One must keep in mind that Israel has proportional representation, with regard to the practicality of the outcome.

I know from your twitter that you love this Coke/Pepsi analogy, but surely it only applies to them attempting to fudge the brexit thing without alienating large swathes of their support one way or another. As big as that is, there's a lot more life and Labour at the moment seem pretty much opposite to the Tories on austerity, tax, social care, housing, the NHS, transport, environment, and well, everything.

Anyway, I can respect a Green vote (and will go back to them if/when the centrist types finally manage to sabotage Labour enough to get it back to the middle of the road shit we tired of years ago - then it truly is something where your analogy works), there's principles in it. 

I only use the Coke Vs. Pepsi analogy in the context of FPTP voting, because it's in their mutual interest to maintain a system that supports the myth of a binary choice. The political calculation is that it's better to have a 50% chance of all of the pie than the virtual guarantee of around a third of it.  A proportional system is clearly more democratic, enfranchising virtually every voter, but the Tories and Labour don't support it because it's not in their parties' interests.

To Smiffy's point, yes, Israel has PR; but so do 89 other countries, including some of the most politically stable - staid, even.

fair enough, that makes sense. I never did like fizzy drinks much.

Maybe we can get stuck enough into hung parliaments and minority governments to make it happen, although i dread to think the trouble getting there will cause.

OK, I didn't know that, not having looked into it to any degree (obviously).

'more democratic' sounds like a good and desirable thing; in the age of facebook and twitter it is proving problematic.

I don't think a particular electoral system or political structure can in and of itself ensure a good outcome, if the participants can't even broadly agree on the definition of what that might look like.

I do think some experimentation is warranted in view of current systemic failures. A lot of what we're seeing is a rejection of the status quo because so many have been hard done by it, they are willing to entertain nuclear options (Trump, Brexit et al).

To me, the only way to save the day (and the planet), is swift and decisive wealth redistribution. Fuck 'slavery reparations', we need *poverty* reparations, on a global scale.

Democracy does need an appropriately educated populace to be effective.

Capitalism works better when the peons can be conned and divided.

AsboJo got the police called to his girlfriend's flat, over a sofa-ruining drunken altercation last night

New series Rise of the Nazis on the BBC starting 2 September. Apparently Germany was a Liberal Democracy and yet 4 years later was in the hands of a dictator with a government of murderers. Seems that it was as much about ruthless personal ambition and a desire to hold onto power by more moderate politicians as it was about extreme ideology. Just saying.

What's happening is scary.

I could see Irritable Duncan Syndrome filling Joseph Goebbels' shoes.

Fuck me if it hasn't all gone sideways. In a good way.

I'm not counting chickens yet. My rule of thumb is to ask "what would a bunch of spoilt, entitled, schoolboys do now?" It won't necessarily be clever, but it's likely to be vicious.

I just tweeted along these lines this morning:
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The vicious is getting old, beginning to look more like helpless thrashing about and self-harming. What chances do you give the "people vs parliament" shtick?

It's a hard one to call. H L Mencken wrote "No one in this world, so far as I know ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." The point is that this has moved far from a question of rational argument about what is best for the UK and when we're talking about how individual psychology translates into mass action and choices then who really knows?

I think Johnson has probably lost it for many Tories, but then again, there are a lot of them that emerge into the light when an election is called. And for most of them voting Tory is a religious matter. For many more, they will simply be unaware of events and as long as the Sun and the Daily Mail bray at them that BoJo is good, they'll support him. I mean, who can believe the insanity of Jacob Rees Mogg being portrayed as a Man of the People? A multi-millionaire member of the landed-gentry whose every move and utterance displays contempt for the people. 

The key problem with a pre 31 October election for Johnson's government is that the Brexit Party (so-called) will threaten to stand against them unless they adopt a no-deal Brexit policy; but if they do adopt such a policy, they will lose a small, but significant chunk of the pro-Brexit, anti-no-deal constituency. Either way they lose votes. Furthermore, nobody believes that a no-deal crash-out will be without substantial collateral damage, including damage to business, to jobs and to health & life, which will be a long term electoral liability.

Best bets for the Tories might be either to re-introduce the Withdrawal Agreement, ideally with cosmetic tweaks, but failing that, as-is, and hope that sufficient MPs are now bricking it that the balance of voting changes: or, to lose a vote of no confidence and hand the whole sorry mess over to a GNU which will be just as hamstrung as any one-party government.

I wish I shared your faith in our electorate. 

It's not even just that, they think it's worth it (and presumably that it won't affect them personally so much) somehow. To "get it over with" as though No Deal wouldn't be just the beginning of a colossal fucking mess for the next several decades. 

Tories helping a lot by being impressively incompetent but labour played a blinder yesterday and today. I have a tiny sliver of optimism.

I dare say that if you were a fund manager with a business in, I dunno, Ireland, there's a great deal of money to be made by short-selling shares in UK industries that rely on the EU.