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Fuck you. ACTUALLY FUCK YOU FOR BEING THIS FUCKING DUMB.

Article, tweets.

Here is a quick test to find out how good your opinions are, using the student fees protest as an example case. If you thought:

“The protest was a bad idea, students should just suck it up and pay. It’s a reasonable price for your improved job prospects.”

Sorry, you don’t score any points this time. Not only does your opinion suck, but I’d bet you are a really indignant person who uses the fact that you work and pay taxes to complain about everything and I can’t shake the intuitive feeling that you probably have a weirdly-shaped head so you are going to have to look elsewhere for now.

“It’s about time someone stood up to the Government’s evil plans but it’s a shame the day was ruined by a handful of people smashing up Tory HQ.”

Uh oh, you said the magic word, ‘ruined’, and now you too lost all your points. You strike me as pretty boring and way too idealistic and we all know that people with ideals are always trying to ruin your day with them. Zero points.

“Disregard protest, acquire riot!”

Correct! Whether through apathy or ignorance you’ve arrived at the correct stance that the Government are going to do whatever they want and the worse things are now, the slimmer the chance they’ll get re-elected when their term is over. You might still be hanging on to the tiny thread of hope that comes with the alternative vote referendum that the Lib Dems might not completely let down everyone who voted for them (and hopefully Miliband will step up and do something at this point), or you might not give a single fuck. But at the same time, it doesn’t take a genius to realise that rioting is fucking badass and those guys who smashed up 30 Millbank and lit fires outside were pretty awesome, turning an otherwise shitty and forgettable event into something that brings the angry right-wing kids out from under their rocks to decry what they feel is the lefties’ false sense of entitlement to a publicly-funded (or at least heavily supported) higher education and also the boring lefties themselves have popped their heads up to loudly denounce any connection with the people doing all the fun rioting and to promise that all the actual students there were well-behaved and peaceful because everyone in Whitehall will probably think “oh, since it wasn’t any of the students fucking up that building I’d guess we’d better listen to them and do what they want, right?” and everyone will live happily ever after.

I love overhearing people because I can silently and smugly judge the balls out of them for the awkward shit they say to each other. On the way into university this morning some dude behind me was talking to some girl about his course. Complaining about it, I think. Turns out that after taking a course in politics, he didn’t really like politics. Except for, in his words, “development”, which, to people on undergraduate degrees in the University of Warwick’s Politics department, presumably means something more specific than the common definition of the word. Ultimately, he told her, there wasn’t much to do with development in his current year, just a module called “Development and Gender”.

and that’s less about development and more about gender and I don’t want to sit through a bunch of feminists’ opinions. I’m not anti-feminist but… I just can’t be bothered with all that

By this point I’d had him pegged as more-or-less a tosser and I missed a couple of lines in the conversation that I couldn’t hear over the sound of my involuntary but very powerful eye-rolling. Upon returning to the conversation I caught a line from the girl including the phrase “thorny caress”. The guy jumped on it for some reason with this:

A thorny caress? That’s a very poetic description. A thorny caress like what your grandma gives you.

*AWKWARD SILENCE*

Ha, yeah, sometimes I take things too far!

Sure you do, pal. I had to interject here and I turned around and laughed in his face. “Too far?” I asked him. “What do you mean by that? You want to hear some real inappropriate comments?” They looked pretty perplexed that I’d interrupted them so I carried on. “More like the thorny caress of the rough pubic area of one of your mum’s old friends from school that she used to keep in touch with against your six-year-old cheek as he rakes his sweaty, semi-erect penis across your lips from base to tip, even though he’s meant to be baby-sitting you. All the while, he’s clutching your head between his grimy hands and leering salaciously as he thumbs the tears out of the corners of your eyes, telling you not to say anything to your parents or he’ll have to hurt them and your then three-year-old sister who was curled up naked in the foetal position on his kitchen floor, shuddering and bleeding from his turn molesting her. The thorny caress that you wake up startled to the flashbacks of, drenched in cold sweat and alone in your bed.” Pay attention, guys, because if you want to impress a girl you’ve really got to show them how much better you are than other dudes, especially at this kind of thing.

Well, we’d stopped walking by now and I wasn’t about to stand there while they processed my gloriously-painted scene so I turned away and kept walking, heading to lectures.

I think the moral of the story is: don’t be a dick about gender equality. Maybe?

There are probably millions of posts outlining who you should vote for and why, and I didn’t really want to add this to the slew of unread opinions on the internet but I think I have perfected the criteria for picking a political party to vote for.

If you guys have been paying attention on Twitter or whatever then you’ll have a reasonable idea of which way I intend to vote on Thursday. I derive my ultimate choice of political party from my personal decision to hold the unofficial AHS motto as a primary life value. Above all else, it suggests, “dinnae be a cock.”

