I'm a bad person

[ajva]

My disappointment at the unexpectedly poor showing of the LibDems last night is, frankly, massively outweighed by my sheer Puckish delight at the chaos resulting from this particularly numerically "balanced" hung parliament we've got. I managed to stay up until 0520 (sadly missing the Brighton Pavilion declaration, but my first action on waking up about noon was to fire up the iMac to check out what had happened there). And as an election geek, I had a night of rapture, as every single bloody result was completely different. Incredible. And, if you're someone with no clear party allegiance like me, really rather fun. So much fun that my alcohol intake was actually rather moderate, so enchanted was I by what was going on. A bit like when you go to see a film that grabs you so much that you sort of forget about your popcorn.

I bet there are suddenly lots of Conservatives astonished by the fact Clegg is talking to the Tories, so certain were many of them that he was what they might call "loony left" in disguise. And, I have to say - committed democrat (with a small 'd') I am - despite my natural aversion to Conservative politics, I was pleased to see that Clegg stuck with his campaign promise to firstly favour the party that had attracted the most votes/seats. If he'd done anything else, he wouldn't have been worthy of the 'democrat' bit of his party name, in my view.

Comments

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

So I'm a privileged leftish intellectual because I care about tiny, piffling issues like detention without charge, torture, rendition, the asylum process, etc? Fine, I can live with that. I suspect that when a person is being tortured, *that* is the only issue of relevance to them at that point! Using an emotive ad hominem doesn't help here, since I suspect we're probably operating at roughly similar levels of privilege in most regards, but I *really* don't want to get into one of those sort of one-downmanship debates, because it's just. Not. Relevant. And it's boring for everyone.

You seem to be implying that poverty is the only issue worth addressing, and that if anyone wants to talk about anything other than poverty, they are being a complete bastard who doesn't give a toss about the poor. It's entirely possible to care about the subject without having to make every conversation about it - all that does is make a person look like an ideologue, and I'm not not really into that. When the conversation is directly connected to poverty, you bet your arse I'm going to have an opinion on it. But to suggest that poverty is the only political issue of any importance, ever, seems, as well as derailing, to make the discussion so very broad as to be almost meaningless, which doesn't seem to me to help with the poverty either. Context matters, to be honest, and since I didn't make the original post, I don't really think it's for me to hijack it.

I'm not really sure why my position is bothering you quite so much. It's hardly as if I'm saying "bollocks to poverty, I want electoral reform so I can vote for tax breaks for meeeeeeee!".