Andrew Hickey

During the AV referendum (I'm not bitter, honest) we heard time and again from No campaigners how much simpler First Past the Post is than the Alternative Vote.

After all, all you need to do is put an X next to the person you want to win and then job done. That's so much easier than faffing about having to rank candidates, surely?

Well it depends where you live and what you want to achieve with your vote. Under FPTP you only get one choice. It's a system with limited inputs and therefore there is a limit to how the system can process that input.

There are plenty of examples of three way marginals in the current general election but let's take a live example. South Thanet.

This is the seat that Nigel Farage hopes to win for UKIP. Indeed if he doesn't win it he has already said he will resign as leader so the stakes are pretty high for him. But an average of recent polls in the constituency put UKIP on 31.6%, the Tories on 30% and Labour on 29.8%.

Let's put aside the fact that on these numbers, UKIP would win the seat on less than a third of the vote with nearly 70% of voters voting against the somewhat extreme Mr Farage (which is a definite defect of FPTP as well).

What I want to focus on here is what a voter in South Thanet who wants to keep Nigel Farage out should do. So if you wanted do this you could vote Tory. After all they were slightly ahead of Labour in the polls. Well, 0.2% ahead, but given that there is a margin of error of 3% in the polls it's actually equally likely that the Tories are behind Labour and you'd be better off voting Labour to keep Farage out. This is an invidious position to be in for a voter. You are almost being forced to vote for someone you might not actually want to vote for. Let's say you're a natural Labour voter but you become convinced that the Tories actually have the better change of keeping UKIP out. In order to keep Farage out you'd have to vote blue. But that might be the wrong choice. Doing that might let Farage in! There's no way of knowing until the count.

This is where AV would be a much better system. If our Labour inclined voter wanted to keep Farage out he could simply vote Labour 1, Conservative 2 (and either not rank UKIP at all or rank them at the bottom below all other candidates). Then when lower preferences are distributed at the count, if Labour are eliminated our voter's vote would go to the Conservatives who would then be in the final round with UKIP. But if it turned out Labour were in the final round, he/she had already voted for the other party in the final round to keep the purples out.

This is a scenario where AV is actually a much simpler system than AV. The voter would not need to second guess how everyone else if going to vote in order to try and make sure their vote made the difference. They would simply rank their votes in such a way as they would definitely know it would count in the final round.

Sadly we are not voting under AV or any sort of preferential system. The electorate rejected the change to the system so we are stuck with the current system for probably a long time to come.

But when, eventually electoral reform creeps back onto the political agenda (as it may if we keep seeing hung parliament after hung parliament) just remember South Thanet in 2015 when someone tries to argue that FPTP is the simplest system.

There are plenty of occasions when this is manifestly not the case.

Chord progressions of 25 000 songs.

Another old one that didn’t make it over from the Facebook page.

Tagged: home, social anxiety

This is, of course, another episode that all the usual Moffatistas praise to the skies.  Well, that's fair enough.  All the Moffaty things they love are here.  Again.  And what on earth could possibly be wrong with wanting to watch exactly the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again?  I mean, Moffat makes lots of money writing the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, so obviously repetition is good, right?  Stands to reason. 

Also, such is the religious devotion that certain people have to this man that nothing thrills them more than yet another episode where Moffat sticks his hand up Doctor Who's arse and rearranges its guts to his liking... or (perhaps a better metaphor) meticulously works his way through a library of classics, scribbling 'Steven Moffat is cleverer than the person who wrote this' over every page.  And he is, obviously, because he gets big viewing figures and makes lots of money from being a Whovian capitalist.  The definition of artistic success, clearly. 

Katie Barron tries to canvass a particularly self-righteous suburban mum on behalf of the Liberal Democrats. Here is one side of the conversation….

This is completely unacceptable calling round at this time. Saturday afternoon is family time.

No she hasn't won anything, George. She wants to win something, that’s why she’s coming round disturbing people.

It’s not a daffodil, Maisy, it’s a rosette. It doesn't grow in the ground, darling, it’s made of cloth. She wears it to show which party she’s from. No you can’t go to the party, it’s not that sort of party. It’s a political party. No they don’t have presents. Well they’re not supposed to, although sometimes they help themselves to presents.

It’s a group of people and they want to be the government and then there are other parties and they want to be the government too and they fight it out between them. No, she hasn’t got a gun. She’s just got leaflets. George, behave! Don’t fight the leaflets. Oh I’m sorry. They’re not too dirty are they? I’m afraid they’ve got extra energy because of the rain. They’ve been cooped up too long. It’s not the best time, as I said.

Not till senior school. They do Civics in senior school. He’ll learn all about all this then. It’s the Romans at the moment.

Dictators – I s’pose they were – Frank? Frank! I thought we agreed you’d watch the highlights! Now he’s off watching his sport, might as well let the children play with their play stations. Thank-you very much. Yes alright children, go on then.

Well it does disturb us actually but thank-you for apologising.

Who was happy to see you? The lady at number five? Well she’s probably lonely.

Do we visit her? We don’t have much time, that’s why our family time is so precious. We do plenty for our neighbours anyway. Keep each other’s keys. There are a few young families in the street, we go to the park together... What do you do for your neighbours?

Don’t think standing to be a councillor really counts does it?

For the community? You politicians don’t care a drop for the community. What about school places? Why can’t they just count how many children there are and have the right number of places for them? But you’re all too busy fighting. It’s worse than little boys in the playground. Sometimes I hear them in Parliament – Frank switches it on, I wouldn’t. It makes me sick. All that braying. It’s all egos. Men, isn’t it. And now women are copying them.

 No I’m not suggesting – of course I’m not suggesting a one party state!

 No I don’t think we should copy Russia. Or Syria.

No I’m not saying we should have emperors, I’m making a serious point. Why can’t you all work together? We mums worked together on the school fete last week. It was a storming success. Made nine hundred pounds for the school. And we do it for free, whereas you get paid, don’t you. And as far as I’ve heard there are quite a few sweeteners for local councillors on top....

I’m not accusing anyone, I'm just saying that you’re none of you are saints.

I don’t think it’s relevant who I heard it from, but I have heard that some of your Liberal Democrat councillors took bribes for the development at Gnomes Wood. But it’s families like ours who’re going to have to live with the chavs.

Why d’you keep asking me who I heard it from?

Maybe it was from a Conservative. That doesn’t make it untrue.

 Yes it was on the phone.

I don’t know if I am a Conservative voter.

I don’t know why they picked me to ring. There you go with your party politics again.

 Look I’m not taking you to court –

You could take me to court? I’m not repeating slanders, I -

I think this conversation is finished, don't you? You asked me if there were local issues bothering me, I’ve told you I’m really worried about what’s going on in Gnomes Wood –

You would say that you fought it though, wouldn't you? Fact is, it’s happening, and what can you do about it?

Section what? Now you’re quoting jargon at me. It sounds impressive, but what does it mean for us?

I am interested. Are there things you could do? What is it Maisy? Well ask George for it back. You don’t need a rosette. Please don’t give it to her, it’s got a safety pin on it. You don’t have children, do you.

Fairly obvious if you don’t mind my saying so.

I didn't say you needed to be ashamed. What’s ashamed got to do with it? But maybe there are some things you don’t understand much about. You want social housing for everyone, but do you think about the effect on us, living with those people on the door step? Will I feel safe for Maisy playing in the street?

George! Where did you get that water pistol from? That’s for the summer. Put it down. George put it down now.

George – George! She’s soaked! That’s very naughty! Say you’re sorry. 

Pull your trousers up now!

Who are you calling?

The police?

An ASBO! How dare you!!

This - 'The Hertfordshire Mum' - is an extract from 'Adventures in Tory Land: Democracy in Middle England, Tales of the Canvassing Trail' by Katie Barron, with caricatures by Asbjorn Gundersen. Buy it now on Amazon.

 See more of Asbjorn Gundersen’s work,

This is an old comic, but I seem to have overlooked it when I moved over here from the Facebook page. Enjoy!

Tagged: cinema, social awkwardness

Longtime comic book artist Herb Trimpe passed away Monday night. Herb worked on many comics and characters during his career but is best associated with two: He drew The Incredible Hulk for Marvel for seven years and in one issue, he first drew the hero Wolverine. He was also a staff artist at Marvel for many years and his handiwork impacted books all across the line where he designed or rendered covers, did art corrections and had much to do with the "look" of Marvel. He was also a very nice, much-liked man.

Herb was born in Peekskill, New York in 1939. A longtime comic fan, especially of the E.C. line and of artists Jack Davis and Wally Wood, Herb attended the School of Visual Arts. One of his instructors there, Tom Gill, often employed students to assist him on his comic book and strip work, and that's how Herb got into comics. Gill was drawing for Western Publishing and Herb helped out with inking and backgrounds. So did another S.V.A. student, a friend of Herb's named John Verpoorten.

Trimpe served in the Air Force from 1962 to 1966 and upon his discharge began looking for a way to get into comics on his own. Verpoorten had begun working for Marvel and he helped Herb secure a job there running the photostat machine in the office. It was a low-paying position that involved inhaling photo chemicals all day but it got him into the office and it was not long before he segued into part-time art jobs and then full-time. He had arrived just when Marvel was trying to double the size of its line and many more hands were needed.

Herb drew other characters besides Hulk and Wolverine. His work could be seen at different times on Iron Man, Captain America, Sgt. Fury, Ant-Man, Killraven, Machine Man, Godzilla, G.I. Joe, Shogun Warriors, The Transformers and many more.

He lost his staff position in the mid-nineties when financial problems forced Marvel to downsize for a time but he continued to freelance for them. As he got older though, his style fell into disfavor with the current editors. In the year 2000, he wrote this article for The New York Times about ageism in comics. It got him some work but mostly, he was teaching art then instead of creating it. He also became a frequent guest at comic book conventions where fans lined up to commission sketches from him, mostly (of course) of Hulk and/or Wolverine. Later on, after he had been ordained a deacon by the Episcopal Diocese of New York, he offered to perform marriage ceremonies at cons.