That’s basically all the election advice you need. Don’t be a cock, just fucking vote for some good guys. A party beginning with the letter L is a good place to start. Even if Cameron is as progressive as he claims his party is now, that doesn’t hold true, I’m sure, for most Tory PPCs. They’re still consumed with this resentment towards helping people they perceive as undeserving. Their “let’s cut benefits” poster is terrifying. I guess their sense of entitlement to hold on to a little bit more money is greater than the feeling of compassion for those who do not abuse the welfare system and genuinely need the money to support themselves or even just to keep themselves alive.

Labour party has fucked up a couple of times just lately but how much really depends on how bad you felt about the war in Iraq. Regardless, this is a) the future, after that mistake has already been made and b) Gordon Brown, who I don’t think really cares about killing Iraqis because all he can talk about is how desperate he is not to let David Cameron give the economy a right dicking (in a bad way). Fair enough, he was Shadow Chancellor for five years and Actual Chancellor for ten after that; he knows what he’s good at.

The Liberal Democrats, well, I had decided to vote for them ages ago (more than a year ago, even) when I heard a radio interview about their views on education. I can’t remember what exactly was said but since it struck a chord, I took some time to read up on them. And now that it looks like they’re going to do better than they have in a long time in this election, I’m beginning to get my hopes up that they’ll be able to push through some benign, helpful policies as well as score some electoral reform before the next election so we can fix the pathetic excuse for a voting system we’ve currently got.

As for securing the economic recovery, well, I don’t think it’d be too much to ask of Brown, Darling, Cable and Clegg to get together one weekend, get in a stack of Domino’s pizzas and some Red Bull multipacks and hammer out a reasonable and sensible plan for all the cuts that will have to come into effect, as well as plan when they’re going to happen (since Gordon’s oft-repeated claim that cuts right away risks falling into recession again seems both genuine and appropriately cautionary). And a Lib/Lab coalition government would prove to the scaremongers that there doesn’t need to be a majority party to have a workable government. I wonder if Nick Clegg would actually be happier working with Labour in a coalition than the Tories, but can’t say so because a lot of progressives are already torn between the reds and the yellows and Clegg doesn’t want to give them an excuse to vote Labour like Gordon did with his ‘I agree with Nick’ mantra in the first debate.

At first I’d hoped just to put “don’t be a cock” as the only line in this entry but I’ve guilted myself into elaborating. If you are really stuck about who to vote for this election, there’s always this handy guide.

It would probably be a fruitless and very tiresome (if not never-ending) effort to list ALL the things that could do with being shaken up around here. So for the moment I am going to settle for this very brief but presently high-profile list of some shit that needs changing.

1. Decriminalisation of Drugs

   I am sure I don’t need to link you to any of the number of articles online about the decriminalisation of drugs in Portugal. Google it if you want to. This, from the TIME.com article about it:

   “Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research [into its success]. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.”

   In light of the news about the mephedrone deaths that have just happened, the government will inevitably end up adding it to the list of banned substances, like they did with synthetic cannabinoids at the end of last year. That they still have to keep banning the new ways people find to get themselves high suggests that people are going to try it regardless. The only real way we can increase the safety of those who do choose to try it is by regulating the quality of the drugs sold (so that they’re not cut with rat poison) and to fully understand through scientific experimentation the effects so any short- and long-term effects can be made clear through education. Legalising the old-school drugs that everyone knows about will cause users to gravitate towards them. They’ve been more extensively studied than these new ‘legal highs’, so that bodes better for education and treatment of ill-effects and addiction.

2. Libel Law Reform

   In case you haven’t been keeping abreast of one of the most (if not the most) high profile libel lawsuits of late, Simon Singh was recently accused of libel by the British Chiropractic Association. He wrote that any chiropractic practitioner who claimed to be able to cure things like colic in babies was lying, with plenty of demonstrable evidence showing it to be ineffective. As well as in being counter-intuitive to assume that spinal manipulation can solve all your problems. While with any reasonable set of laws, the chiropractors would have no hope of achieving anything from suing someone with stacks of scientific evidence to back up their claims, actually suing someone for libel is no longer about who wins or loses. Because of the incredibly dramatic cost of being sued for libel, often the accused has no choice but to back down and not fight if the accuser is financially well-endowed. With a relatively small cost to a corporation, it can silence any individual or small organisation it wants to with the threat of expensive legal action, and thus hide any of its wrongdoings. The Libel Reform campaign seeks to raise awareness with the ultimate goal of getting this changed. And while it might not benefit the majority of people directly, it is a freedom of speech/censorship matter that needs to be addressed and corrected lest it remain an affront to liberty forever.

