Occupational Thoughts -

This site’s domain expires on 14/09/2010, I think it’s also the time around which I’ll have to renew my hosting. I’ve been thinking about this, a lot. For one renewing this hosting & domain would be somewhere in the region of £70, however I look at it I always get the feeling the price has jumped up by about £15 since last year. Secondly I want a server in the UK, and a UK domain name.
I considered building my own Mini-ITX server, until my dad changed us from a fixed IP address to a dynamic one when he decided to move ISPs from BT to Virgin Media.
And lastly this whole blog has been slowly petering out, it’s a good place for photo dumps, and long articles, but I tend more towards photo dumps, or just leaving the entire thing alone. This blog was a natural step along a chain from blogger.com to wordpress.com to WordPress installed on a hosted server.
This has been my longest running blog but now there’s nothing new to move on to, and my appetite for blogging has slowed down considerably. So for the time being I’m going to backup everything on this server to our big networked hard drive and wait for the renewal time to tick by.
I did however come up with a new idea, whilst doing journalism at the Morning Star I came across the London film co-operative. They show fairly obscure films such as environmental documentaries, social realist dramas, biased historical documentaries, basically anything slightly radical which isn’t easily available.
If you read this blog carefully you’ll know that I’m a fan of Sergei Eisenstein and his epic dramas. That’s why I used the Battleship Potemkin as my first example of HTML5 video, because I like it, it’s film history. However, the London Socialist film co-operative has a flaw; it’s in London. I tried to get to their cinema and got lost. It’s let down by being in a physical location. So, I announce a new website, not a blog, a film archive. To be more precise it would be a radical film archive.
It would run on Trade Union UK web hosting, no more than 1 gigabyte of space and 10 gigabytes of bandwidth. Films will be stored on Amazon’s hosting service and the site will just link to Amazon. All the films should be available as torrents for me to download and then upload them. Wherever possible I’ll try to include films in an ogg or matroska container.

It’s with great trepidation that I’m letting this blog go, before I do though here are some of the stats I had been holding off publishing:

Views graph since October last year

Traffic sources

Twitter accounted for roughly 10% of all visitors. Total visit count was 1,286.
Average time on site was 1:06 minutes

Browser capability was split up as follows:

1. Firefox 45.57%
2. Chrome 28.15%
3. Internet Explorer 17.50%

All Your Internet Are Belong To Us was the most visited post.

I suppose the last thing I can do is to get everyone to cut off any incoming links. I might continue to post here between now and the end date, but don’t link to it as it’ll all soon be gone. Now all hurry into your lifeboats, the ship is sinking!

Here we sit in Cameron’s Britain, and it’s not that bad, we still have running water, the hospitals haven’t been privatised (yet), and the angry masses are all at home watching Hollyoaks.

So, one might think I was a little hasty when I wrote a protracted rant predicting the apocalyptic future of Conservative Britain. I was also too harsh on the target of my anger; a young conservative. I find the whole idea of ‘young conservatives’ bizarre, because the youth are by their nature revolutionary. The youth have repeatedly throughout history challenged the ideas of those which came before them. That’s why the establishment is so scared that we might vote, because if we could we’d have rebelled against our masters at almost every opportunity.

There’s a wider point here that young people are often misled into thinking they’re challenging society by conforming to it. But I’ll ignore that for the moment, were my predictions correct?

1. They have an obsession with privatisation. Last week Mr. Cameron announced his ‘big society’. In theory the people could take ownership of their services and run them as co-operatives, make them accountable to regional soviets. In practice it means handing over public services to unaccountable institutions such as private companies and charities.
   Furthermore the corrupt Health Secretary Andrew Lansley wants to privatise the NHS. Tick.
2. The Conservatives will ‘take from the poor and give to the rich’. Did everyone see George Osborne announce the emergency budget? I watched it unfolding live, then took to the streets in protest. The 20% rise in VAT is a regressive tax which will hurt the poor most. The government predicts at least 500,000 public sector jobs to be lost as a result of their budget. According to the government the economy will expand to absorb the newly unemployed, the glorious private sector entrepreneurs will emerge like shining gods and create magical new jobs everywhere. Liars. Anyway, some Capitalists enjoy having a high unemployed population, it keeps their wage slaves from going on strike. Tick.
   Oh and it’s a lie to say that only ‘non-jobs’ are being cut. I met some of these ‘non-jobs’ and their work is definitely useful.
   
