Nature Vs Science and Transhumanism

So I was talking to this guy the other day who was insisting that we should behave more 'naturally'. Trying to claim that modern human behaviour is "not natural" in some way. Perhaps coz it can sometimes be so violent and selfish.

We as a species do plenty of killing, certainly, but do we do an unnatural amount of killing? Almost everyone that's ever lived has been killed by 'natural' causes. Billions of souls lost with only just six billion actually surviving at the moment.

It makes me sad, and I'd happily throw the "natural" state of human mortality out.

Of course everything humans do is "natural", there are no supernatural events, no magic, no ghosts. But if you define "natural" as "not man-made" then at least the idea makes some kinda coherent sense.

Even then it's still not true of course.

Where there is understanding, empathy and morality in the world it's a human thing, and not 'natural' in that sense at all. It's man-made. Invented in himan brains.

I want more of that stuff, of kindness and empathy, not more violent uncaring red-in-tooth-and-claw "nature."

Increasing consciousness is essential to properly ensure that the increases in power that come with science are used responsibly, sure, but I don't know any way we can get that increased understanding other than, well, more science.

Study the world, understand it, make it better.

Which probably makes me some kinda hippie. One of those new-fangled geeky cyber-hippies.

There may be things which can't be understood through science, I guess. Some clame there are. But I think I would contest that these are things which can't be understood at all in that case. It seems to me that investigating, testing, trying to prove yourself wrong, constantly improving your model, is how understanding works at all. And this is what science is.

We are indeed, as a species, making some unwise choices and reducing biodiversity, causing mass extinctions. The enviornment is suffering. But guess how we know this? Guess how we're coming to understand it and finally be in a position to do something about it?

Through investigation and data-collection and reason and the quest for knowledge. That's how.

Through science.

If you were able to do as some wish and stop science, end that progress, I'm pretty convinced it would be a bad thing for the planet, for bio-diversity, for us personally. After all, the hunter-gatherers knew more than enough to drive the mega-fauna extinct without really understanding what they were doing.

Learning to grok it is the only way to learn to do something about it.

If you were to somehow stop science, stop that learning, that knowledge gathering, you would stop the development of the kinds of consciousness and awareness of our world that we need to prevent it's descruction from happening at all.

If we are becoming aware of what we are doing, and I think that we are, it's not through turning a blind eye to the world and waiting for it to spontaneously evolve. That's not how Darwinism works. Evolution is blind and as likely to produce short-term solutions leading to global extinctions again as it ever was. If we're increasing awareness, becoming more conscious of our effects on our world, we're doing it through that thirst for knowledge. Through science. Stopping that growth of our own consciousness would be disaster. Deadly for the planet as thus for ourselves.

As far as we can tell, in the entire galaxy of a hundred billion stars, there's only one species which has ever become sapient, become aware of themselves and come to understand their own understanding. Their own origin and the systems which brought them to being: Us. Homo-saps.

As far as we can tell we are the only "mind" in the universe.

Which I think is precious, deserves everything we can to do preserve and fill the galaxy with empathy and understanding and morality and, well, mind.

Is there room for us all, if we stop dying, if we stop decay, if we become imortal?

There is plenty of room, we just have to get off this rock.

Course, we need to do that anyway, or else nature's more vicious weapons like space-rocks and super-volcanoes will kill us all at once rather than the more mundane ones of decay and ageing and disease doing it one at a time.

Exponential growth is lunacy, and especially as we live longer we'll have to have to grow less quickly. But this isn't a reason to condemn the 6 billion people alive today to all, every one of them, die over the next 100 years. Think of that. Six billion minds, gone forever. Six billion individuals with hopes and dreams and understanding all destroyed over a mere 100 years of horrendous slaughter. Over a hundred thousand people a day. Over five thousand people every hour, dead. Dead.

We should be doing all we possibly can to stop that.

Is our destiny as a species to sit on this planet, being careful not to use it up, preserving the status quo, until it and every one of us is destroyed by a space-rock or the exploding Earth itself? Or is it to use this planet's resources to spread mind through the rest of the solar system, to terraform Mars, to inhabit the moons of Jupiter, to send consciousness into the stars?

I know which I'm routing for.

I love "Nature", that part of the world which isn't human, but it will kill us all, one by one until the day it decides to take whoever's left all at once.

