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From Total Politics to Total Burnout

by Jennie Rigg    
June 23, 2008 at 11:46 am

Is there a blog we should be reading, or a post that you think we should link to? Email us your tips to tips@liberalconspiracy.org

Iain Dale’s Total Politics site has launched, and revealed its editorial team. It’s actually quite interesting, and appears to be very well funded too… Why no, these grapes are sweet and tasty, why’d you ask? (Hat tip, Mark Pack at LDV). Oddly they don’t appear to have linked to us from their political blogs directory, but then, as a top ten political blog we’re hard to miss, and the blog directory is so badly-constructed, it’s possible they have linked to us and I just haven’t found the link

Andrew Rilstone writes about how a writer’s writings are distinct from and yet linked to the writer as a person and that person’s political views. Brilliant post (and not just because he says The Shadow Over Innsmouth is better than The Call of Cthulhu), but does contain rude words: proceed with caution.

PC Bloggs turns her ever-acerbic eye onto government in the latest of her occasional series on 21st Century Policing. If I could make PC Bloggs a Home Office advisor…

Political Betting are wondering if the Labour Party will lose their deposit in Henley.

Lynne Featherstone is a big blubbing girly – and this entry is so lovely it turned me into one too. Get your tissues out, and I won’t tell anyone that you needed them.

BluJay posts in the cheerfully-named So Very Doomed group blog about the difficulties that we in the developed world will have obtaining food if things don’t change drastically and soon.

Slightly Warped posts pictures of a fire in a cave in Uzbekistan that’s been burning for 5 years (so far) and is known as the Door to Hell. (Hat tip: Neil Gaiman)

Your Mom Had Groupies

by Jennie Rigg    
June 9, 2008 at 11:10 am

Michelle Schwartz was incensed by some very sexist adverts for Canadian Club Whiskey. She did a parody of the advert from a feminist perspective, and then lots of other people joined in. This link is graphics-heavy, but brilliant. I think I like Your mom was a pilot best…
Lib Dem Jo has been listening to Hazel Blears on the radio. She’s a braver woman than me. I can’t listen to Blears for more than a few seconds without falling into a frothing rage, but Jo managed it for a whole phone in!
Snuffleupagus, an inner city teacher, talks about her incredulity that one of her colleagues is blithely indifferent to her daughter going to a school in Special Measures.
Stephen Glenn has news for the Northern Irish health minister: the “treatment” that she advocates to “cure” gay people doesn’t work. He knows, because he’s been through it. Three times.
Brad Hicks is a big ball of hope and fear when he listens to Obama speak, and thinks that people calling it a “cult of personality” dismissively are missing the depth of his generation’s feelings on the matter.
Cobalt warns American women not to be seduced by the siren song of McCain, with reams of reasons.
And finally, Charlie Stross has posted a “how to behave” guide for commenters on his blog. It’s good general advice for how to behave on the internet.

See her for what she was

by Padraig Reidy    
May 29, 2008 at 5:01 pm

Mary Whitehouse has always been a peripheral idea in my life — one of those puppets on Spitting Image I never really recognised as a child, but laughed at anyway, because if I didn’t seem to be paying attention, my parents might revoke the ‘being allowed up late to watch Spitting Image’ licence they had so generously granted.

Later, in my smart-arsed adolescence, came the Mary Whitehouse Experience, the apotheosis of smart-arsed comedy. I don’t think I really knew where the name came from, save from the notion of some batty old woman.

That batty old woman turned up again last night, in the BBC’s Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story.
continue reading… »

What good did funding the arts ever do?

by DonaldS    
February 18, 2008 at 9:59 am

So, who wants to hear a joke?

Q: What’s the difference between libertarianism and anarchism?

A: Under anarchism, the poor people get to shoot back.

Boom, boom. I guess that’s more a caricature than a joke, as such. Anyway, I’m not here for the standup. What I want to address is the arts, partly by way of reply to Chris’s post here last week, specifically the estimable libertarian objection to arts funding. In libertopia, arts funding is for private individuals. “There is no such thing as society” (some of them really write stuff like that, non-ironically), so spending on the collective is wasted. Immoral. Theft. In any case, the Dead Hand of the State (10,300 Google hits for a phrase I’ve never heard anyone actually speak) can only have a pernicious impact on private interaction, and what could be more private than art?

Let’s look at some evidence. continue reading… »

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