After the tragedies of 9/11, Herb spent eight months working at and around Ground Zero in New York as a chaplain, helping people to cope with the death and destruction. As noted here, he later authored a book about his experiences and observations. In 2002, Comic-Con International recognized his work in this area and presented him with the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award.

I met Herb in the Marvel offices in 1970 and always enjoyed visiting with him, mostly at conventions. Occasionally when he stayed with friends in Los Angeles, we'd get together for an evening. He was a very interesting, friendly guy who cared about doing good work in comics and also cared about many, many things that had nothing do with comics or his own career. He seemed so vital and alive that it's a real shocker to hear of his passing at the age of 75. A real shocker, indeed.

The post Herb Trimpe, R.I.P. appeared first on News From ME.

Tuesday:

This is an ultra-quick skim through the prospectus of our erstwhile Coalition partners. Like Labour's effort yesterday, it has lots of pretty pictures.

The Tories' offer presents as very progressive, full of pro-active "our plan of action" bullets, promoting policies as positives (even when they aren't).

There are perfectly decent things. Unsurprisingly these are mostly lifted unblushingly from the Liberal Democrats: no income tax on the minimum wage; single tier pension and triple lock; apprenticeships; more women on boards; even "gay" marriage (a clue they still don't get "equal marriage").

But the more you read, the scarier it gets.

So I like the stuff at the start, up-fronting all the goodies, on investment and infrastructure. Maybe not the expanded roads programme, but better broadband and free wi-fi in public libraries (I'd go further in making free public wi-fi available; there are benefits similar to the introduction of the "penny post" in Victorian times). And devolution of investment and job creating powers to the North is bold and worthy.

And I like the promises on the NHS.

"ensur[ing] you can see a GP and receive the hospital care you need, 7 days a week by 2020, with a guarantee that everyone over 75 will get a same-day appointment if they need one"

is good policy, and it's long past time that the health service should offer more appointments at the weekend for people who are working all week. Though typically Tory putting pensioners first!

But then we get to the fantasy economics. Lots of spending promises; massive tax cuts, particularly for the better-off, particularly – it even gets its own chapter – for the dead rich in the South-East; and huge but undisclosed benefit cuts.

The one transparent claim…

"We will lower the benefit cap from £26,000 to £23,000 to reward work"

…doesn't even make sense! The rewards for work are at best disconnected from the benefit of benefits, but surely this will start to impact in work benefits, reversing the "rewards of work".

While disinterring the inheritance tax pledge is a certain signpost to this being a "if we could govern without the Lib Dems" manifesto; we diverted that money to better use in raising the personal tax allowance for a tax cut for the less-well-off.


Then we start to get to the "Nasty Party" stuff from Teresa May's briefs:

First Immigration, where they won’t give up blaming the immigrants for the problems of not addressing housing, services and jobs:

"Tougher tests for migrants before they can claim benefits"

"We will legislate to ensure that every public sector worker operating in a customer-facing role must speak fluent English."

"And to encourage better integration into our society, we will also require those coming to Britain on a family visa with only basic English to become more fluent over time, with new language tests for those seeking a visa extension."

…all address fictional problems in order to appear "tough".

And later, on Law and Order and Terrorism where they have become almost entirely negative:

"scrap the Human Rights Act"

"and curtail the role of the European Court of Human Rights,"

"so that foreign criminals can be more easily deported from Britain"

They claim they would "support victims" – but clearly not if those victims are victims of government and miscarriage of justice.

As for:

"tackle all forms of extremism, including non-violent extremism"
…that's the right to peaceful protest done away with!

While independent journalism and alternative points of view (in entertainment as well as factual) will be further curtailed with an arbitrary swipe at the BBC licence fee, claiming they will

"freeze the BBC licence fee, to save you money"

or (if they were being honest) to strangle the organisation and let Murdoch have free reign.

The "Big Society" returns from wherever we thought they'd buried it, with their new, rushed-out promise to grant three days "volunteering time" to workers (that is, have business pay for people to cover the charities people can no longer afford to support, but that the government needs to cover the services they've withdrawn), and a scheme to "expand National Citizen Service", i.e. put more kids to work cleaning the streets so we don't have to pay for proper road cleaners.

Speaking of kids, on education, the Govian madness continues, with:

"…primary school place for your child, with zero tolerance for failure"

"turn every failing and coasting secondary school into an academy "

"and deliver free schools for parents and communities that want them"

How about delivering schools to every community that wants them, not just the buy-your-own free-schools if they want and can afford them? How about spending money to turn failure around (say… a pupil premium!)?


On the environment, very little "green crap" that isn't actually the work of Ed Davey, but glaringly they toss in:

"halt the spread of subsidised onshore wind farms"

…which surely contradicts their other aspirations of "cutting carbon emissions as cheaply as possible," "and ensur[ing] your homes and businesses have energy supplies they can rely on"?


Finally, they manage to have two whole sections on the constitution – on the United Kingdom and Europe – that miss almost the entire point of why people are crying out for big changes to how we are governed and represented, where instead

"give English MPs a veto over matters only affecting England, including on Income Tax"

and

"give you a say over whether we should stay in or leave the EU, with an in-out referendum by the end of 2017"

are together a short cut to constitutional chaos, and the breaking of our Union at home and abroad, with the most successful partnership of nations in history (England and Scotland) and the most successful trading bloc on the planet (Europe) tossed aside to get on the populist UKIP bandwagon.

(And telling that they would give income tax but not dare to share full budget control with Scotland; especially when they will devolve budget spending, but not income tax, to the "Northern Powerhouse".)


Overall, in spite of the "Let the Sunshine in (encore)" rhetoric, the attack on welfare and basic values of justice and tolerance, coupled with the rolling out of private provision from education to the media even to charity through their "volunteering" wheeze, paint this as a terrifyingly full-blooded Thatcherite manifesto that has abandoned any of the 2010 efforts to detoxify the brand.

And that is even before we get to the biggest clue: the resurrection of Mrs T's signature "Right to Buy" policy, extended to Housing Associations (with no doubt further devastating effect on the social housing stock). It is, as they say, a pretty blatant clue.

It's clear that the Tories are going to put to the test their insane theory that they only lost last time because they were not right-wing enough.

In fact, it proves more than ever how much the Liberal Democrats have done in Coalition to take the better (or only the least worst) Tory ideas and produce a modern, progressive government.

And how desperately important it is that the Liberal Democrats are returned with enough strength to do that again.




All emphases my own; original document here (contains pdf)

From author Delilah S. Dawson:

It’s 2012. I’m sitting at a table in the front of the room, a microphone poised to capture my every word. At this local writing conference, I am considered a rock star. Everyone in the audience wants what I have–a three-book contract with a traditional publishing company. Their eyes are hungry, their pens poised over notebooks. We take a question from the crowd.

“How do I build a platform and make money with my blog?” a woman asks.

“Build a time machine and go back to 2005 and start your blog then,” I say.

. . . .

From the very beginning of my writing career, I’ve been told that publishers want a writer to have a brand, a platform, a blog, a built-in army of fans. But that was 2009, and now it’s 2015, and that doesn’t work anymore. Book blogs become paid services, giveaways become chum pits, conference-goers dump purses full of business cards out in the trash to make room for more free books that they won’t read. It is virtually impossible to get your blog seen or your book discovered. We are glutted with information, and yet our answer to “How do I get people to buy my book?” is social media marketing, which is basically throwing more information out into the void.

Why?

1. Because Twitter doesn’t sell books.

It is a sad fact that if every one of my Twitter followers–which is 9,631, as of this post– bought my next book, HIT would hit the New York Times bestseller list. BOOM. Easy. One success like that helps an author with every stage of their career, raising their advances, giving them more bargaining power, and lending them a sort of street cred that even my grouchy Luddite grandfather understands and respects. Looking at my sales numbers, my followers are not following me for the purpose of buying my next book, and that’s totally okay. They’re probably there for my brownie recipes and #badscarystories. But the point is that whatever a publisher sees when checking my Klout score doesn’t necessarily translate into book sales. Whatever form of alchemy causes a person to click BUY IT NOW runs deeper than simply hearing the message every two hours as if the author is an insane cuckoo clock.

2. Because Facebook hides posts for blackmail purposes.

Back in 2007, Facebook was beautiful in its simplicity. You posted something to your personal page or your Fan/Author/Brand page, and everyone who was your Friend or Follower saw it. Since then, however, Facebook has recognized the error of allowing us to speak to our friends for free, and now, of my 1836 Fans, only 3-10% see any given post on the Author page that they have chosen to follow for the express purpose of reading my posts. If I pay $20, I could bump that number up to 30%. I would have better luck randomly mailing postcards to strangers. No matter what I say or how beautifully I say it, my message doesn’t reach the people who have asked to hear it.

. . . .

Are you seeing the thread here?

Social media is PUSHING.

And today’s reader doesn’t buy things because the author pushed them.

As a reader, I want a book to pull me.

When I see a book’s name pop up again and again among people I trust, I want to read it.

When the cover is beautiful and the hook is compelling, I want to read it.

Link to the rest at Whimseydark and thanks to Scath for the tip.

Here’s a link to Delilah S. Dawson’s books

On a dry planet on a distant arm of a distant galaxy, there was war! The wheels of conquest and heroism had rolled across the barren sands of the unnamed world, grinding the bones of the weak under the tread of laser tanks, and greasing the gears of the nuclear-powered rail guns that leveled entire mountain ranges with a single titanic shot!

The war had begun eons ago, on another world in another universe, but so far there had been no winner - could be no winner - as long as one last warrior on either side lived to hold a weapon! This was a war of extermination in which there could be no prisoners and no retreat - only death!

