Under Saturday morning Extreme Trivia, I’ve just been reminded of two Twitter incidents from way back in 2009.

Firstly, Armando Iannucci’s reaction when he was listed as a “Guest Contributor” by Labour List for this article:

Who is the twat-thumper who put me down as a 'contributor' to the Government's weep-rag LabourList? I want his or her cock for a salad.

May 7, 2009 16:18 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Aiannucci

Armando Iannucci

Secondly, Nick Lezard the Guardian / Observer’s reflector-in-circles, on why Twitter is only for:

idiots with a steadily decreasing attention span

Nick joined Twitter last week as @nicklezard.

Nicholas Lezard: So you’re eating lunch? Fascinating

Where does one start with the momentous news that Stephen Fry was considering leaving Twitter? Apparently someone, although broadly sympathetic to Fry in general – no, better, someone who admired and adored him – complained that some of his tweets, as I gather they are called, were “a bit… boring.” Fry took hurt, and announced his intentions before having a re-think.

Now, I have nothing against Stephen Fry, although one questions the wisdom of someone with an easily-bruised ego telling 800,000 people that he’s eating a sandwich and expecting every one of them to be thrilled by the news, but I certainly have something against Twitter.

The name tells us straightaway: it’s inconsequential, background noise, a waste of time and space. Actually, the name does a disservice to the sounds birds make, which are, for the birds, significant, and for humans, soothing and, if you’re Messiaen, inspirational. But Twitter? Inspirational?

No – it’s inspiration’s opposite. The online phenomenon is about humanity disappearing up its own fundament, or the air leaking out of the whole Enlightenment project. In short, I feel about Twitter the way some people feel about nuclear weapons: it’s wrong. It makes blogging look like literature. It’s anti-literature, the new opium of the masses.

Its unreflective instantaneousness encourages neurotic behaviour in both the tweeters and the twatted (seriously, the Americans have proposed that “twatted” should be the past participle of “tweet”, which is the only funny thing about the whole business); it encourages us in the delusion that our random thoughts, our banal experiences, are significant. It is masturbatory and infantile, and the amazing thing is that people can’t get enough of it – possibly because it IS masturbatory and infantile.

Answering the question: “Why do so many people seem to like Twitter?” Twitter itself does not say: “Because people are idiots with a steadily decreasing attention span, and 140 characters is pretty much all anyone has space for in their atrophied brains any more,” but instead, “People are eager to connect with other people and Twitter makes that simple.”

Twitter asks one question: “What are you doing?” (It also adds, in the next paragraph, that “Twitter’s core technology is a device agnostic message routing system with rudimentary social networking features”, and I hope that clears everything up for you.)

Oh God, that it should have come to this. Centuries of human thought and experience drowned out in a maelstrom of inconsequential rubbish (and don’t tell me about Trafigura – one good deed is not enough, and an ordinary online campaign would have done the trick just as well). It is like some horrible science-fiction prediction come to pass: it is not just that Twitter signals the end of nuanced, reflective, authoritative thought – it’s that no one seems to mind.

And I suspect that it’s psychologically dangerous. We have evolved over millions of years to learn not to bore other people with constant updates about what we’re doing (I’m opening a jar of pickles … I’m picking my nose … I’m typing out a message on Twitter …) and we’re throwing it all away. Twitter encourages monstrous egomania, and the very fact that Fry used Twitter to announce that he was leaving Twitter shows his dependence on it. He was never going to give it up. He’s addicted to it.

(There’ll be a real post along soon.)

How Twitter Times Change is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Mark Zuckerberg had it all.

Most successful social media company in the world.

Umpteen-billionaire in his 20s.

Beautiful girlfriend.

And presumably a Philippe Starck Lemon Squeezer.

And then he got the Hippy, Hippy Shake, and innoculated himself with Social Management-Speak:

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

….

We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.

Ugh.

I would print some more,  but there’s 2200 words of the damned thing.

A punt on which to put your pension?

Cartoon Credit: Gaping Void, 2007.

Zuckerberg was on a roll … is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Not a post I expected to be writing this afternoon; it was to be about Laurie’s interesting  comments on Channel 4 News last night.

However, that’s been trumped, and this is now about online harrassment.

One of the Youtube video’s of one of Laurie’s TV appearances over the weekend received this comment from a Twitter user called @regul, which account has now been deleted:

Brian Whelan, of Yahoo Ireland, who was prominent in summer 2011 as one of the bloggers who helped expose writer Johann Hari as a fraud, rapidly tracked down the commenter from his supposedly ‘anonymous’ account name and other breadcrumbs which were lying around the internet – Facebook accounts, Amazon accounts and others, and posted an article.

