Miss SB's Very Prestigious and Entirely Serious Blog Awards - Category Six: Sexiest Blogger

Here is a list of all the blogs which have been nominated for sexiest blogger:

The Atrocity Exhibition
davegodfrey
djm4
helenic
matgb
minnesatva
nanila
Penny Red
strfvr
Wil Wheaton

Please take a look at them, assess them, and then vote. The vote is anonymous, and you don't have to have a Dreamwidth account to vote - instructions on logging in with open ID are here. Do feel free to pimp it out to your readers if you've been nominated. The poll will remain open for a week, and the next category will go up tomorrow.

Poll #4056 Sexiest Blogger

This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 40

Which blog should win the award for sexiest blogger?

The Atrocity Exhibition
1 (2.5%)

Dave Godfrey
3 (7.5%)

David Matthewman/djm4
1 (2.5%)

Helenic
3 (7.5%)

MatGB
3 (7.5%)

Minnesatva/Holly Mathies
3 (7.5%)

Nanila
22 (55.0%)

Penny Red/Laurie Penny
1 (2.5%)

Strfvr
1 (2.5%)

Wil Wheaton
2 (5.0%)

Other Categories:

• Best Political Blog - 11 hours left to vote! The poll will be closed at midnight. Debi Linton is currently leading Millennium Elephant by 2 votes.
• Best Fandom Blog - 1 day left to vote
• Best Feminist Blog - 4 days left to vote
• Wittiest Blog - 5 days left to vote
• Prettiest blog - 6 days left to vote

---

This blog is proudly sponsored by

Benefit "Fraud" and Tax "Evasion"

If ever there was any doubt about the fact that the Golden Rule* is still fully in force, compare the media coverage of and political rhetoric about the two crimes I mention in the title of this post. Benefit Fraudsters are scum; feckless, worthless criminals; living immorally off our taxes. Tax Evaders are barely mentioned at all, and when they are they are mentioned in the kind of force-of-nature way that rapists are mentioned in victim-blaming discourse...

Very few people pay attention to the fact that tax evasion costs us fifteen times as much as benefit fraud. Add tax avoidance into the mix, and it costs £95billion, next to the relative peanuts of £1.5billion for benefit fraud. This gets ignored because the rich and powerful, the owners of the newspapers and the politicians who rail the hardest against IPSA, don't want us to know that the stuff they do as a matter of course, that they feel entitled to do, costs the tax payer more than an order of magnitude more than benefit fraud.

Very few people pay attention to the fact that most benefit fraudsters do so to survive, because benefits are not enough to live on. Very few of the people who rant about benefit fraudsters have ever actually tried to live on benefits. There is an especial hypocrisy when a lot of those self-same people go on about poor pensioners, when pensioners get almost double Jobseeker's allowance (note: I am not saying that pensioners are living in clover; they are not. Just pointing out that they get more peanuts than those on JSA).

Even the terminology is damning: benefit FRAUD is a crime, it's despicable, it's evil. Tax EVASION... well, it's something we'd all do if we could, right? It's stepping out of the path of something nasty. Much as I hate to be on the same side as LabourLost and the TUC and lining up against my own party, I have to say that...

If this was really about saving money for the exchequer, we would be chasing the tax avoiders and the tax evaders 63 and a third times as hard as the benefit fraudsters, and they would feature in the news reports 63 and a third times as often. The fact that they don't tell me that something else is going on, and it is this:

The poor are easier to bash and less able to fight back than the rich.

What gets me is why so many people just swallow it and put up with it. Any idea how we can do something about that, oh all-knowing internets?

* He who has the gold makes the rules

---

This blog is proudly sponsored by