Irish road signs, again.

When you drive over the border from Ireland into Northern Ireland, there's a big sign warning you that speed limits are now in miles per hour. When you drive from Northern Ireland into Ireland, there's a big sign in English, French, and German warning you to drive on the left.

I can't figure out whether this is an incredibly subtle and clever put-down or just the stupidest damn thing on the planet.

Of course, there is the possibility that the road planners of Ireland actually run a competition for Stupidest Road Sign Ever — it would explain a lot — and this is the winner.

Complexity and intention.

Damien makes a case against voting "reform" rather succinctly:

I am opposed to the adoption of AV. One of the main reasons I am opposed is that most of the people who will use it (including many of those who support its introduction) don’t understand the system; whereas nearly everyone on Earth understands FPTP. Call me “a conservative Right-winger who hates any form of change”, but I think that it is fundamental to the legitimacy of a democratic system that its voters know what their votes mean.

Predictably, commenters are ridiculing this, on the grounds that how you vote in AV is really very simple. This misses the point.

AV's defenders tend to misunderstand the "complexity" complaint. The problem isn't that it's too complex to understand how to vote. The problem is that the relationship between the vote and the result is complex enough to allow people who've studied the system to make their votes count more than other people's. And that's fundamentally antidemocratic.

Plus there's an instinct problem. Give people a list of candidates and tell them to list them in order of preference, and they'll put a number next to every name. People don't like leaving blanks. This is why Facebook do so well: stick a form on the site for "favourite music" and users will list all their favourite bands, despite the fact that it's a completely pointless thing to do. AV by the nature of its design abuses this fact of human psychology to give large numbers of votes to candidates no-one actually wants. And it is deeply counterintuitive: putting a candidate twelfth out of twelve is understood by everyone to mean "Worst — do not elect", but AV treats it as a positive vote to be counted in that candidate's favour. Which comes back to my first point: the few politics junkies who study the system will know this, enabling them to make their votes more valuable than everyone else's.

That AV's voting instructions are so simple to follow is the very problem: the system is so simple to use that its complexity isn't apparent to users — and, if people don't know the complexity's there, they won't try to find out about it. A system that was more obviously complex would actually be an improvement: it would be honest.

So farewell, then, Hosni.

Perhaps the most helpful change we can make is to change in our own thinking. In the West, there's been a certain skepticism about the capacity or even the desire of Middle Eastern peoples for self-government. We're told that Islam is somehow inconsistent with a democratic culture. Yet more than half of the world's Muslims are today contributing citizens in democratic societies. It is suggested that the poor, in their daily struggles, care little for self-government. Yet the poor, especially, need the power of democracy to defend themselves against corrupt elites.

Peoples of the Middle East share a high civilization, a religion of personal responsibility, and a need for freedom as deep as our own. It is not realism to suppose that one-fifth of humanity is unsuited to liberty; it is pessimism and condescension, and we should have none of it.

We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East. Your nation and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. Longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold.

As recent history has shown, we cannot turn a blind eye to oppression just because the oppression is not in our own backyard. No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its victims, and our great democracies should oppose tyranny wherever it is found.

  — George "Dubya" Bush

Interesting that the man was famous for being ineloquent, yet I couldn't put it better myself. I'm not sure anyone ever has.

A man in need of some punctuation.

There's an estate agent round my way by the name of Peter Rogers. He puts signs up outside people's houses which say

Peter Rogers
Estate Agents

This pleases me.

Liberty.

Voters of Derby, take note. This is what your elected representative thinks of your rights:

Of course, the police can get a court order but what a waste of public money in order to do that.

Yes, Tory MP Heather Wheeler thinks that for the police to obey the law — specifically, law designed to protect us from tyranny — is a waste of public money. If she's consistent in her principles (assuming she has any), then she must think the same about having to get a warrant to search your house. That, or she actually has no idea what she's talking about and is disastrously unqualified for her job. Tough call.

As I may have mentioned before, the problem with the Tories is that they're authoritarian bastards.

More crappy BBC sub-editing.

The headline:

Ex-Irish PM Bertie Ahern to stand down at next election

Yes, the BBC appear to be suggesting that Bertie Ahern is still Prime Minister and used to be Irish.

New life.

It seems only fair, since Daisy's birth was quite excitingly blogged live from here, that her new sister get a mention.

Poppy Antonia Kynaston Reeves was born on the 25th of November. She is very well, thank you, and looks exactly like Daisy, which is no bad thing. She is also a right wee besom. Already.

Long-time readers of this blog may remember from four years back that Vic suffered major health complications exacerbated by a certain amount of NHS awfulness after Daisy's birth, and might even by interested to know that all is well on that front this time around. We can wholeheartedly recommend the treatment you get in an NHS hospital shortly after you've made an official complaint against them. Works wonders.

I'm knackered.

Two adverts that are really annoying me.

Insert useless apology about not blogging for ages here.

OK. Anyway.

First, Dettol. Their Surface Cleanser is being advertised on heavy rotation at the moment, and, apparently, it "kills 99.9% of bacteria, including the flu virus." It's reassuring to see that a company that specialises in disinfectant products is unaware that 100% of bacteria wouldn't include the flu virus, in much the same way that 100% of pigeons doesn't include the Bengal tiger. The correct voiceover should be "Kills 99.9% of bacteria, not including the flu virus, obviously."

And so on to Bailey's. I love Bailey's. It is a quite wonderful drink. But my God, this advert is stupid. These people are having a party and their fridge breaks down or they're too thick to figure out how to use it or something, so they have no ice. So they go outside and break off icicles and use the icicles in their drinks. OK, nice image, very good. But then there's the voiceover: "The time we made our own ice." Well, no. This is in fact the exact opposite of what you've done here. When the fridge works, that's you making your own ice, using the fridge. Unless you've been spending days carefully turning the central heating on and off to jiggle the temperature of your house's roof above and below and above and below freezing in order to get the snow on the roof to repeatedly melt and refreeze at the optimum rate for icicle-creation, no, this is not the time you made your own ice. This ice you're using wasn't made by anyone; it just happened. The correct voiceover would be "The time we didn't make our own ice."

Glad I got that off my chest.

Chinglish from someone who can't spell "China".

The matter at hand.

So I was watching an episode of Castle and it starts with a PG-rated yet highly vigorous sex scene, and it's one of those scenes in which they convey the rumbunctious nature of sex via the medium of breakages, so cups are getting kicked off bedside tables and everything's rattling, etcetera etcetera, and right at the end, climactically, a great thump on the floor causes a couple of pictures to fall off the wall and I immediately, unhesitatingly, think "Well, what bloody idiot put them up? Shoddy job."

And it strikes me that this is how you know for sure middle-age is nearly here.