Interesting Links for 20-12-2014

[andrewducker]

• How UKIP will do in the 2015 general election: a seat-by-seat prediction
  (tags: UKIP politics uk )
• Hot tip - if your job revolves around entities of non-provable existence, DON'T DISS SANTA!
  (tags: religion Christmas faith )
• Amazon is selling rape porn about Zoe Quinn. Hurrah for GamerGate!
  (tags: rape porn Amazon games )
• The Pope Just Helped the

Comments

[gonzo21]

Yet Amazon removed a book from sale because of their perceived mis-use of hyphens?

Though I think that gamergate ugliness has been nuked already. Fingers crossed.

[a_pawson]

Its already been removed. I doubt Amazon can possibly screen the content of every story someone uploads for sale.

[andrewducker]

Agreed.

And they seem to have removed it commendably swiftly.

[gonzo21]

No, I mean, they should. But then they'd have to start forking out to employ some reviewers again.

[supergee]

Thomas M. Disch's The M. D., a Horror Story begins with a nun telling her parochial school class that there is no Santa Claus, thereby Calling Up That Which She Cannot Put Down.

[andrewducker]

Nice. The synopsis looks intriguing too

[kalimac]

The guy writing about UKIP's prospects may well be right, but it frustrates me that he doesn't seem to be taking into account the possibility of mass defections from Tories annoyed at Cameron's moderateness. (And if they think Cameron is a moderate, that shows how extreme and UKIP-ready they are.)

Also, focusing on a party's target seats is not always the best indication of its prospects. The old Liberals used to have lists of target seats that they didn't win, even as they won other seats. They didn't win them because their definition of a target seat was one in which they came closest to winning last time, but in those seats they'd already squeezed the vote as much as they could and weren't going to get any more. (That example isn't really relevant to UKIP, which doesn't have much of an electoral history, but it does show the perils of prediction.)

[andrewducker]

Oh yes, it could be that there's a massive swing section of people who are effectively lying to the pollsters.

But I'm not betting on it.

[kalimac]

You mean the polls showing UKIP support steadily rising and now above 15%? (A level at which the old Liberals won considerably more than the 2 or 3 seats this guy is predicting for UKIP.) Those polls?

[andrewducker]

Yes, those polls.

Which are generally showing that they are 15% in a very large number of areas, but not actually getting more than their nearest competitors in many of them.

FPTP is very much going to be UKIPs enemy here.

[ipslore]

The wrench thing is a reminder that we're living in The Future, and it's great.

[andrewducker]

It is marvellous. Very impressive technology!

[drdoug]

The tags on this post include the sequence "pope, porn, rape" which gave me a quite start when I noticed while scanning my FL.

[andrewducker]

There's a search phrase that would get you...interesting results.