Woop!

1. I now have access to the electric internet again; my usual inconsistent pace of posting will return shortly.

2. I interviewed Vince Cable today, along with several other bloggers (see below).

3. I met several lovely fellow bloggers who I’ve not met before, including the regal Lady Mark, the owner of an excellent bag Jennie, the I’m-trying-desperately-to-resist-the-temptation-to-call-her Jo Crispy-Strips, the distinguished Mary Reid, the brilliant Alix, the lovely Helen Duffett, and of course the fluffy Millennium with his daddy Richard.

4. An evening in the pub’s always quite nice, innit?

Election Night Reactions

So Dimbleby has disappeared from my screen (meh), as have Vine (hurrah!) and Alix (bah!). Things I have learned tonight:

1. I contributed today to the re-election of Sian Reid by quite some margin. So hooray. Not that I’m surprised – the only other party who bothered to deliver leaflets to me and my friends were the Tories. The best claim “In Touch” could make for representing students was “supporting” CUSU’s Access campaign. Pfft. Don’t get complacent, now, Sian.

2. The Lib Dems apparently exist in some kind of parallel universe whereby we compete in an electoral vacuum. This seems to me to be the only possible explanation of the BBC’s logic. In 2004, when these seats were last contested, we were riding the wave of anti-Iraq war protest votes, the Tories were steadily recovering but not exactly looking great, and Labour were deeply unpopular. This was, in short, prime Lib Dem electoral territory.

4 years later, the Tories are having a resurgence, and the Iraq war has died down. Apparently, therefore, a drop of 4% in our vote is a reason to berate us. This, despite the fact that we’ve just MADE NET GAINS IN COUNCILLORS, AND MAINTAINED OUR LEAD OVER LABOUR IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT, PUSHING THEM INTO 3RD PLACE FOR ONLY THE SECOND TIME IN MODERN POLITICAL HISTORY.

Yes, you heard me: We, the supposed third party of British politics, have just beaten Labour, the supposed party of government of British politics, into third place on projected national share of the vote. We’re doing pretty bloody well. And yet, in the BBC’s logic, we are to be berated because we’re not doing as well as a time when we did even better.

3. The Lib Dems got rid of Ming Campbell because we got 26% in the 2007 local elections. Which is funny, because I could have sworn I remembered something about poll numbers in October at around 13%, a terminal slump, and a media determined to sideline Ming, plus a bottled snap elecction. Must have been an idle daydream. You live and learn.

4. The BBC’s “projected national share of the vote”, when fed into their magic general election machine, gives Labour about 159 MPs and Lib Dems about 56 (if I remember correctly). This, lest you forget, off the back of Labour 24% of the vote, Lib Dems 25%. As fucking ludicrous as our electoral system is, even I have to conclude that the BBC’s election predicting machine has some pretty robust assumptions built into it.

Thank goodness for Alix, or I might have felt like I was going a bit bonkers.

Nigel Kneale: Do We Owe Him That Much?

Loz Miles has posted this interesting piece challenging the received wisdom on Nigel Kneale. OK, I know, not obviously Lib Dem, but there is undeniably a Doctor Who fan audience to be found here! Quote from the article:

The Quatermass serials have left us with a vague sense of superiority, without prompting us to question their meaning. And it’s a poor sort of television that only inspires mistrust. Kneale’s vision is an insular, mean-spirited one, in which everything unfamiliar is a threat; all human endeavour is worthless, if not actively dangerous; and anything which goes against the principles of old-school Britishness must be destroyed.

Intrigued? Irritated? Go read.

Whilst I’m plugging Lawrence, I will also point out that the updates to his bizarre new fictional blog seem to have started flowing again, too. Hurrah!

Random Comedy Video Clip of the Week

from Maria Bamford, whose Edinburgh Fringe show I saw in 2006. It was good.

