Monday, October 28, 2013 

Thoughts on the end of the liberal conspiracy.

Liberal Conspiracy is gone.  It's something that's clearly been approaching for a while, such has been the dwindling number of posts, but it's still rather sad.  My thanks go out to Sunny for considering my witterings to be worthy of occasionally featuring there, and I wish him luck in his future ventures.  This also seems as good a time as any for a brief interlude of introspection, so here we go.

Sunny pulling the plug on LC is indicative of where blogging has gone over the last couple of years, which is pretty much down the toilet.  Perhaps I just haven't kept up, but away from the group blogs it seems moribund.  A few are still going fairly strong, others aren't updated as regularly as before, while plenty have thrown in the towel.  Clearly, individual blogs can still grow exponentially, for which see Wings Over Scotland, it's just they need a well-defined niche.

I would say this, but for me the real explanation for the decline isn't the mainstream media coming late to the party and overtaking the amateurs, it's that most writers now spend their time on Twitter rather than blogging.  Each to their own and everything, I just don't like the format and way it inevitably leads to circle jerks, as well as the tendency it inspires in trying to one up those you disagree with, which leads absolutely nowhere.  It also seems to lead some to believe that Twitter, or rather their followers and those they follow are the internet, the culmination of which seemed to be the "boycott" of August.  I'd like to think blogging broadens rather than limits horizons, while social networking in general does the opposite.  Might just be me.

It may also be somewhat to do with how ghastly politics is and has been for the last couple of years.  People seem to have tuned out to the point where Russell Brand being his normal, half-berk half-idiot savant self inspires more comment than anything in months.  You can focus when the government of the day is doing one or two things that are spectacularly ill-advised and wrong; when the coalition seems determined to bugger things up on so many different levels, it tends to inspire apathy rather than opposition.  With so many struggling to make ends meet it also leaves you determined to make the most of the leisure time you have, and while I might be the kind of sad bastard who likes smashing out hundreds of words every day, plenty of others who might have started out before think better of it now.

All this said, I for one am still fairly happy to keep going on.  I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought of putting an end to Obsolete/septicisle or whatever stupid name this site has quite a few times down the years, but for one reason or another I've continued.  Why stop now that the "competition" is dwindling?  Let's give it till Christmas, at least.

(Thanks to everyone who does humour me.  And if you're still reading, thank you especially.)

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10/28/2013 06:09:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, August 08, 2013 

Save us from the trolls Dave!

There is growing pressure on social networking sites to do something about something tonight, as politicians and newspapers alike blame them for every single problem in the world today.

The prime minister David Cameron led the way, urging everyone to boycott ask.fm until it stopped working as any sort of service.  Speaking to Sky News, Cameron said: "These people have got to step up to the chicken basket and show some responsibility.  Simply allowing users of the site to block anonymous messages isn't good enough.  If someone makes nuisance phone calls, we obviously don't hold the caller responsible; we blame BT for allowing the call through in the first place, even if they have so-called call blocking available.  The same goes for the postal service.  If a mail bomb slips through the net and it kills someone, then obviously the postman who delivered it should be held accountable.  It's just common sense."

Expanding on his theme, Cameron continued: "Now while it's true that I hadn't heard of this ask.fm website until yesterday, that shouldn't stop me from talking about something I know absolutely nothing about.  I really do encourage a boycott, as I've also been told that the one organised by the delightful Caitlin Moran on Twitter was such a huge success last Sunday, at least until the new Doctor Who was announced.  If we stop using these sites, there's absolutely no chance whatsoever that people will simply move elsewhere, or that bullies will strike offline rather than online.  We must drain this eco-system of hate."

The tabloids meanwhile have called for more meaningful action.  Both the Sun and Daily Mail have demanded that ask.fm be banned, once again demonstrating their profound understanding of how the internet works.  Neither paper has any truck with bullies, as the comments section on the Mail website regularly demonstrates, regarded universally as a haven of informed, reasonable debate.  Likewise, columnists Richard Littlejohn and Jan Moir would never dream of writing about minorities in a prejudiced or inflammatory style.  As for the Sun, only those with extremely long memories can recall that during its campaign for Baby Peter the social workers involved with his case were urged to kill themselves by those commenting online, something that might cause a few regrets considering that two of the paper's journalists charged in connection with Operation Elveden have since had their own mental health problems.

We asked a random nerd slamming away at a keyboard for his take on these events.  "It's all a bit knee jerk, isn't it?  For a start, we don't know exactly why these four young people took their own lives.  Were they just being bullied on ask.fm, or were they being bullied offline as well?  Did they have other relationship problems, or had any relatives or friends recently been ill or died?  I've had depression myself, and I find it difficult to believe that it was just bullying online that led them to take such a drastic step.  It could have been the trigger, or the last straw certainly, but we can't just blame a website without knowing the full facts, and you would have thought anti-bullying and children's campaigners would know that."

"Besides, why is it that parental responsibility seems such a foreign concept when it comes to the internet?  Yes, it's difficult if you don't understand the technology and the slang, and when you can't have complete control due to almost every device now having net access, but clearly you have to talk with your kids about the sites they use and let them know they can always come to you if they don't feel safe.  It's no use blaming a service if you don't use the privacy settings it has available.  Those truly responsible here are the pathetic little shits who think it's hilarious to tell 14-year-old girls they're fat and ugly and should die. How about we go after the messengers rather than the message provider?"

"As for the tabloids, could you possibly tell it's the silly season? Any passing frenzy will do, even if it's likely that the internet as a whole helps those who feel excluded in real life far more than it harms those already vulnerable (just look at the It Gets Better campaign). They're also looking for anything to distract from their own far from honourable record when it comes to treating those who come to their attention with respect, especially as argument continues over the royal charter to establish the new press regulator."

A reward (a wine gum and a can of cream soda) is being offered for any information that leads to the tracking down of a Labour shadow minister.

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8/08/2013 07:18:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, August 05, 2013 

The epitome of modern self-absorption.

