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There are some things that really annoy me.
Sometime you just have to articulate these online, it seems. Supermarkets: 060419 Is anyone else curiously positive about supermarkets and their impact on farming and animal welfare? I think it is a three-stage process: 1 - Consumer notices animal products are treated terribly or just taste bad at Sainsbury's (substitute Tesco / Waitrose / whatever) (examples: inability to process fish whatsoever, ignorance of the difference between pork, bacon and beef (really!), inability to provide any cooking guidance, ignorance of even what products taste like, etc etc) 2 - Consumer easily finds a local provider that really knows what it's all about. Consumer does now spend more (e.g. on chickens from the UK that are free-range, rather than chickens that are produced abroad to standards that would be illegal in the UK) but is happy that it's worth it. 3 - Consumer looks for more products that can be sourced appropriately, e.g. fruit, cheese, fish, bread, meat, vegetables etc Supermarkets are left to scrap for the really rubbish market - cheap baked beans and Nescafe. And Walker's crisps. Consumers decide that life would be better simply ignoring these products and Tesco's turnover drops to nil. How many like me/you will it take? [Note: I would actually prefer a more direct way to reduce the supermarkets' powers but cannot see it happening except for as above. If you do recognise your supermarket as being crap, please stop using them for such items. There will be a local alternative, it will be a bloke you might see around after work in the local pub and it will be much better quality, both ethically and aesthetically. Do it. We now have really good fish, meat and cheese, and avoid animal products unless we can get good quality ones. I think I am doing more for animal welfare now than I was when I was vegan, as I directly promote and purchase quality product. Try it] Iraq: 060419 I note my earlier comment that the Iraq war may have had positives in respect of telling other countries to buck their ideas up, and that this was positive in some way. This was, er, claptrap with a capital B. Please accept my apologies if you made any life-influencing decisions on this basis; clearly I was bizarrely optimistic and utterly wrong. Smoking bans: 060418 OK so here's what I said to my MP: Dear Mark Field, I note your general opposition to the smoking ban. We have communicated before (ID cards) and I respect (and agree with!) your views on the matters of individual liberties - there are important human rights that need to be upheld. However, smoking is an interesting area from such a perspective - I respect the right of an individual to kill himself with fags, but I believe that he should be discouraged from doing so. It is the position of government (ok, read "elected representatives") to provide some discouragement. I come to this debate as a recent (i.e. in the process of becoming an) ex-smoker. I have also smoked a number of less licit substances in student days; I find it difficult to differentiate in any meaningful way between marijuana and tobacco from a regulatory perspective. While I think that it is right that marijuana is broadly decriminalised, I also think it is right that it is not readily available. I also think that tobacco products should be similarly inaccessible/discouraged. Tobacco products are specifically appropriate for this non-libertarian treatment as they are uniquely addictive and damaging. Their historic accessibility has created an acceptance that is not commensurate with their effect; it is the job of government to correct such an imbalance. Tobacco is as damaging as most class A drugs, and should be treated as such. Every smoker has a little thought inside himself: sooner or later he's going to have to give up smoking. MPs are now in a uniquely influential position - they can help people to do what they know they need to do. Now is the time. I therefore urge you to change your position on the smoking ban. It is the position of government to take difficult and unpopular decisions. I think this is an area where we should park the civil liberty issue and say, "smoking sucks, we should take what steps we can to stop it". I think you would ultimately have very few smokers disagreeing with such a sentiment. This issue has a medium-term certainty: smoking will be looked on with incredulity within 25 years. That people polluted themselves so! Now is the time to start the future in this respect. This Labour government has lost any idealism or long-term view it may ever have had, but it is still leading the way on this matter. Respectfully, it is time for you and your party to recognise that opposition here is absurd - there are many more appropriate targets for party politics; choose a different battleground. Yours sincerely, What it is to have a Tory MP. I find myself trying to change/convince him, but on analysis, I have more in common with him that Labour! It is interesting that looking at They work for you, he is generally against the government (from the left) on key matters. What is New Labour exactly? ID cards: 050918 ID cards, eh? Decided to write to my MP on this one: here's the letter. Predictably I'm against them; my MP is as well, but I think he needs some encouragement! BTW he responded well but has not made any speeches against. I'll nag again soon! The Tory party: 050817 Now I'm pretty left wing. Comfortably more so that Labour (that leaves a lot of scope...), so why do I care about the Tories? I want them to be an effective opposition: as the Lib-Dems are the 'other' party, they aren't taken seriously, and someone's gotta do it. OK, nothing earth-shattering so far. My point is that I actually have a system that might just help the Tories provide a reasonable opposition and (heaven forbid!) get into power. It's based on the political compass - here. I think that Labour has moved into much of the Tory heartlands: It's hard to find the difference between Blairiam and Majorism (was there ever such a thing?). However, what the disenfranchised Tory voters really want is individual freedom - freedom to hunt, to protest about city to**ers invading their nice country (too many letters?) lifestyle, to drive Chelsea tractors and to shoot burglars/asylum seekers/dodgy Arabs/treehuggers/travellers/people not named after minor Shakespearean characters on sight. So the Tories need to go south on the political compass - retain the slightly right of centre politics (jeez don't go further right!), but focus on creating a genuine distinction between them and Labour: libertarian centre-rightism (OK it needs a better catchphrase...). How? Drop anti-gay stuff (what's it to do with them?), oppose the liberty restrictions created in recent anti-terrorism bills (including ID cards), let dodgy countries get on with things until they really pose an immediate threat and need to be dealt with like NOW, and generally chill out. Then their tax cut ideas make sense: we don't tax you as we don't impose on you. The central theme could be based on trust: they trust you, get on with being British, we know that that's what all the foreigners want anyway, being British means you pay (lowish) tax (grudgingly, but you'll always cough in the end) and want privacy, so we'll help you to achieve this ideal. This strikes me as ultimately Tory and potentially election-winning, but there's a second effect: it'll bugger the Lib-Dems. They have always been more liberal than Lab & Con, but lacked sufficient identity to obtain votes. If the Tories went south the Lib-Dems would have to shift very left (no bad thing, for me) to have an identity. So would this work:
