So...for the first time in history (or second, depending on your opinion of Sir John A.), something worthwhile has come out of Kingston.

I went out to see Woodhands play Sneaky Dee's two days ago, and they did not disappoint. They played their house brand chunky-hooky-indie-dance-tronica with typical aplomb. But it was one of the opening bands, Magic Jordan (who looked much too young to have been drinking their on-stage beers), that really made the night for me.

The Magic played a half-hour set that consisted of maybe four songs, including a hard-edged Gary Numan cover and a lengthy and twisting spacey electro number that crawled in from somewhere deep in electro-dance territory to savage the audience. It was brilliant. By about ten minutes into their set the first twenty feet in front of the stage were packed with writhing hipsters, jerking spasmodically to the vicious synth riffs like a group of syphilitic monkeys. And it only got better from there. Once the crowd were in thir hands, MJ rocked them savagely, even being called back for an encore--pretty much unheard of for an opening act.

But enough superlatives.

The bassist/vocalist was an enormously fat, somewhat awkward, guy with a 'funky'/loserish haircut, who looked like he belonged on the cover of BNL's Gordon. The keyboardist/vocalist (her vocals consisted entirely in dog-like barking) by contrast was a pole-thin tomboy, all 80's-androynous with a small faux-hawk, and ballplayer grease under her eyes. And the drummer, the only guy who looked comfortable on stage, had a buzzed head, wore black knitted gloves, and basically looked like he should be working the kits for some rap-metal outfit.

SO: Magic Jordan looked comical, sounded great, and their set came pre-packaged with a performance by Woodhands for the same price (free, in my case, since I was on the "list"). What more could I ask for?

I had to wonder, though, exactly who their audience back in Kingston was. Not townies, certainly--I found the idea of the Chez Foo Foo/Royal Tavern crowd ditching their ancient, warbling Hip cassettes for a band of ultra-electro indie new wave revivalists amusing. And Queen's students are mostly too fratty to go for something like this. And RMC students?? Well, let's not pursue this line any further.

"Hector Smarm and his Twin-Tone Orchestra" would be a great name for a '30s big band, wouldn't you agree?

Also: Transport for London has this refillable fare card known as the "Oyster". I thought a good ad for it would have a stylized tube map, with little pictures of London sights [in that cartoony popping-off-the-page over-perspectivized style] and the caption "The Oyster is your world."

There's a new-ish book out on voter bias by a guy named Bryan Caplan. Basically, Caplan argues that the ongoing failures of public policy can be largely blamed on four irrational biases shared by most voters: anti-market bias, anti-foreign bias, pessimistic bias, and bias towards work over productivity. I haven't read the book, but there's an interesting interview with Caplan here, where he says a lot of reasonable things.

Andrew Potter, who I normally have a lot of respect for, knocks the book for implying that we would we better off disenfranchising a lot of people. Potter says that we don't have democracy in order to arrive at good policies, but to "ensur[e] the legitimacy of our system of government". I don't agree that this is a good trade-off, or even that a democratic government has any intrinsic legitimacy that other forms of government do not.

First off, it's hard to see that you accept the concept of governmental legitimacy without believing in "rights" in one form or another. And if this is the case, I think you have to accept that sometimes democracy comes into conflict with these.

If one believes in rights as Platonic absolutes, than one cannot logically believe that whatever happens to be endorsed by 50%+1 of the population is also always right.

And even if you believe that rights are not absolutes, but can give way to the majority will in some cases, I don't think you can argue that the tiny amount of input into government decisionmaking that each of us has can really justify all of the abuses that majoritarianism can produce.

I don't think that (to pick a very loaded example) anyone would term a lynch mob "legitimate", simply because everybody who attended the lynching apart from the victim was in favour of the proceedings.

So then what does it mean to call a government "legitimate"? Can a government that routinely does illegitimate things (ie. violate people's rights) be termed "legitimate"? Potter seems to be saying so. Well, I guess you can hold on to this position, but only if you throw out any natural law or consent-of-the-governed bases, and simply define "legitimate government" to mean "government that allows everybody some insignificant amount of input".

But if we toss out this tautological definition in favour of a more, well, legitimate one, it is clear that Potter's argument amounts to nothing.