This is not particularly difficult to do in most cases.

While not an active death threat, this comment is utterly unacceptable, and seems to me to come within the category of online harassment, defined in the 1997 Protection from Harassment Act:

Prohibition of harassment.

(1) A person must not pursue a course of conduct—
(a) which amounts to harassment of another, and
(b) which he knows or ought to know amounts to harassment of the other.and would come within the category of stalking if repeated.

There is also a Civil Remedy (i.e. damages) available under the same Act:

3  Civil Remedy

(1) An actual or apprehended breach of section 1 may be the subject of a claim in civil proceedings by the person who is or may be the victim of the course of conduct in question.

(2) On such a claim, damages may be awarded for (among other things) any anxiety caused by the harassment and any financial loss resulting from the harassment.

To my eye it may also qualify as an offence under the Public Order Act 1986:

4A Intentional harassment, alarm or distress.

(1) A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he—
(a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or
(b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,
thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.

There’s been something of a campaign over the last several months, particularly in the New Statesman, particularly for harassment of female writers.

I’d like to see this kind of offence prosecuted or at least reported to the police, and I’m in support of Laurie should she choose to do so, although there are also other remedies available, such as in this case a report to @regul’s University.

There can be opposition to a writer, satirical comparisons, demonstrations of incompetence, insults, even expressions of contempt. In my book those are all acceptable, even when officious law makers try to regulate them away. This one is way over any line of acceptability.

My support is not entirely altruistic, because of hoary old myths which have become attached to the anti-harassment campaign.

Julia Hobsbawm has written that the key problem is not misogyny but anonymity:

The key issue here is not actually misogyny – although it is clearly prevalent, on the increase with particularly violent and criminal intent, one writer having both her home address and a threat to rape her published in a single comment  – but anonymity.

This is wrong, and I wouldn’t completely agree that it is misogyny either, but that is one for another day. Brian Whelan has demonstrated in this case that anonymity is much harder to maintain than a lot of people think, and it is only thought to be a problem rather than being a significant real one.

It is possible to be difficult to find online, but it usually takes so much effort and so many adminstration overheads in maintenance of accounts, emails, diversions, proxies and the rest as to not be worthwhile. And if it is worthwhile, then treating an offence seriously – by involving the legal authorities – makes anonymity even harder to maintain, as most internet companies will comply with legal demands from Police or Courts.

Julia has also exhumed the old “Mainstream Media Professionals Good; Amateurs Bad” hobby-horse and taken it out for a canter round the stableyard:

The hundreds of thousands of words a day written by paid commentators has been hard-won and designated, paid-for editing and sub-editing time is devoted to it. What has not happened in a decade in which the public’s voice has been used to add riposte to comment is the emergence of much new prized comment voice. Why not? Because of its quality as well as brevity.

This is quite a bold claim in the year of Hari and Hackgate, and it does not deserve house room for even ten seconds.

In addition to the paid media having more than it’s fair share of fools with wage packets, many of the recent crops of good new journalists start out as amateurs blogging. Many excellent writers also remain as unpaid or occasionally paid commentators.

But, while they are attached to a loud campaign about harassment, these myths may attain some traction.

So I’d like to see some of these harassment cases prosecuted to begin to close down the problem, and our day by day freedoms left alone, rather than having a lot of hot air produced about harassment, and our politicians introducing ill though-out new restrictions.

Tomorrow I may have a go at Laurie’s accuracy, reliability, competence, or sensationalism.

Today she has my full support.

In support of Laurie Penny is a post from: Anna Raccoon

From the thrumming intellectual engine at the heart of the Occupy movement, earlier this month:

(Davane)

I just wanted to point out that I found the Sack Boris Campaign website the other day, and took the opportunity to donate some cash to get some Sack Boris Oyster card wallets. A friend of mine works in the TFL Lost Property Office, so I am thinking of “accidentally losing” a few and asking if he has found them.

…

With the TFL fare increase, and the state of the economy, one way to give back to the community might be to look into handing out free PAYG oyster cards with the wallets. We could top them up with say £5 each, and let people hand in their old PAYG oyster cards (and wallets, naturally) to be topped up and donated. That’s a free day’s fare in and out of the city, to visit Occupy London.