3. The Digital Economy Bill

   Sometimes I think Lord Mandelson doesn’t see things the way the rest of us do. His perspective on certain subjects is so skewed, I think maybe he might benefit from some psychiatric evaluation.

   Even if he passes the lunatic test, though, this doesn’t make his Digital Economy Bill any less insane. Mandelson wants to be given unlimited power to amend copyright legislation. He wants rights holders, via the courts, to be able to disconnect people suspected of filesharing without requiring any proof. He is willing to deny internet access to whole households to punish (and that’s punish, not rehabilitate or force repayment from) copyright infringers. There has also been a clause added that says ISPs would be obligated to block access to certain websites that facilitate copyright infringement (which could even include YouTube and possibly Google), but again this seems to only take place at Mandelson’s command.

   I’m also interested in the overlooked modifications to Nominet. It’s a kind of nationalisation of the service for registering domain names in the UK. Might not mean much to most people, but putting more of the internet in the hands of this government unnecessarily (Nominet is functioning fine as an independent body at the moment and can’t possibly benefit from being under government control) is an unmistakably bad thing. Some of us have registered domain names and don’t want ownership of them revoked at the whim of Lord Mandelson.

That’ll be all for now, I think. I will do some more when I get back to my chat logs and assemble all the ideas I came up with when Chris put me on the spot yesterday evening with all the policies I’d have if I formed a political party.

You may have heard of two technology-related stories in the news recently.

The first is that Gordon Brown is going to spend £300 million on his Home Access scheme to bring free laptops and one year’s worth of free broadband subscription to poorer families across the country.

The second is that Lord Mandelson is pushing for tough counter-piracy measures for internet filesharers, including disconnecting entire households from the internet.

What Labour seem to be doing is giving out internet access with one hand while taking it away with the other. Education Secretary Ed Balls has declared that there are educational, economic and social benefits to being on the internet that cannot be ignored. Indeed, the internet is so vital that part of the criteria you need to fill to qualify for the Home Access scheme is that you are a child on free school meals. That means these laptops and free internet access come with a similar priority level as providing food for underprivileged children. If that doesn’t sound like an opinion leaning towards classing internet access as a human right, I don’t know what does.

But Mandy obviously is unconvinced, since it is still his intention to cut off entire households from the internet because of the action of one of the house’s residents – or even the action of a neighbour – even when there’s every likelihood that a disconnection would result in more ‘innocent’ people (non-filesharers) than ‘guilty’ people (filesharers) being denied all those social and educational benefits.

A disconnection from the internet today is more crippling than ever. Apart from the real inconvenience it would cause to people no longer being able to look things up or check their online banking at their leisure, it would also stand in the way of anyone who occasionally works from home (seemingly more and more people nowadays), and it’s tantamount to capital punishment for anyone with lots of social networking contacts they can’t see very often in person.

And so far I haven’t even addressed the real problem. Buying DVDs and music is fine for those able to afford it and who are also ignorant enough to presume that £15 is a fair price for a DVD or CD (it isn’t). But those more technologically inclined will find ways around being tracked if they want to continue filesharing. Downloading will never, ever stop. But handing out free laptops and free broadband to poor children is going to give them the previously unseen option of downloading music or watching TV shows online. What will the Government do when its own broadband users commit copyright infringement? Disconnect them as fast as possible?

The internet is either a vital resource or it isn’t, Labour. Perhaps Brown should make sure everyone in his cabinet agrees which before they start making contradictory comments to the media.

Or just lynch Mandelson and let the crows have his eyes, whichever.

Well, well. It’s been quite an interesting few days for British politics. The British National Party have gained two seats on the European Parliament. It’s a bit upsetting, I suppose, but let’s put a bit of perspective on the horror now that we’ve had our day of screaming “NOOOO THE EVIL BNP!!” and realise that it is just two seats in Britain’s 72, so we’re not going to have any issues of being misrepresented in the European Parliament.

I want to talk to you about an idea I’ve been nursing for a while, a new take on “democracy.” Now, I agree that everyone is inherently equal to begin with, and everyone should have the right to vote. Nobody is disputing that point. I’m not disputing that point. But it sets my bullshit-radar off when I think that everyone’s vote counts for the same amount, no matter how well- or ill-informed it is. Now, don’t close your mind to the idea right away until you’ve read the whole of what I’m suggesting.

On the radio this morning I was listening in to some callers from both the pro- and anti-BNP camps, calls from people who voted and those who didn’t and some of their reasons. Here are some paraphrased exerpts from the show:

I voted BNP as a protest against the MPs’ expenses scandal

I didn’t vote because I didn’t feel I knew enough about the parties to make an informed decision

These were actual thoughts expressed by people phoning in. Now, it’s obvious that neither of these people know enough about the political parties in this country to make informed decisions. The second guy openly admitted that, and he therefore didn’t vote. The first guy, how do I know he doesn’t know enough? Easy, first, he voted BNP as an anti-establishment move, a “rebellion” against the big party names (Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrats) who have been tarred by the expenses scandal. Second, he’s picked the BNP without realising they’re a racist party. We know this because if he did know they were a racist and fascist party, he’d have voted Green or some other less offensive party, unless he is in fact a racist himself, in which case he wouldn’t have phoned in to national radio announcing it in a nation where it’s socially unacceptable to be a racist.