A Lovely Surprise

Having noted the demolition notice hanging over Lawrence Miles’s Beasthouse for the last few months, I am pleased to see he has apparently thought better of this decision. Hurrah! And just in time for Christmas, too. Although he has broken his silence with a somewhat erratically numbered Advent Calendar feature. Either that, or he is doing his irritating deleting posts thing.

Anyway, that’s all from me today, since I am on a 9am shift tomorrow (it’s obscene, dammit! Don’t they know I’m a Student?!).

Hurrah for Nintendo (the Lib Dems of Video Games)

Today’s BBC tech page features the news that the Wii has brought Nintendo a doubling of its profits. Which makes me happy. Even better, the Wii has sold twice as many units as the over-priced glorified Blu-ray player that is the PS3.

“Ah-hah”, any of you inclined to defend Sony cry, “surely that’s because the PS3 hasn’t been out for as long, and Christmas ’06 will have put a lot on the Wii’s figures”. Well, that would be fine, if the PS3 was outselling the Wii now. Which it’s not. Here is a lovely graph.

OK, then, so why should I be all that bothered about this? Surely I am celebrating one company making a huge amount of money rather than another company making that money, neither of which makes much difference to me? Well, yes and no. I am, it has to be said, a shameless Nintendo zealot. I bought a Gamecube and not a PS2, a rather more questionable choice than the one most consumers are making today. Why?

Well, Nintendo are just a nicer company. Throughout their history, they have been willing to be innovative and take risks with their products. Sometimes they have produced what can only be described as duds with this strategy. And on those occasions, only people who wanted to support Nintendo as a company bought their products. But on other occasions, they produced things that revolutionised the industry, and were immediately stolen by the other companies. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the parallel to the Lib Dems here.

So for instance, Nintendo gave the world the analogue control stick, immediately nicked by Sony, whose horrid PS1 controller was soon replaced with the swanky Dual Shock, a PS1 controller with not one but two analogue sticks shoved on the bottom. The next generation, there wasn’t much in the way of innovation, but still Sony couldn’t produce a controller that was anything like as nice to hold as Nintendo’s. This generation, of course, Nintendo have gone so far out of the box that they can hardly see it any more, with the Wiimote. As soon as the operating concept for the Wii was announced, of course, Sony once again set about ham fistedly stitching it into their plans for the PS3, with the result being the less than exciting Sixaxis. Very little so far has been done with it, compared with even the limited output on the Wii.

“Policy theft” aside, another parallel we might point to is “non-sensationalism”; the nature of the games that Nintendo makes its flagships compared with the other companies. Where Sony and Microsoft are all about wars and the “broken society“, with the selling point being essentially populism and shrouding themselves in glamourous clothing, Nintendo sells its games based on a sound philosophical underpinning based on characterful and slightly more wholesome franchises and, most importantly, interesting and innovative gameplay. As a recent article in Edge argued,

It’s these two factors – innovation and kid-appeal – that have remained at the core of Nintendo’s philosophy … And, although that assumption that Nintendo is for children may raise howls of frustration from dedicated grown-up fans, it’s a crucial point … whatever their real age, there’s no doubt that Nintendo perceives its audience to be childlike. Whether five or 50, Nintendo thinks of its gamers as playful, curious, eager to be delighted, ready to laugh. It’s not how Rockstar, Epic or Bungie would ever describe their target audience.

Indeed it isn’t. Before I leave this point, let me just make clear that by “wholesome”, I don’t mean “family” or “kiddie” oriented, I simply mean a game that isn’t intended to appeal to the most brainless instincts in a person. I equally think that applies to innovative games with rather more gritty clothes like the new Metroid game, or, on another platform, Deus Ex. The point is not that games be brightly coloured platformers; rather, it is about what the structure and gameplay of the games says about its creators’ expectations of the audience. Equally, the Lib Dems aren’t necessarily the “nice party”, in the sense that they haven’t got the guts to take difficult decisions (they have, you will be surprised to hear!) so much as they are the party who aren’t as interested in appealing to people’s more unpleasant nature.