I believe in balance in government. Given that the Lib-Dems are not going to get into power for 20 years we need a rein on Labour excess, and that's the opposition's job. Above is my call as to how they could achieve it. God knows they need the help! Sudoku: 050702 A device designed to show the clear superiority of computers over humans. Without the subtext: "at certain tasks". My very first Excel VBA was a sudoku solver, and it's an incredibly easy program to write: just crunch some numbers, and you're there. I think I have started four sudoku, finished two, made some stupid mistake somewhere on the others. On each, I have constantly been thinking: just what is the bloody point? The logic is so easy, and there is no elegance (caveat: I think Japanese sudoku have a Japanese elegance that is lost on us uncultured westerners). They are taking over from cryptic crosswords, which are so uniquely English in their obscurity, and converting us into sub-standard computers. We can't do 100% testing effectively (I know this: I had a software company!), but we can do leftfield, off-the-wall thinking that computers just can't. So why do we subsume our strengths by trying to make ourselves into ZX81s (I'm sure that 1k RAM would be enough to solve sudoku) when we are so good at non-linear tasks? If you agree, just email me for my sudoku solver, and together we shall admit defeat, allow the computers their victory at certain meaningless number-crunching tasks and I still only manage one Guardian crossword in five, at a push... First half of 2005 Clearly married life is good for me and I have been finding other things to do than rant! :D Americans: 051104 I guess it's too obvious really, but all of the goodwill (OK, that's going too far: lack of badwill maybe?) that I may have had over the previous election has gone. Last time, Bush quite clearly cheated, but there was bugger all you could do and whining was totally legitimate. However, in your defence, you didn't really know quite how bad he would be, so I never really held it against you, yankpeople. This time it's different. You could see that he was a moron, and greedy to boot. You can see (can't you???) that he has made the world and America especially a less safe place. He gives tax breaks to his rich chums when the economy is, like, shot. AND YOU VOTED FOR HIM AGAIN!!! So this time I take it personally. I can only conclude that you, Bushvoters, want to increase terrorism, suppress the American poor and f*ck the environment. Therefore I will do my bit, and it's actually quite easy. For me, the Bush states no longer exist. I won't go there, so you don't have the benefit of my tourist dollars (and I get loads of them for my quid now, as your economy is so shafted!), and I don't have to put up with your obnoxious stink. It's not that much of a concession really, as I really can't think of any Bushvoting states I'd actually like to go to: someone coined the phrase Bush the "flyover president", as he got voted in by those states you fly over when you might be going somewhere interesting. It also allows me to recognise that there is some sanity in the US in places I will visit, and I can hold some hope that corrupt fascists like Cheney or fellow morons like Rumsfeld won't be in in four years. PLEASE!!! The Iraq war: 051104 Oh my god I still care. I must be weird or something. I could go through all of the issues and list the things that I detest about what happened. In fact I might do that soon, but it will need a page of its own. However, I think it might be more fun to look at some positives: It might oust Tony. Now I voted Tony in, but didn't vote for him to stay in and will probably vote to oust him again. Sorry about that. For me New Labour has taken all that was good about the Labour party and dumped it in favour of a totalitarian right-of-centre nightmare. They confuse big state with nanny state and continue Thatcher's privatisation binge with a vengeance. Duh, go, you haven't done what we voted for you, now your integrity is shot and people see through you. Do get enough votes for a hung parliament though please, as the Tories are really scary! It has actually got rid of Saddam. He needed to go. Mugabe and others need to go more, yeah, but one at a time. The fact that oil was the reason he was taken out does not make the outcome less legitimate. I will admit that Iraq may not be in a great state now, but hey, one thing at a time, please! States that stand up to other and say "hey, you can't kill thousands of your folks for no reason" are the way forwards - we should see intervention as a good precedent and use it to strengthen the UN to enforce its mandates more often. It tells other countries to buck their ideas up. Yeah really - I reckon those little countries that don't have much of a clue about laws and economics are looking at this and thinking "hey, if I continue to harbour terrorists through negligence and the lack of education, America might invade! Damn, I'd better instigate a system for compulsory schooling, improve sanitation and infrastructure, and stop the warlords! Then I can at least say I'm trying, please don't send in the Cruise missiles!" A belligerent US could improve the world overall (albeit at some cost) more quickly than the previous position of no effective superpower. Egg card: 021104 Egg keep calling me when I spend money. Ooh, that transaction looks a bit odd, maybe his card is stolen. Rather than know our customer, let's get a machine to call him up every four minutes! To Egg: my phone at work does not register it if I press buttons. Therefore asking me to "press 1 to confirm that I am Adam Slim" does not help. Redialling every two minutes is not going to improve my attitude to you. I have called you and emailed you asking you to stop. You have the best deal with your credit card and it is the best online solution, but I am about to cancel it as you annoy me so much. How can you get consumer service so wrong? Never talk to me and I will love you! No wonder the cheese-eating surrender monkeys kicked you out: "je voudrais acheter du fromage" "pas avec ta carte oeuf bleue, mua ha ha ha" "merde! Je surrendre..." Just go away and stop annoying me. I may have to emigrate to France where I can ski in peace :) |
Adam
and Claire