Neither of these people knew enough to make an informed vote. The second guy did what was responsible even if it can’t be condoned by the people who harp on with the same line “don’t complain if you didn’t vote,” etc. and will therefore be openly condemned. The first guy just went ahead and picked a name without fully realising the implications of what he was doing.

Our system doesn’t currently account for the differences between informed and uninformed voting, and I think that’s a massive oversight.

How do we go about correcting this? Well, it wouldn’t be an easy process. It would massively complicate the voting system which would undoubtedly affect voter turnout. But if people really want their say they will suffer the extra effort of the new voting system. What new voting system? My system.

Even the smallest checks at voting time would be a massive help. It could be a case of 1a.) tick the box of the party you’re voting for, 1b.) why? Maybe next to the BNP there could be a couple of options: I am voting for the BNP because I truly believe that the descendants of the ancient Anglo-Saxon and Nordic settlers from Europe truly have the right to be called “indigenous” British people and all others should recognise this and that this country belongs to those people so let’s close the borders to immigrants and secede from the EU or I am voting BNP because DERR EXPENSES LOL or I am voting BNP because I think Nick Griffin’s a really nice guy who’s going to look out for everyone in the country’s best interests, and your vote then gets multiplied by how sensible your answer was.

But this would require some kind of external party to come up with the responses and rate them and it would all be very prone to corruption and being challenged and there would be all sorts of problems with it.

So instead, maybe the ballot should be a booklet printed of the manifestos or perhaps just summarised mission statements made by the parties themselves. The test could just be simple reading comprehension with multiple choice questions. The value of a vote could go up in stages so those who read the page of and fill in every answer to every party score the same grade as those who do that for just, say, 70% (with penalties for wrong or missing answers on questions about the party voted for), and those who only answer questions about one party score the same no matter which party it is (because if you’ve only read up on one party you don’t know enough to have a valuable vote).

I don’t think it’s too much to ask for that people are equally and objectively exposed to all their choices before they are asked to make one. Clever wordplay door-to-door by deceitful BNP representatives can be countered by reading “the BNP stands for the rights of idigenous British” and answering the multiple choice question “whose rights do the BNP stand for?” a) everyone’s; b) people born in Britain’s; c) “indigenous British”; d) nobody’s.

I don’t know, it’s 2am and what started off sounding so clear and well-thought-out in my head has kind of fallen apart on paper because I haven’t been bothered to plan it and research stuff and lay it out properly or proof-read at all but I am tired and hungry so… forget it all. I’m not going to make a successful point so just disregard it all. Instead let’s just make me emperor of the world and I’ll just tell you that you have to follow my specific and unique views (like ID cards are not only ok but actually pretty cool yet copyright law sucks all kinds of hell) “just because.” And bomb North Korea, because even if Kim Jong Il is subject to my imperial global rule, who cares? Nobody cool lives there. Send Josef Fritzl there. That’s someone everyone’s forgotten about. Let’s talk about him for a bit.

Worthless.

Sir Alan Sugar has been made an Enterprise Tsar, not “the” Enterprise Tsar. It’s not an already-established position, but it is already unchangeably decided on by the government now.

For your viewing pleasure: the Enterprise Tsar. The Soviet emblem and the red obviously not implied by the word “Tsar,” but MY COMEDIC PHOTOSHOPPING KNOWS NO LIMITS.

In the Labour reshuffle that is happening this morning, people are very concerned with the position of various Secretaries of things, but nobody seems to be calling anyone out on the appointment of Sir Alan Sugar as the vague “Enterprise Tsar.” It’s a term that’s never been seen before and I can’t yet find a concrete definition for. So, building on the arbitrariness of the appointment and title, I hereby name myself Internet Tsar.

ALL HAIL THE INTERNET TSAR.

I’m fucking sick of Gordon Brown outstaying his welcome. What does he hope to achieve? His ridiculously waning popularity should have been the hint to cut and run ages ago, so what can his intention possibly be? Hold on to office and try and regain some stature? I don’t know. I don’t know anything about politics really, so that’s why I’m naïvely suggesting that we just revolt and spend a few years in anarchy to blow off some steam. Then we’ll all calm down when we’re bored of lawlessness and let ourselves be subdued by the next batch of incompetent leaders. But it will have been a few years of fun at least.