Right, can we cut the crap now?  This Twitter nonsense has gone on for far, far, too long.  The trolling of Caroline Criado-Perez et al has almost nothing to do with feminism, or misogyny. What it does have to do with is a internet subculture that has been there for years, and has become most known thanks to the exploits of Anonymous, but most certainly did not originate with 4chan, or even the Something Awful forums.  Once upon a time, websites and their forums got "raided". Sometimes this happened justifiably, more often on a whim or on the basis of a deemed insult.  In essence, what would happen is that message boards would be flooded, goatse and plenty of other gross pictures would be posted, and a bad time would be had by members of the specific community.  As time has gone by, the targets have switched from being just forums to online games, and yes, social networking profiles.

From here, it's easy to understand how Anonymous broke through, although it's always surprised me that for the most part the main Anonymous grouping has had broadly left-wing political aims, as it always seemed to be the libertarians that shouted the loudest on the sites where its support sprung from.  Nonetheless, the potential has always been there for a similar grouping to emerge that while holding similar views on internet freedom to Anonymous eschews politics and instead just goes after whoever takes their fancy today.  I'm not saying this is what has happened in this instance, as it doesn't look as though the trolling is fully co-ordinated, but in the main the abuse is so obvious as to be laughable.  Some of it is plain misogyny, such as that coming from those using their own names and talking about "smashing up the arse", while talk of "all aboard the rape train" or anyone putting "lololol" or the like in their message pretty much gives the game away.

The real problem we have here then is that the likes of Caitlin Moran and all those that "boycotted" Twitter yesterday just don't understand the way the internet used to work and still does work outside of their own personal bubbles.  The only way to deal with being "raided" is to pull up the drawbridge, or ignore it.  Instead, we've had a media frenzy and surprise surprise, the abuse and rape threats keep coming.  Twitter itself has gotten the blame for something that has happened on every previous messaging platform and which they have all had difficulty dealing with.  Much of the trolling is coming from "one use" accounts, making it difficult for Twitter to do anything even if there was an easier way of reporting abuse, which itself would be a nightmare to administrate however many staff Twitter took on to do so.

It's understandable that those who have been subject to the abuse have taken it as being about men trying to silence women, about centuries of misogyny etc, but there isn't the same excuse for those who ought to know more about the wider internet.  The vast majority of those trolling won't be chauvinists but rather those who've taken exception, for whatever reason, to someone who ends up in the public eye, usually as a result of conducting themselves arrogantly.  They use insults or threats that they know will get a response, hence the emphasis on rape or death.  I might be blasé as in the past I've done my fair share of trolling and have in turned also been trolled, and threatened with getting beaten up etc, but I would have just laughed at most of the messages that have been sent. Reporting them to the police is the equivalent of a red rag to a bull, while treating it as though it's the most pressing issue for women in general is to lose all sense of proportion.

If anything, the whole debacle has just illustrated both how up themselves a hell of a lot of people are, and how they don't like it when the boot is on the other foot.  Anyone with a decent amount of followers can swiftly get anyone who criticises them, unfairly or not, an online mullering, as some have pointed out Moran and the likes of Suzanne Moore aren't above doing.  That number at the top of a profile only encourages the belief that they are an internet big shot; I have 30,000 people hanging on my every word, how can Twitter possibly cope if I simply stop enthralling every single one of those individuals?  The answer, it ought to be obvious, is that Twitter couldn't care less about political and media luvvies. It might have done a few years back before the site was embraced by celebrities, but it doesn't now when there are millions of 12-year-olds who use it only to declare their undying love for Justin Bieber or One Direction and who are the ones paying for the servers.  The idea of boycotting a free service in itself is only marginally less stupid than going on hunger strike in solidarity with those at Guantanamo, but going about it as some did just emphasised how out of touch with reality they've become.

None of this is to condone the nasty and malicious trolling Criado-Perez and Stella Creasy amongst others have been subject to. It has however revealed just how self-regarding and self-obsessed the modern media has become, and just how quickly it can find itself outside of its comfort zone. It might also highlight how little regard there is for some of them at the same time as they think they've mastered the new environment. One suspects though that this will go completely over their heads as they carry on #shoutingback.

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8/05/2013 09:41:00 pm | | | links to this post

Sunday, August 04, 2013 

Internet!

A number of Twitter users say they are boycotting the website for 24 hours.

Yeah.  You know when something starts off stupid and just keeps dafter until it finally explodes due to the sheer fuckwittedness of all involved?  This is the ne plus ultra.  It's like Clockwise but without the laughs.

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8/04/2013 02:54:00 am | | | links to this post

Monday, July 29, 2013 

The Twitter hate machine.

I've come to the conclusion that Twitter is the new arsehole of the internet.  There have been many sites that have combined both the best and the worst of the internet previously, but for the most part the media ignored them.  Twitter you can't ignore: there is almost always one story on the Graun's front page about something that's happened on there, regardless of importance, precisely because it's been so adopted by the media, even more so than Facebook has.  These self-same people are in the main the ones that are so shocked that, horror of horrors, there are some really rather nasty people on the internet who enjoy making empty threats against those in the public eye.  Trolling goes back to the earliest days of BBSes; it's only really moved on in that some people are now so confident they troll or flame using their real names.

Stewart Lee couldn't have been more right when he described Twitter as "a government surveillance operation run by gullible volunteers, a Stasi for the Angry Birds generation".  Twitter both monitors and reports, and if you're one of those caught up in a periodic furore when it's decided someone completely lovely has been unfairly traduced, then watch out.  Enter Caroline Criado-Perez, who just so happens to be a freelance hack.  Following her campaign to get true feminist icon Jane Austen on the £10 note, she was subjected to some pretty par for the course abuse on Twitter.  Regardless of who you are, if you become even briefly notable, you will get flamed and trolled, however unwarranted such treatment is.  It's how the internet has always worked.  Where once we just swore at the TV, now some people swear in public via Twitter.  It isn't pleasant, but a lot of people have found there's little to do other than put up with it.  Hell, just a fraction of the criticism and abuse Lee has received makes up part of his last show, Carpet Remnant World.  Turn it to your advantage; ignore it; block people; let them get on with it; or, and this is a really scary one, try and do without the stupid thing.  You might just be able to.