Next, Nintendo are a company whose numbers add up. Not for them the practice of selling their consoles at a thumping loss in the hope of making the cash back from software sales. It’s just as well; unlike Sony they don’t have a large, succesful parent company to bail them out. Why do Sony think people want to pay such a lot of money for their product? Well, because they reckon (and they’re probably right) that what they’re offering is good value for money. The trouble is that not everyone wants all the things they are selling as an indivisible package. I already have a DVD player, I don’t want a console to act as one for me. I certainly don’t want to buy into the Blu-Ray side of the format war until the whole thing has died down.

As good liberals, of course, we know that the answer to this is for non-essential stuff to be left as a choice of the buyer, leaving them the option of having the money in their pocket. Which is why the Wii was launched at £180 and each one makes Nintendo a profit, whereas the PS3 launched at £425, and still made a loss with each unit sold.

Lastly, I guess, we have the superficial points. To many people’s eyes, Nintendo have been an underdog, (even though they have never been in the business of making losses – the Edge article again:

In 1993, when a slump took profits down to a still very handsome 23 per cent of sales, The Economist was startled enough to run an editorial asking if it was the beginning of the end. For a modern perspective that seems ludicrous: it’s hard to imagine how ecstatic Sony or Microsoft, both currently shouldering multi-million dollar losses, would be to be pocketing 23 per cent of their incomes. Nor has Nintendo’s golden goose status diminished. Its latest annual financial results show a 77 per cent rise in profits – ¥74.3 billion (£310 million) from total revenue of ¥966.5 billion (£4 billion).

Similarly, the Lib Dems are seen as an underdog, despite a massive trend over the last 30 years of movement upwards in the polls and a dash for our political territory. Meanwhile, we have Sony (the Tories), who are just bad, and Microsoft (Labour), who mean well but are just so hulking and over-centralising that one can’t get too enthusiastic about them. Sega (the SDP?) have now given up as a hardware producer, and now co-operate with Nintendo quite a lot. I think this metaphor is best left for dead now, not least because, in Sony’s videogaming infancy, they flirted with Sega, which would make Sony Labour and not the Tories. Never mind.

So yeah. Nintendo are lovely. And all good Lib Dems should go out today and find themselves a Wii (stock is still short, it seems; they are selling second hand online about £280 at the moment) and copies of Shigeru Miyamoto‘s masterpieces for it. I am not on commission, honest.

Ashdown Enjoys Jenkins Breaking Wind

It was only towards the end of yesterday that I got round to finishing reading the Guardian and looked at the letters page. There, sat at the top of the page, was the following letter from Paddy Ashdown:

Simon Jenkins’s ability to break wind at length on your pages provides one of the Guardian’s most enjoyable and readable high points. His seeming aversion to ever expressing a modulated opinion somehow does not appear to diminish the pleasure.

But enthusiasm to make a point is not an excuse for inaccuracies. In his piece this week, he said I had “returned recently from Kabul consumed with imperial zeal” (It takes inane optimism to see victory in Afghanistan, Comment, August 8). In fact, I have never been to Kabul.

As for “imperial zeal”, which Sir Simon spends much of his article attaching to me and railing against, if he had read my recent book, Swords and Ploughshares, before commencing bombardment, he would have found it dedicated to the proposition that the era of imperial intervention is over – I call it “gunboat intervention” – and that we have to find a different way of doing things.

Finally, he accuses me of saying on your pages that success in Afghanistan was “probable” (his quotation marks). I said no such thing. In fact, the word “probable” does not even appear in my article.

What I actually said was that failure was likely, unless the policy radically changed. There is a difference between the two.

