Good Night, and Good Luck

Rant #2 of the week concerns ULU. It's the ULU elections this week, and, fortunately, after they extended the nominations period, people actually stood for the positions so there's even a choice of people to elect. The elections have been outsourced to the Electoral Reform Society, for reasons best known to the ULU Powers That Be, no doubt at vast expense which they cannot afford. Voting is all online - you are emailed a password if you get a ULU card, and then you can vote. My rant?

1. I can't vote as I never received a password. This in itself annoyed me as a lot of others will probably not have received passwords so will either be blissfully oblivious that the elections are even happening, or will know they are happening but can't be arsed to chase it up.
2. As I can be arsed, I emailed ULU. They said my card "wasn't registered on the system" so I can't be issued with a password. Now, first of all, I am a student, and a full member of ULU, so in denying me a vote they are actually in breach of the 1994 Education Act. And regardless, if my card isn't registered, then how have I been obtaining student-rate gym membership on it since October? Either I am ripping off ULU in using their gym at cut-rate, so they screwed up.
3. All UCL students recently received an email, whether or not they had a ULU card, giving them a password and allowing them to therefore vote in the ULU elections automatically. So different rules apply to UCL students and Heythrop students, who have student cards yet have to (along with everyone else bar UCL and, apparently, Iimperial) obtain a second card from ULU in order to vote. The card must be registered with ULU, therefore if you didn't get one at Freshers your only option is to traipse up to Malet Street from South Ken or wherever to get one and hope that your details get onto "the system". Basically, "All voters are equal, but some are more equal than others."
4. Nice though it is for UCL students to be able to vote, though I don't expect many will bother, whoever passed on their details to the Electoral Reform Society is in breach of the Data Protection Act. Apparently the decision to do so was taken by the UCL Union Executive Committee, and details had been passed on for election purposes only. However, the UCL Union Executive Committee does not own the personal data (email addresses, names etc) of every individual at UCL and as such it is illegal for them to pass these to a third party without permission.

I would raise it at the next ULU Council; unfortunately this isn't until May, and if it's like the last two, nobody will bother to turnm up, so it won't happen anyway.

Going back to the film in the title, The film is short anyway - we were in and out in two hours including adverts - and huge sections of it are made up of McCarthy speeches and interspersed with a (pretty good) Jazz soundtrack, so I'm not sure how much of it was actually original dialogue - I don't think it can have been more than 40 minutes at the most. Now, the timing of the film's creation and release are clearly intended to make the parallels between McCarthy and our current situation blindingly obvious that the whole thing is almost one big, in-your-face cliche, but, fortunately, it's quite a good one, and anyway, it has George Clooney in it, and I would certainly recommend seeing it if you have a spare couple of hours. It does somewhat imply that at the time CBS was standing alone against McCarthyism, when, actually, intellectuals and artists, from New York Times journalists to Arthur Miller writing "The Crucible" were taking the witch hunts and running with them, but the fact remains the people who should have been doing something about it were either not bothering or had already been branded as Communists, and, it's true, the programme's actions were courageous, or political suicide, depending on how you look at it. Either way, there was an irony that while America was espousing the view that Russia and China were evil in the way that they were denying freedom of speech, political opinion, and denouncing anybody who didn't agree with them, America was, in fact, denying freedom of speech, freedom of political beliefs, and publicly denouncing anyone with even the most tenuous link to Communism (and often no proven link at all); it's just that America didn't have gulags.

Now, of course, it's doing quite a lot of that again, even to the extent of keeping tabs on what their citizens check out of libraries, but this time it has Guantanamo Bay.

On a somewhat random note, one of my Christian Ethicist Mates (doesn't that make us sound trendy?) has some sort of connection with a new initiative called Pray-as-you-go, which sounded suspiciously evangelical but, I was pleasantly surprised to find out, is actually the work of the Jesuits, who seem to be "getting down with the kids" now that even the Pope has an iPod. The general idea is that you download a prayer a day onto your iPod and listen to it on your way to work. As I have set aside my daily commute to indulge in such deep and meaningful stuff as The Clash and The Kaiser Chiefs, I'm afraid I have been unable to make room on my MP3 player for Celtic music and a Jesuit homily, but you can listen online as well, and for eight minutes a day, if you're looking for something Lenty to do, check it out and let me know what you think so I can pass it on to Ang.