Ed Milliband

The current leader of the Labour party is growing on me.

I know that this is a dangerous thing to allow to happen, and that all mainstream politicians are probably in fact callous moneygrubbing bastards. But I don't seem to be able to help it.

I mean, he's definitely developing a knack for calling Call Me Dave out on his crap. That's probably not a hard thing to do. But still, he's good at it.
From watching PMQs today, it hit me that Eddie M is not actually a horrible public speaker. At least not all the time. He's certainly got the hang of making his points heard in the Commons, and at least today he managed to do so without resorting to pointless populist soundbites. So, he could be much worse.

The main thing, though, is how extravagantly underestimated Milliband is. The standard reaction to his existence tends to be "oh, him, he's useless", or "I definitely couldn't see him as PM". But this seems to be for no reason other than his geeky face and nasally voice. Do we really think, as a voting population, that such things are a crystal-clear window into a person's soul?

The almost-unanimous rejection of any notion that Milliband may, actually, be a half-decent politician seems to me to be a symptom of just how shallow and populist our politics has become. The 2010 election pissed me off massively, just from the fact that Gordon Brown's startlingly evident intelligence and vastly superior economic experience seemed to be swept aside by the fact that Cameron was so much prettier than him. I mean, yeah, I know that's not the only reason Labour lost, and there were some genuinely decent reasons for voting Conservative. But if you think about it rationally for a second, there's sort of absolutely no reason that TV debates would be a good judge of who would make the best Prime Minister. Public speaking can't be more than 15% of the head of government's job. The rest is trying to work out coherent and effective ways of making the country better, something, incidentally, that Call Me Dave seems to be incredibly bad at.

So, yeah. I wouldn't necessarily vote for Milliband, but I think he's worth a lot more than what the media has decided.

Six Things on the Internet Which Have Annoyed Me Recently.

I have a bad habit of obsessively reading things that piss me off. I have no idea why. So yes, my experience with most of the following is entirely my fault. Despite this, however, I think I have a genuine reason to find this stuff irksome enough to blog about. So please enjoy this list of internet-based annoyances I wasn't able to stretch out into a blog post each.

1. The Facebook like-page-thing which says "like if you're a 90s kid without a kid"
This is an exception to the rule above, as it appeared on my Facebook news feed without any deliberate chasing down from me. But yeah. The point of this page is to celebrate the fact that there are 13-22 year olds (yes, I can math) in the world who have not yet begotten children, because, according to the creator, "there aren't many of us left!!". If fact, all the creator of this page is doing is getting a cheap sense of superiority by pointing out the fact that some people have made a mistake he somehow hasn't, and encouraging others to do the same. 
I'm going to blow this wildly out of proportion and use this as a platform for addressing the overarching attitude people seem to have towards teen pregnancy. The general idea is that teenagers with kids are automatically sluttier, less classy, less intelligent, and generally more worthless individuals than the rest of us. Bollocks. Most of the people I have heard bitching about teen parents are themselves a) teenagers and b) not virgins. Clearly and obviously, the only difference between the bitchers and bitchees here is that the bitchees have had a stroke of misfortune the bitchers have escaped (malfunctioning contraception, drunk sex at the wrong time in a menstrual cycle, etc.). The adults who go on about teen pregnancy also have no right to, well, go on about teen pregnancy, because it's precisely none of their business. Getting pregnant as a teenager in no way makes in necessary that the pregnant girl sleeps around, and even if she did, it's still none of your business. You don't get to judge people over how much sex they have, especially when doing so (as it surely must for some of these Daily Mail types) requires self-induced amnesia towards your own teenage years.
I especially hate that teen parenting is another incident in which girls/women are given infinitely more crap for the state of their sex lives than men. Since the boy/man doesn't have to have the foetus growing inside of him, he can take off, or at least walk down streets with strangers having no idea that he's impregnated anyone. Women aren't so lucky. They have the physical symptoms of their misfortune, which open them up to snide glances and comments from anyone in the same few square feet as them.
ANYWAY.