Don't though claim this is a unique problem for women online, because it isn't.  Yes, it's true that women tend to be abused in a far more degrading and sexual way than men are, as just some of the tweets directed at Criado-Perez suggest.  This is mainly due to how, again surprise surprise, the vast majority of trolls are men (or often boys), and usually men whose lack of social skills has made them especially embittered towards women.  As another report currently on the Graun's front page makes clear however, men can and have received almost identical treatment.  Stan Collymore has previously highlighted the racist tweets that were being sent about Patrice Evra in the aftermath of the Suarez affair, while even the slightest digging will find people being unbelievably stupid on the site, such as those complaining about the royal baby being assigned a "gender role".

This is the problem with bringing the police into the equation.  Not only would they never be able to cope if every potentially lawbreaking tweet was reported to them, it raises fundamental questions about fairness and just how abuse in response to abuse should be treated.  As Anorak points out, plenty of people said that Emma West, the woman convicted of a racially aggravated public order offence on Croydon tram, should be raped or killed yet no one it seems was arrested for saying so.  Nor were those who called for Azhar Ahmed to be killed prosecuted, despite the fact that they went further than he did.  The courts have also so far failed to take into consideration the "disinhibition" effect the internet has when sentencing those who have been convicted of going beyond the limits of free speech online: the two Facebook "rioters" were jailed for a staggering four years, longer than many of those who actually did riot, while Matthew Woods was given a three-month sentence for posting a bad taste "joke" about April Jones.  Those who want certain kinds of trolling to be treated as criminal or online threats as equivalent to those made in public or over the phone have to be comfortable in the knowledge that similar punishments will inevitably follow.

The most obvious reason as to why Twitter doesn't have an easy report feature is that it would be endlessly abused.  Moreover, if you are being subjected to an orchestrated campaign of abuse as Criado-Perez says she was, then the police probably are the right people to turn to rather than Twitter itself.  There's trolling and flaming, and then there's bullying.  To repeat a point, there's also an off switch.  Until relatively recently we managed to go without constantly bombarding each other with messages of 140 characters or fewer.  Yes, some people on the internet probably hate you.  More importantly, some people in real life probably like you.

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7/29/2013 06:28:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, June 05, 2013 

Check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Oh, the fun there clearly is to be had on Twitter if you're a member of the squabbling classes.  Somehow, I'd managed to avoid knowing about this whole "check your privilege" thing, which has apparently become err, quite the thing.  On the surface, it's a perfectly reasonable concept and is closely related to thinking before you speak, only for those who spout on about politics. Do you have personal experience of the subject you're talking about? If you don't, do you think that if you had it might change your perspective?

Only, as is the way of the internet, it's gone beyond this and turned instead into a way to shut down debate and maintain the walls between self-identifying groups, some of whom are incredibly quick to take offence at the slightest perceived insult. Think the row that blew up after Suzanne Moore's throwaway remark that women were meant to aspire to the body image of a Brazilian transsexual, which quite incredibly led to someone trying to claim that she might have further incited hatred against the already under threat transsexual community there.

Enter both Louise Mensch and Dan Hodges, neither of whom are impressed with how this phrase seems to have become popularised. Not that Hodges actually argues against it, he just mocks it, which is pretty much how he approaches everything he disagrees with.  As for Mensch commenting on privilege, wouldn't it be lovely if all of us could abandon those we'd pledged to represent for 5 years to move to the US? Her wider point, that feminists in the US organise while those over here argue on the internet, is also easily disproved.

There are though obvious problems with approaching subjects from this perspective, and these haven't been adequately answered by those defending the practice. First, that it is utterly ridiculous to expect a work of fiction to address how you specifically identify yourself. As a twenty-something white British male, I literally couldn't give a shit about a bunch of twenty-something white American upper middle class females, which is why I haven't watched Girls. When Caitlin Moran tweeted she literally couldn't give a shit about how Girls doesn't include people of colour, despite being set in Brooklyn, she wasn't being racist, just pointing out that it's incredibly difficult to write about something you have very little knowledge of.  Lena Dunham might have plenty of black friends and acquaintances, or she may not, but clearly what she knows best and can both portray and satirise in equal measure is the world that she has lived in and experienced.  Write about what you know.  It's one thing to expect a soap opera to reasonably represent the wider world we live in, since it's at least somewhat attempting to be realistic, it's another to demand it of a comedy set in a contained world, however much it purports to be commenting on how we live now.

Second is the dead end of intersectionality.  I would say this as something of an old socialist, but there is nothing that divides and also unites us as much as class.  This isn't to deny that gender, race and sexual orientation don't also have a major impact on prejudice, or that at times they don't all interrelate, it's that this compartmentalising of everything is getting us nowhere.  The emphasis on identity politics has achieved many things, but it hasn't succeeded in having an impact on overall inequality.  Nor does it help when Laurie Penny comes across as condescending of anyone who doesn't understand the theory, saying that schoolchildren have been using the term on the internet for years.  Have they? Are all schoolchildren now studying sociology at an advanced level?

Third, and most importantly, asking someone you disagree with to check their privilege doesn't work when those they're actually talking about act in ways that don't fit their own prejudices.  Consider the extremely sad case of Emma West, the woman whose rant on a tram in Croydon went viral after someone filmed it and put it on YouTube.  To say that she was demonised wouldn't be putting it too strongly; here was the reality of casual racism in modern Britain, in all its uneducated, drunken glory, or so went the majority of the responses.  Only today did we learn of West's background when she pleaded guilty to the charge of a racially aggravated public order offence: she's suffered from depression since she was 18, and had only been released from a psychiatric ward two months previously.  On the day itself she had taken a double dose of her medication, explaining why she seemed inebriated.  Since the video was posted online the hearing itself has been repeatedly postponed due to her mental health, something not helped by the fascists and racists of both the National Front and BNP wanting to befriend her.  Thankfully, the judge has indicated he will be imposing a community rather than a custodial sentence.

Whatever the original worthy intention was, the "check your privilege" meme has turned into just another example of social networks reinforcing our original views rather than challenging them.  Despite Penny writing of bloggers changing their perspective when challenged with better information, my experience is overwhelmingly of the opposite, and as Twitter is a supercharged version of a personal blog, it only exacerbates this further.  Nothing gets solved, and unnecessary antagonism and mockery are the end result. Some of which, quite frankly, is downright deserved.