But one day there came upon the beautiful fields of combat a terrible truce. The generals of one army strode across the empty desolate plains to parlay with those of the other, and their troops, the finest intergalactic shock commandos in a dozen realities, took advantage of the rare quiet for a day of rest. What would be the result of this truce? Could there be . . . peace? No one dared guess.

On a distant mountain on a far plateau of this desert world there stood a concrete box, approximately five feet by five feet, closed on all sides. There was a muffled sound from within, the sound of steel cables tensing as if to burst. In the afternoon heat of this desert world the heat was unbearable, but through the miracle of an unknown endothermic reaction the box seemed to absorb all heat around it, such that the concrete was actually cold to the touch. There was a moment of silence when the titanic movements within the box seemed to pause, and then the front face of the box began to slide open.

Far away on battlefield where the generals discussed their truce, they heard the sound of a distant explosion, as if the bonds holding an ancient Titan of old had broken in a violent conflagration! What was happening? This planet was distant and empty, there were no other sapient beings for parsecs on any side. What could this strange event foretell?

Suddenly there came a silence, like the calm before a dreaded Bargoxian Ammonia Storm. The general rumble of armies at peace faded and all present knew they were on the cusp of something epochal. A man came into view striding from the desert, unhurriedly and yet with the supreme confidence borne of a total mastery of all natural and logical processes. He was clad simply in robes and wore nothing on his feet even as he marched across the burning sands. He wore no covering on his head and yet did not squint in the afternoon sun. His hair was cut short and his skin was bronze, the color of cooling iron after it has been tested by the forge. All present knew at once they were in the presence of a singular creature, a MAN who would and could change the destinies of every living being, if he so chose!

He was a MAN of uncommon bearing. His muscles rippled and twitched in the light, never truly still, constantly tense under the burden of perfection, a burden he carried in the desert heat with as much heat as a camel might carry a sheet of fine white paper ten thousand miles on a lonely trek.

Finally, the MAN approached the clutch of generals in their repose, arrayed around a table festooned with beverages and other delicacies. All along the plains where two armies stood motionless silence reigned, as all present held their breaths to hear what this potent stranger might say.

He paused at the table and stood without movement. Finally, he opened his mouth - but instead of moving his jaw and articulating his tongue, the words simply flowed from his mouth like waves crashing on a rocky beach. His words were THUNDER and his speech was LIGHTNING, and it seared the souls of all those who attended him.

WHERE IS THE WAR?

The generals were afraid to speak in the presence of one so much greater than they. Finally, one brave warrior, older and more esteemed than all the others, rose on his spindly legs and addressed the stranger.

"We have warred for generations, but we have come together today to broker peace. Because we are tired of war."

BUT WAR IS LIFE.

"We have lived on this barren rock for longer than I have been alive, fighting one another for control of nothing. We wish to make peace and to leave. We no longer wish to be at war with one another."

BUT WITHOUT WAR, IS WEAKNESS.

"We have fought for centuries and tested our resolve against our enemy. We have earned valor uncountable. But we grow old and our numbers no longer replenish themselves."

YOU HAVE SUCCUMBED TO WEAKNESS, AND FROM WEAKNESS UNTO DEATH, AND FROM DEATH TO DISHONOR.

"We have fought long enough to satisfy honor."

I UNDERSTAND YOUR WORDS BUT NOT YOUR MEANING. THE ONLY GOOD DEATH IS DEATH BY BATTLE, ALL OTHER DEATH IS DISGRACE.

The elder sat down in defeat. Another rose, from the same side of the table, to answer the proposition. He was not so old, and not yet so weak.

"We have forgotten why we fight."

YOU DO NOT NEED A REASON TO FIGHT. IT IS NATURE TO DESTROY, NATURE FOR MEN TO SWEEP THE EARTH OF ALL RESISTANCE AND ANNIHILATE THE WEAK.

"But sir," the second general began, "many among us no longer wish to fight."

NOT MANY MEN ARE TRUE MEN. WHO DO YOU FIGHT.

A figure from the opposite side of the table rose and began to speak. Before she could address the stranger, he spoke at her.

WHO ARE YOU TO SPEAK TO ME?

"I am the leader, the highest general of my army."

BUT YOU ARE . . . NOT MALE.

It was true! The general who now addressed the MAN was a woman, old and wizened, but still strong underneath the delicate ceremonial armor which she wore in the desert heat.

"That is true, I am a woman."

THEN HOW CAN THIS BE. YOU ARE WEAK.

The second general from the other side of the table arose and spoke. "They are women, yes, but they are warriors true. They have fought us across the universes, to a standstill, and at great cost to both sides."

ARE YOU MEN?

"Yes, we are -"

NO, YOU ARE MALES. YOU ARE MALES BUT YOU ARE NOT YET MEN. TO BE A MEN IS TO UNBURDEN YOURSELF OF THE CLOAK OF WEAKNESS THAT ALLOWS YOU TO BE STYMIED BY NOT-MALES.

"But sir -"

SPEAK NOT AGAIN LEST I DESTROY YOU WHERE YOU STAND.

The MAN tensed his left and right biceps and the sound of an earthquake filled the ears of all those present.

IT IS SAID THAT TO STRIKE WITH THE OPEN HAND IS TO STRIKE WITH LOVE. DO YOU STRIKE WITH THE OPEN HAND?

"No, sir, we strike the the fire of a thousand thousand suns. The fearsome might of our blitzkrieg is hailed across the known realms, from Asterum to Zeenig."

YOU STRIKE WITH THE OPEN HAND, BECAUSE YOUR ENEMY - NOT-MALES - YET LIVES. WEAKNESS IS LOVE, AND LOVE IS WEAKNESS. THEY ARE BUT NAMES FOR ONE AND THE SAME THING, WHICH ARE BOTH SIGNS OF THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH. TO STRIKE WITH THE FIST IS TO STRIKE WITH HONOR, TO STRIKE FOR DESTRUCTION AND FOR HONOR AND DIGNITY.

"Sir, we have fought across the universes -"

AND YOU HAVE NOT WON. I KNEW I WAS RIGHT TO LEAVE THE WORLD OF MALES BEHIND.

"You were once one . . . of us?"

I WAS NEVER LIKE YOU. FROM A YOUNG AGE I PERCEIVED THE LOGIC OF STRENGTH. I TOOK THE RED PILL AND I KNEW THE FUTILITY OF ALL RESISTANCE.

"But sir, we have taken the holy Red Pill as well! All of us have pledged our lives to destroy the Adversary."

AND YET YOU MAKE PARLAY WITH YOUR ENEMY.

"We have fought long and hard. We have upheld our honor."

IF YOU HAD UPHELD YOUR HONOR I WOULD STILL BE AT PAUSE IN MY EXILE. MANY EPOCHS AGO I RECOGNIZED THAT I WAS THE ONLY MAN ALIVE - PERHAPS, IN MY TIME, THE LAST MAN. I EXILED MYSELF FROM THE WORLDS IN ANTICIPATION OF THE DAY WHEN I COULD ONCE AGAIN COME AMONGST YOU, MY PEOPLE, AND BE NO LONGER ALONE. I WAS TO BE - THE FIRST MAN. BUT I SEE THAT MY EONS OF REST HAVE BORNE BITTER FRUIT. THERE ARE NO MEN, ONLY WEAK AND SIMPERING MALES, AND LESS THAN MALES.

The MAN turned to address the commanders of the second army, resplendent in their molybdenum polymer armor, ritual war lasers at their side.

NOT-MALES, WHY DO YOU FIGHT?

"Sir," the eldest general replied, "we are warriors for social justice. We have crossed the known realms and laid barren whole galaxies to prosecute our cause with great zeal."

YOU FIGHT FOR - SOCIAL JUSTICE?

"Yes."

WHAT IS - JUSTICE?

"Why, justice is equality and fairness - equal representation and fair access. It is the right to be addressed with dignity and respect by equals."

THERE IS ERROR IN YOUR WORDS. YOUR IDEALS CANNOT WITHSTAND THE KEEN BLADE OF REASON.

"We welcome free debate -"

THERE IS NO DEBATE. THERE IS NO DELIBERATION. THERE IS MERELY THE STATEMENT OF TRUE AND NOT-TRUE PROPOSITIONS. YOU HAVE STATED NOT-TRUE PROPOSITIONS.

"What is 'not-true' about the desire for justice?"

YOUR PREMISE IS FATALLY FLAWED. JUSTICE DOES NOT EXIST.

"Justice is human and fallible, but no less necessary -"

ALL REASON BEGINS WITH THE PROPOSITION THAT A=A. THE PRINCIPLE OF IDENTITY PROCLAIMS THAT OBJECTS CAN ONLY BE EQUAL TO THEMSELVES. JUSTICE IS PREDICATED ON EQUITY BETWEEN NON-IDENTICAL CATEGORIES, HENCE IT IS A FALLACY.

"We fight to defend the universe from your ideology."

THEN YOU FIGHT A FUTILE WAR! A=A! A CANNOT EQUAL B! TO BELIEVE THAT ANOTHER IS EQUAL TO MYSELF IS WORSE THAN A FALLACY - IT IS THE WORST KIND OF DEATH, EGO DEATH!

"But we are all of us equals."

THEN WE ARE ALL NOTHING! EQUALITY AND JUSTICE ARE MYTHS PERPETRATED BY THE WEAK TO MAINTAIN THEIR STATUS AS BLESSED VICTIMS. IN TRUTH, THE WEAK SHALL INHERIT ONLY - DEATH! THE ONLY TRUE ACT OF THE STRONG IS TO DESTROY!

"But if destruction is your finest aspiration, how can you survive?

TO BE MALE IS TO EMBRACE DESTRUCTION AS THE ONLY POSITIVE ACTION. TO BE A MAN IS TO ACTUALIZE THE DESTRUCTION OF ALL CREATION WITH EVERY LIVING BREATH. THIS IS TRUE AND GOOD.