We all know TFL/Boris did this to try and prevent support for Occupy London, by pricing the poor off of public transport, and thus limiting their access to the camp and the facilities that they provide. We shouldn’t let them get away with this. Instead, we should turn it to our advantage.

(No exaggeration of their own importance here. Oh no.)

(Hairyloon)

Really!?

(Davane)

Okay, maybe this is just a conspiracy theory of mine, but fares are something Boris has direct control over, and if you have a registered Oyster card, then your journeys are tracked, so TFL can see how many people are travelling to the sites closest to the Occupy camps. You don’t think they would be monitoring that sort of information?

…

In fact, the Oyster card itself, while convenient, is also a thinly disguised means of tracking people’s movements. This is WHY they offer a discount on journeys made using Oyster – they want people to use Oyster, so they can track what people are doing. Now, it has always been my philosophy that you cannot hide what you are doing, rather you should always act and be prepared as if you are being watched. In my case, I generally don’t care whether people see me or not. If something needs to be done, I will do it, and it doesn’t matter if I am being watched or not.

(I have a certain sympathy for the ‘tracking people’s movements’ concern, but more because I think that such a large database will be likely to be cocked-up, misinterpreted in error out of context in ways which will harm people, and possibly stolen.)

…

Maybe I should run for London Mayor this year? As an Occupy candidate?

(Hairyloon)

Go for it.

Until you played your card as a conspiracy theorist, all of your posts have been pretty sensible: even I might have voted for you… Except I am not registered in London.

(Davane)

I think most conspiracies are a matter of perception myself – There are many theories, and I am a theorist. It comes from being a psycho-sociologist. It’s just that sometimes they happen to be about conspiracies. All the good conspiracy theories do actually have sense in them, which is why it can be so hard to work out whether they are true or not. My attitude is to always keep an open mind and an open eye. I come across a lot of interesting information all the time.

Watch out, Ken.

You may have competition in the mad Mayor of London stakes.

(* Pyscho-Sociology: the study of subjects, issues, and problems common to psychology and sociology. )

Photo credit: Sugarmelon.com.

Occupy Psycho-Sociology is a post from: Anna Raccoon

An intervention from a makeup artist at slightly the wrong moment on Sky News.

The presenter is Samantha Washington, who used to work for BBC Breakfast.

via @liarpoliticians.

Off Colour is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Last week the Daily Mail reported last week that so-called ‘Moldovan Squatters’ have occupied a house in London, subsequently picked up by the Telegraph and the Evening Standard.

The ‘Moldovan squatters’ were discovered on 8 January, in a house belonging to Mr and Mrs Mason:

The house was built in 1970 and Mrs Mason’s parents, Betty and Bill, moved in the following year when she was nine. Bill died in 2003 and Betty moved into a care home in 2009. The house was rented out to pay the costs.

Betty passed away in December 2010 and the two-year tenancy came to an end in May last year, after which Mrs Mason decided to sell up.

So far, so good. The sale came to a halt on January 8th:

An offer of £248,500 was accepted last month but the deal ground to a halt on January 8 when the Masons, who have no children and live 12 miles away in Epping, Essex, learned the Moldovans – four adults and four children – had moved in.

And the occupants claimed to be Tenants:

The owners were also met by a woman clutching a ‘tenancy agreement’ when they arrived.

‘She was saying she would call the police,’ said Mrs Mason. ‘So we thought let’s call the police and resolve the matter. But they couldn’t do anything.’ Officers examined the occupants’ documents, which stated they let the property from a woman called Sharon Wright from December 28 and paid £2,000.

The occupants allowed the Masons to examine the House:

They were unable to contact the woman and refused to pass her mobile number to the Masons, who were allowed inside briefly to examine the house, which had been left unfurnished.

But this is not a police matter:

Police told them they were powerless to act as it was a civil matter.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: ‘Squatting in an empty property remains a civil matter and the owners were advised accordingly.’

The Masons are distraught, understandably:

‘We’re not eating, we’re not sleeping properly. I have had to inform my buyer that the house is now occupied by squatters and we cannot sell it to her.

and it may take 8 months to regain possession:

Lawyers have advised the couple that they face a legal process that could take up to eight months and cost them thousands of pounds.

While I have huge sympathy for Mr and Mrs Mason, there are more FAILS here than you get in an integrity check for MPs’ expenses in the last Parliament.

Taking a deep breath:

1 – This is not squatting. If it was squatting they would not have waved a ‘tenancy agreement’ in front of the people knocking on the door.