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6/05/2013 11:10:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, January 14, 2013 

Oh, for goodness sake.

Of all the things I don't understand about this world, the Twitter flounce out only to return 24 hours or so later is one of the things that perplexes me most.  It's the kind of thing I used to do on games forums when I was 15; when you're 55 you really ought to be over it.

This said, you can't help but sympathise with Suzanne Moore, if not with those who decided to come to her defence.  Short story is Moore contributed an angry, excellent essay to a Waterstones anthology in which, in a throwaway exaggeration, she suggested women are meant to aspire to the body image of a Brazilian transsexual.  Rather than take this in the good humour it was clearly meant, Moore was lambasted on Twitter for her crime of "transphobia", the chief complaint being that Brazil has a terrible record when it comes to hate crime against trans women and Moore's comments were therefore unhelpful and offensive.  It didn't seem to matter that I doubt the New Statesman (which reprinted Moore's piece) is among the foremost media outlets in Brazil, or indeed that there are far worse slurs in common usage (shemale, for instance), such is the nature of Twitter and its echo chamber effect that the entire issue was soon making waves.

Moore herself wrote a reply piece in the Graun, which again is fine, although she does enter into hyperbole again when she says this government makes Thatcher look like Shirley Williams.  Her point, that she doesn't care whether you were born a woman or not and that she meant no real offense, even if she also states that some "trans people appeared to reinforce every gender stereotype going".  Which again, is in my eyes a fair enough comment.  Controversial, not necessarily correct, but not offensive.

Enter stage left Julie Burchill, who has dedicated her entire journalistic career to being a contrarian.  You could call her insincere, except she appears to genuinely believes everything she writes, regardless of how it's intended to challenge, or more usually, offend, or at least seems to at the time.  She has therefore variously slandered John Lennon (someone's got to do it), supported the Iraq war so vociferously that with her partner she wrote an entire book about the hypocrisy of those who opposed it, and gone from finding God and becoming a Lutheran to apparently contemplating converting to Judaism, mainly down to her love for Israel as a country.

With friends like Burchill, Moore clearly doesn't need enemies.  Burchill's piece for the Observer, since removed from Comment is Free, was essentially one long tirade against transsexuals in general, rather than those who took offence in the first place.  If it had been posted as a blog on Burchill's personal site then there clearly wouldn't have been an issue: you can rant on about "dicks in chicks' clothing" and how transgender people telling Moore how to write "looks a lot like how I’d imagine the Black and White Minstrels telling Usain Bolt how to run would look" to your hearts content there, not least as that's what they'll expect from you.  The Observer giving it a home suggests no one at the paper actually read it, which wouldn't be surprising considering the fact it's now put together by two interns and a three-legged pussycat.

Honestly though, it's difficult to be offended by anything Burchill writes as it's just so obvious, and more pertinently, boring.  It's fine that she enjoys low culture; I really like certain aspects of what's considered low culture, such as exploitation films.  It's that she completely ignores how the same people she champions, the "chavs", the working class and celebrities are exploited by those she claims to loathe for the very things she defends, such as Big Brother.  The reason why she's found it so difficult to find a regular home for her columns in recent years is down to how she's become predictable, with the people who used to snap back against her having realised that she's a prime example of the commentator as troll, in the same way as all the other Glenda Slaggs.

For Lynne Featherstone to call for both Burchill and the Observer editor John Mulholland to be sacked is just grist to the mill.  That Featherstone happens to be a minister in the coalition that Moore so denounced may have influenced her decision, but it's also that Featherstone is one of those politicians who thinks nothing of calling for people to resign when the full facts are not yet known, as she did during the uproar over the Baby Peter case.  Interestingly, I can't find any indication that she made a similar call over Jan Moir's article on the death of Stephen Gately, although once she became equalities minister she did mention it in a speech to LGBT conference on Gay Pride.

Quite obviously, no one should lose their jobs over Burchill's column (as a freelancer, Burchill can't exactly be sacked in any case).  After all, the PCC didn't so much as chastise the Mail when it printed Moir's article, as she'd been careful not to use any pejorative term for homosexuals, which is key when it comes to breaching the PCC's clause on discrimination.  Whether or not Burchill's piece breaches the code isn't quite as clear cut: her riffs on "dicks in chicks' clothing" and "screaming mimis" certainly come very close to the line.  The PCC also tends to be harsher on the ex-broadsheets than it is the tabloids, so it wouldn't be wholly surprising if it did act.

All of this nonetheless rathers prove Moore's original point: that rather than organise opposition and resistance to the coalition's attacks on the most vulnerable in society, we're all too busy focusing on ephemera.  Austerity hasn't worked, yet there's very little anger, or when there is, it's directed at politicians in general rather than those who are imposing it.  Solidarity has partially broken down precisely because class is no longer the identity it once was.  Ours is an age where we label ourselves and gather in ever smaller cliques, often without seeing the wider picture.  It's one where anger's fine, as long as it isn't directed at anything that actually matters.  This sorry saga has ended up saying far more about the left in general than just about any newspaper think piece, and it's a deeply depressing picture.

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1/14/2013 09:19:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, October 11, 2012 

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but the police want a word about the names you called me.

Here's something that really hasn't been stressed enough, although Simon Jenkins hinted at it back in August: as deserved as the worldwide outcry was against the 2-year jail sentences for three members of the Russian group Pussy Riot, that's nothing compared to the 4-year stretches handed down to two young men in another authoritarian nation, namely our own.  These two men didn't supposedly offend Orthodox sensibilities by performing their anti-Putin song in a church; all they did was set up pages on Facebook for events that didn't take place.  This was enough for the judge to describe what they did as an "evil act".

Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan will now be over a quarter of the way through their sentences, and will hopefully be released before too much longer.  As acts of stupidity go, theirs was fairly spectacular: setting up pages on Facebook advertising meeting places for riots during the hysteria of last year clearly was asking for trouble.  Nonetheless, no one turned up at either, and in Sutcliffe-Keenan's case he always maintained it had been a joke that had badly backfired.  For the two to be sentenced to terms far in excess of what others who actually took part in the riots received was an overreaction of quite staggering proportions.  That their appeal against the length of their sentences was also rejected is a stain on the justice system.