A QUESTION: IF A MAN SPEAKS, IS THE ACT AN ACT OF CREATION OR DESTRUCTION?"

"To speak is to create."

NO! TO SPEAK IS TO DESTROY SILENCE! IF A MAN SPEAKS IN THE PRESENCE OF A WOMAN, HE DESTROYS THE POTENTIAL FOR HER TO SPEAK. IF A GENETICALLY PURE MAN SPEAKS, HE DESTROYS THE SPEECH OF OF A IMPURE MONGREL RACE SPECIMEN.

"But why can't there simply be room for all to speak their peace on an equal basis?"

A=A! A CAN ONLY OCCUPY THE SPACE OF A! A AND B CANNOT COEXIST! IN ORDER FOR A TO REMAIN A, IT MUST ANNIHILATE B! A CAN ONLY REMAIN TRULY A UNLESS ITS EVERY ACT IS DESIGNED TO ASSERT AND REASSERT IT'S IDENTITY!

"But why can there not be room for everyone?"

TO BE FULLY ACTUALIZED IS TO ACCEPT THE MANTLE OF SUPREMACY. TO REJECT SUPREMACY IS TO EMBRACE WEAKNESS. TO BE WEAK - TO ACCEPT MULTIPLICITY AND RADICAL EQUALITY - IS TO EMBRACE DEATH, FOR ONLY IN THE EXERTION OF POWER AND DESTRUCTION IS THERE LIFE AND FREEDOM.

The general who first spoke, aged and wizened, rose again and addressed the demigod who now walked amongst man.

"It is obvious from your words that you are the prophet who has been foretold, the MAN above men who will lead the male race to its position of genetic and ideological purity over the mongrel and not-male. But we have fought long and hard to fulfill your ancient teachings - how have we failed?"

YOU HAVE FAILED BECAUSE EVEN THOUGH YOU HAVE HEARD MY WORDS YOU HAVE NOT LISTENED TO THEM. YOU LIFT THE CUP TO YOUR MOUTH BUT TURN AWAY BEFORE YOU DRINK.

"How best can we follow you?"

FOLLOW ME? YOU BETRAY YOUR IGNORANCE WITH EVERY WORD! YOU CANNOT FOLLOW ME. I AM NO LEADER. THERE ARE NO MEN AMONG YOU, BECAUSE NO TRUE MEN ARE CONTENT TO LEAD OR BE LED. IF THERE WAS ONE MAN AMONG THE THOUSANDS OF YOU, THEN THERE WOULD BE ONLY ONE MAN. HIS ACTUALIZATION WOULD MEAN THE DESTRUCTION OF ALL FALSE PROPOSITIONS, ALL NON-ACTUALIZED MALES.

"So there can be only one?"

IF THERE WERE A MAN AMONG YOU, HE WOULD KNOW THAT SURVIVAL OF THE SELF DEPENDS IN ALL INSTANCES ON THE DESTRUCTION OF THE OTHER. IF THE OTHER IS ALLOWED TO SURVIVE, THEN THE EGO IS DIMINISHED, MADE WEAK, RENDERED UNTO DEATH.

"But then how can there be society?"

SOCIETY IS AN ILLUSION AND A LIE TOLD BY THE WEAK IN ORDER TO BE ALLOWED TO SURVIVE UNDER THE SKIRTS OF THEIR BETTERS. TO BE ACTUALIZED IS TO RECOGNIZE ONE'S AUTONOMY, AND TO RECOGNIZE THAT SOCIETY IS A DISEASE OF COMPROMISE.

"But how can men survive alone?"

MAN CAN ONLY SURVIVE ALONE! TO INTERACT WITH OTHERS IS TO ADMIT WEAKNESS!

"What can a man truly do, then?"

MANY EONS AGO I LEFT THE WORLD OF MALES AND NON-MALES TO BEGIN MY EXILE AND REST UPON THIS DISTANT WORLD. I BUILT MYSELF A SHELTER OF STONE, A CLOSED BOX WITH NO WINDOWS AND NO DOORS. IN THIS BOX I HAVE SAT, MOTIONLESS, FOR MILLENNIA, THE ONLY SOUNDS THE TRIUMPHAL STRAINING OF MY STEEL MUSCLES IN PERPETUAL ISOMETRIC SELF-ANNIHILATION, MY ONLY THOUGHT THE ENDLESS RECITATION OF IDENTITY - A=A! A=A! AND IN THAT STATE OF DIVINE MASCULINITY I COULD HAVE HAPPILY REMAINED UNTIL THE END TIMES.

"Why have you come upon us now?"

I HAVE LEFT MY SUBLIME MEDITATIONS ON MANHOOD TO EXAMINE YOUR CONFLICT - TO SEE IF, AS I HOPED, THE ERA OF TRUE MEN HAD ARRIVED. I SEE NOW I AM WOEFULLY MISTAKEN. I SEE NO MEN HERE - ONLY WEAKNESS AND DEATH.

"How will we know when the age of True Men has arrived?"

YOU WILL KNOW FROM THE ANNIHILATION OF ALL FALSEHOOD. A=A! ALL NON-MEN SHALL BE DESTROYED, AND IN THIS ACT OF DESTRUCTION ALL FREEDOM SHALL EMERGE!

"But if we can only destroy, how shall we propagate the race?"

PROCREATION IS WEAKNESS! DO YOU ACCEPT YOUR NEGATION? DO YOU WILLFULLY SUBJUGATE YOURSELF TO THE WILL OF ANOTHER? DO YOU EMBRACE IMPERFECTION? THEN YOU PROCREATE WITH THE KNOWLEDGE THAT YOU SHALL BE SURPASSED IN TIME BY ANOTHER. TO ACTUALIZE YOURSELF IS TO REJECT PROCREATION, IS TO EMBRACE THE THESIS THAT YOU ARE ALREADY THE PINNACLE OF ALL! YOU SHALL NOT POLLUTE YOURSELF WITH THE ACT OF PROCREATION! TO GIVE LIFE TO ANOTHER IS TO TAKE YOUR OWN!

"How will we know when the final age is upon us?"

YOU WILL KNOW BECAUSE THE ONLY LIVING BEINGS WHO REMAIN SHALL BE THE SELF-ACTUALIZED, THE POWERFUL, THE TRUE MEN OF MEN. AND THEN IN THE FINAL DAYS WE SHALL MAKE JOYFUL WAR, TO DESTROY EACH OTHER AND THE UNIVERSE THAT EMBRACES THE WEAKNESS OF ALL LIVING THINGS. IN THE END OF ALL TIME, ONLY ONE MAN SHALL REMAIN, ONLY ONE MAN SHALL STAND VICTORIOUS OVER ALL CREATION! AND THEN IN THE FINAL ACT OF FREEDOM THAT MAN SHALL DESTROY CREATION, EXTINGUISH EVERY SUN AND DISINTEGRATE THE EARTH BENEATH HIS FEET, FINALLY ACHIEVING TRUE MASCULINITY. UNTIL THAT MOMENT, WE SHALL BATHE IN WEAKNESS AND COMPROMISE, DAMNED TO DRINK THE FILTH OF THE UNWORTHY AND TO FEAST ON THE OFFAL OF THE UNCLEAN.

"And what then, will the Last MAN do, at the end of time?"

THE FINAL ACT OF DESTRUCTION SHALL BE THE OBLITERATION OF THE SELF, THE FINAL FLEXING OF INVINCIBLE MUSCLES THAT SHALL UNDO THE POTENTIAL OF ALL THAT EVER WAS AND ALL THAT WILL EVER BE! IN THE FINAL MOMENT OF ECSTATIC SELF-OBLITERATION SHALL THE LAST MAN KNOW TRUE PEACE!

"So, the true fate of MAN is to uncreate the universe!"

YES! TO ACTUALIZE THE MASCULINE IS TO EMBRACE THE DESTRUCTION OF ALL THAT IS! TO REJECT THE ILLUSIONS OF JUSTICE AND FAIRNESS! TO UNDERSTAND THAT COMPASSION AND EMPATHY ARE THE INTOXICANT OF THE WEAK! TO KNOW THAT CREATION IS ABOMINATION, AND THE ONLY TRUTH IS POWER - REAL ULTIMATE POWER - THE POWER TO ANNIHILATE!

"By the great moons of Gargolax, we have been wrong, we have wandered weak in the valley of suffering! Give us a new gospel, bring us the truth of all existence and uncreation!"

On a dry planet on a distant arm of a distant galaxy, the MAN who was above all men spoke again, and his words were burnt into the soul of every space-warrior present. They knew that they were present at the end of the beginning, of the beginning of the end of all things. The imperfect prophets of yore had failed to adequately prepare the human race for the Final World, and it would fall on every soul present to spread outwards from this remote and war torn world with the new gospel of Man, to save and redeem the universe through fire and steel.

A=A!

SOCIETY IS COMPROMISE!

COMPROMISE IS WEAKNESS!

DIFFERENCE IS WEAKNESS!

WEAKNESS IS DEATH!

PROCREATION IS SELF-DEATH!

SELF-ACTUALIZATION IS POWER!

POWER IS DESTRUCTION!

DESTRUCTION IS SELF-ACTUALIZATION!

SELF-ACTUALIZATION IS LIFE!

Kicking the poor in the teeth never goes out of style, particularly when questions about the nation’s economic future are troubling the minds of many.  Ever since food stamps were introduced in 1939, one of FDR’s many radical ideas about how you shouldn’t have to suffer and die just because you’re down and out, there have been those — mostly on the right but increasingly amongst the judgmental wing of lifestyle liberals — who have inveigled against the notion that you should just let people have food to keep them from starving.