3. The Conservative party is still homophobic. The new Minister for Women and Equalities is Theresa May, and in the past she’s voted against repealing Section 28. Tick.
4. They supported both the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan with great enthusiasm. Still true. Although the junior partner in this government, Nick Clegg, declared the Iraq war illegal during Prime Minister’s Questions. It stings, doesn’t it? When your lackey describes the conflict you supported as nothing less than a war crime. Despite that the position of the government is to support the occupation of Afghanistan, so they’re still up for imperialism. Tick.
5. Disdain for human rights. This one’s a bit murky now that the Lib Dems are involved, we still have yet to see a British Bill of Rights in an encoded constitution which keeps the rights granted to us in the European Convention on Human Rights.
6. They refuse to take climate change seriously. As with human rights there’s no solid evidence for this yet. What we do know is that as part of George Osborne’s budget he’s decided to cut the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s budget, this isn’t really a surprise as pretty much everything’s being cut at the moment.
7. According to the Conservatives ‘it’s not racist to talk about immigration’. Theresa May, remember her? wants a ‘border police force’. While they’re at it, why not string barbed wire around the beaches. Tick.

I’ve definitely got to point out that the ideology of the government is ‘Liberal Conservative’, and therefore the Lib Dems had best step up and take the blame for some of this. Most of the links I’ve provided follow through to the Guardian, sorry about that, it’s because they reinforce what I’m trying to say.

It’s been double-checked and confirmed: the first meeting of the Oxford Game Network is being held on the 29th June 2010 at 19:00 at the Jam Factory. Feel free to come along, myself and Graeme will probably be lurking somewhere around and it’s really not that large a space so you’ll find us easily. Drinks at the Jam Factory are ludicrously expensive although it’s handy to keep in mind that you’re also paying for the atmosphere.

We will be talking about games, talking about the possibility of setting up a regular gaming event thing. Like a LAN party. I like LAN parties, for their brilliant social aspects, however every LAN party I’ve hosted so far seems to have had some significant flaw to it, be it the one or two people crouched in a corner secretly watching porn, or a crippling dependence on Counter-Strike as the only game anyone agrees to play together.

Incidentally, I do have a spare gift copy of Counter-Strike: Source on Steam somewhere, if anyone wants it it’s still up for grabs.

There’s not much more I can say about it really; other than that Otaku fans are also welcome, and there’s always the option of Anime screenings at some point in the future.

On an unrelated note, it’s now possible to buy a virtual english flag for your Xbox LIVE Avatar, and I find this quite distasteful, for a number of reasons.

At the weekend I went and bought Tomb Raider: Underworld and Kameo: Elements of Power on the understanding that they were both British games and only £5 each. So far Kameo has truly entranced me as a Fable-eqsue fairytale fantasy directly influenced by Lord of the Rings. Despite this I’ve been playing Tomb Raider the most, and from what I can report so far the platforming is devious yet natural. Most platforming games tend to be highly linear, and this isn’t always a bad thing, Tomb Raider gives the player a sense of exploration and pretends there are many different ways of accessing a certain ledge or rock crevice. It does this by moving around sequences of events that they can be completed in any order, or by allowing the player to deviate from their path in order to find a hidden artefact.

I like the artefacts, they are brilliant gameplay devices which have no value recognised by the game, yet I still strive to collect them. It displays a strange feature of society’ that I am willing to deviate onto a potentially dangerous track out of little more than curiosity and a desire to collect things. And because of the journey that was necessary to obtain them the artefacts are granted value by the player.