If this was simply an aberration, an example of the judge in question being as overcome by the hysteria of the moment then it wouldn't be so serious.  Since Paul Chambers finally succeeded in having his conviction for sending a "menacing" message on Twitter quashed at the High Court, albeit only after he had attracted the support of celebrities and pro bono legal representation, an absurd case that the Crown Prosecution Service should never have brought let alone twice contested at appeal, it might have been hoped that judges and magistrates would think long and carefully before convicting anyone else under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003.

Yet this week has seen two more such cases prosecuted, neither of which should have ever reached a court.  Azhar Ahmed was more fortunate than Matthew Woods, although not by much.  Earlier in the year Ahmed was moved in the aftermath of the deaths of four servicemen in Afghanistan to post an angry Facebook status update in which he said that "all soldiers should die and go to hell".  His status also made clear that more attention should be paid to the deaths of innocents in the country, although this seems to have been much overlooked.  It was clearly an angry, very much over the top and potentially offensive message, but it was a political one.  A failure to be eloquent should not be used to punish someone for making their voice heard.  Equally clear is that Ahmed did not say that soldiers should be killed; and as the court presumably accepted, Ahmed afterwards apologised to those who responded to his update, saying that he hadn't meant for anyone to be upset by it.

Despite all of this, Ahmed was convicted of sending a "grossly offensive" message, and was told by district judge Jane Goodwin that he had gone beyond the bounds of freedom of speech.  Indeed, she said that he had "failed" to live up to the responsibility that comes with it.  He was ordered to perform 240 hours of community service over two years; by comparison, the TV presenter Justin Lee Collins was ordered this week to perform 140 hours of community service after he was found guilty of a prolonged campaign of harassment against his ex-girlfriend.

Undoubtedly worthy of less sympathy is Matthew Woods.  Woods pleaded guilty earlier this week to sending a grossly offensive message after he was arrested "for his own safety".  Woods' crime was to post jokes on his Facebook page about both April Jones and Madeleine McCann, one of which was described by magistrate Bill Hudson as "abhorrent".  This seems to be a reference to Woods' show-stopping gag:

"What's the difference between Mark Bridger and Santa Claus? Mark Bridger comes in April."

If delivered on a stage, it would have been worthy of boos.  Posted online during a search for a child, with all the emotions surrounding such a disappearance, Hudson decided it was worthy of three months in prison.  Only Woods' early guilty plea prevented it from being for the full six months available under the law.  Earlier the same day the court fined a man £100 and ordered him to pay £100 in compensation after he called a woman who had pulled up alongside him in her car a "fucking black cunt".

Woods was badly advised, if indeed he was legally advised at all.  It seems dubious however whether or not an appeal would be worth it, as the joke clearly is grossly offensive.  The problem here is the law itself: we should not be criminalising grossly offensive messages purely because they are sent online.  No amount of seminars between Keir Starmer, lawyers and the social networks are going to make a difference when the law was drafted at a time when the closest thing to Facebook and Twitter were Friendster and Friends Reunited.  It's also ridiculous that the onus should be placed on the social networks themselves to police what is and isn't "grossly offensive" or "menacing" when it should be down to users to not outrage themselves.  There's a massive difference between someone posting jokes on their personal page that they suspect will only be read by their friends, never imagining that they'll be widely linked to or retweeted and someone directing their ire straight at someone, and it's one which the courts are not taking into account.

It's also the case though that as the Heresiarch says, true free speech has never been very popular in this country and seems to be becoming less so.  That judges now seem to believe that prison sentences are an appropriate punishment for saying or writing things that clearly do not incite hatred of any variety but which do hurt feelings is a sad indictment of what a petty, pathetic bunch many of us appear to have become.  Twitter storms and online witch hunts rather than ignoring or calmly criticising the obnoxious and mean-spirited now seem the accepted norm, and it's a deeply dispiriting change.

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10/11/2012 11:59:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, January 05, 2012 

Another depressing passing frenzy.

Sigh. Honestly, are we going to carry on in this way until the end of time? People in other countries use social networking sites to help launch and organise revolutions; we apparently use them to flay alive those who say or do things we don't like. No one's safe, whether it's 13-year-olds with dreams of stardom, clearly drunk women mouthing off on trams, an ageing, jeans-wearing man who likes cars cracking a joke about impartiality, BBC news editors who light-heartedly included a panda in their list of women of the year, not expecting that over Christmas there would still be thousands of humourless people on Twitter, or as today's shown, an MP being careless in their choice of words.

I didn't really even want to write about this, but thought I had to after yesterday's post. And let's make this clear, as plenty of people have wrongly drawn equivalence between Diane Abbott's comments and Luiz Suarez's argument with Patrice Evra. There is simply no comparison between a footballer, who when asked by his opponent why he kicked him said it was because he was a negro, repeats the word a further six times, and then denies he's done anything wrong until he issues a feeble general apology months later rather than address it personally to the man he said it to, and a politician who was quite clearly not seriously implying that *all* white people love playing divide and rule when replying to a critique of the idea of there being both a "black community" and "black community leaders".

This said, Abbott's subsequent attempts at explaining her tweet have not been fully convincing. Yes, as the hash-tag in her original makes clear, she was defending the idea of there being a black community when in the past both the establishment (overwhelmingly white) and colonial powers have tried to prevent any such leadership from taking shape in order to keep black people in "their place". Politics is though inherently all about dividing and ruling, as this government is more than ably demonstrating, and Abbott should have known that generalising it to "white people" was a simplification way too far, even for 140 characters. She then compounded this by not fully explaining just what she meant, rather going for the age-old excuse of it being taken out of context. If she had done that to begin with and apologised immediately for any offence she may have caused, she probably wouldn't have received the public dressing-down from Ed Miliband, or prompted an onslaught from those who jump at any chance to launch an assault against the "politically correct" lobby on the comment sections of websites.