2 – On the other hand this *is* probably part of the Mail’s continuing ‘demonise the foreigners’ campaign. Whether Moldovans should be here or not is a different matter.

3 – That ‘up to eight months’ eviction time is roughly how long it can take to eject a legal tenant who has decided to stay while not paying the rent – the process is tortuous. Repossession of an unlawfully occupied property by someone who wasn’t a tenant, in contrast, usually takes a small matter of weeks.

That lawyer deserves the sack.

4 – If they were real squatters they would not be brandishing a ‘Tenancy Agreement”. In that case, all the owner has to do is prove that the Tenancy Agreement is a fake and that they own the property, and they can move straight to a repossession hearing at the local Court.

5 – There is no need for the sale to fall through; all that was required was appropriate advice as to how long the process would take, and the buyers would be likely to stay.

6 – The Telegraph has picked up the Daily Mail story without substantial correction.

7 – In this case a criminal offence has been committed, and the police could have picked that up.

The potential offence is that the ‘tenants’, who have to leave the property, are the victims of a con-artist to the tune of £2000, which are the upfront costs for a tenancy on this type of property – a month’s rent, a ‘deposit’, and potentially some ‘admin’ charges.

I can think of no better way to stop this type of scam than by catching the conmen who are organising it. They should be the target of the Daily Mail, not their victims.

It is possible that the 8 occupants of the house had faked up their own Tenancy Agreement, but in that case it remains a police matter (faking a Tenancy Agreement and fraud), and they would be exposed just as quickly by the appropriate police intervention.

What happened?

To wrap it up – The Epping Forest Guardian reported last week that a Court Hearing was being heard on January 19th.

And that would be, errrm, exactly a week and a half since the owners discovered that their house had been occupied. A decent result for the existing system.

If you want some squatters who we do need to get angry about, try the likes of the Social Centre Plus which occupied the former Job Centre in Deptford High Street in pursuit of opposition to ‘cuts’ last year, and derailed a planned local voluntary project which was planned for the building to benefit the Local Community.

That project was run by the people behind the Deptford Project.

Social Centre Plus was tied up with the extreme left, although presented as ‘non-party political’.

I’d support an amendment to the clause in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offender Bill currently going through Parliament to go beyond current proposals for the criminalisation of squatting in residential buildings. Where projects are underway, or planned in the short term, I’d like to see the concept of Protected Intending Occupier, introduced for  residential property in the Criminal Law Act 1977, extended to all buildings.

That would also have caught the OccupyLSX wallahs who occupied a building undergoing residential conversion at the weekend.

Photo credit: Daily Mail.

Daily Mail Fail: Moldovan Squatters is a post from: Anna Raccoon

We all know that the Advisory Service for Squatters (ASS) until recently hosted an internet forum which was used by Housebreakers to advertise ‘handyman’ services for ‘opening up’ (i.e., breaking into) buildings which squatters wanted to use.

That is the standard trick – squatting is itself legal, but unlawful; breaking and entering is not. And using a third party to do the criminal bit for you allows you to cross your fingers and ‘finesse’ the police about your knowing nothing of the illegal part.

Squatting is itself becoming illegal soon for residential properties (about time, too), but when the Occupy LSX crowd entered Roman House yesterday they declared that it was all legal, hunky dory, and safe:

Occupy supporter Bryn Phillips, 28, dismissed the safety concerns, saying: “There was a log book inside the building and it was completely blank for asbestos.

“And we’re only going to be occupying one floor at a time and that would be health and safety checked first.”

The protesters plan to open the building to the public on 23 January, which will be the 100th day since they began the London chapter of a global movement against “corporate greed”.

However they’ve already left, having made a dog’s breakfast of their choice of building, which was in fact a residential project which was already underway, where the developer had agreed to spend £4m on 26 units of affordable housing. Had they done their homework, they would know that it received final planning permission as recently as 23 December 2011, and was in process of asbestos removal.

But there’s a footnote on the subject of legal occupation.

What is this I see before me, nestling in the ample bosom of the published Occupy LSX accounts?

It’s £137.00 for a bolt cutter, allocated from the Occupy central budget for the “Direct Action” group, and – as all items must be – approved by the General Assembly.

I wonder what that was used for?

Entering a building illegally, by any chance?