The only way to stop that is to use our understanding, our knowledge, our science.

And even that's a long-shot.

Plea to my new (old) MP

I am very drunk, and should certainly be in bed rather than writing to congratulate my new (old) MP.

Nevertheless, I am not.

Damnit.

Open litter to my MP:

Dear Emily.

Excellent, surprising and (I admit, for me, disappointing) work there Emily. I don't know if you can receive email through the parliamentary system or not, but it's the only email address I have for you.

Um. Can we have PR now?

Really.

Surely this situation can give us a referendum on PR.

This vote wasn't one, but we can have one.

We haven't agreed much, but I have hope we can agree on that.

Hopefully.

Congrats again, really good election skills ;)

Summing Up My Election Night - Bedtime. #ge2010

So we're all anarchists now then?

Win.

I guess.

I think I described roughly this result as "best hope" a couple of days ago. But watching it unfold, watching Limbet lose his seat, watching Evens lose his seat, watching my lib candidate Bridget Fox have her opponent's majority increased by like thousands of votes, watching the Pirates all fall under 1%, it didn't really feel like a win.

The libs should deal with Cameron, if and only if he offers a referendum on PR. Surely? I mean that is the price.

But I don't think he will. Which makes it tricky. I hope I'm wrong

I think I agree with my assessment a couple of days ago. This is, basically, the best realistic result. God but it burns though.

Anyway. I should actually go to bed I reckon. Hope the party leaders are getting more sleep than me :)

Election Rant 2010

Ten days until the election here in the UK and things are looking more interesting than usual. The newspapers are calling it "The Clegg Effect" but then the newspapers also thought Mephedrone was called "Meow Meow" so I suspect their opinion on why the Liberals are polling better than usual might well be about as useful as their opinion on whether cannabis being class B or class C will stop someone smoking a joint.

Personally I suspect that anyone half competent in his place saying roughly the same things (IE, stating Lib policy) would be getting roughly the same effect. Kennedy or Ashdown probably a better effect. After all, they'd benefit not only from being neither Gordon Brown nor a Tory, but also from being well known and liked.

The Lib's Labservative campaign says it all really. Everyone's fed up with what we've had for the last ten years and the Tories look like the same only more so. As long as the alternative looks different and even vaguely credible we might as well try it.

Course, to judge by the chatter on the networks you'd think the Liberals were even more ahead than the polls say. Twit Vote is a sea of yellow, Facebook's got yellow by far in the lead,  Nick Clegg beats David Cameron at GoogleFight by 3 to one. (Obviously google-fight is no good for measuring incumbents, they've had 5 years of press).

Nobody seriously expects that to leak into real life, it's what they're dismissively calling "the twitter echo chamber" and it certainly is one. But echo chambers do one thing very well: they make the voices in them louder. We've had the capitalist corporatist echo-chamber of the print and broadcast media for so long we forget that the newspapers don't represent everybody either. The internet has brought with it lots more echo chambers and it's drowning out the traditional voices that tell everyone who to vote for.

Which opens up the field somewhat, even for those who aren't listening to that chamber. It still inflates the confidence and noise of their friends that do, the things said there do seep into real-life conversations. The twitter echo chamber, blogs, social and personal media, they're all making everyone's voices louder. Is it loud enough to drown out the corporate press who traditionally only really shout their own?

Perhaps not yet, but it's likely having an influence as much as the specific face standing looking slightly creepily into the cameras.

Anyway, whatever the reason the Liberals are polling better than usual, it seems to have both the other parties worried. The Guardian reports today that Labour and the Tories moved to confront the Liberal Democrat surge as they warned of the dangers of a hung parliament.

What does that mean? It means the leaders of those parties asked the newspapers to report that they thought a hung parliament would be bad and the newspapers uncritically agreed to do so.

Hurray for an independent questioning challenging press.

The mainstream parties claim that they fear "weak indecisive government," but who exactly would be making it indecisive? If they really would just prefer the opposition being decisive to to bickering and argument then all they have to do is stop bickering and arguing.

Surely?

It ain't that hard. You compromise, look for consensus, put ideas to proper evidence-based testing and analysis. Work with your co-workers not against them, like the rest of us have to at work every single day.

