Apathy Sketchpad

Facebook allows anyone who wants to to buy little “flyers”, which it then displays to anyone in the approprate network on a random basis. The Metro informs me that the Labour deputy-leadership contest is being fought in no small part on facebook. The other day, it gave me this one:

There are a number of things wrong with it. Firstly the punctuation and composition of the headline. Secondly, it implies, using no fewer than sixteen (and probably twenty-six) question marks, that there exists any uncertaintly about who will be the next Prime Minister. But mostly, it is blatant false advertising.

If you click the flyer, it takes you to Labour’s “Leadership Contest” homepage, which is adorned with a big ol’ picture of Gordon Brown. This page carries a link to what appears to be a list of candidate. Whether one item can constitute a list is a matter for either philosophers or linguists, depending on a matter of semantics (or, perhaps more practically, whether you are a philosopher or a linguist), but I’m damn sure it can’t constitute a decision. There is, as everyone knows, only one candidate. So how the hell do Labour think they can offer me “the chance to decide the next Prime Minister of Great Britain”?

And if they can’t make a flyer without getting every single aspect of it dead wrong, how can I expect them to run an entire country? My God, it’s like having the contestants on The Apprentice running the country sometimes…