We all know that, as the Guardian’s highly successful resident controversialist, Sir Simon’s job – and nature it seems – is to relish failure more than success. But he would be more powerful, and no less enjoyable, if he took a little more care to be a little more accurate.
Paddy Ashdown
Norton sub Hamdon, Somerset

Of course, there is little love lost between our party and Simon Jenkins, so it came as little surprise to read the article which prompted this letter, where Jenkins essentially makes the argument that Afghanistan is a lost cause and that we are being imperialist to continue to try not to let it slide into the mire which Iraq has already found itself in. I don’t know if I agree, but if the facts are as slapdash as Paddy suggests, I don’t know if it’s even worth engaging with.

House of Lords Bill

Sometimes you need someone with an untenable position to be able to see their way through an argument which is clouded for others by vested interests. Such an occasion occurred yesterday, when the Lords gave Lord Steel’s House of Lords Bill its second reading.

A general, smug consensus had been building throughout most of the contributions that Jack Straw was being terribly naive, and that appointment was the way to go. We even saw Lord Campbell (Con) ask: “What about affinity with the monarch? That has at all costs to be retained, albeit reset constitutionally from time to time. Nobody seems to say anything about it. ” (Column 510) .

The whole thing was getting so terribly depressing as I sat watching it this morning on BBC Parliament. Of course, I knew I could hold out for Lord McNally’s (LD) thoughts (Column 529), but before that arrived, reassurance came from an altogether more unexpected corner of the house. Up stood the Earl of Onslow (Con), one of the 92 remaining hereditaries, to make the following storming speech (Column 517), which I have reproduced in its entirety:

The Earl of Onslow: My Lords, I start by reminding your Lordships of Macaulay’s comment on the Plantagenets. He said that the Plantagenet kings were restrained by a powerful and hereditary aristocracy. The hereditary aristocracy was there not because of heredity but to stop an appointed House. Macaulay and the Norman barons were right, but I understand that the whole House is arguing for appointment. In the immortal words of Mandy Rice-Davies, “They would, wouldn’t they?”

Elections would mean that a very large number of noble Lords would be on their bikes, so, not surprisingly, that may influence their thinking. We all love it here, but I am afraid that there is no modern justification for exercising power and bossing your fellow subjects about other than by popular election of one sort or another. This was what my great-grandfather talked to Salisbury about; it was said in the 1911 Act; and it was said in 1999. With regard to privy counsellors, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine, said that we should stay here until the House was democratically elected, but since when has privy counsellors’ honour been subject to a statute of limitations? I did not think that it ever had been.

I am here not because my forebear got tight with Pitt or because one of my great-grandmothers slept with Charles II—she did but it had nothing to do with a peerage; that was another one—or because one of my forebears was Chancellor of the Exchequer to Walpole; I am here to ensure that the promises of an elected House are delivered. I am essentially a totally ridiculous character in that context. I may try to make up for it in other ways but, essentially, I am a ridiculous character in the modern world, and I am here to remind your Lordships of promises unfulfilled. I look around me and see lots of very able people, all of whom contribute in the way that has been described. But, in a modern world, we cannot have power exercised other than by popular vote.

Much is made of the supremacy of the House of Commons. In 1340-something-or-other, this House said that it would not have anything to do with tax. This House is restrained by the Parliament Act; another place’s votes apply. Under those circumstances, this House is already, and has been for a very long time, subordinate to the House of Commons. Therefore, the argument about gridlock is relatively feeble. As a democrat and as someone who loves the concept of parliament, I am afraid that I see nothing wrong in gridlock from time to time. Can we honestly say that every single Act of Parliament, every clause, every subsection and every statutory instrument passed over the past 20 years will go down in history as immutable and unchangeable and that it will be quoted as being as perfect as the law of the Medes and the Persians? That is self-evident rubbish. We should resist the parts of the Bill that make it easier for us all to stay here and feel self-satisfied about the benefits of an appointed position.

I suppose when one feels like something of an outsider to the rest of the house anyway, it is much easier to go in all guns blazing in this fashion. I do hope that, when one day we do achieve an elected second chamber, we manage to elect a house similarly peppered with mavericks. Of course, there is no reason why we shouldn’t – the commons seems to manage quite well for “characters” of its own.