What they're really saying when they say "weak indecisive government" is "we care so little for the welfare of our country that we'll wreck it rather than seeing those others get their way"

Nice. Thanks for letting us know. Only I'm not really up for voting for people who would rather see Britain "paralysed" than play a constructive role in cooperative governance.

Clearly what they're really worried about is parliament actually representing the people, for in a representational parliament they would never have absolute power again. And they like absolute power. Politicians are attracted to power like I am to redheads. They'll genuinely try not to go crazy insane with desire for it, but they are absolutely rubbish at doing so. They go crazy anyway. They think their ideas are self-evident without needing to be discussed, debated, argued and even actually scientifically tested. If they're allowed to do whatever they want without a sanity check they'll not bother with a sanity check.

They even state it outright: They want "Strong Government," this is their reason to dismiss Proportional Representation. They want government to be strong.

See, I think that strong government leads us into wars despite millions out on the streets marching against them. It leads to to a poll-tax, to failed banking regulation crashing the economy. It leads to cow-towing to business that lobby against the freedom of the people. Strong government does whatever the hell it wants, consequences be damned.

Government is power, and power needs to be moderated, it needs checks and balances and should operate though consensus or not at all. We are better off with no new laws than bad new laws. Remember, like Bill Hicks says, all governments are liars and murderers. Personally I like my liars and murderers not to be strong. Perhaps we occasionally need someone to lie and murder on our behalf, but the rest of the time they should be chained and restrained not raging out of control boasting about the size of their majority, giving PFI corporate hand-outs to their friends and benefactors while stuffing their own pockets full of our cash.

Only answer is to vote for whichever party is promising to make parliament more representative. If the Liberals weren't offering that I'd be spoiling my ballot anyway.

Now personally I think the Lib Dems are far too unwilling to tax the rich, redistribute wealth, and remove all victimless crimes. I'd like to vote for an anarcho-socialist party. I'd like my MP to be someone who actually had something in common with my views and I don't care if he lives in London or Wales so long as he actually does that. Geographical link be damned.

But there is nobody like that standing, not in my seat, not in the vast majority of the seats. So I'll go out and vote for the folks who might make that a bit more possible.

What else can you do?

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(If you liked this, link it, duh!)

Good News Everyone! The conspiracy media are shooting themselves in the foot.

As promised, Rupert Murdoch's newspapers are moving to a pay model, it'll be two quid a week to read the Times from July.

Many of you will have previously clicked on a link to an article at, say, the New York Times and been confronted with a page saying "Register for FREE to read this article." If you're anything like me, you almost always think "Screw that" and hit the back button because it's just not worth the effort of filling in a form.

And now the London Times will not only require a registration, but also require a credit card number and a subscription of some kind. Which is the point of course. Articles behind pay-walls are almost useless: You can't link to them, you can't share them, you can't spread them, they don't gather responses from people who can't read it, they aren't a part of the global conversation. All you can do it read them. One-way media. Plus of course things that don't get linked to, don't get read. So you can barely even do that unless you check their own individual specially biased selected index pages.

So I welcome this change in the big conspiracy newspaper's behaviour. I hope they ALL lock themselves behind pay-walls in their own little inaccessible corner of the web and let hoards of tiny independent media co-ops take over the mainstream news content instead of the big lumbering corrupt media giants.

Hopefully any remaining good journalists at the Times will be able to quit and so cut the profit-whoring newspapers out of the loop and start self-publishing. You don't need so many well paying ads to just support one journalist as you do to support an entire press team. Do we need to find ways to fund quality journalism? Yes! Certainly. But the resulting articles need to be freely available because as soon as you charge for that article it becomes less valuable. It's worth more if it's free, which means all pay-to-read articles are intrinsically worth less than their cheaper, freer, competition.

The corporate media has never been good at funding quality journalism anyway. They just make things up, and even take to the courts to enforce their right to distort and falsify the news. If the corporate media, the Times etc., actually did represent the best journalism had to offer I might be a bit sad to see them go. But they're not. They're just tabloid biased lies and hate. We're almost certainly better off not letting them program our minds.

I hope we as a society find new ways to fund good investigative journalism, and I hope frankly that we can do it without having to concentrate power in massive easily-bought (if expensive) media conglomerates.

In the mean time if those big conglomerates want to lock themselves out of the global conversation, if they want to hide in a minority audience behind toll-doors, then I for one applaud the removal of their biased lying scaremongering crap from the free web.