2. People going on about grammar in an unhelpful and boring way
So Youtube comment arguments are a thing which sucks. I think that's essentially a truth universally acknowledged. But it gets infinitely worse when people detract from the topic at hand to bitch at each other over their grammar or spelling.
Obviously the worst instances of this are when people bring in useless, invaluable grammatical rules like split infinitives being bad and how you can't end sentences with prepositions (which will pretty soon earn them a blog post of their own). But even when people do make genuine grammatical errors, like misuse of apostrophes or using the wrong there/their/they're, it's just not a valuable thing to talk about. You understood what they meant. They probably know what the rule is, it just slipped their mind in this particular instance. And most importantly, it does NOT, by any stretch of the imagination, automatically make you more clever them them. All it means is they've spent less time/attention in English lessons than you.
There is a certain group of people on the internet (and in, like, the real world) who seem to think that knowledge of spelling and grammar is the infallible means by which we rank the value of each member of our species. To those people, I say, "fuck off".

3. The perpetuation of "people cut themselves/act depressed for attention" myth
This is self explanatory (or SHOULD BE, if you've read my blog posts on the matter, as all humans must do). But, seriously. Jeeeeesus Christ.

4. Art criticism
I know that film or book reviews are by no means the sole domain of the internet, but my only real experience of them is through sites like RottenTomatoes and Goodreads, so I'm going to gripe about them here. Essentially, one's reaction to an artwork is personal and largely emotional, and trying to rationalise such reactions into some kind of objective, prescriptive truth is pointless and annoys me.
I mean, I get that there is an objective standard relating to the quality of art. I get that, technically, the Mona Lisa is probably the highest-quality painting that still survives. But I will never rate the Mona Lisa above the work of Van Gogh, because for me, the ML is just a painting of a lady, and Van Gogh's Starry Night is a moving and heartbreaking testament to the beauty of the universe. And that's okay.
The problem I have with art criticism is that the artsy reasons for crediting/discrediting something often have very little bearing on whether people will actually enjoy them. So what if the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel contains it's fair share of clichés. So what if the idea of children fighting to death in an arena under a totalitarian government did not leap fresh and unprecedented from Suzanne Collins' brain. That does not stop the Marigold Hotel from being funny and moving and wise and a joy to watch, or the Hunger Games from being thrilling and edgy and sad and joyful and immensely readable.
If art criticism exists, it must be to give people an idea of whether they would like a film/book/painting/whatever were they to experience it. It cannot be for the sake of satisfying the egos of pretentious irritating farts who like the feeling of importance writing gives them but don't have the capacity to write about anything interesting. Right now, the way such criticism works is great for the latter role, but completely fails to fill the first.

5. The Sun website
Because it vastly reduces the chance of the Sun stopping existing.
 
6. The BBC News comments section
One thing I will never, ever understand is why, when the BBC were deciding how to put together an internet based news service, they thought: "Hey, do you know what would be a nifty idea? Why don't we open certain articles up for being commented on by any member of the public, no matter how half-baked or uninformed their opinion is!"
My issue is this. I'm fine with people sharing there opinions, even when their opinions annoy me. But the internet is already a bountiful hunting ground for opinion-sharing opportunities, as proven by this blog. As well as blogs, there's twitter, youtube comments, Guardian opinion piece comments, etc. All these places are good arenas for open commenting for their own varied reasons. But BBC News is a place for fact. It's where nearly all British people, and many non-British people, go to try and understand what's occurring in the world each day. And having a page full of the random musing and reckonings of anyone who feels remotely strongly about an issue distorts that completely, particularly as the type of people who comment on BBC News tends to be the type of person who makes up their opinion before registering any but the most basic facts. BBC News comments have largely become a mincing ground for angry uninformed right-wing types, whose proximity to each others' views makes them think that more people agree with them then actually do. What I mean by that, is that if someone writes something like "poor people should lose their child benefit to stop them breeding because everyone born into a poor family is destined to be a scrounger", and it gets "voted up" 30 times, then the people reading the comment will think "wow, this must be a really popular view". In fact, it just means that 31 people hold that view, which given the number of people with access to the internet, isn't remotely surprising.
Also, I just don't really care about these people's stupid opinions, and don't see why anyone else would. I realise that probably makes me sound like a bastard, but I just can't comprehend how a substantial percentage of the people who read BBC News could possibly think: "well this is an interesting story, I wonder what a load of random people with keyboards with absolutely no qualifying connection to the issue have to say about this".


Aaaand that's all the bitching I'm going to do for today. I hope you had fun.