Maybe the voters would be better informed and more tolerant under a more open and accountable system. Maybe the mess created by a broken democracy encourages them to hold such unprogressive views.
The FPTP system causes positive feedback. The complexion of Parliament changes just as we should expect it to under a positive-feedback dominated system - occasional big swings, with gradually reducing majorities between. The alternative on offer is AV, which should suffer somewhat less from positive feedback. Therefore, vote for it.
His "point" is to have a dig at me, 'cos I live near Chelmsford and think that AV would be a minor improvement over FPTP.
Mark, have you got a link for that Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron letter please? HRW's reply would be appreciated, too, if/when you get one.
Alfred, follow Laura's Youtube link. The English had it coming to them.
Somebody, you are glorious in your isolation from the manipulation of public opinion. Others, including myself, are more easily swayed. Hari's opinion carries far more weight than mine, but I have sympathy for him, having made much the same mistake myself some weeks ago, when I briefly supported the Libya "no-fly zone", a stance of which I'm now deeply ashamed.
Evgueni, I agree that the creation of "credible, mainstream, agenda-setting news outlets" would be of immense value, as would the extension of the franchise. I just don't see how to encourage this. They both involve the overcoming of a threshold, and the threshold has become unachievably high. By contrast, local community schemes and local currencies can develop piecemeal, one contributor at a time. Could the local approach assist your larger schemes? Maybe the blogsphere sits midway between the two, awaiting some catalysing event or "critical density" that pulls the threads into a coherent whole...
How did Switzerland get to where it is?
I strongly agree with this. However, I urge you to write "liquid fuel" rather than "energy" in this context in future. There's loads of available energy. The current wars are about fuel in liquid form. When "oil" is mentioned, people supportive of our current lifestyle leap to its defence with proclamations about "electric cars" - always their personal involvement, cars, cars, cars. During the harvest, the moderately sized combine-harvesters used in the UK burn forty litres of liquid fuel per hour. The grain is transported and dried using oil. Fresh fruit and other perishable goods are transported by air-freight. For every calorie in our food, ten calories worth of oil are burnt. And then there's the military, to take and hold the oil fields... These things cannot be run effectively on batteries!
Hey, good score with those KEFs! I found a magnificent librarian's desk made of solid oak. It has five drawers and twelve card-index tray drawers, all constructed with beautiful dovetailing. I attached wheels to it and pushed it home.
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