Blush

Soooooo, let's say you're a right-of-centre political party currently without any MPs, but a fair number of council- and Euro-level representatives. You are offered the services of a science-hating, racist, money-grubbing, gay-hating, Iraq-war-supporting defector who had previously been elected under both old Labour and new Tory banners to be your one and only MP, garnering a large amount of publicity for your organization, probably showing it in a rather poor light, and almost certainly convincing several people of your party's essential barminess.

What would you do?

(a. accept the services of the slimy spineless toad, compromising any principles you ever had in order to get a single, useless seat in the legislature...
(b. refuse politely and suggest he might prefer to switch to the BNP...
(c. beat him repeatedly around the face and neck into unconsciousness with his own shoes?

We report! You decide!

Shot

Spotted on CiF:

if you can still bring yourself to vote Labour after they've stolen from the poorest workers, lost your children's personal data, assaulted habeas corpus and the right to walk the streets without carrying a card like a criminal, left a million schoolchildren without even a single one of the devalued GCSEs to their name, wasted billions on the Olympics, borrowed in the good times with no thought for the coming downturn - then, frankly, you should be shot.

Great stuff.

Face

Labour backbenchers last night convinced the government not to go out and just start punching poor people in the face.

Green

This is probably the slickest party political video I've seen this side of the pond:



I might not agree with everything they say, but it is very, very well produced.

(ps. can you see my google ads? I can't, but I think they do that on purpose)

Four ideas for better democracy

For every parliamentary candidate:

1. Criminal records indicated on the ballot paper.

2. Full CV and two references posted online for all to see.

3. Set your required salary (inc expenses) on the ballot paper.

4. Politics 101 test score also on the ballot paper (testing eg. stats, political history & philosophy, comprehension)

And that's just with the current system. Don't even get me started on electoral reform...

War On Progress

What annoys me most about the term "progressive" is that it only every seems to be used by lefties who think that the left has a monopoly on "progress", whatever that is. A lot of people think that Thatcher made a lot of "progress" by crushing the trade unions in the 80's, but does she get the "progressive" mantle? Of course not - progressivism is only for elitist left-wingers who think that their vision is the one and only true one. Just fuck off, m'kay? If you want to say that you are an environmentalist feminist multiculturalist left-leaning liberal, then don't try and appropriate a word that connotes "good". It's like the whole mess of the "decent left" all over again.

What progressivism really reminds me of is the wanky non-speak of the Transition Towns movement that seems to use an awful lot of words to mean not very much at all.

ps. no post on progress can go without mention of Daniel Davies superb "Don't Just Do Something, Stand There": the great thing about the status quo is that it is no worse than the status quo.

Chips

My local Sainsburys (and if you know Bath, you know it's not a big one by any means) devotes an entire frozen aisle to selling chips. It sells 26 varieties of frozen chips. TWENTY SIX! Twenty six products that are, at base, potatoes sliced into a particular shape. Furthermore, of those 26, many are simply duplicates by a different brand - so there is McCain's straight-cut oven chips and own brand straight-cut oven chips, which are different in price by pennies.

What I find most frustrating about this explosion of choice in the supermarket is that they still never manage to have exactly what you wanted in the first place. I wouldn't mind approaching-infinite choice if it meant that I could have the huge fat fluffy chips that the pub down the road from my old job did, but you don't get that - you always get a sub-par substitute. What's the point? If you're not going to get exactly what you want, they might as well pile it high and sell it cheap.

I like Marks & Spencer, because it knows that it is catering to a very specific market, and so doesn't need to offer ten different kinds of each product in order to target the wallet size of every customer shopping, and can just get on with selling one kind of each thing. Thus it manages to offer 75%+ of the products of Sainsburys in less than 25% of the floorspace. Of course, I realize that I'm paying for the privilege of less choice, which is barmy in its own special way.

Inequality kills...

National pay scales kill - FACT.

Fafblog

If you don't read Fafblog, then you should.

So for the last five years all the liberals and the hippies and the nattering nabobs of normalcy have been coming up to Giblets and going "Was the war a mistake Giblets?" and "Are we losing the war Giblets?" and "Oh look at all the dead people Giblets, maybe we should stop the war." And the correct answers to these questions have been "Shut up," "Shut up you traitor," and "We'd be winning already if you'd just shut up."

It's great. Scroll down to Now They Hate Us With Our Freedom, too.

Indy

The Independent today announced the 80p Euro on its front cover with a huge splash story. However, the paper itself was priced in the top-right corner "80p / E1.10". Doh.

Gordon Brown thinks smoking pot is worse than raping someone

The maximum penalty for possession of cannabis is five years. Considering that dealing is a separate offence (and, I think, you get automatically upgraded to dealing if you're holding a certain amount - anyone know if this is true?), that means you can do five years in jail for carrying a single person's supply of cannabis. What's that - a half?

The maximum sentence for rape is life imprisonment - however, the average sentence seems to be about four years.

That means that, according to one person at least, holding a few spliffs' worth of pot is worse than the typical rape.

Great moral compass, eh?