Spontaneous Monotony

In last year’s US Presidential Election, many ‘experts’ said that blogging, and the internet more generally, would be key in deciding who eventually won. It didn’t really work out that way. Howard Dean didn’t even get his party’s nomination, never mind the Presidency, and eventually it all came down to party loyalty as usual, rather than who had the best blog.

Not to be deterred, the Blog the Vote campaign, a UK organisation trying to increase voter turnout through the blogging community, is planning to make a big push for the (expected) General Election in May this year. Whether it will have much of an effect remains to be seen, but it is definitely a good idea and one that I will be keeping an eye on through Bloglines.

Like most sane people, I am not the biggest fan of Valve’s ‘Steam’ content screwuppery system. But it really surpassed itself this time. Since I got a few games for Christmas (Dawn of War being the chief culprit) I haven’t played HL2 for a while.

So the other day I started up good ‘ole Steam, only for it to insist that Half Life 2 was not installed, and I needed to download it from Steam (at least it wasn’t asking me to pay, but downloading several gig of stuff is not going to happen at half eight at night, even on my broadband pipe. Despite all the files being where Steam installed them, and completely unchanged to boot, Valve’s ‘innovative’ piece of crap still couldn’t find them.

Valve’s technical support was (predictably, given the talent of the Steam programmers) about as helpful as an iguana on crack, leaving me to start Steam up myself this morning only for everything to work fine (well, CS Source, I haven’t tried HL2 since the screwup yet). One thing that can be said for EA and Micro$uck$- at last they don’t screw us over with stuff like Steam.

A handful of MPs have taken the plunge and decided to start a blog. But in many cases, it hasn’t worked. Most of them aren’t really worth reading (Boris Johnson’s is one of the better ones). The problem is that most still see it as a cheap way of publicising their policies. When it comes out as forced like that it just doesn’t work (and consequently neither does the aim of promotion). If more MPs would write honest, half decent blogs for their own sake (rather than as a blatant party political plug) then it would be much more effective at raising their profile.

Wasn’t it a political masterstroke for Charles Clarke to announce his ‘solution’ to the Law Lords’ ruling (that detention without trial is in fact illegal) in the same week as the Auschwitz liberation anniversary? His fantastic, totally-non-illegal plan basically boils down to ‘we’re still going to imprison you without trial but its going to be in your own house so that you have to pay for the upkeep not the government.’

The Blair-loving media as usual didn’t pick up on that minor technical point, preferring instead to show pictures of the big-eared one droning on to a near-empty parliament. Let me just draw a comparison: when terrorists kidnap people who disagree with them, its called terrorism. When the Blairites kidnap people who disagree with them, its called anti-terrorism. Explanations? WHAT EXPLANATIONS, WHERE ARE YOUR PAPERS TERRORIST?

If, as expected, the General Election is called in May, I won’t be entitled to vote. But even I can see that, if they don’t improve dramatically, the Tories are on their way to a monumental gubbing. As irritating and anti-democratic as their policies might be, New/Old/WeLoveBlair Labour are at least talking about health, education, security, you know, stuff that people generally care about. So what does Michael Howard come up with?

Cutting the numbers of asylum seekers (even more illegal than Bliar’s war, and likely to exacerbate our shortage of skilled workers), and… inheritance tax. Now, families aside, the people who are hit by inheritance tax are, well, dead, and therefore unlikely to vote Tory to thank Howard for this tax cut. To achieve this, he will cut such non-essential quangos as the DVLA (yes, that DVLA) and the National Blood Register. Now, I despise quangos as much as anyone else, but I think this takes it just a tad to far!