Sad to say, there is also more than an element of truth to their accusation that if a politician had made a similar blanket statement about black people (although you can't exactly turn it directly around in this instance) then it's more than likely they would be out of a job now, even if an apology was made or there were similar nuances involved. It's worth remembering that Patrick Mercer was ridiculously made to resign from his shadow cabinet position by David Cameron, supposedly over how he repeated the stereotyping used by drill sergeants (although it always seemed more likely it was to do with how he dismissed out of hand any suggestion that there might be racial discrimination in the army), a decision also likely made as an attempt to ensure that his "detoxifying of the Tory brand" was in no way undermined. It would be lovely to imagine that all instances of racism could be treated the same regardless of the colour of the skin of the person involved, but this itself is difficult when some on the left continue to believe that it is only those with white skin, or those in a position of power who can be racist. This needs to be seriously challenged and to change.

It would also help wonderfully if the media, rather than looking for constant controversy and jumping straight on the back of a Twatterstorm could instead continue to reflect on how the last couple of days have demonstrated that British society has been changed for the better by the courage, tenacity and dignity of two people who simply wanted justice for their son. They were helped along by both natural and unnatural allies, including those who made their own individual breakthroughs, like Diane Abbott. Moving on to the next passing frenzy was especially crass in these circumstances.

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Wednesday, December 08, 2010 

Julian Assange, Wikileaks and bloggocks.

The whole saga surrounding Julian Assange, Wikileaks and the allegations made against him in Sweden has been I hope all will agree, dreadfully reported and commented on, including and especially by bloggers. Doing so accurately was always going to be made difficult by the differences between English and Swedish rape law, and also by the fact that until Assange's appearance in court yesterday, the full claims made by the two women against him were not known. Now that they are, it's apparent that two of the charges would in this country be investigated as allegations of rape.

In the light of this, John Band's initial post on Liberal Conspiracy on the case, which caused so much gnashing of teeth earlier in the week reads especially badly in places. It doesn't however alter his point, which was subsequently all but ignored by many of those who responded so furiously, that very, very few women who make rape allegations are liars. Even taking into account things said in the heat of the moment, and on Twitter, with its inherent limitations on expression, Cath Elliot's tweets and subsequent post were the product of bile and dogma rather than anything approaching an open mind. It might well be the antithesis of feminism "to automatically assume that a man accused of sex crimes is innocent", but it is the legal position that someone is innocent until proven guilty. To assume that is not to feed into the "prevailing misogynistic anti-woman narrative that says that all women who accuse men of rape are lying", nor is it an example of the "way left wing men always sell out women in the end".

As Chris has argued, cognitive biases have come into play on both sides. Too many assumed and indeed continue to allege that the claims made against Assange must either be malicious or part of a conspiracy to discredit the organisation which he has come to represent, when there is very little to no evidence whatsoever that the entire process has been motivated by anything other than the Swedish state wanting to see justice done on the behalf of two of its citizens. Unarguable is that they have handled the case very badly indeed, and as a result smears against Assange by those who oppose what Wikileaks has been doing since it started releasing the documents apparently obtained from Bradley Manning have been made far easier. While it's true that Wikileaks and Assange are not one and the same thing, such has been Assange's role both as its main creator and public face that it's not surprising that the two have become all but inseparable in the eyes of the media and indeed others.

One of the reasons for just why bloggers have fallen down so badly in this instance was elucidated by Assange himself at the beginning of the release of the current cache of US diplomatic cables. He and Wikileaks believed that rather than professional journalists doing the heavy analytical lifting from the documents, it would have been the bloggers and the likes of Wikipedia editors. Instead, the case has been the exact opposite. It's only when the initial work has been done that those individuals then started to dig deeper and provide extra perspective. In this regard, Assange and his friends fell into the belief that has been common for some time among the more prominent advocates of blogging, that it's been they rather than the mainstream, or rather the "dead tree press" or "lamestream media" whom have been in recent times providing the scoops and stories which have then been followed up by the old media. While this has been true in a few cases, it's overwhelmingly still been the dedication and hard work of professional journalists that have meant we've had such exposes in recent years as the rendition scandal, or the expenses file. True, it's often that these scoops are provided to journalists by sources or whistleblowers, yet it's still down to their work and the organisations that pay their wages that we've had governments held to account.

With the mainstream media not acquitting themselves well in respect to reporting accurately a story which began in a country where few have correspondents and where the main language spoken isn't English, bloggers had to rely on the few sources that were available or those that did attempt to look into the background of the case in more detail. This was further hindered by, as Unity explains, one of the main sources from Sweden being directly involved with Assange, putting into question their integrity. What's more, blogging itself increasingly seems to be becoming just an adjunct of wider social network interaction. With time which may once have been spent on posts being hived off to the use of Twitter and Facebook, articles in general and the research being done for them has been shortened further. This is a personal view, and one which many will disagree with, but Twitter especially seems to be exacerbating this tendency; anything that can't be said with relative brevity increasingly seems to be disregarded. What was once contained to forums where walls of text were greeted with the somewhat tongue in cheek response "tl;dr" seems to be spreading to blogging. Time constraints have always been something of an explanation, and it's often true that less is more, yet the discussion of certain subjects, especially those where little is certain often require care which can't be adequately expressed in as few words as possible.

To return to the cognitive biases on display, one of Cath Elliot's points against those defending Assange does hit the mark. Wikileaks has been almost unanimously accepted as a force for good purely on what it has released rather than its views on freedom of information, and with that has been supported with little thought for the potential ramifications if it starts releasing personal as well as government information. While I can no longer find it, during one of the outbreaks of the intermittent News of the World phone-hacking scandal the site ran a comment piece which was highly critical of the Guardian's stance on the matter on the basis that the information obtained via the method should be in the public domain regardless any public interest being served by its release. With the criticism that followed the release of the Afghanistan war logs, which on Wikileaks itself still contained information which could have identified the source (although it seems, as far as we know, that no one named has suffered personally as a result), that free for all stance might well have changed, yet we certainly can't be sure of what those behind the site would do should a cache of such material fall into their hands. Much the same applies to the "Anonymous" grouping and those behind Operation Payback, who many are cheering on, myself included, for hitting back at those spineless enough to withdraw their service from Wikileaks without providing a legal reasoning for doing so. We might not be so pleased should their next target for their opt-in botnet be less deserving.

