I am the world’s biggest idiot.
I just tried to delete, from my ebook reader, the music directory, so I could put some different music on it.
I typed, as root, rm -rf /media/disk/Music
I now have no MP3s by any artists beginning A-Bea . ‘Luckily’ the Beach Boys directory was so huge that it was the last thing to be destroyed before I noticed my mistake. *ACTUALLY* luckily, I’ve got most of the bootlegs backed up, and anything legit by the BBs I’ve got on CD and/or vinyl (and is spotifiable).
But that’s how tired I am.
Vote #yes2av so I can get some rest!
This is the last post I will make on this blog until, probably, Saturday. This is because I will be *busy*.
In a couple of hours, I will be making a two-bus journey to a target ward. There I shall deliver a couple of hundred leaflets, to go with the 500 I’ve already delivered this week. I will then come home and, if I’m lucky, get three hours sleep before getting up at 4AM to go out leafletting again. I shall then spend an entire day delivering leaflets, knocking on doors and tallying at polling stations. This will finish at 10PM, at which point I shall make my way to the Town Hall, to try to help supervise the council election count until maybe 3AM. At which point I shall go home and get some sleep before going out to the actual referendum count.
This is how I spend my holiday time from work.
And I would like not to have to do this any more. I’m not a natural campaigner – I simply don’t have the energy for it – and yet I’ve spent a huge chunk of my spare time in the last five years doing this kind of stuff. In the last year I’ve helped out at twenty Yes street stalls as well, lugging a huge table and big boxes full of heavy leaflets on buses. (And before that I helped out regularly at No2ID street stalls until we won that one).
And I’ve been doing this because we have an unfair voting system. The party I support needs to get far more votes per MP than the Tories or Labour – we have to make a Herculean effort to get the same results they get *without even bothering*. That means that if I want my vote to count the same as a Tory or Labour voter, I have to persuade another four or five people who otherwise weren’t going to vote, to vote the same way I do. And I have to do this even though I’m burned out.
I’m not a campaigner at heart. I just want to live in a world where I’m not raised to a blood-boiling fury by the government and totally impotent to get them out. If we can get AV in I might well help out a bit when I’ve got time, but I won’t feel the need to take election weeks off out of my small holiday entitlement and spend them doing heavy physical work, because we’ll have – not a totally fair system, but one where *my vote matters*.
Otherwise… well, there’s council elections next year, the Euro elections the year after that, more council elections the year after *that* and a General election in 2015. I’d better get that ‘holiday’ time booked when I get back to work on Monday, hadn’t I?
More Seven Soldiers posts on Saturday.
I Mean It, Get Out The Fucking Vote #yes2av
So the polls are showing the Yes campaign massively behind the No campaign. I’m already seeing people all over the place criticising aspects of the way the campaign’s been run, like they’ve decided we’ve lost.
We haven’t.
There are two very, very important points to be made here. The first is that polls are usually more accurate *before* an election campaign starts than during. Do you remember ‘Cleggmania’ last year? It evaporated – and the election came out almost exactly as anyone would have predicted in March.
The second is that it’s going to be down to who can get the vote out on the day. Most people don’t care about this referendum one way or another. THEY ARE WRONG NOT TO CARE – this is literally the most important decision they will ever make, and will affect everything from crime policies, to immigration policies, to tax levels, to how healthcare is run, for decades to come. But we’re looking at something like a 30% turnout. YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. The No campaign have no real volunteers. They’re reliant on Tory activists and a few of the more moronic Labour people who can’t tell when they’re being used to entrench the Tories in power for another century. They’re winning the air war because they have money and we don’t, but we have volunteers. We need more though.
And this doesn’t even just affect the UK. I have seen two Canadian friends (Plok who comments here regularly and the comics blogger David Uzumeri) beg British people on Twitter to vote Yes, because then the Canadians will take notice and might be able to avoid ludicrous results like the one they just had.
The No campaign DO NOT DESERVE TO WIN. There have been faults with the Yes campaign, and whether we win or lose you can expect to see them gone over ad nauseam. But the No campaign has been built entirely on lies. The No campaign are liars, and they are lying to you in order to keep control over you. The one time I’ve met any No campaigners in real life (three local Tories who turned up for half an hour to do a spoiler stall near ours, before giving up), they joked about all the lies in their leaflets.
Understand this – the decision you make on Thursday will determine the make-up of the government for the next century or more. Do you want another century of the broad liberal-left being split between two, three or more parties, and the Tories winning two thirds of elections while getting around a third of the vote? Of ‘elected’ dictatorships with unshiftable majorities destroying industries or taking us into illegal wars when only 30% of people voted for that party? Because that’s what a No vote will mean. It’s what not bothering to vote will mean. It’s what not getting everyone you know out and voting yes will mean.
VOLUNTEER, NOW! Here’s a list of events in your area. Here are the phonebanks you can help out at. If you don’t do this, you forfeit your right ever to complain again that the government you got isn’t the one you voted for.
Linkblogging For 02/05/11
I presume everyone has guessed by now that I’m not going to finish the next five posts in the Seven Soldiers series by last Wednesday. I’m still going to try to get the book finished ASAP, but maybe trying to get it done in two weeks wasn’t the best idea when we had a visitor from the US for a week and a half, I was finishing a major project at work, and we were in the middle of the most important political campaign of my lifetime, and I was finishing up another book. And putting together an issue of PEP! Also the dog ate my homework. The next part will be up tomorrow, anyway.
In the meantime a few links:
The Aporetic talks about the similarities between Libertarians, Marxists and Fundamentalists.
Various people have been talking about Saturday’s Doctor Who – Millennium sums up most, but not all, of the problems with it. Meanwhile his Daddy Alex tells you why you should vote Yes on Thursday.
Gavin R also tells you why you should vote Yes on Thursday.
DJM4 also tells you why you should vote Yes on Thursday
Jennie talks about Cameron’s sexism
And finally, I thought I’d linked these before, but don’t appear to have – Andrew Rilstone’s great series of posts on why you should vote Yes on Thursday. Once you’ve read those, you should read the dozen or so posts he’s done since then, on folk music and the Bristol riots, all of which are also excellent.
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