Interesting Links for 30-09-2014
Sep. 30th, 2014 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- First pop act enters charts based on streaming alone.
- David Fincher discusses meeting Disney about Star Wars: Episode VII
I would kill to see a David Fincher Star Wars movie.
- Instead of using Ello, why not use a social network with decent privacy controls and far more functionality?
- The way that Captain America deals with pain is much better than the way Batman does
- Human genome was shaped by an evolutionary arms race with itself
- 3 reasons why New Zealand has the best-designed government in the world
- Seven gorgeous spiral staircases
- A great piece on the negative attitudes towards strippers (and other sex workers)
- 7,000 years older than Stonehenge: the site that stunned archaeologists
- Woman Takes Short Half-Hour Break From Being Feminist To Enjoy TV Show
- Most People With Addiction Simply Grow Out of It.
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no subject
Date: 2014-09-30 11:30 pm (UTC)Best electoral system IF you like 2 party rule with tiny inneffectual third parties. Plus, of course, Scotland and Wales both use MMP as well, the latter entirely because Peter Hain's an arsehole and ignored the recommendations of the commission that he set up because it didn't give the result he wanted so he implemented that anyway. The commission recommended STV, obvs.
Unicameralism is good if you think letting the House Of Commons getting a bee in its bonnet and, for example, pushing through the Dangerous Dogs Act without any check whatsoever is a good thing, so many times last 20 years I've been so very glad we have a revising second chamber to blunt the idiocy of the Govt dominated lower chamber.
And the monarchy point would be a good one, but the argument used is so wrong headed it actually made me rethink my position which is generally in favour of constitutional monarchies. It would be good if they did sack PMs more often if they'd obviously done something stupid and didn't have the support of the House, that's part of the job. Plus, if you're running a Cabinet system drawn from the House as a plan, then the House ought to see its term out when possible, that's democratic, the idea that the only way to be democratic is to vote on everything constantly is just so utterly wrong.
(appears my brain is now beginning to wake up, ah well).
no subject
Date: 2014-10-01 07:53 am (UTC)(I can see the point of requiring negotiation. But spending all of your time having to negotiate a compromise amongst parties in house 1 and then having to renegotiate your way through house 2 as well strikes me as hitting a wall of limited returns.)
no subject
Date: 2014-10-01 03:03 pm (UTC)I'd be very wary of scrapping a 2nd chamber completely for the UK as a whole unless there was both massive devolution of powers to nations & regions and a major reform of the voting system, and not MMP which as we've seen doesn't prevent majority government (in part because single member plurality seats always favour two-party politics as the article implies)