Of late, there has been a virtual explosion of comfortable conservatives seeking to restrict, curtail, or outright eliminate the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the modern incarnation of food stamps — this after the program has already undergone severe cuts, under the watch of a president who these same conservatives claim is unprecedented in his coddling of the poor with entitlement giveaways.  One Missouri politician is moving forward with a plan to stop SNAP recipients from using their aid to buy steak and seafood, a move that not only vastly miscalculates the amount of resources available through SNAP and how they are used, but further encourages those with limited funds to spend them on garbage, a point we will return to later.  In Kansas, a state somewhat legendary for its susceptibility to the tales of Republican fabulists, there is a movement to prevent the use of Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) funds to visit, among other things, strip clubs and swimming pools, based on another conception of the lifestyle of poor people that is completely delusional.  Other states seek to restrict food stamp users from buying snacks, desserts, or soda.  And Wisconsin, under chicken-shit coward Scott Walker, is proposing to drug test recipients of SNAP benefits, following the example of Florida, which has already done so at the price of millions, to catch a minuscule number of weed-puffers, thus obviating the entire point of the program by costing more government money than it saved in catching violators.

I have some experience of food stamps.  At my lowest ebb, several years ago, I applied for and was granted SNAP benefits, at a time when I had no job, no income, no assets, and no home of my own.  I was not receiving any other form of government assistance, my unemployment benefits having already run out, and SNAP was the only way I could feed myself.  As a single male with no spouse or children, I received the lowest level of benefits, coming out to a little less than $40 per week; anyone who has been forced to feed themselves on this laughable amount of money can tell you how ridiculously hard it is, so I won’t belabor the point, other than to say that the very notion of eating fresh fruits and vegetables, let alone steak or lobster, was beyond the realm of possibility, and I instead stocked up on inexpensive crap like ramen noodles, hot dogs, and white bread, not because it was remotely good for me, but because it was cheap.  When the state, apparently infuriated that poor people were still dining in high style off the dime of some oil billionaire not savvy enough to dodge his tax burden altogether, enacted even further restraints, I simply stopped using the program and relied on whatever the two relatives who let me stay with them, both of them elderly retired women on a fixed income, could spare.  The new restrictions, which included traveling multiple times a week to the benefits office, showing evidence of a job search using methods devised by someone whose conception of looking for employment dated back to the 1950s, and submitting to an onerous analysis of my every food purchase, simply wasn’t worth the tiny amount of aid I would receive.  And if it would eat into my time, how burdensome must it have felt to the other people in the program, many of whom had families to support and jobs to do?

There are any number of factors at play in these continual pushes to restrict, regulate, or revoke government aid.  There is the old game of morally shaming people who are less fortunate than ourselves (see the erroneous and pointless “only in America are there poor people who are fat” argument), which takes on many forms.  No one ever dares suggest dictating to the rich what they can and can’t spend their money on, even if that money comes from government contracts or massive tax breaks, but let a poor person do something to enjoy herself once in a blue moon, like buying a slightly better brand of frozen dinner or a cut of meat that isn’t gray and spoiled, and the knives come out.  Add to this the liberal tut-tutting at the atrocious eating habits of poor people — all those fats and sugar!  All that starch and salt and preservatives in processed food!  Never mind that more healthful food costs more, and often isn’t available in poor urban areas; never mind that taking treats away leaves them not with the choice to eat better, but with no choice but to eat worse.

There’s also the all-too-familiar moral panic of finding a tiny handful of people who abuse the system and using them to condemn the system as a whole.  This is behind the drive to drug-test SNAP recipients, an effort that has expended huge amounts of money and yielded results that indicate less than 2% of those tested were drug users; it’s also seen in the Republican obsession with “voter fraud”, which every study has shown is virtually non-existent.  Even the granddaddy of food stamp ‘reform’, Ronald Reagan, was typically full of shit; his story about the welfare queen who bought bottles of vodka with her benefits and drove them home in a new Cadillac was always a lie, but that hasn’t stopped generations of his admirers from using it as their blueprint for eliminating welfare.  I’m sure there are a handful of people, like the jackass unearthed by FOX News a few years back, who really do use SNAP to buy filet mignon and EBT to visit titty bars, but if we’re going to shut down an entire program that helps millions of people because of the chicanery of a statistically insignificant number of free riders, then we’d also better put every banker in America behind bars because of the ‘few bad apples’ who precipitated our most recent financial crisis.

But really, this is all just smoke and mirrors.  The goal is not to make poor people healthier; if it were, liberals would support equal educational opportunities for them, and conservatives would demand that they have access to the same quality of food that wealthier people have.  The goal is not to save tax dollars; if it were, huge wastes like drug testing would not be performed.  The goal is not to prevent fraud; the fraud that exists is so minute as to barely exist, and is a scrap of a pittance of a crumb compared to the fraud committed by big corporations for bigger government payouts.  The goal is the same as it always is:  to criminalize poverty.  Say that the problem is voter fraud, and the solution will be a measure that will disenfranchise millions of poor but law-abiding citizens; say that the problem is welfare cheats, and the solution will be the elimination of welfare as we know it; say that the problem is food stamp abuse, and the solution will be making the hurdle for getting food stamps so high and the benefits so low that millions will go hungry.  The point is not to make people less dependent on government aid; it is to make them more dependent on the slave-labor wages that big-money companies are willing to offer, creating a permanent underclass of low-wage workers with zero mobility.

If you have a large nation with a lot of people who can’t rise to the top, you have two options.  You can do what you can to make them equal to your other citizens, lending them a helping hand that allows them to live with dignity on the principal that all men are created equal.  We invented that idea, but we no longer practice it; that duty has fallen to the hands of the vile monarchists we once vowed to oppose at any cost because of their hatred of freedom.  The other option is the one you see when people natter on about ‘voter fraud’, or complain about food stamp recipients buying lobster and caviar, or ignore the way we have incarcerated more African-Americans than ever sweated under the yoke of slavery, or nod approvingly at a town like Ferguson, where virtually every resident is squeezed for their last pennies by a legal system drunk on money:  it is to turn the less fortunate into criminals just for existing, to make people whose every economic decision is an agonizing one even more miserable.  That is the one we have chosen, and while it is nothing new to step on the necks of the poor, it takes a lot of guts to claim that it’s their fault we had to wear steel-toed boots.

With Special Opening Act, Tony Smith!

What do Dune, The Road, Blindsight, Anathem, and I Am Legend all have in common? Together, they comprise The Five Worst SF Books EVER, as compiled by my buddy, Tony Smith over at Starship Sofa. Of course, this is hardly the first time Blindsight has been so honored— but when a winner of both the Hugo and whatever award is represented by that weird forties-era-Popular-Mechanics-airplane-thingy-in-front-of-his-fridge-at-the-lower-left-there weighs in, well, it’s worth sitting up and taking notice.

Thanks a lot, Tony. You owe me a brewery.

*

Anyway.

The BUG and I were hanging out the other day with a friend I’ve known for thirty years. Debbie and I attended grad school together; but while I devolved into an SF writer, Debbie jumped onto the tenure track and rode it to the University of Toronto, where she’s been doing odd things with fish for a couple of decades now. One thing I always take away from my time with her is a harsh reminder of how far past my best-before date I am, as any kind of biologist (she pointed out a couple of pretty significant flaws in that genetic-recoding paper I was salivating over a while back, for example).

So Friday. Over wine and cheese and salmon (and a horde of cats who’d once again hit the jackpot), the subject turned to this nifty little piece of research in which an anatomically-female rat was reprogrammed into behaving like a male, thanks to the injection of a certain hormone. (This is unlikely to come as welcome news to those on the whole defense-of-traditional-binary-marriage side of things, but that’s reality’s well-known leftist bias for you.) It was Debbie, typically, who saw the immediate potential for kids’ movies.

“There’s this question I put on my exams,” she said. “I ask my students what would have really happened in Finding Nemo, after Nemo’s mom got eaten by the barracuda.”

Let me just take a moment here to admit how much I loved Finding Nemo. I think I saw it at least three times in the theater— years before I even had step-pones as an excuse— once with an honest-to-God rocket scientist who also loved it. (I belted out “The Zones of the Sea” in the shower for weeks afterward.) Plus I used to be an actual marine biologist. And yet it wasn’t until Debbie brought up her question that the obvious answer hit me in the nose:

Nemo’s dad would’ve turned female.

That’s what clownfish do, after all. (Also wrasses. Also a bunch of others I’ve forgotten.) When the dominant female disappears from the scene, the next male in line switches sexes and fills the vacancy, becoming a fully reproductive female in her own right. So Marlin would’ve become Marlene— and while that might mean no more than a couple of bonus points to some UT undergrad (you can see why Debbie has a fistful of teaching awards), the ramifications reach all the way down to Hollywood.

We live in an age of reboots and sequels, you see. And In A World where even the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers get a dark and gritty (albeit unauthorized) update, what possible excuse could there be for not slipping a little real-world biology into a Nemo reboot? You wouldn’t even have to change the story significantly (although you’d need a new voice actor for Marlene— I nominate Amy Poehler). And talk about a positive sympathetic role model for transgender kids! Aren’t we long overdue for one of those? (Can’t you just imagine the drives home after Sunday school? “But Dad, if Marlin can change…”)

You listening, Disney?

RT @philipjcowley: "Labour will replace the House of Lords with a Senate of the Nations and Regions" (p.69). Good luck with that one…

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) April 13, 2015

@PolProfSteve @MSmithsonPB But having been burnt on it last time, there is no way a mere aspiration will do this time for the LDs.

— Philip Cowley (@philipjcowley) April 13, 2015

You may remember how a couple of weeks ago I told you the story of Sajid and his sad addiction to knee-jerking. Well, I’ve found out some more about this story, and it’s not pretty.

One of the precursors to knee-jerking is often a substance that addicts know as ‘research’. However, it’s important to stress that this ‘research’ often bears little resemblance to what you or I might term as research. It’s often of poor quality, comes from unknown sources and has often been cut with self-selecting samples and unweighted data. We’re all aware that even the highest quality research can be misused, so imagine what this poor-quality ‘research’ might be like in the hands of a committed knee-jerker.