One of the worst traits of modern media is to try to provide immediate context, and with it comment while also attempting to uphold the same levels of objectivity and authority associated with "old-fashioned" reporting. Doing so is all but impossible when you have the resources of a newspaper, let alone when you're a one man band. We would all greatly benefit if we dropped the pretence of being an unimpeachable source of the facts. Equally, we should be less quick to assume ill intent or read more widely into something from a single, short post. This might however be to go against the very grain of the internet, not just blogging.

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12/08/2010 11:59:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, November 11, 2010 

This joke isn't funny anymore.

Calling something common sense is a much abused turn of phrase, especially when deployed by either politicians or tabloid newspapers. It is however incredibly difficult not to conclude that the very inverse of common sense has been the order of the day ever since someone from Robin Hood airport near Doncaster searched Twitter, found Paul Chambers' clearly facetious update about blowing it sky high in a week if the then closed terminal wasn't reopened and reported it to the police. The mindset alone of the person who reported it has to be questioned: while you can understand those who joke about having bombs in their luggage when being searched before boarding are treated with the utmost seriousness because they really could have explosives on them, however unlikely it is, it's a different order of threat entirely when someone lets their frustration out on a social networking site.

If we were only dealing with the malevolence of a passive aggressive, jobsworth employee at one of the nation's lesser airports then Chambers would never have become something approaching a cause célèbre. Instead it's been that same level of by the book officialdom, combined with the hysterical climate regarding terrorism in which we unfortunately live which has followed at every stage of Chambers' interaction with the authorities which is so completely baffling. While the police are obliged to investigate every report which they receive and will have undoubtedly had to treat what could have been something far more serious with a certain level of care, that doesn't explain what possibly made the Crown Prosecution Service think that this was a case which was worth pursuing through the courts, having had everything laid out in front of them. It doesn't explain how not one, but two judges haven't been able to see Chambers' message as anything other than menacing, and tell the CPS to stop being so silly and wasting everyone's time and money. Indeed, it also doesn't explain how a supposedly learned woman, Judge Jacqueline Davies, could say in all seriousness, regardless of the context in which the message was being sent, that Chambers' tweet was "menacing in its content and obviously so. It could not be more clear. Any ordinary person reading this would see it in that way and be alarmed."

Well, as such a statement almost demands in response, this ordinary person reading it sees it as an obvious joke, in poor taste perhaps and ill-advised, but about as genuinely menacing as Chambers and crazycolours look as posed on her Twitter page. Perhaps that however is the whole point. It's not ordinary people that have sat in judgement on Chambers since the very beginning - it's instead those in positions of authority, however slight, who have seen fit to treat Chambers not as a frustrated and anxious individual on his way to meet someone in person for the first time, someone he now lives with, but as an actual potential terrorist on whom the full level of the law must fall. Unintentionally, Chambers mocked the ridiculous situation in which we find ourselves, called upon to find everyone and everything potentially suspicious until proved otherwise, and for that has been dealt with in a shocking manner by a system which we usually rely upon to make the distinction between the frivolous and the deadly serious.

We can't however pretend that it is purely those in positions of power that are so puffed up with pride that they regard anything that dents that façade as the equivalent of a violent blow against their person. Yesterday the Tory councillor Gareth Compton was mainly being held up as a hypocrite after he jokingly called through a tweet for Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to be stoned to death, only later to then condemn the violence on the student protest in no uncertain terms. Alibhai-Brown didn't see the funny side, and whether as a result of her own report to the police or someone else's, he was today nonetheless arrested, subsequently bailed, and then suspended from his party. Worth highlighting is Alibhai-Brown's reaction as reported by the Guardian:

"It's really upsetting. My teenage daughter is really upset too. It's really scared us.

"You just don't do this. I have a lot of threats on my life. It's incitement. I'm going to the police – I want them to know that a law's been broken."


While I don't wish to be insensitive, and different people will always react to such things in different ways, my response would be the same as to those who failed to treat Chambers' tweet in the context in which was sent: to tell them to get over their fucking selves. I might have developed a blasé attitude to similar "threats" having spent a considerable time in some of the internet's less salubrious locations, yet surely it's impossible not to view Compton's message as anything other than an exasperated response to the arguments she was making, intended for a small audience of his followers and no one else.

This is however what I see personally as one of the key problems with Twitter: there are so many ways in which misinterpretations can arise as a result of the 140-character limit, something not a problem when there's far more space to let your argument breathe as it were, and also so many who are more than willing to do the misinterpreting. In fact, from what I can tell from my ivory tower of disdain, that seems to be one of the reasons to use it when you're politically minded: to take part in pointless arguments with your ideological enemies while circle-jerking with your fellow-minded followers. While then Compton has been unfortunate, and Alibhai-Brown has been overwrought, he's brought it all on himself through his own stupidity, regardless of the considerations set out above. He certainly shouldn't be prosecuted, but he should have known better.

The same cannot be said for Chambers. When Judge Davies says "[A]nyone in this country in the present climate of terrorist threats, especially at airports, could not be unaware of the possible consequences", she's right but her point is also completely irrelevant. He couldn't have expected in his wildest nightmares for his throwaway tweet to be reported to the police, let alone for it to have been dealt with in such a way. Some people have long held that there are some subjects on which jokes should never be made; such a po-faced attitude is itself deserving of ridicule. It should always be whether the joke itself is funny or not, and that's for you personally to decide. When others are deciding that for us and doing so in the courts without the slightest understanding, it really is time to start wondering who the real enemies of freedom are.

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Friday, April 09, 2010 

The Twitteroracy is ablaze with indignation.

A prospective Labour candidate has been expelled from the party after a journalist was bored enough to look at his Twitter page.

Hamish McMadeupname, the Labour party's candidate for the fictional constituency of Loch Ness, was found to have been using the social-networking website to communicate directly with potential voters, asking them what their concerns were and whether he could help with any problems that they were currently experiencing.

A Labour party spokesman explained the decision in far more than 140 characters. "His position was frankly untenable. Everyone knows that Twitter is there to state the obvious, get into pointless squabbles with opposition politicians and to insult minor celebrities, as well as providing the vital service of informing the entire world of exactly what you're doing at that precise second. We simply can't allow someone to use the site in such a way; it sets a terrible example and shows up the rest of us. How can you possibly defend someone that didn't comment on members of the public waiting at a railway station by identifying them as "Burberry wearing, Special Brew drinking, hideously tattooed underclass cunts that will be first against the wall come the revolution"? Why couldn't he try and fit in like everyone else by describing Lady GaGa "as having a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp while possessing the body of a 80-year old woman. Oh, and she has a cock as well." How was he going to get noticed without referring to Nick Clegg as "the kind of public school boy that always ended up having to eat the soggy biscuit"?