The combat system is atrociously bad, it basically consists of just holding down the left trigger to lock on to the nearest enemy and then the right trigger to shoot at them. As an extra addition you can jump or roll in order to escape enemy bullets/jaws, but that’s it. All that’s needed to make the experience worse is to bring in an automatic cover system and quicktime events for single movement kills. Ideally Lara Croft would act as a stealth character when attacking humans and only come out guns blazing when fighting off a hungry pack of tigers.

There’s some discussion to be had over Lara Croft’s representation of women. On the one side she’s a vacuous pin-up who only serves to objectify women and on the other side she’s a strong female main character who serves as a shining role model to young women everywhere. I think it’s somewhere between the two, although I’d err on the side of her being a good representation. Perhaps I’ll discuss it with a radical feminist when I next see one.
The last thing I have left to say on the matter is that Lara Croft is a uniquely British invention, and that such a character could have rarely originated in America.

Images are in 720p resolution, this is because it’s too much bother to change the Xbox’s resolution, plus I’m sacrificing resolution for lower distortion. 1080i requires deinterlacing which I don’t know how to carry out on screenshots.
Incidentally, this is the first post made from the shiny new WordPress version 3.
As an ending note: crocodiles can climb up walls. How? I’m not sure if they’re really crocodiles or things which look like crocodiles, like alligators.

I submitted this proposal to my school regarding what would happen if they go ahead with academy status. Either the school is taken over by a private corporation, or we save it by taking it into collective ownership, I’ve already had worries over the legality of children owning shares in a co-op, and I can’t deal with them at the moment because I’m busy being a Journalist in London, anyway here’s the proposal:

Under a co-operative every student in the school automatically would become employee shareholders. This means they own one share in the co-operative for as long as they remain at the school. The co-operative gives every student the right to propose an idea, and every idea can be voted upon every week or term in a school referendum; one share is equal to one vote and no student can own more than one share each.
If a decision is approved by more than 66% of the students it goes up to the second tier of governance; this is comprised of the parents, teachers and school staff. The role of the second tier is to filter out bad ideas and to propose amendments to sensible ideas. This second tier would own real shares in the co-operative (valued at £1 each) and would be able to vote at an Annual General Meeting twice a year. Shareholders also have the right to propose ideas to be voted on at the AGM.
The final tier of governance is the Senior Management Team who take care of the day-to-day running of the school. If possible the students would also be represented by an independent school student’s union, and a representative of that union would be a member of the Senior Management Team

That is what the democratic structure would look like, and this would be enshrined in the constitution of the co-operative.
I have written to the Co-operative Education Trust Scotland to ask for resources, and have also found two examples of academy projects backed by the Co-operative Group:

• Brownhills Maths and Computing College
• Plant Hill Arts College

A co-operative would allow the school to take control of it’s finances under the academy scheme without compromising the internal democracy of the school. It would also safeguard the school from unwanted corporate influence, for example a corporation would be free to make a profit off of the Academy and could mould the curriculum to serve their interests.

Lastly I should emphasise that although a co-operative academy would greatly benefit the students, academy status is not ideal for the whole school, and that the best position would be to remain as it is.

I’m being brief because I’ve got to go to bed soon to wake up early tomorrow for the commute, good night everyone!

I’ve just seen the latest piece of propaganda emanating from the Gaza aid flotilla shootings. And I’ve had the lyrics for Anatomy of your Enemy by Anti-Flag floating around for a while. They’re vaguely relevant to the situation, so I’ve re-published them here in a modified form:

First step: create the enemy. Sometimes this will be done for you. Enemies can easily be found sitting on things you want.

Second step: be sure the enemy you have chosen is nothing like you. Find obvious differences like race, language, religion, dietary habits or fashion.

