A moral election.

Imagine if you will going to two job interviews on the same day and telling both that you had the other interview and take the best offer. Imagine also that both employers wanted you and sent you details of pay, conditions and how the company operates including the broad outline of it's business plans. One has a great dental plan, mediocre superannuation, excellent pay and highly successful strategy of firebombing the buisnesses of competitors and murdering their employees if they attempt to bid for the same contract. The other has no dental plan, reasonable superanuation, the opportunity to learn more valuable new skills and does not use violence in it's business. Would you spend any time at all wondering who to work for? Of course not unless you're a sociopath, yet this (Australian) election people are doing exactly that.

They are deciding that although they don't think the use of lethal force in Iraq is justified or rational they are going to vote on the basis of who can give them enough goodies. Free dental work, more free education (if it's worth it why don't people pay for it?), better hospitals, they think of everything that can be taken from someone else's pocket and given to them. In no other situation do people think like this. Only in politics is it OK to be this mercenary when issues of life and death are at stake. And yet people will claim they are voting on the basis of a "fair go" or "moral values". My arse they are.

They're not voting on the basis of common sense either. The latest war on drugs nonsense is proof. I can't fight the war on drugs because they're too expensive so I have to fight the war clean and sober. Anyway they're going to "quarantine" the welfare payments of people convicted but not jailed for drug offenses. The idea I suppose is that they can prevent drug takers spending money on drugs and get them to spend it on their kids, a new bible I don't know I lost interest. Of course this qualifies as the second easiest to dodge bad social security idea in history. The worst was that "work for the dole" scheme where all you had to do was claim to be doing $62 worth of work a fortnight to avoid the obligation. This isn't quite as easy. You actually go into the supermarket, buy things on someone else's shopping list and have them pay you for them later. So really less trouble than getting the drugs in the first place. Fuck I hat it when it takes longer for the government to explain the scheme than for me to figure out how it's fucked.

Oh and BTW remember those new "road safety" laws prohibiting P platers from taking passengers at night (or was it any time? DKDC)? Well it turns out that teenagers responded to said laws by carrying their friends in the boot (trunk) or lying down and thus unseatbelted. So another effort by the powers that be to make us safer through coercion failed. And I also have failed to predict that failure months beforehand. So from now on there's a competition. As soon as I mention an effort to make us safer everyone send in how they think it will bankfire. A special "No Prize" awarded to the first accurate prediction.