The Blood is The Life 14-02-2012

[miss_s_b]

• Those new Liberal Democrat groups explained
  Yet another splinter group was launched yesterday. I fully agree with Jonathan Calder about the lot of them.
  (tags: )
  
  
• TARDIS Eruditorum: A Psychochronography in Blue: You Were Expecting Someone Else 8 (Alan Moore's Doctor Who Work)
  I must confess to not having read Moore's Who stuff, and that my first thought on clicking through to this was "if he only did 28 pages, did he have time to fit the rapes in?" Not that I think the much vaunted Moore is fond of some troubling tropes or anything...
  (tags: )
  
  
• Literary Characters, as drawn by a police sketch computer programme
  Rochester is eerily like my imagined picture. Sam Spade is just ODD, but that's probably because he looks nothing like Bogey. The scariest one is Emma Bovary, who looks like a scowling Anna Ford
  (tags: photos books )
  
  
• Valentine Dilemma
  This is so familiar.
  (tags: funny )
  
  

Comments

[andrewducker]

I thought splinter groups were groups which splintered off and were separate from the original group. These are all subgroups inside of the party, aren't they?

[matgb]

Exactly, a faction isn't a splinter, there's no talk of any splits. Given that debate within the party is currently dominated by a group that insists on qualifying its liberalism and rejecting elements of liberalism, that there are people setting up mainstream groups to add to the debate and ensure it's not just the SLF makign the running is a good thing. For a start, membership of the two more fringe groups is a good method of spotting the people for whom pinches of salt are needed at times.

Although for one of those groups a tablespoon or two might be more appropriate.

[miss_s_b]

It's bad enough having this sort of pedantry in the house, now I've got it on my DW too...

[andrewhickey.info]

I'd agree, except that the two new groups (I don't have the same problem with the SLF or Liberal Vision, though I do have problems with both groups for other reasons) seem to exist not for any positive reason, but for purely negative definitional reasons - "We're not *those* bastards over there!"

I have friends in both new organisations, but I don't think either of them will do much more than make things more fractious, rather than less. We need more debate within the party, but what I don't think we need is for people to take sides and sign up to policies based on group membership rather than the policies' individual merits.

I also think that what we really need right now isn't a group cosying up to Labour or the Tories, or trying to define some other group within the party as heretics, but a debate that will allow us to find a common core set of principles that the majority of the party can agree on. I agree with Jonathan Calder that we've left the debates about political philosophy too long, and allowed ourselves to have a load of policies that are all good things but don't really have an organising principle.

I think that forming factions within the party leads to creation of artificial distinctions rather than real ones. For example, the SLF, for all that they portray themselves as Fabians-lite, contain a lot of supporters of proper 'economic liberal' ideas like Land Value Tax and Citizens' Income.

I just think we're a small enough party, and one that is basically united enough on most of the important stuff, that we don't need to fall victim to factionalism.

[miss_s_b]

Note to self: f-list is full of pedants. Word things more carefully.

[andrewducker]

It's why you love us :->

[drunkwriter]

I think the only Moore Who I've read is Business as Usual, which was reprinted as a filler when DWM had a strip delivered late in the early 90s. It's a jolly little runaround, and as such it totally fills its original purpose as a back-up strip - a point I think the critic could have acknowledged.

On the whole, though, I think Alan Moore is a colossal pillock. A colossal pillock who's produced some good work, granted, but I've yet to read anything he's said beyond his work that didn't make him seem supremely thumpable.

In fact, when I put forward my general view that creators talking about their work can only devalue their creations, he's pretty much my exhibit A.

[davegodfrey]

The story he tells about why he worships the 2nd Century Roman glove puppet Glycon is quite good. Other than that, I haven't heard him say much.

[bagpuss]

He got a slot at the Uncaged Monkey show I went to at the Hammersmith Apollo before Christmas and while I am glad to of seen him I will say his was the most surreal but least interesting section of the show

[davegodfrey]

I saw him do something similar on the 9 Lessons And Carols for Godless People. He was also on the edition of Today that Stewart Lee edited, although they wouldn't put him on Thought For The Day :(