Third step: once these differences are established continue to reinforce them with all disseminated information. Attempt to dehumanise your enemy.

Fourth step: have the media broadcast only the ruling party’s information. Remember, in times of conflict if your government represents the interests of capital all for-profit media will repeat it’s information.

Fifth step: eliminate opposition to the ruling party. Create an “us versus them” mentality. Leave no room for opinions in between. Anyone who does not support all actions of the ruling party should be considered a traitor.

Sixth step: use nationalistic and/or religious symbols and rhetoric to define all actions. Align your actions with the dominant deity and use it to give you legitimacy.

Seventh step: use vague concepts like ‘freedom’ or ‘justice’ to justify your actions. Then present the enemy as opposed to those concepts.

Eighth step: Create and atmosphere of fear, and instability and then offer the ruling party as the only solutions to restore order. Remembering always that the fear of the unknown is always the strongest fear.

That’s a one-way ticket to fascism right there.

Last tweet-up Graeme Hunter approached me with the suggestion of creating a sort of framework for gamers in Oxford. The idea behind it being that it’s akin to a tweet-up, and if it’s possible to gather people in one space to talk about social media, why could the same concept not be applied to video games? I’ve already dipped my toes into this kind of thing, here’s extracts of a proposal I submitted to some fellow students regarding setting up a ‘Gaming Society’:

We are an autonomous association of people who share an enthusiasm for gaming. We are not a clan. We meet regularly every week after school in a central location. Our aim is to introduce people to new games, we do this by allowing a platform for the free exchange of games amongst ourselves. We would also encourage members to talk on aspects of game design, their thoughts on some games and announce anything major happening in gaming news that week.
In playing together we’d have to consider 4-player multiplayer games: Halo 3, Modern Warfare 2, Left4Dead 2 and things on the Wii, and on the PS3, that would require someone bringing in their own game console. And if we have too many people I suggest a rota, after each death the controller is passed on, this way we can accommodate up to 8 people.
It would also be a framework for other events, matches which would take place, we would swap gamertags, Steam IDs and whatever Wii-users and PS3-users use to locate their friends.

The proposal was rejected on the succinct grounds that “people from our school are wankers”. It’s a legitimate concern that such a group would be overcome with divisions between fans of different consoles, games or genres which could tear it apart. Though most players are respectable there’s the odd few who always ruin the game for everyone. I’m hoping that this would be overcome by the mature adult nature of a group.

I used the term ‘autonomous association’ from having learned about Anarchy. There’s some similarity between the organisational structure of BarCamp unconferences and that of anarchist gatherings. They both have as little central leadership as possible and rely on decisions arising from participants of the group. The tweet-ups appear to rely on that structure as well. It does all seem brilliant, but I’m not sure how it would exist in the context of playing and talking about games. People are irrational and will no doubt surprise me by creating something unexpected.

I note that we do not want to be a clan. This means that we don’t play together as a necessity; we play together because it is a shared social experience. It also means we don’t rage on the ‘noobs’ those of the group who don’t play as well as the rest. We should teach and support them.

Next is developing the practicalities: we potentially have a room to occupy 8 to 10 gamers on desks, we don’t know how much that would cost to rent for two hours. Our equipment capacity is unknown as it relies on members to bring in their own consoles plus spare controllers for those who don’t have any. This is something we’d have to work out in the first meeting. The minimum necessary equipment for a match of Halo 3 multiplayer is 2 Xboxes, 8 controllers (at least 4 of which are wireless), 2 screens, an ethernet cable and of course two copies of Halo 3. I’m unaware of the capabilities of the PS3 or the Wii so if there’s possibly a setup for as many gamers which uses less equipment let me know.

Also Graeme’s written a good explanation of communication theory, which will probably come in handy.

Yesterday I finished playing Perfect Dark Zero.

