Random Variable

Wednesday will see a good turnout from a broad cross-section of the Left (from liberals to hard-lefts). Small, but isolated damage to property. Some occupations. Heavy police presence will contain everything else.

No thousands-strong armies of disaffected youth. Not enough time has elapsed in the financial crisis for anarchist social movements to scale their size. British groups in the Left are historically unable to come together, due to the dominance of some major sectarian organisations. Without the emergence of actors than can broker or arbitrate between various groups, you will not see a larger movement. Put People First might be one such actor, but not right now.

Here’s Infinite Thought:

As Don Letts put it: ‘They used to say don’t trust anyone over 30, but today I don’t trust anyone under 30 – let’s be blunt: today’s young are spoilt motherfuckers.’ Reared on warmed-over irony, children’s cartoons, cynicism and celebrity medja, those puffed up bastards who work in the city and offices all over London are exactly the kind of person who’d think: ‘wouldn’t it be hilarious if Boris Johnson was mayor, huh huh huh’. You fucking idiots! My generation can go to hell, spawn of Thatcher and Hobbes, with their fucking egotism and ‘what’s in it for me?’ attitude, trained like Pavlov’s puppies to respond only to money and to, like, stuff. Wankers, the lot of them.

Don’t take out your anger on us, at least not all of us. The views of people I know amongst the under thirties were (in descending order or popularity):

1. Why would anyone vote for Boris. Vote Ken. Tell everyone you know to vote for Ken. Shout it from the fucking rooftops.
2. We are libertarians. Johnson rox! Lolz. (approx 10%).
3. What election? (approx 20%).

That’s still 70% of us who are not wankers.

I think it was the bread and peace model that showed itself at work here. If economic growth falls below a certain point, then the incumbent loses. At the end of the day, it came down to issues. People want lower taxation and Boris will deliver it, at the risk of the collapse of public transport.

Voters are sooo predictable.

But perhaps Ken knew which group would destroy him:

… London’s financial centre was this small inward-looking club of old white men who’d all been to the same schools; [Thatcher] destroyed them, they were swept aside by international capital, which is much more dynamic, much more progressive, less racist and sexist (I mean, it’s not wonderful in there, but compared with the old lot …); and the new people were quite prepared to engage with me, whereas that lot would refuse to meet. Now they recognise that mayors can deliver things, and they rely on me to try and get the flow of office development and new housing.

And now the old club fought back.

And with that, I announce the launch of Boris Watch, keeping an eye on the mayoral trainwreck. I need co-authors for this to get off the ground. Anyone want to volunteer?

Right, This blog is now officially designated a “green blog” from now on.
In any case, you should definitely be reading “Life is complicated yet beautifully simple” – the work of one very intelligent student medic member of the Green Party I met during the fun LondonFed social last week who wishes to remain anonymous for now. Also Natalie Bennett’s Philobiblon who does a hell of a lot of work for the party.

They’re also the joint number 2 green party bloggers. So there.

This week, I attended two programming fan sessions.

The first was for the London Ruby Users Group on Wednesday.

Presenting was Tiest Vilee’s summary of the recent RubyConf in October. Having not used Ruby at all, a lot of it was over my head, but what I did get out of it was that a load of very cool, interesting people are into it.

And with that, I purchased Agile Web Development with Rails (30% off, woohoo) at the London Perl Workshop today, probably to the chagrin of a lot of people there because they don’t believe in web frameworks, apparently.

Jon Stewart will be in the UK on Decmber 11th to promote his book “America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction“.

Also, there’s a celebration of blasphemy at the Unitarian Headquarters on November 30th. I’m hoping Stewart “vomiting into the gaping anus of Christ” Lee will be there.