The State We're (Not) In...yet.
Just a few post-election observations - I'm still catching up with correspondence, so some of your points may be addressed here:
1. Forging a union in the age of Twitter. We seem to have come full circle, in that the hordes of journalists and bloggers physically or remotely dogging the footsteps (and screeching tyres) of Conservative and Liberal Democrat party officials (and their respective vehicles) now resemble peasants staring up at the bedroom windows of newlywed monarchs in the 16th century. Technological advances notwithstanding, any satisfied grins and bloodstained bedsheets displayed with smug pride may not be forthcoming tonight. Go home.
2. Disenfranchised by poor design? No, I don't think so. The polling stations were open from 07:00AM. If voting was important to you, then foregoing or re-routing your morning jog, or delaying your breakfast should've been a priority. They were certainly options, along with sorting out a postal vote in advance, having a later dinner, missing whatever garbage was on TV that evening, or taking your unpleasant, screaming infants with you into the voting booth. Leaving it all to the last minute (or 90 minutes), and then making an unholy fuss about your deliberate, casual tardiness smacks of poor organizational skills. You don't deserve the vote. Stop moaning.
3. The primary objective: Get Gordon Brown's half-bitten, unelected fingernails out of the Number 10 door surrounds once and for all. After God knows how many hours of piss-poor election coverage, complete with some desperate celeb-wrangling (Bruce Forsyth?), and onscreen visuals nabbed from an early beta version of The Sims c.1998, David Dimbleby at the BBC finally lost it when he suggested that the idea of Brown being an unelected Prime Minister was a fallacy. His argument? That there were precedents; historically, it had happened before. Doesn't make it right, Dimblebum. Then or now. And it's the utter wrongness of that situation (which has persisted ever since Brown took over the Labour Party leadership from Blair, on the cowardly, unjustifiable whim of the latter reprobate, and without so much as a by-your-leave, internal stalking-horse opponent, or reference to the British electorate) that pissed people off.
4. The myth of a collective consciousness at work. Balderdash. If you've got any sense, you vote for the least worst candidate, i.e. one who isn't barking mad, an out-and-out crook, or a thoroughgoing social deviant. The overall outcome, when you tot up the numbers of attention-seeking, overly-ambitious misfits who have successfully conned the most gullible people, is always a gamble, if only because party allegiance is the one convenient myth no one's prepared to debunk. (Which is why, this close to the result, you're hearing very little - if anything at all - about the phenomenon of MPs crossing the floor, and siding with whatever turns out to be Her Majesty's Opposition.)
It's always been a numbers game. That's what makes it fun for statisticians. And believe me - they deserve some fun.
1. Forging a union in the age of Twitter. We seem to have come full circle, in that the hordes of journalists and bloggers physically or remotely dogging the footsteps (and screeching tyres) of Conservative and Liberal Democrat party officials (and their respective vehicles) now resemble peasants staring up at the bedroom windows of newlywed monarchs in the 16th century. Technological advances notwithstanding, any satisfied grins and bloodstained bedsheets displayed with smug pride may not be forthcoming tonight. Go home.
2. Disenfranchised by poor design? No, I don't think so. The polling stations were open from 07:00AM. If voting was important to you, then foregoing or re-routing your morning jog, or delaying your breakfast should've been a priority. They were certainly options, along with sorting out a postal vote in advance, having a later dinner, missing whatever garbage was on TV that evening, or taking your unpleasant, screaming infants with you into the voting booth. Leaving it all to the last minute (or 90 minutes), and then making an unholy fuss about your deliberate, casual tardiness smacks of poor organizational skills. You don't deserve the vote. Stop moaning.
3. The primary objective: Get Gordon Brown's half-bitten, unelected fingernails out of the Number 10 door surrounds once and for all. After God knows how many hours of piss-poor election coverage, complete with some desperate celeb-wrangling (Bruce Forsyth?), and onscreen visuals nabbed from an early beta version of The Sims c.1998, David Dimbleby at the BBC finally lost it when he suggested that the idea of Brown being an unelected Prime Minister was a fallacy. His argument? That there were precedents; historically, it had happened before. Doesn't make it right, Dimblebum. Then or now. And it's the utter wrongness of that situation (which has persisted ever since Brown took over the Labour Party leadership from Blair, on the cowardly, unjustifiable whim of the latter reprobate, and without so much as a by-your-leave, internal stalking-horse opponent, or reference to the British electorate) that pissed people off.
4. The myth of a collective consciousness at work. Balderdash. If you've got any sense, you vote for the least worst candidate, i.e. one who isn't barking mad, an out-and-out crook, or a thoroughgoing social deviant. The overall outcome, when you tot up the numbers of attention-seeking, overly-ambitious misfits who have successfully conned the most gullible people, is always a gamble, if only because party allegiance is the one convenient myth no one's prepared to debunk. (Which is why, this close to the result, you're hearing very little - if anything at all - about the phenomenon of MPs crossing the floor, and siding with whatever turns out to be Her Majesty's Opposition.)
It's always been a numbers game. That's what makes it fun for statisticians. And believe me - they deserve some fun.