Thanks Rupert! Can you please take the rest of your hate-filled biased rags off the free web as soon as possible too? Cheers.

I just hope the dying moments of the soon-to-be-extinct big media corps don't somehow bribe our government to betray us and gut the BBC, which is funded in a way which CAN give us free media, before the door hits them on their way out.

Digital Economy Bill, Liberals and Pirates

As you may remember, there once was a lunch in Corfu between Lord Mandelson and David Geffen, one Hollywood mogul and record company exec.

After that meeting, Mandy came out with his new copyright bill, the Digital Economy Bill, which among other things, gives the government the right to force your ISP to spy on you and cut you off if you're accused (without trial mind) of unlicensed sharing copyright infringement, and not-incidentally also gives the Secretary of State, that is him, Mandy, the power to create new penalties for online infringements whenever he wanted without interference from the Commons, the Lords or even the Queen.

That bill is currently being read in the Lords (if you haven't written to your MP then you likely should have. I did, and I got a reply).

Some Liberal Democrat Lords have proposed an amendment which frankly just makes things worse.

I mean I dunno what they're thinking. Someone's convinced 'em that it's a good idea to allow courts to order all of Britain's ISPs to shut off access to specific sites if these sites were found to be involved with copyright infringement. Which would be all of the 'web storage' and 'backup' places on the entire net, basically.

I fired off a tweet to my local Liberal Democrat representative asking what the hell was going on? I mean, this ain't a freedom-loving amendment.

Rather than taking two months to reply, she responded initially within hours and then she blogged about what a bad idea it was and coordinated an open letter asking her colleagues to reconsider. Keeping me in the loop through twitter the whole time.

Which is pretty good I reckon. Hurray for Bridget Fox. Hope she gets to be my MP some day.

The amendment will hopefully be dropped, and the whole bill will hopefully fail to be pushed through before the election but it really seems to be the aim of the top Labour folks to get it through before they have to stand down and the Tories are offering their usual token resistance while clearly secretly thinking "Woah! I can't believe our luck! That's exactly what I'd do." so I dunno how much hope there is that it'll fail.

Incidentally, this is the same bill which will allow professional organisations to use your images freely, just so long as they fail in their "adequate search" to find out who they should pay while also ensuring they can shut off your ISP access if you repost one of theirs.

Fucks sake! This will all be law in six weeks or so.

Even if it does fail, the Tories will no doubt make something similar should they get in and there's literal secret conspiracies at top international political levels to try and do much the same.

This stuff is about the very thing which makes us human: our culture. Learning from and copying each other, about the free flow of ideas, about corporations being determined to steal our culture from us and force us to pay to get it back. It's about political corruption and bribery. Yet people barely seem to care. it sounds like the Pirate Party will barely have enough cash to run a handful of candidates at the elections, the only upside of which I can see is at least it won't leave me torn between voting for Bridget or some local Pirate.

*sigh*

And some folks think it's about "Stealing" music.

Do Dream Sheep Bleat? - My Army Of Penguins

New Novella

My new novella, entitled "Do Dream Sheep Bleat?" has been released this weekend. It's a short story about magic and mind, about consciousness, cognizance and conjuring. Also, there's a penguin whose picture is on the front cover.

You can read it online, for free, either in your browser or by downloading a pdf. You can also order a nicely bound print copy to be shipped directly to your door. As you can see from the pictures on this page, it's a handy pocket-sized mini-book. Nice and portable, easily transportable, weighing in at just 80 pages or so. The print copy costs just four UK pounds, but if you're to cheep to pay it, by all means just download.

What's it about?

The book follows a few days in the life and dreams of one John Shamrock, quoted on the back of the book as saying "Incredible, this book has completely changed the way I live my life. It's taught me my aims, my goals, how to achieve my dreams. Now I'm rich!"

John is, of course, a fictional character whose life is turned around over those few days by a book which he somehow acquires on a drunken night out. This book is a short novella with a picture of a penguin on the front called "Do Dream Sheep Bleat?", and appears to be a book about itself.

Over the few days reading that book, John meets a four foot tall, fat, squinty eyed penguin who teaches him about magic.

Magic

The penguin, it turns out, is a magical symbol infused with consciousness. It teaches John about "Sidual Magic," an archaic method to infuse symbols with the ability to have actual, physical, effects on the world.

