Politics and Geek blog
This is a rhetorical trick which is becoming increasingly common, and frankly it’s getting on my tits.
Because this isn’t about criticising your political opponents for things they’ve actually done or actually said; it’s imagining a scenario in which they do something hypocritical, and then criticising them for the hypocrisy that you’ve just imagined.
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Toby Young has just been appointed to the board of the Office for Students – a new regulator with a remit “to champion the interests of students, promote choice and help to ensure that students are receiving a good deal for their investment in higher education”
This is the same Toby Young who championed the flagship Tory ‘free schools’ programme, which literally funnelled money from state schools into increasingly exclusive education.
But let’s put that aside, and see whether he’s a worthwhile advocate for “the interests of students”… in his own words.
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In the news right now is the tragic death of a 28 year-old Kansas man who seems to have been the victim of a swatting attack.
If I’m honest, I thought swatting was a fad that had come and gone. It appears I was wrong.
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You may have noticed your more daring friends making the temerarious suggestion that Die Hard, a 1988 action film starring Bruce Willis, could perhaps maybe actually be considered… a Christmas Movie!
*GASP*
Except it’s not audacious at all, is it? Because you heard the same fucking thing last year, with the same breathless sense of faux-naughtiness surrounding it.
And if you’re thinking that you heard it all the year before that as well? You’re not wrong.
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So – way back in March, having moved hosts, I decided to update the site.
This was something that should only have taken me a month at most, as it’s not exactly a complicated procedure.
As you can tell from it being mid-December, things didn’t work out quite that well. The basic redesign was relatively straightforward (as anything Wordpress-related is), but transferring my database from my previous host failed, and that – plus some work commitments and various other Real Life™ issues – slowed everything down to a crawl.
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I’m not a fan of the Tories. But I’ve read the BNP 2005 manifesto.
It’s a vile piece of literature. The BNP aren’t comparable to any other UK Political Party. They’re a white supremacist party.
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In July this year, the Left of UK Politics was rightly impressed with Mhairi Black’s maiden speech to the House of Commons.
One part of that which particularly resonated on social media was her reference to Tony Benn’s “weathercocks and signposts”
Following the Parisian atrocity there have been two main responses – a call for blood, and a call for a peaceful solution.
The call for blood is fairly straightforward: innocent people have been killed in a brutal attack, and there are those who want what basically amounts to retribution.
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