results on Thursday night, after I get back from an interesting looking Volnay tasting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just two days to go to the UK general election. I’ve already voted (postal vote), but I’m not going to tell you who I voted for. Look, I’m very happy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=534"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":536,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions\/536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}