A magical system which, of course, created the penguin itself, which gave him life.

As John slowly learns from the penguin, and the book, his understanding of his own consciousness, his world view, and as a result his whole life, is turned upside down.

Copyright Agreement

The book's unusual copyright agreement, termed "Copy-Far-Left," requires no payment, and allows anybody at all to copy the text with only one restriction: That they make another copy and send it to someone else.

If you do not make a copy and pass it on then you are a pirate and a thief, stealing my livelihood and worse, draining the penguin of the force which gives it power, consciousness and life.

Hope you enjoy reading the novella as much as I enjoyed writing it, please let me know what you think and even more importantly, don't forget to send it on to someone else too! Help increase the size and might of the army of penguins I've sent out into the world to do my bidding.

Click here to read or buy the book.

Reply From my MP about Pirate Party stuff

Before Xmas I got a reply from my MP about The letter I wrote her earlier. Been too busy/lazy to update on that. The best bits follow.

The Government has a difficult balance to reach between protecting the creative industry from potentially huge losses incurred through illegal file sharing, and respecting individuals' rights to unrestricted and private use of the internet. The Creative Industries are currently undermined by illegal file sharing and measures to address it are due.

However, I understand your concern regarding the proportionality of proposed measures on peer to peer file sharing. A number of questions need to be answered including where due precess fits into a penalty enforceable by the Internet Service Providers. Furthermore, fears about the security and privacy of our private data and internet activity need to be addressed. I have written to the Secretary Of State for Business Innovation and Skills to raise these concerns[...].

In my view the industry should be putting it's energies into developing new business solutions and greater compromises may need to be made in order to develop these new business models.

I have written to Jack Straw to ask for more information on the next steps for reform of law in the area and I will write again when I receive a response.

She seems to be under the impression that file-sharing reduces sales. Despite the fact that the most shared things also sell the most, which is a common enough mistake I guess. Understandable, if mistaken. It's not clear from her reply if these "greater compromises" are copyrightists having to allow sharing, or file-sharers having to give up their privacy and freedom. Probably both I guess, that's the nature of compromise.

Anyway, I bring that up because she has indeed written again now that she has a response.

The Minister reiterates the importance of legislating to address online copyright infringement and explains briefly the process by which those identified as infringing copyright will receive warning from their ISPs and may be subject to a court action if the ISP is required to identify them to the rights holder as a result of a court order by the rights holder.

The further powers granted to the Secretary Of State by the Digital Economy Bill allow him/her to introduce technical powers through secondary legislation. As the Minister explains, these technical measures could include a restriction on bandwidth, or temporary suspension. The working of the independent appeals procedure which would be overseen by Ofcom are less clearly set out. The Bill is currently being scrutinised by the House of Lords and I am sure the Government will be pressed further on these powers. I will be following the passage of the Bill carefully.

At least it sounds like she can see giving the secondary powers is wrong, though it also appears she'll merely stand by and give her consent to such a thing should her party demand it.

She encloses the reply sent ot her from Stephen Timms:

Dear Emily,

The Government wants as many people as possible top enjoy all the benefits that broadband internet can bring. New technology has changed the way people wnat to use and access media content, in some cases faster than products and services commercially on offer have developed. We are also clear that the benefits of the internet must include economic benefits for our creative industries and artists. We therefore take extremely seriously the problem of on-line copyright infringement, and have been working closely with rights holders, media companies and internet fiorms to develop practical solutions to reduce and prevent this

Note: Big companies. They're talking to big companies, and no file sharers. No independent artists. No small struggling bands. Nobody with an actual myspace page. Likely no actual constituents. None of the people they're actually paid to represent. This is fairly typical.

He continues...

Whilst all parties would prefer a voluntary solution, rather than regulatory, it is clear that such a commercial solution is very difficult to achieve We recognise that one problem is the need for a level playing field and therefore acknowledge the need for a regulatory baseline.

The digital economy bill, published 20th November, sets out in detail our proposed legislation to tackle on-line copyright infringement, including unlawful peer to peer file-sharing. The Bill will impliment many of the key recommendations in the Government's Digital Britain Report.

The Bill would require ISPs to write to their customers whose accounts had been identified by a right holder as having been used for illegal down loading of their material. In the cases of the most serious infringers, if a right holder obtains a court order, the ISP would have to provide information so that the rights holder can take targeted court action.

