One outcome of all the MySociety work for this election was the survey administered by DemocracyClub volunteers to all candidates. The results by party are graphed here, with standard deviations and error bars. Some immediate conclusions: Surprising egalitarianism. Look at question 1, which asks if the budget deficit should be reduced by taxing the rich.…
Read More a centre-left nation needs what kind of government?The Institute for Public Policy Research has issued a report on the correlates of BNP membership and support (pdf). Fascinatingly, they reckon that there is very little or no correlation between BNP support and key socio-economic indicators like GVA per capita, growth, unemployment, immigration, etc. It’s as if a typical BNP supporter was, well, a…
Read More IPPR: I agree with…Jamie Kenny mentions Thailand’s “black clads”. Who they? Reuters has an excellent article that gets into this question. WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE MEN IN BLACK? Witnesses and grainy video footage revealed armed men with assault rifles and M-79 grenade launchers appeared under cover of darkness on April 10 during a heated standoff between…
Read More they’re protecting us, but we don’t know who they areThis has done the rounds and been roundly done for all the right reasons. There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer. Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded, reciting terrorists their rights, or the legally meandering and confusing rule that some terrorists…
Read More Authoritarianism Does Its ThingAh, the David Cameron poster machine is on line. And it’s gold dust. Somehow, that poster seems almost designed for satire. There are excellent reasons why it works so well; it’s possibly the most stylised example of a political advert I can think of. In a sense, it’s a movie – not at all original,…
Read More Cameron: Cinema: CameraHow could I forget this? The Obscurer‘s coverage of the Undabomber has been marked by one man. Here he is: Peter Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the House intelligence committee, said it was examining Mutallab’s links with the radical Yemeni imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, who has inspired a number of terrorists. Awlaki had contacts with Major…
Read More Profiles in Wanktankery: Alexander Meleagrou-HitchensAaronovitch Watch reflects upon dinner with Denis MacShane. There’s an important point here, and one that was well made as a by-product of Nick Davies’ brilliant reporting on Operation PENTAMETER 2, a giant police sweep looking for prostitutes brought into the UK by force that failed to find even one. It turned out that the…
Read More permanently operating factorsHere’s that that jihadi having a row with an Aussie blogger. Quick recap – she linked to a text of his as an example of Al-Qa’ida thinking, he noticed the referral and the traffic, he replied to deny association with the OBL team but to boast of everything else. Some points on the text. 1)…
Read More the pundit internationaleSpeaking of new Soviet men, The GOP Speaks continues to be a fantastic resource on authoritarian thinking. Short version – chap writes to every county- and state-level Republican chairman in the US and asks them to fill in a questionnaire. Blogs the results as they come in. Here’s number 26. 1) So long as it’s…
Read More the GOP speaks, and so does the unconsciousLibertarianism, by which I mean yer bog standard comments thread North American subtype, is irrational. This struck me in the context of this post of Charlie Whitaker’s, which was of course criticised by the local libertarian in the usual terms. First of all, let’s define terms; the standard set-up of modern right-libertarian arguments is based…
Read More that’s not noise, that’s the sound of freedom – oh, by the way, I voted Libertarian