And I liked it, especially when I go to meet Carrington the fat Scottish man who’d been organising/narrating all the operations so far.
I was really surprised when Chandra betrays Joanna, or at least I think she betrays her…
It had just the right amount of Cyberpunk style, bizarre alien magic and retro British feel. Now that it’s finished I’ve got a feeling as if I’ve missed out on something, like it ended too early. After this last exam I can always play the original Perfect Dark.

The first episode of Doctor Who: the Adventure games is meant to launch this Saturday. However it was made available for download yesterday from the BBC site. Without spending too much time working out why it was released early I seized the opportunity to download and play it. So here are my first impressions:
Unlike other adventure games exploration is not encouraged or rewarded, the rules of the game world force the player down a linear path. This linearity isn’t necessarily a bad thing in all cases, for one it keeps the game designer’s job simple and cordons off any distraction which would stray off from the main story. The player has simple goals and simple purposes, and the game is incredibly story-driven, it’s pretty much presented to the player without the requirement that they participate in it themselves. There are some places where this is proven wrong, for example the player is allowed to pick which lines of dialogue to say during some conversations, this is commonplace in most adventure games, but the crucial difference is that what dialogue is said makes a difference as to what the outcome of the conversation is; in this game the outcome of the conversation is always fixed.
The graphics look strange with a very low level of anti-aliasing.

There was one aspect of the TV series which I disliked: the sonic screwdriver. Every time the doctor was held in a tight spot he would whip out his screwdriver, point it at something and whatever he wanted would just magically happen. It’s basically a cop-out the writers use when they want a solution to a tricky situation. I dislike it because it seems too easy to simply waggle a light stick at something and solve a problem, the doctor is meant to show ingenuity and genius in solving problems. Unfortunately reliance on the screwdriver is translated over into the game, when he wants to open a locked door or terminal he goes open inventory>use screwdriver on door/terminal. It’s too easy.

But all the downsides of gameplay and whether or not it’s ‘fun’ can be overlooked by the fact that it retains core elements of the Dr. Who series, such as the dialogue, the story and the setting. These things mean that although it may not be the best game it certainly features a good story.

Looking back at it now it makes me wonder who the game was aimed at, it could have been designed for children, which is quite likely. Or it could have been designed for people who don’t normally play video games, which is equally likely given the conventions of games it breaks to emphasise the story.

Over the holidays someone borrowed Forza Motorsport 3, and I’ve been playing it in spurts, doing the occasional race. I’m not a big fan of many racing games so they all seem the same: GRID, Blur, Split/Second, PGR 4, Need for Speed: Shift, Gran Turismo. All apart from Burnout Paradise, which I actually own and have clocked nearly 2 days playing, I see it as unique. What delighted me about Forza was the mode where the player can pause the race and take a photo, the scene is rendered on the Xbox 360 and can be uploaded to Forza’s own website, these renders are surprisingly good quality for a games console which costs little over £140. The problem with them is that they’re compressed as low-resolution JPEGs and have the Forza logo pasted on the bottom left hand side as a watermark. Instead I captured them directly from the game:

I’ve come up with a bizarre theory that the more streamlined a car looks, the harder it will be to drive in-game. I don’t know why this is, perhaps it’s because I’ve been forced to play with this awful yellow thing for too long.

In other news I went to the MCM Expo on Saturday, more on that later.

Yesterday the projector we have stopped working, this is because it’s summer and it had gotten hot, and the thermal switch popped out. The thermal switch stops the bulb from lighting and blinks with a yellow orange error message that something’s gone wrong. The projector is a Sanyo PLV-Z5, and in order to open it up you need a medium-sized cross-head screwdriver. Turn anti-clockwise to unscrew the screws. On the bottom of the projector there are three screws.

And on the back panel there are another three.



Gently pull the top of the projector case off and it’ll expose the innards. I’ve indicated the switch with the same red arrow.

Press firmly on the switch, it should click back in place.

Then close the lid, screw all the screws back in and you’re finished.