Twitter users themselves were scathing about the decision. @twattermeup tweeted: "Like, ROFLMAO. @Hamish4Labour was bringing the lolz. I'd like to see #GordonClown do that. And he was going to get the tree overhanging my garden cut back."

Nick Clegg has had at least 30 women.

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Thursday, March 11, 2010 

Social networking refuseniks.

I suspect, although I might be wrong, that I'm one of the few regular bloggers (not to mention also of a certain age) that hasn't also embraced the wonders of Facebook and/or Twitter. There are a few reasons behind this, especially the way that I'm not comfortable with revealing who I actually am, both in terms of my name and in posting photographs, which I loathe taking of myself in any event. I also dislike the whole erosion of privacy which comes with both, regardless of whether you hide behind a false identity or not; nor do I understand why other people would care what I'm doing at any precise moment. For those that have plenty of friends, or even just online friends, and are completely at ease with the past, I'm sure they're great and a wonderful way to keep in touch, I just don't think they'd add anything to the already pristine brilliance of my existence.

Are there then any other social networking refuseniks out there that do pretty much everything else on the net, including blogging, and yet don't get involved with these sites? I'd be genuinely interested to know, or even if you're just a refusenik that doesn't blog, with your reasons why, or just an acknowledgement. And no, I don't want persuading of just how fabulous Facebook and Twitter are. I'm not alone, right?

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3/11/2010 09:53:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, February 04, 2010 

Diana in outrage hell.

We all know how much I love Twitter, which reading back now, seems to be one of the most staggeringly hypocritical and self-fulfilling statements that I've ever put together here:

... it's a glorified instant messaging service where every stalker and sad sack can follow your ever so fascinating immediate thoughts ...

Err, yeah. Doesn't describe me at all. Sorry.

This though is hilarious (via Anton), although it's doubtless already spreading around like an online version of the clap. The Express, that journal which dedicated itself to keeping the memory of Princess Diana alive by splashing almost every Monday with a new conspiracy theory fresh from the fevered imagination of the owner of a certain fuggin' Knightsbridge department store, has discovered that someone is besmirching their favourite dead ex-royal by pretending to tweet as Diana from heaven. Cue the outrage:

A SICK prankster has set up a social networking website as Princess Diana.

The macabre Twitter page pretends the messages come from heaven. One says: “I can’t talk about Dodi (Al Fayed) for legal reasons.”

The fake Diana criticises the small numbers turning up to her memorial fountain in London, claiming nobody realises it was filled with the Queen Mother’s gin. Referring to the site of her fatal car crash, she says: “Now looking down at Pont de l’Alma tunnel. Bigger turnout than at Memorial Fountain.”

Alan Berry, co-founder of the Diana Appreciation Society, urged Twitter to ban the page. He said: “It’s sick that some people can pretend to be Diana. What respect is that showing?”

Twitter allows people to impersonate others as long as it is clear it is a joke but last night the firm failed to respond to questions about the Diana page.

It seems that @dianainheaven is in the wrong business. Pretend to be someone dead in a humourous fashion on a social networking site and you're sick; pretend to be a journalist and you can become the royal reporter on the Express.

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Monday, August 17, 2009 

Twitter twatter.

I'm sure that I'm not the only person who's getting thoroughly sick of both the hype and churnalism surrounding Twitter, or more appropriately, Twatter. The latest is that 40% of the messages sent on it are "pointless babble". Shurely shome mishtake? Shouldn't that be 99.9%? You also know that when the government appoints a "Twatter tsar", to go with all the other inexplicable tsars it seems insistent on appointing, the other one being Arlene Phillips as a "dancing tsar", that its demise hopefully won't be that far in the future.

David Cameron, for once, wasn't too far wrong in his view that too many twits might end up making a twat. I can see the point of the likes of Facebook, despite not using it, and do have a MySpace account although again I never use it, they're just not really for me, mainly because I prefer to operate under something of a semi-anonymous shroud. Twitter though, with the exception of when it is clearly put to good use, such as when instant updates are necessary such as on breaking news, reporting on protests and organising around them, seems to be beyond pointless; it's a glorified instant messaging service where every stalker and sad sack can follow your ever so fascinating immediate thoughts on what your sandwich tastes like, what it's like being stuck in a lift, and why the NHS is brilliant. Obviously, accusations of hypocrisy can be levelled against a blogger for criticising such "micro-blogging", and some bloggers do indeed do little more than those on Twitter do, but I'd like to think for the most part I put more thought into what I write here than many do with their numerous updates throughout the day (although blogging has been deliberately lighter this month).

Then there's just the wishful thinking, such as Sunny's that Twitter challenges right-wing dominance online. This would be amusing if it wasn't so tragic. If the NHS couldn't find enough people who could relate their own experiences of its service in a supportive fashion then Daniel Hannan would be more than right in calling it a sixty-year old mistake. Those doing so are clearly apolitical; they support the NHS, not the political arguments behind it. The entire hype behind online political campaigning has got all out of proportion to its actual value and use: there has been no indication whatsoever that the success of campaigns in the US can be translated to this country. Indeed, repeated attempts by the Conservatives to do so have failed abjectly, from their "Tosser" campaign to more recent calls for donations, whatever their size, appropriating from last year's US campaigns. If the Tories, the main players online as we are forced to admit can't do it, how can anyone?

Twitter provides what the other social networking sites do: circle jerks, where like-minded people share like-minded things, all while stroking their egos. Again, I'm not going to pretend I'm also not guilty of this, but Twitter just exacerbates the problems inherent in blogging. It is essentially meaningless, not even giving extra quality to real life relationships like Facebook does. Doubtless I'm about to be flayed alive in the comments, but once again the hype and the defences of it simply fail to live up to the reality.

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8/17/2009 10:39:00 pm | | | links to this post

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