You don’t need to imagine, as it turns out that Sajid’s latest knee-jerk was based on some very poor-quality ‘research’. It’s now “a remarkably effective operation” able to turn ‘research’ into a full knee-jerk policy within the space of a morning, and thanks to the internet, that policy can be distributed to hundreds of hungry distributors (often called ‘journalists’ in the knee-jerk trade) to force onto an unsuspecting public, telling them that it’s proper and reliable policy but not of its shady origins.

‘Research’ is clearly a vital precursor to knee-jerking, and perhaps by stemming the flow of it we might be able to begin to win the battle against the knee-jerk policy that’s flooding the country right now. Perhaps one way to start would be to educate politicians and other knee-jerkers about how to recognise the signs of poor quality ‘research’ and to ask questions of their suppliers before using it. Maybe then our streets won’t be flooded with poor-quality policies.

Back in 2010, the Tories made a big play of how they would transform the country through localism and the Big Society. Localism would free communities from the dead hand of Whitehall controlling everything, while the Big Society would encourage a new era of civic involvement, getting people involved in community organisations, allowing them to really make a difference.

If the first leaks from their 2015 manifesto are anything to go by, both those ideas have been thrown into the bin, which has then been set on fire and the ashes scattered to the four winds to prevent any prospect of them ever coming back together again. Community-based organisations are to be ripped apart by Government policy, while councils will have to follow diktats from the centre in order to raise the money to fund this dismemberment.

Housing associations are private non-profit organisations, generally run by members of the community they’re based in and providing a valuable service in providing social housing. The proposed Tory policy will declare them to be nothing more than another arm of the state, in order to compel them to sell off their housing at below the market rate. Yes, because we’re not suffering enough problems in the housing market thanks to forcing councils to sell their stock off cheaply, they’ll go on to compound the error by doing the same to housing associations. Remember, these aren’t government-owned organisations, and yet the Tories – the usual champions of property rights – seem to see no problem in riding roughshod over someone else’s in pursuit of their policy.

(Of course, this policy won’t apply to other private landlords, and tenants in the private rented sector won’t get any right to buy their homes no matter how long they’ve lived there. Perhaps if Housing Associations were allowed to donate to the Tories, they’d have been exempted from this policy too?)

Even the most barking policy to sell assets off at below market price has a cost, and in order to fund this, they’ve decided to show how much they’ve decided localism was a bad idea by committing to a true policy of anti-localism. Councils are part of the government of the country, but in this era of devolution and localism, one would have thought they would be left alone to run their own affairs. Unfortunately, bad policy trumps principle and so to find the money to pay for housing associations, councils will be told to sell off their most expensive houses. They’ll be able to keep some of the proceeds to build new houses, but only one for each house that has been sold off. The remainder of the money raised by these sales – of assets that were built by local councils for their residents, remember – will be handed over to central government to pay for the costs of housing associations being told to sell their properties off cheaply. Yes, it’s a perfect circle of robbing Peter to pay for the tools that are needed to rob Paul. They’re selling off everything that’s not nailed down in order to pay for the removal of the nails to let them sell what’s left.

As Tom King states, it’s the worst policy of the General Election yet, but we’ve still got the rest of the Tory manifesto to see, and let’s not underestimate how bad the rest of it might be.

#868, 5th August 2000

When Craig David’s manager heard the chorus of “7 Days” for the first time, he knew at once the 17 year old would be a star. The song made him. It also doomed him. “7 Days” is the most immediate single of the year, and also the easiest to parody. A committed, self-serious lad, David chafed at the attention of comedians, particularly Bo Selecta!’s Leigh Francis, whose consistent, surreal use of the singer was blamed by David for sabotaging his career. But “7 Days” is so ridiculous – and so catchy – that it attracted piss-takers like piranha to steak. That doesn’t make David’s hurt and regret less real, or void his case – the relationship between pop music and the rest of British culture, comedy included, was on the turn. But it doesn’t make “7 Days” less funny.

Perhaps I’m taking too much for granted, here. Surely some people listen to “7 Days” and hear the soulful, seductive record Craig David intended it to be. I find that easy to believe, but also hard to imagine, so I’ll try and unpick why it doesn’t work as that for me, even though it feels like explaining a joke. The central problem is that the chorus – and the title – sets itself up as a classic days-of-the-week riff, and then blows it, folding the last few days into “making love”. That’s poetically unsatisfying, and also turns “chilled on Sunday” into a punchline. Worse, the rapid cadence of “and on Thursday, Friday and Saturday” concertinas the making love section, making it seem rushed. The image that comes to mind isn’t four days spent in the sensuous reverie implied by the delicate arrangement and David’s cooing voice, but four days of rapid, trousers-round-the-ankles banging. Accurate enough, no doubt – we’re talking about an 18 year old here – but sophisticated? Not really.

Things get worse when you listen to the verses (which, to be fair, I suspect almost nobody did). On “Fill Me In”, David’s eye for the specific turned the risky fumblings of teenage lust into something evocative and dramatic. On “7 Days”, the detail is weirdly misapplied. The woman Craig falls for is completely anonymous – “a beautiful honey with a beautiful body” – yet it’s important to note that they met at “quarter past three” and she gave him a “six digit number”. The clever touch of having the rest of the verse framed as David bragging to his friends sets up the tantalising idea that the narrator could just be making all this stuff up – but the song doesn’t follow up, instead detailing the date and seduction at length, but never in detail. In the end the mates’ incredulous question – “Was it for real?” is the most credible moment. The whole thing sounds like what it is – a wannabe Casanova’s juvenilia, a seduction narrative written by a barely experienced kid.

There’s no harm in that – teenage boys brag, and dream of having things to brag about. In its way, “7 Days” is as authentic as “Fill Me In”, except it’s a product of awkwardness, not a song about it. And whether intentionally or not, “7 Days” is as funny as it is immediate and prettily executed. Heard a song on Monday, sang it in the pub on Tuesday, made our own one up by Wednesday… and so on. But where do you go after it? Once “7 Days” is loose in the world, can Craig David be taken seriously? Or as seriously as he wants to be, at any rate.

Leigh Francis thought not, and saw in Craig David’s earnest but callow self-presentation the perfect star to serve as the bizarre centre of his show. Compared to some celebrities, David got off lightly from Bo Selecta! – he was ubiquitous, but Francis doesn’t seem as hostile to him as he was to people like Mel B or Jordan. Francis has dismissed David’s claims of career-wrecking, pointing out that the singer’s star was on the wane before Bo Selecta! launched. And the sheaf of top ten hits David did score across the rest of the 00s show a man with a very limited range – the delicate soul-pop of his first two solo hits seems the beginning and end of his abilities, and as the UK garage element ebbed out of the music, most of the interest went with it. Would he have shown more ambition without the mockery? It’s impossible to say.

Ultimately, the signficance of Bo Selecta! isn’t really in its effect on any individual career. It was the attitude to pop music and culture that was new. The rise of alternative comedy intertwined with the rise of post-punk and indie music. In the 80s, alternative comedians found allies in some areas of pop – Madness and Dexy’s showed up on the Young Ones – and largely ignored the rest. Spitting Image touched on the most obvious targets but mostly had loftier ambitions. In the 90s, comedians and Britpoppers shared a constituency, and often a stage – Vic Reeves and the Wonder Stuff, Keith Allen and Blur, Baddiel and Skinner and the Lightning Seeds. They mounted a cultural takeover together – and then, suddenly, the pop end of the deal collapsed. Leigh Francis’ generation of comedians found themselves in a pop landscape where the music they felt most affinity for had fallen from grace, replaced with something that seemed the most obvious of targets. “I’m sick of you little girl and boy groups, all you do is annoy me…”

And so the minutiae, and the personalities, of pop culture found themselves in the crosshairs of comedy in a way they hadn’t been in twenty years, if ever. Bo Selecta!, and other shows stuffed with cultural detail and references, work on familiarity with, as well as contempt for, pop culture – a student viewer knew who newly famous pop stars like Craig David were, in a way that the adult viewer of a 60s or 70s impressionist might not have done. And the interesting thing is that this easy superiority became a default tone of British music coverage itself: Miquita Oliver and Simon Amstell’s enjoyably world-weary approach as presenters on Channel 4’s Popworld was immensely influential, giving broadcast media a snide wit the UK music press had always employed.

Mockery was an inevitable development given a pop world where access to the truly global megastars was so tightly controlled, and local musicians were hardly likely to retain much mystique when they increasingly came from the same university or drama school backgrounds as presenters. Sometimes you got the feeling those presenters and comedians – and later, the bloggers and broadsheet columnists – loved pop, in all its foolishness. Sometimes you got the feeling they despised it, or felt it had lost some invisible legitimacy after Britpop failed. Whichever it was made little difference to the outcome – snark reigned.

Was that a bad thing? It depended entirely on the targets. Reverence would have been the wrong reaction to the world of “7 Days” and Five + Queen. But the new atmosphere would suit some stars more than others, and Craig David – a serious young man who sung a silly song – choked in it.

Last year I did a talk in London on auditory hallucinations, The Beach Boys and the psychology and neuroscience of hallucinated voices, and I’ve just discovered the audio is available online.

It was part of the Pint of Science festival where they got scientists to talk about their area of research in the pub, which is exactly what I did.

The audio is hosted on SoundCloud which gives you an online stream but there’s no mp3 download facility. However, if you type the page URL into the AnythingToMP3 service it’ll present you with you an mp3 to download.

It was a fun talk, so do enjoy listening.

UPDATE: The nice folks at Pint of Science have made the mp3 downloadable directly from the SoundCloud page so no second website trickery needed.

Link to audio of Vaughan’s talk on hallucinated voices.

Looks like I'm not going to have time today to post more than this. Hey, don't look at me like that. I posted plenty of content last week.