Note that I haven’t actually powered it back on yet to see if it now works.

Over time I’ve been exploring the ideas of media ownership and how propaganda can be used for good. It’s raised serious questions regarding freedom of speech which I’ve tried but not entirely succeeded to dismiss. And so I present some more solutions to this problem.
A disadvantage of a media industry influenced by capitalism is that it becomes a tool of the free market. A disadvantage of state ownership of media is that it becomes a tool of the state and we end up with the same regrettable situation as if media were owned by large corporations: the artist loses and free expression is supressed.
In my last post I hinted at

Some anarchic system where anyone could create and consume media and the role of the state would be only to facilitate this, by providing accommodation, food and the materials needed to create media.

Since then I’ve had the opportunity to go over that idea with an anarchist and ask them exactly what they thought would be an ideal situation. They replied that one must look at the situation in a broader context, to imagine a society free of the influences of both capital and state, and within that society artists would be truly free. And I suppose they’re right in that anarchy is like a step after communism; after the influence of capital is gone then the influence of the state can also be slowly rolled back.

And my second solution was obvious, pointed out to me by Andrew Tindall after I asked him whether it was wise to nationalise everything including the media. He replied “well, we’ve got the Beeb”. The BBC could quite easily expand as one big platform which allocates funding according to it’s public service remit.

While researching I came across this fact, which I feel might come in handy later: it’s estimated that Fox News alone gathered 566.9 Million dollars in advertising revenue in 2008. Which is a lot of money.
I feel there should be a picture of some kind accompanying this article, so here’s a totally unrelated screenshot of a rabbit in a field. It’s from Lugaru HD:

I’m learning a lot by looking at ways the ‘creative industries’ could be structured, but it’s wearing me out so this is probably the last you’ll hear about it for a while.

I read recently on the Bungie.net weekly update that they were slowly getting rid of the Halo: Reach multiplayer beta screenshots. I don’t have many but I don’t want them to disappear, so here they are in a gallery:

I realise they were all taken from Powerhouse, I don’t know why I didn’t take screenshots on other maps, perhaps it’s just that Powerhouse looks the most like Halo 3. The fortified bunkers and open plains looked similar to High Ground, I felt happy to play in that familiar environment. You’ll also notice that I managed a mid-air assasination, not using a jetpack, just waiting until someone stepped off a ledge then falling down after them, they were dead before they hit the ground. Also just looking at the graphics, I’m worried that each subsequent iteration of Halo has gotten more gritty and realistic, moving towards a style more in tune with big-budget games like Modern Warfare 2 or Battlefield Bad Company 2, and I don’t like that. I want a return to the clear bright-coloured style of Halo 2.
The gameplay’s fun, if not addictive. Someone from my school said that jetpacks would make the game unbalanced, it didn’t, in fact it made the game better by introducing an element of randomness which meant you could never really determine the outcome of every confrontation.

I’ve also been playing Aquaria, little by little exploring the great depths of the ocean and battling fierce creatures while the story slowly drags you forward with a small hint of intrigue at every turn. I have to say it’s brilliant, through the introduction scene there’s a flashback of a city sinking into the water, and then later on we start discovering ancient ruins of that city and it goads the player on to explore further. The gameplay concept of using songs to cast spells is quite neat, far from being a gimmick it forces you to learn certain spells so that you can cast them quickly in the heat of battle. There’s no question of just tapping Y to launch a shield spell, you have to learn the sequence of notes to play and that introduces a new feeling of interactivity with the character.

I’ll be at the MCM Expo in London on Saturday and there’s a high probability I’ll be tweeting from the event, if not I’ll take my notepad. Before I go, here’s another feature of Halo Reach.

