Today, on a popular and successful personal networking site, I made the decidedly uncontroversial and eminently justifiable claim that it would be possible for any human being to live a perfectly good moral life simply by doing the opposite of everything the Daily Mail suggests. Whilst the idea of not doing what a shit newspaper tells you may seem pretty easy to achieve (most sensible people tacitly do it all the time) the actual act of positively contradicting this particular shit newspaper is a step that may produce some interesting results. So, starting today and continuing into the forseeable future, I will do one thing every day that directly challenges the gist of Daily Mail story or article published on the given day. The first was easy enough...
As I write this, polling stations up and down the country are filling up with sad, grey bits of paper. If the opinion polls have it right, roughly sixty per cent of these sad, grey, bits of paper will have sad, grey 'X's next to the word 'No'. The Daily Mail this morning ran a headline urging us all to vote against a small but, I strongly believe, necessary step towards political reform. It is too late for me to convert anyone to the 'Yes' camp, and sadly it looks like the small amount of campaigning I have done will be in vain so I won't bore anyone with my reasons for voting in favour of AV. Instead I would like to thank the Daily Mail for inspiring me to write this blog. I see this post as the short introduction to what could easily become a lengthy and attritional operation. My first anti-Mail act - the act of voting 'Yes' in today's referendum - will, I fear, be ultimately unsuccessful. But even if everything that follows is equally unsuccessful, it may prove slightly entertaining and will almost certainly make me feel better about myself as an agent of moral reasoning.
If you are wondering where Stalin fits in with all this: he doesn't, other than the fact that I borrowed a book from the library called The Art of Hand Shadows, thinking that I could explain the nuances of AV using shadow puppetry. Yes, it was a stupid idea. It turns out that making hand shadows of former world leaders is easy. Making them talk intelligently about the drawbacks of the first-past-the-post system is damn near impossible. David Ben-Gurion is riding a camel across my bedroom wall, oblivious to the need for fairer votes. No wonder we're going to lose tonight.
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