A couple of folks online are disputing my claim that Stan Freberg had the longest career of anyone who ever did cartoon voices. They say June Foray has been doing it longer. That would be true if you believe the earliest credits for June that are listed in the Internet Movie Database but I do not and at least when I co-authored her autobiography, June didn't either. Both Stan and June did their last cartoon voice work last year — in 2014. Stan, we know, did his first in 1945 for cartoons that were released in 1946.

There is some dispute over what June's first cartoon was. Her first inarguable credit was in Cinderella, which was released in 1950. I don't know when she recorded her part but it probably wasn't before 1948. There are three or four earlier cartoons in which people think they've heard her but I don't think any of them are her. To get a second opinion, I played some of them for her and she said, "That's not me."

Of course, June is still with us so it's not impossible she could do further work that would best Freberg's record. If she doesn't, it might be a long time before anyone else could. I can't think of a single other person currently doing cartoon voices who did them in the forties or fifties. There are a few from the mid-sixties. Perhaps around the year 2036, one of them will match Stan's longevity.

I'll be back tomorrow.

We've been having a lot of police chases in Los Angeles lately. The other day, a man who was reportedly armed with a gun carjacked a taxicab and led police on a two-hour pursuit until large, armored SWAT trucks came in, spun the cab out and then surrounded him. Along the way, crowds gathered on sidewalks to cheer him on and a few citizens even ran up and high-fived the guy during the low-speed portions of the chase.

We'll probably never find out what, if anything, was on the fellow's mind. Of all the vehicles out there to carjack, why would you pick a lime green taxicab? Even if you didn't know that most cabs today are equipped with the kind of G.P.S. that makes them easily trackable, why would you want a car you couldn't sell and which was easily identifiable? Also, this particular cab was a Prius. That's a good auto for driving to the Whole Foods Market but it's not the ideal vehicle for trying to outrun police cars.

I suppose the answer is that nothing rational was on his mind. Fleeing from the cops is not a particularly rational act. Your chances of getting away are darn close to zero. Your chances of having a collision that will kill or injure you are considerably better.

We always hear the reporters covering these chases saying, "He probably figures he has nothing to lose." But of course, he has his life to lose. And once these guys are caught and taken into custody, we rarely hear much about who they are and why they might have done it. How many of them really were "three strikes" criminals who figured that once caught, they were going to the slammer for the rest of their lives? How many really had "nothing to lose" by running?

I wonder about that and I wonder about two other things. They can't all be irrational or stoned. How many of them are running just because they know that if they can evade the cops for ten or fifteen minutes, helicopters will magically appear above? How many like the idea that they'll be on most of the TV channels in the city for a few glorious minutes or even an hour or two?

And in a related wondering: How many think these days, "Well, I'm going to prison no matter what I do. I stand a better chance of not being shot if I'm on live TV when the cops take me in"?

The opposition has complained that the government has upped its advertising budget in the run up to the general election.

This is of course an egregious use of taxpayers money with the suspicion that it is being done to promote the agenda of the government for electoral advantage and it should definitely not be happening.

Oh, did I mention this story is from January 2010 when Labour were in government and the Tories were in opposition? Back then Labour claimed doing this was vital to "promote important campaigns".

There is a similar story in the news today in the run up to the 2015 general election but now Labour are in opposition the fact that the government has increased its advertising spending is apparently "an abuse of official resources and ministers must urgently clarify how this was agreed". This is according to Angela Eagle, now shadow leader of the Commons who back in January 2010 was a Labour government minister and strangely silent on this issue at that time....

When I saw the domination of this year's Hugo finalists by a slate of works nominated by a misogynist racist and his colluders, my immediate reaction was that I should vote "No Award" ahead of every one of their nominations, no questions asked or quarter given. (I was not alone.)

There has been some debate about this in the last week. Notably, George R.R. Martin, John Scalzi and Mary Robinette Kowal all advocate assessing the Hugo finalists on merit, ie giving the slate nominations an equal chance. On the other hand, Phil Sandifer and Adam Roberts advocate voting No Award in every category, on the grounds that all of this year's Hugos are irretrievably tainted. I certainly don't agree with the latter position; there are no slate nominees in the Best Fan Artist category, and I can certainly choose between the five finalists there with a clear conscience

I was beginning to lean a bit towards making some allowance for those who were unwittingly included on the slate, but do not share its creator's racist and misogynist agenda, such as Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Annie Bellet and Edmund Schubert. Why should they be penalised because of my feelings about the decisions made by others?

But I'm back at my original position. The fact is that most of the slate nominees are on the ballot, not because people enjoyed and appreciated their work and decided to reward them with a Hugo nomination, but because the slate told its supporters to vote that way and they did so, sight unseen. All of the slate nominations are therefore unacceptable, a point made well by Matt Foster, whose wife Eugie, might well have had a chance at a nomination if the slate had not intervened. She will never have another chance to win a Hugo, because she died last September. She, and many other potential finalists, have lost out through the actions of the slate supporters, and by considering the slate nominees at all we compound the damage to them and to us. (Matt's posts in general are a thoughtful and sad response to the situation.)

I agree that some slate nominees are less undeserving than others. Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine does great work, and it's a shame that they have been previously overlooked. I hope that will be put right in future years. But the fact is that at least 94 people nominated ASIM this year, whereas in 2013 and 2014 it did not even get into double figures. Along with one of its former editors, whose post on Facebook crystallised these thoughts for me, I simply do not believe that another 84-plus voters suddenly started browsing the ASIM website in the last twelve months, and then reached the point of enthusiasm where they nominated it in good faith alongside John C. Wright's fiction and Vox Day's editorial skills. In fact, I bet that 90% of those who nominated it have never even looked at it, but simply accepted the instructions of the slate.

The list of Hugo finalists has been rigged, and rigged to fit the agenda of a misogynist racist who clearly states that he wants to destroy the Hugos and whose slate designed for that purpose got 61 of its 67 candidates onto the list. (Three of those 61 declined nomination, and one of them has explained why at length.) These nominations were made out of spite, not out of love for the genre, let alone for the Hugos. I feel sorry for those unwittingly caught in the scheme, but there is only one way for me to cast my vote, and that is to rank "No Award" above all the slate candidates. Deirdre Saorse Moen has helpfully listed the remaining finalists.

Two more thoughts. First, I see (second-hand) reports of abusive messages and threats being sent directly to the slate organisers. This is wrong, stupid, dangerous, and a waste of energy. The way to win this is to engage the uncommitted and confused middle ground, not to yell at those who already disagree with you and are entrenched in their positions, let alone to threaten them. It's a very lazy option, sending someone a rude message and then relaxing in the righteous and erroneous glow of having achieved something thereby. Two wrongs don't make a right. Having said that, I note the complaints by the henchmen of the chief slate organiser that they are being unfairly described as racists, when one is married to an African-American and the other is Hispanic. Well, there are words for people in either of those situations who collude with racists on political projects; and one of the politest of those words is "fool". If you choose to ally with a notorious bigot, I am not obliged to research your family circumstances before passing comment.

Second, while I'm unexcited about most of the changes to procedure that have been recommended (though Mike Scott has a good thought), because they will take a couple of years to implement, there is other action that can be taken immediately. Mary Robinette Kowal proposes to donate supporting (ie Hugo-voting) memberships of Sasquan to anyone who asks, unconditionally. As noted above, I think Kowal is wrong on how we individual voters should approach the ballot, but she is dead right that the best future path is a more open and inclusive voting process, and kudos to her for proposing a practical way of making that happen.

In his book, “Language: the Cultural Tool” Daniel Everett writes,

We can understand information [as] … all the things there are to talk about. It is perhaps infinite. But culture and circumstance will severely restrict what might be said in a particular exchange between two people … human cultures narrow the things there are to talk about and keep the flow of information manageable.

Is this what we autistic people don’t see, or don’t need? This restriction on conversation topics? It’s what costs us friendships (albeit with the wrong kinds of people – those who never really liked us in the first place), and stops us making social connections; because we talk “too much”, and/or about the “wrong” things. We obviously don’t have this cultural “information filter”. But is that really such a bad thing?

I have my own interests, those “hobbies” psychologists so patronisingly like to call “special interests”, but I’m generally interested in a much wider range of topics than other people, and can be interested in almost anything… but only as long as it contains detail. For example, I’m quite happy talking about the weather, but if the conversation doesn’t quickly move on from nice-for-the-time-of-year-isn’t-it to dew points and adiabatic lapse-rates (or whatever), I’ll get bored. Skirting about on the surface of a topic is so dull! I could listen all day to a meteorologist, or a rare-breeds sheep farmer, or an art historian – anyone passionate about their subject, and willing to talk about it – to discuss the detail… to provide that “restricted information”. But find someone like this at a party – the chap who “only talks about honey badgers” – and he’s called THE BORE? Not fair! I’d go to more parties if only they were full of people willing to talk dirty detail with me.

I love other people’s passion in their subjects; but although asking newly-met people what they do for a living is a socially acceptable question (resulting in a socially acceptable response), asking them what their job actually entails, on a day-to-day basis, elicits raised eyebrows and awkward foot-shifting. Why is that? People are said to be at their happiest when talking about themselves, but asking them about what they actually do is considered too personal – that is, unless you’ve known them for a while (a “while” being hours, days, or weeks – and somehow you’re supposed to know which). Ask someone about the details of their job, and they blush and bluster, and say, “it’s all a bit boring really.” But it rarely is.

In some ways, autistic people are more socially adept: we don’t spend our lives as slaves to social etiquette, trawling through the standard (acceptable) “levels” of conversation; instead we get down to detail – the place where people make connections and build real friendships.