We hope these arrangement on their own will secure the 70% reduction in illegal peer to peer file sharing which is our aim. If that proves not to be the case, the Bill provides a reserve power obliging an ISP to apply 'technical measures' to a customer's internet account to restrict or prevent illegal sharing. Technical measures might be a band width restriction, a daily downloading limit or, as a last resort, temporary account suspension. A proper independent appeal would be available against application of technical measures.

More widely we also include a reserve power to amend the Copyright Design and Paten Act. This will allow us to tackle quickly any misuse of emerging technologies for copyright infringement and provive an element of future proofing. These measures were adopted following two consultations on file-sharing and extensive meeting with all stakeholders.

ALL stakeholders? ALL of them? I wonder if Richard Stallman was there? I wonder how much attention they paid to Cory Doctorow? Or to ME, come to that. I wonder if those "stakeholders" were actually their constituents at all?

We also recognise the need to ensure proper education of consumers, for new attractive legal sources of content as well as a system of notifications. Notifications will play a significant part in that education role, but it is vital that there are attractive legal offers available so that unlawful behaviour is no longer the "default" for many seeking content on-line. Rights holders need business models which work in the new digital environment. That is why we welcomed the announcements such as the Virgin Media and Universal agreement, the development of Spotify and the music offers announced by Vodafone and Sky. These are the types of agreement which will play a critical role in moving the great majority of people away from piracy.

The agreements to which he refers, of course, are the agreements which are designed to ensure the big companies retain their stranglehold over our culture, that they remain the gate-keepers, able to determine which data is pushed at you through their 'legal' channels and blocking out all those who don't play their corporate game.

It's also interesting that these laws are being written by someone who still says "on-line" rather than online, who still says "down loading" rather than downloading, "band width" rather than bandwidth. Clearly people invested in net culture.

There's only one party which actually understands the issues here, which isn't in the pockets of the media giants.

Join the Pirate Party today.

Reply from my MP about Prof Nutt & Cannabis

Reply to the letter I previously sent to my MP arrived today:

Thank you for your email about Professor Nutt. I apologise for not replying sooner. I was interested to hear your view on this important matter but I am afraid that we disagree on this issue.

Professor Nutt's abilities as a scientist and his qualification to offer advice on drugs policy are not in doubt but as the principle advisor to the Home Office, his role was to give advice and not to comment on Government policy. Scientific advice offered to Government is published for all to see and it is clear that Professor Nutt's views differed from the Government. However, the media interviews conducted by Professor Nutt amounted to a campaign against Government policy and clearly made his position untenable.

In my view it is right that the final decision on policy, whilst being informed by the advice, should lie with politicians. It is politicians who are accountable to the electorate not scientists. Furthermore, I think it is wrong to characterise Professor Nutt's research as the unquestioned truth. Scientific opinion on the danger of drugs is not united as Professor Robin Murray has made clear.

Many seek to argue that drugs such as cannabis and ecstasy should be considered in the same was (sic.) as alcohol and tobacco which are also are also (sic.) very harmful. I find these arguments disingenuous. There are cultural and historic reasons why alcohol and tobacco are not illegal drugs although restrictions have been placed on their use. The comparison belies the problems cannabis and ecstacy cause in our communities.

Cannabis use in Islington, particularly amongst young people, is largely tolerated these days - and I am concerned that this usage is creating sub-cultures of exclusion. Whilst alcohol use can also be damaging, there are social constraints on its use. I actually think that the semi-legalisation of cannabis gets the worst of both worlds - its use increases but without the benefits and constraints of socialisation, that might occour under full legalisation.

For this reason - based more on the social implications than the medical - I am not opposed to the upgrading of cannabis from class C to B.

I am sorry that we are not able to agree on this matter but I hope you can understand my reasoning. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with me in the future, on this matter, or any other.

Best wishes

Emily Thornberry MP

So there you have it. The use of cannabis is creating sub-cultures of exclusion and so obviously we have to maintain the legal system which excludes in order to, um, reduce the social problems associated with exclusion? Or something.

It is indeed politicans who are accountable to the electorate. I suspect I'll find it difficult to vote for one with reasoning like that.

More pestering my MP - The Digital Economy Bill