The Trouble With The Trouble With Sloths

Among all the YouTube comments from young American males full of testosterone and ignorance abusing me for my non-American pronunciation in The Trouble With Sloths—ironic, given that it warns against exactly such abuse—a young Australian has challenged my claim that “sloath” is the only Aussie pronunciation (in response to a question about the British, who use both):

i live in australia and we all call them sloths not slowths, i’d never even heard anyone call it a slowth till i watched this video.

Read More · 13 May 2010 · Whatever

Cobbled Together

One more post on the general election outcome, to preserve some comments posted to Metafilter yesterday. Rather than paraphrase them I may as well just post them, along with some further words I didn’t get around to adding there.

Read More · 13 May 2010 · UK Culture

Compulsory Venting

If the first-past-the-post system is frustrating, the attitudes and assumptions it has bred among Britain’s politicians and pundits are even more so. This morning’s Today programme on Radio 4 featured comments about eight years of “unelected prime ministers” if Brown and a Labour successor governed from 2010 to 2015, ignoring the fact that Cameron would be just as “unelected” a prime minister—which is to say, not at all. In Westminster-style democracies, not least the mother of all of them, the people don’t elect the leader of the government, their representatives do. And people elect their representatives for all sorts of reasons, not simply as proxies for their party leaders.

Read More · 11 May 2010 · x2 · UK Culture

Hare's Breadth

It’s times like this that warm the cockles of a pol sci graduate’s heart. I’m referring, of course, to Britain’s hung parliament, and the rare opportunity it affords for a public discussion of different electoral systems. As someone who grew up under one of the best, voting under first-past-the-post is always exasperating, and now millions more get to share that exasperation.

Read More · 9 May 2010 · x2 · UK Culture

April 2010