Political advertising and subversive humour
10
June
I’ve never liked negative campaigns. The demonisation of the opponents, the personal attacks, etc. I prefer to see debates on the issues, genuine engagement, open discussion. Of course, that’s not to say that negative posters, etc don’t have a place, but the over-emphasis of them in recent years has, to my mind, been part of the degradation of political discourse that has lead to the widespread apathy that we’re all aware of.
Sometimes, however, there’s a point to it all. Sometimes, it’s nasty, vituperative and yet still downright funny. In this case, Iain Dale reads B3ta, so poor dial up users like me can get the good bits.
There’s another good one, found by the reboubtable Jack Thomas, but it’s a rather large animation that doesn’t compress well, it’s definately worth a look though. There is, however, a slightly more serious point to be made here, the excellent Liberal Review takes on board this (actually reasonably good) advice on rebuilding your local Party association on Conservative Home and finds a point of disagreement:
Vote Blue, Glow Green
Like I’ve said before, my utter horror at the idea of Nuclear Power has lessened into a “not sold, we’ve got to cut emmissions somehow but…” perspective, but when Cameron is trying to sell his environmentalism, not sure promoting visits to Nuclear power plants is the best way to build up the party membership…
All the above images are small versions, Blogger uploaded larger versions (click on them), or follow the links to the originals…
- Mat
1. Anonymous | June 10th, 2006 at 10:57 pm
You may well be interested to know that Germany currently produces more energy from windfarms than we do from Nuclear power. Out potential wind energy in this country is amazing.
Don’t believe the Nuclear lies.
Posted by Jack Thomas
2. Anonymous | June 11th, 2006 at 12:24 am
Oh, I’m very much sold on wind farms; I live in a predominantly rural, hilly area, I don’t ‘get’ the eyesore objection at all. Admittedly, population density is higher than Germany/US, but I still think we should use them.
But thx, that I didn’t actually know.
Posted by MatGB
3. Anonymous | June 14th, 2006 at 9:27 pm
One of the problems with wind (most renewables in fact) is that they cannot produce continuous power. Go into Kernow and you will often see the wind farms not turning. So a backup is needed, in Germany quite a bit of this comes from the abundant atomic power produced in France which they can buy in when there is not enough wind to meet demand, so their power is still without any need for burning fossil fuels.
Posted by chris
4. Anonymous | June 14th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
Oh, agree we’ll always need some static reliables. But capacitors and other storage facilities can do well. Modern solar cells should be everywhere by now, seen any recently? Throw some decent tax breaks at the manufacturers and installers, cut stamp duty on sales of houses with them, they’d be installed all over the place pretty smartish.
Wave power, wind power, solar. We use virtually none. That’s stupid. Thing with nukes is that making the plant and transporting the uranium uses up oil as well. Plus, if we’re building them, can we really criticise Iran?
Posted by MatGB