It’s Thursday, Ya Bastards!

Well, today’s the day. I have just been and voted, and I already voted at home via the internet (which, today’s Guardian tells me, may not be such a good idea, but never mind…)

I have really nothing more to say, other than that I thought it would be nice to reprint (in slightly edited form) Marc Maron‘s work of literary genius on the subject of voting:

Vote
by Marc Maron

If you want to rewrite what’s been wrote
Vote

If you want to squeeze the bastard’s throat
Vote

If you can’t find the remote
Vote

If you’re in a german u-boat
Vote

If tomorrow you want to gloat
Vote

Get out there people!

Now For Something Completely Different

One of my random interests that will probably end up on this blog often is US politics. Anyone with a similar interest is probably aware of Air America Radio. For those who aren’t, there follows a brief introduction. If you are, skip the following few paragraphs.

Air America was founded in April 2004, before the November election. It was intended as an effort to bring some balance to the talk radio arena, which since Reagan’s removal of the fairness doctrine from US broadcasting legislation has been dominated by Republicans. Headed by Rush Limbaugh, the American right had built up quite a stranglehold over the medium. There were, of course, a few efforts by individual hosts who have carved out careers for themselves, some of whom joined up to Air America upon it’s inception.

Randi Rhodes and Mike Malloy (who claims that, in some of his previous radio jobs, his views have forced him to carry a gun for protection at work) spring to mind. But the big news when Air America started up was Al Franken, who had recently written his rather entertaining book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Since then, it has become evident that his forte is not really radio, and his show is only really fun to listen to in the sense that it is kind of warm and gentle (comparitively). At the same time, however, new faces were arriving. Part of the strategy of Air America was to use big names. Franken was one. Another fairly obvious contender was Janeane Garofalo, who had made a name for herself in the relevant circles in the run-up to the Iraq war as a fairly outspoken pundit (against, you’ll be glad to know).

START READING AGAIN NOW!

On Garofalo’s recommendation, they also contacted Marc Maron, a little known standup comic. Interestingly enough for someone with perhaps the least experience of any of their hosts, they stuck him on the breakfast show, Morning Sedition, albeit alongside experienced radio host Mark Riley. The show built from a shaky start into one of the most entertaining things I’ve ever come across. Then, at a time when the show was accumulating listeners and Howard Stern was about to go off the air, the CEO of Air America decided he didn’t like it. He didn’t renew Maron’s contract, despite a big outcry from the fans of the show (which it had accumulated in a way I have rarely seen a radio programme do).

But the good news is, he’s now back on the air, in a programme from Los Angeles in the evenings (or, in the UK, 6-8am!). You can stream it from here. You can also podcast it from here, although it will cost you money. I would recommend it to anyone who would like to hear the comings and goings of US Politics in an entertaining way every weekday.

So why am I writing about Maron? Well, it occurs to me that often, he is in fact one of the few genuinely liberal voices on Air America. We all like to bemoan the misuse of the word to characterise the American left, who are now trying fairly hard to rename themselves “Progressives”, since the right have fairly succesfully made liberal a dirty word. Nonetheless, Maron is accurately describable as a liberal, I would say. On the day after the Oscars, many made jokes about Three 6 Mafia winning an award were made by hosts on Air America. Only Maron, to my knowledge, felt uncomfortable with the racially patronising tone of the jokes, and devoted a segment to bringing up his concern.

He frequently makes reference to his enjoyment of people being “freaks in a good way”, and is socially liberal in areas where others might not feel it helps their cause to be (for instance, his stances on pornography). In a rant about the church his co-host Jim Earl made a point of not denying anyone’s right to free speech where all too often other hosts do. Of course, US economic debate is so warped now that it’s hardly fair to look at his economic opinion on the same terms as we would use in the UK. Nonetheless, as a liberal, I would recommend the Marc Maron Show to anyone. Apart from anything else, it’s frequently very funny.