©2015 Life on the Spectrum

#867, 29th July 2000

2014 saw Queen reach an unfortunate milestone – they’ve now been going for longer without Freddie Mercury than with him. It’s been an odd 23 years. John Deacon bowed out with some dignity in 1997, but Brian May and Roger Taylor remain remorselessly active. Sometimes their stewardship has been a great public success – pioneering the jukebox musical, for instance – and sometimes it’s felt more like the most dogged but pointless of May’s many hobbies. This single, their only No.1 since the initial post-Freddie tribute era, surely falls into the former category. But hold on – the official Queen website has no mention of it. Nor does the band’s quite thorough Wikipedia history. What’s up?

A listen to “We Will Rock You” dispels any mystery. This is very much the sort of single you hope slips discreetly out of your discography. You could say it’s the band’s – and our – bad luck that it exists in the first place, since the record seems to rest on several terrible misconceptions, any of which should have been enough for one of Queen’s advisors to veto Five from doing it. The idea, for instance, that “We Will Rock You” would carry more weight with its empty spaces filled by rapping. The idea that J from Five was the MC to do this job. And the idea that his band should drop their endearing goofball act and talk tough, matching the record’s aggression blow for blow.

Being charitable, you can see a point here. The kind of old school hip-hop flow J adopts is a sort-of cousin to the boot-boy chanting of “We Will Rock You”’s verses. And some of the rap he evokes rests on similarly primal beats – the Disco Four even had a song called “Stomp, Stomp, Clap” and plenty of hip-hop has sampled or evoked the song. But let’s not be too generous: this record is a shambles, and the best explanation for J’s style isn’t a deliberate retro move but a man whose idea of rapping and its content is showing off to mates in a Year 6 lunch break. His enthusiasm – often the saving grace of Five’s clumsy, likeable pop – turns deluded here as he and his group adopt a ludicrous swagger. “Watch your back / We got Queen on this track!”

To which the only response – rubbernecking aside – is “why?”. “We Will Rock You” is an odd fish even within Queen’s varied and wayward catalogue. The track’s mass adoption by professional sport has completely eaten its context, leaving something that’s less a song than a rite, a kind of off-the-peg haka. Covering it catapults Five into a world of sweat and testosterone they’re too callow for. The gurning, desperate face of Ritchie Nevile on the sleeve is a summary of the whole foolish endeavour (and this review).

It’s tempting to look beyond the band, and identify the dread hand of Cowell in all this: in the X-Factor world,. “We Will Rock You” is no better quality, but a rather better fit. It’s the kind of farrago that no-hopers in ‘the groups’ might trot out for ‘Queen Week’ before the public tires of them. The natural fate of this is three minutes of hooting, pointing and tweeting on a Saturday night. In that sense alone, “We Will Rock You” is a single ahead of its time.

It’s something I noticed first reading (of course) Lawrence Miles, and it was odd: the idea that Doctor Who, the show I was watching on the TV in 2008 or whenever it was I first encountered Miles, was in some way fundamentally different from the thing that I consumed in paperbacks and VHS tapes borrowed from the library. It seemed seemed very odd to me. It’s called Doctor Who! It’s a television programme about a Time Lord called the Doctor who travels in a blue box called the TARDIS with a series of pals and has cool adventures. Moreover, it’s in-continuity – how could it be any different?

(Similarly, reading Andrew Rilstone¹ here (which is what made me think of this) talking about how profoundly different Star Wars the film and Star Wars the extended universe are: it just would not have occurred to me as a Star Wars-loving kid. It’s Star Wars, it’s all one thing! It’s got the logo on and everything! Look, in the back of this novel that’s the conclusion to a years-long series about extragalactic invasion they had round-robin discussion between all the authors where they talk about having a meeting George Lucas and his giving the go-ahead!)

I was never nearly as interested in the behind-the-scenes aspect of the show (never watched much Confidential, though that was largely down to our only having the terrestrial channels at the time), so I guess it probably didn’t really start affecting my thinking until I read Miles’ Last Interview Ever Ever Ever which I think might now be lost to the internet winds². The key thing about that was his talking about how Doctor Who writers had arguments about how things should go, and, indeed, personal drama and disagreement between some of them.

Arguments? Drama? Disagreement?

The thing is, especially as a younger person, I didn’t really care about who was making the things I liked (I suspect this is an attitude more common in people who aren’t in the habit of e.g. writing thousand-word screeds about the latest episode of Doctor Who, and that in being peculiar among the peculiar I am, in fact, being normal). Sure, I knew their names, but I wasn’t really that interested in how the Hinchcliffe era differed from the Nathan-Turner era in theme and tone or whatever. I viewed the things I watched and read and listened to as undifferentiated masses, monoliths that sprang into being through some distant, unseen creative effort, with no thought for the realities of production or any potential compromises that had to be made. I didn’t, and didn’t really want to, think about the fact that there might have been people within the production team who disagreed about the direction of the show.

This isn’t a death of the author thing or what-have-you, there was no sound rational basis – I just didn’t really want to know whether this or that thing was changed for budget reasons. I wanted my stories to be pure, unalloyed by the grubbiness of practical considerations. I suppose, though this is probably misusing the terminology slightly, I was a Watsonian trying not to think about Doylism at all. I guess there’s probably some point about how I’ve been conditioned not to see these things as works but as brands, one big ongoing story with (quality considerations aside) interchangeable creative teams doing A Run until they pass out and the next round of poor souls are strapped into the machine (you know, like they do with comics). That mention of the Star Wars logo earlier wasn’t flip, either – I distinctly recall being concerned about the canonicity and official-ness of things. Were they sanctioned by the Correct and Proper Authority? This is probably why I never got into fanfiction.

The idea that things that share names are sometimes profoundly different types of things is a mindset that I still haven’t completely internalised. I acknowledge that it’s valid and as far as it goes, probably “correct”, but it’s still not a natural mode of thinking for me.

When I went to Facebook this morning, I found these two images a few inches from each other on my screen…

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

Yesterday, it was feeling like this election campaign was going to be a long haul of staged photo opportunities and announcements of policies that we’d already heard dozens of times before. As John Lanchester discusses here, thanks to knowing when the election would be for years everything was feeling very flatlined, with some quite ridiculous attention being paid to polls fluctuating within the margin of error. Four more weeks of that without even a full-scale debate to distract us on the way was starting to feel like a bit much.

Then last night things got interested. Labour launched a policy that hadn’t been endlessly trailed, discussed, accepted and processed for most of the past five years and for a brief time, no one quite knew how to deal with it. It was a moment of genuine interest in an election campaign that has been sorely lacking in them, and has continued to be throughout the day.

Proposing to get rid of non-dom status is both a good policy idea (it makes the tax system fairer and may well raise more money) and a good campaign issue, especially to launch as a surprise. If other parties support it, then Labour get to say they’re setting the agenda, and if they reject it, then they have to put themselves on the side of the super-rich who don’t have the numbers to shift many polls.

Or you can try what we saw today which is to carp about the details, take comments out of context and not realise that you’re doing a very good job in helping them keep the issue in the headlines, usually combined with an explanation of just what non-dom status is, which doesn’t usually help the cause of keeping it. The most interesting thing for me was the footage of Ed Balls talking about the issue in January being brought out as though that was some trump card that destroyed the policy when it could just as well be seen as ‘politician changes his mind in the light of new evidence’, which I thought was something we wanted to see more of? The interesting comparison here is with recent Tory tax announcements in which they’ve taken to proclaiming the originally Lib Dem policy of raising the tax allowance as their own, but no one in the media regularly challenges Cameron about he used to say we couldn’t afford it.

Interestingly, removing non-dom status is another tax policy with a Lib Dem pedigree, as Vince Cable has talked about it for years. Naturally, this was seized on by Nick Clegg who pointed out that both the big parties were borrowing Lib Dem tax policy, which showed how essential the party’s ideas…sorry, I was in a parallel world for a moment there. Instead, he waffled a bit about being in the middle and helped reinforce the Tory message by claiming ‘the wheels had come off’ Labour’s policy.

Still, things are now interesting, and perhaps this isn’t going to be the sole event of interest in the elction. Perhaps Labour have other new policy ideas up their sleeves, or might it push the Tories to scribble ideas on fag packets to try and get some momentum back?

Elsewhere, it feels like a brainstorming meeting in the Green Party hit on the idea of ‘boy band’ and then got stuck:

It’s a party election broadcast in the fine tradition of British sketch comedy – someone had one moderately amusing idea and then stretched it out far beyond the point where everyone got the joke. However, it’s been shared much more on social media than any other election broadcast I an remember, has had articles written about it and will probably get a lot more attention than a bunch of people talking earnestly against a natural background while policies flash up on screen would have got. The cynical part of me wonders if that was the plan all along.

And finally, it seems that those of you wanting lots of detailed policy thinking from your candidates should be moving to Weymouth to hope you get a pamphlet (‘leaflet’ seems far too small a word) from Mervyn Stewkesbury, who’ll give you his opinion in great depth. That the front page includes the advice ‘if you want to know more about myself read Appendix 1 Page 9′ gives you some idea of how detailed his ideas are.

Remember that the nominations for the election close tomorrow, so you’ve only got till 4pm to get those papers in to the Returning Officer. If you’re not standing, do spare a thought for all the council staff who’ll be having to check the nominations are valid, and all the various journalists typing in long lists of names for general and local elections so we can all see who’s standing.

One interesting day down, let’s hope there are more to come.

“I'm really very sorry for you all, but it's an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.” -- The Mikado



(*) Nova. I positively like Nova. But it's only doing Ultimate Spider-Man again, in the "official" Marvel Universe which seems now to be distinguishable from the Ultimate universe only by checking Nick Fury's skin colour. The point of the the Ultimate Universe was that it was more realistic and less comic-booky than the Marvel Universe, but in the last decade the Marvel Universe has stopped trying to be comic booky. So Nova is a pretty good run on "what if a young lad got crazy superpowers in an otherwise realistic universe." So is Ms Marvel. So, obviously, was the original 1960s Spider-Man. 







If you are interested in fairy tales, you should totally buy my game.