On Thursday I went to #Voicetweetup and got the chance to handle an iPad, imported from America by Amanda Clark. It’s by all means an impressive device, and I admire it’s aesthetic simplicity, yet overall it’s a flawed product. The reason I see it as flawed is that it’s not open. To help you understand what I mean by this I’ll introduce my new portable music player: the Sansa Clip+. It allows the user to see what codec the audio file they’re playing is encoded with, it’s possible to install RockBox on it, it allows the user to browse by folder structure instead of just by Artist or Album and it supports Ogg Vorbis files. These are all features which give the user as much freedom as possible with the device. And that’s why I dislike the iPad, because it restricts the user’s freedom. The user is discouraged from doing anything creative with it. Soldering shut the edges gives a satisfying finished feel, but it makes it hard to modify, upgrade, fix or change the battery of the iPad. I searched for a design philosophy which encouraged this freedom and found none, I even asked my DT teacher and they had no answer, so I’ll define it myself.

• Products should give the user the right to open, modify and otherwise tinker with them. This allows users to take real ownership of their product by personalising it.
• Aesthetics should always be subordinate to functionality. Art is a distraction. Ignore it. Truly functional products have their own beauty.
• The cost of products should take into account a need for them to be accessible to all.

My idea that the user should be presented with choice runs against a very attractive idea that simplicity is a necessary component of good design. This can be addressed by including features which are both useful and relevant (for example: adding a camera to a mobile phone is an irrelevant feature). The point about cost stems from a quasi-socialist idea that technology should be accessible to the masses. I am repulsed when seeing the unashamed elitism promoted by Apple. One could say that they are a “triumph of marketing over engineering”, encouraging an exclusive and fashionable lifestyle to associate with their products. It’s not enough to make high-quality products if they can only be used by a selective few.

7 Reasons the Conservatives will totally ruin everything that is good and decent about Britain:

1. They have an obsession with privatisation and left to their own devices will sell off as many public services as possible to private companies. That means all your schools, hospitals, fire stations, prisons, basically anything they can find which can make a profit will be sold.

2. As a complement to point 1, the base of their entire ‘new right’ ideology is an unswerving loyalty to the free market. They only care about the richest 5% of society and will happily screw the other 95% in order to make that 5% happy. Or to put it more simply ‘take from the poor and give to the rich’.

3. Most of their party is still comprised of old borderline racists and homophobes. Living proof of this are Chris Grayling, Philip Lardner, Philippa Stroud and many others. The tory party introduced Section 28 when they were in power and voted against equal rights for women in the European Parliament. Even the founder of the Tory LGBT rights campaign stepped down after realising that the tories were still largely comprised of homophobic old nutters.

4. They supported both the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan with great enthusiasm. It’s nothing more than brazen imperialism disguised as ‘humanitarian intervention’. The patriotic bollocks about ‘supporting our troops’ is nothing less than a shameful disgrace and a lie used to keep them dying while enforcing the oppression of the people of Afghanistan. And they want to renew Britain’s defunct nuclear weapons system which will cost us £76 billion over the next 25 years if it’s approved (and that figure is only the lowest estimate).

5. They want to water down the Human Rights Act 1998 and replace it with a British Bill of Rights. I wouldn’t be so against this in theory if it weren’t for their obvious contempt for fundamental human rights.

6. Their party simply refuses to take climate change seriously. Oh they say that they care, but really the only solutions they propose are market-oriented (see point 2) greenwash. They refuse to dent the profits of the large oil companies, so they will just carry on allowing them to exploit the planet without making so much as a whimper while the ecosystem burns.

7. According to them ‘it’s not racist to talk about immigration’. Which it isn’t until you start reeling out shitty tabloid lies about ‘polish people getting all the benefits while hard-working white middle class families get nothing’. It all sounds pretty fucking racist to me, including their paranoid ramblings about how Britain needs to ‘retain it’s identity’.

I’m too lazy to get all the links and sources for that, go look it up yourself. And if it’s not too late, please just don’t vote Conservative. Also have you seen the Sun front page today? I know it’ll come in handy later on when I have to analyse it in Media Studies.