Two amusing things…

One intentional, one… probably… not so… much…

Ten terrible arguments

Bob Marshall-Andrews demands stiff punishment for lack of loyalty. No. Seriously.

Awful Fluff

I couldn’t think of a better way to describe this rubbish than “awful fluff”. It’s so pathetic that finding a better insult would be a total waste of time and effort. I won’t write much on it, mostly because a there’s a nice thorough attack of it here. So instead I’ll pick over an interesting detail:

“…Stephen Harper in Canada and Nicolas Sarkozy in France harvested the votes of lower-income workers for their victories…”

1. Class has never had the same sort of impact on Canadian voting patterns as it has in the rest of the industrialised world (at least as far as the Liberal and Conservative parties are concerned; for all the party’s assocition with the yuppy-left, the NDP’s support remains predominantly working class and working class voters in Quebec have largely voted PQ since the 1970’s. But I digress) and Harper’s electoral coalition is, true to form, not based around class divisions. It is instead based largely on the urban-rural divide and the regional-cultural divisions that have dominated Canadian politics since its beginning. Despite that, it’s worth noting that the number of low-income ridings (as Canadian constituencies are rather curiously known) held by the Tories is very low and gets even lower when you remove predominantly agricultural ridings (many of which are much more prosperous than income statistics would indicate). While the Canadian Tories aren’t the party of the metropolitan elites (an interesting contrast with their British kin) they aren’t exactly the party of the downtrodden either.

2. As for France… well… this site has some interesting data on voting patterns in the 2007 Presidential election. While I’m not normally a fan of exit poll data (for a whole range of reasons that I won’t go into here) they do (when done properly) offer an acceptable impression of voting patterns. The most interesting table is the last one. For those that don’t speak French, “Ouvrier” roughly translates as “blue collar worker”. More on this later, maybe.