Occupy Bolt Cutters is a post from: Anna Raccoon

I will pick an example at random, but I can assure you that this nonsense happens in every news source, from the Guardian (hardly surprising, I admit) to Private Eye. This happened to be in the Daily Express:

BRITAIN is in line for a £5.5billion tax boom and thousands of new jobs as investors flock to tap new oil fields in the North Sea.

And:

This revival in drilling for oil in British waters will bring billions of pounds into the beleaguered economy as operators will have to pay tax to the Treasury.

So my first question is: at which point did the Treasury become the economy? What this article should actually say is that the the government is getting an unexpected £5.5 billion to throw away at our expense! Wouldn’t it be better if that £5.5 billion found its way into our pockets, rather than those of profligate wastrels bent on wars, corporate cronies and vanity projects?

And my second question is: why are journalists so appallingly bad at the most rudimentary aspects of economics? Why do they think that paying more tax is a benefit to the taxpayer?

I saw an article in Private Eye in which they proudly proclaimed that they’d managed to close down a tax loophole whereby if CDs and DVDs were shipped through Jersey, they didn’t attract VAT. That’s how Play.com managed to drive down the price of CDs and DVDs to consumers. But thanks to Private Eye, that loophole has now been closed and we’re all paying more for our CDs.

Thanks very much, you idiots.

But the best part was their smug pride that they’d made taxpayers better off to the tune of £100 million a year. No, you bloody idiots, you’ve made us worse off by £100 million.

Why do these morons think that giving money to the government is a boon? Are they all stupid?

A boost for the economy is a post from: Anna Raccoon

On the Left, when commentators are groping for an argument, it is an occasional theme is to attack the Daily Mail for having supported Oswald Mosley’s British Fascist movement for a time 80 years ago in the 1930s.

The line has become a standard Aunt Sally to provide prejudicial background in pieces about the Mail. Picking a piece from the front page of Google, here’s Anita Roddick on her own site back in 2006:

How tired I am of the pious pontificating of the Daily Mail towards the next move in my business life, and after their article on Saturday just look at what I’ve dug up about the Daily Mail and it’s historic link with Hitler’s Nazi party – what an anti-Semitic past it had.

when she quoted Ken Livingstone from the Guardian

Associated Newspapers has always led the charge against the policies that confront racism and anti-semitism. It praised the Blackshirts in the 1930s, and admits that as recently as the retirement party of the last editor of the Daily Mail, two of its staff dressed in Nazi uniforms and were not asked to leave.

Owen Jones has positioned the Daily Mail ‘campaigning for a Fascist State in Britain’ as a background feature in the possible ‘Death of British Democracy’ through over-zealous policing of political protest.

Owen also gives walk-on parts to policing of flying pickets in the Miners’ Strike, the (incorrect) use of Anti Terrorism stop and search powers against Walter Wolfgang, and the use of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 against persistent anti-Arms Trade demonstrators :

If you were a genuine democrat at the turn of 1937, you would have been scared. Fascism was on the march across Europe. Italy had fallen first; German Nazism had shut down the world’s greatest labour movement virtually overnight and was upping the persecution of the Jews; and a fascist-backed military coup against Spain’s left-leaning government had plunged the country into a nightmare civil war.

Here in Britain, Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts – backed by the likes of the Daily Mail – were loudly agitating for a fascist government on the European model. Could British democracy fall next? Without the benefit of hindsight, and with the tragic complacency of many imprisoned (or dead) European leftists seared on to your recent memory, you could not be sure that the lights would not go out here, too.

He suggests that there’s a realistic parallel between the 1930s and now, as if there is some threat to democracy in the UK when protests with a record of turning violent are controlled.

The Daily Mail even gets a walk on part at media blog Enemies of Reason – and Steven Baxter is at least 7,940,287 times more sensible than Anita Roddick ever was:

It’s no different today, with many readers getting angry with the way the Mail reports the story and calls the EDL a ‘magnet for neo-Nazi thugs’ and compares them with Oswald Moseley’s Blackshirts (who, as we all know, the Daily Mail supported back in the day, but that’s by the by).

I came across a counterpoint to the Mosley-Mail spectre, in a book by Matthew Sweet I’m currently reading: “The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London’s Grand Hotels” (*) highlighting casual  Antisemitism:

“I am going back to a quiet family life, and shall do my best to forget what has happened in the past”, [Josephine] Green told the Daily Mirror, which pictured her sitting on the sofa of her parents’ home on Park Lane. The copy-editor chose to pull out, underline and embolden four words from the story – ‘Rich Jew of 75′ – a phrase calculated to invoke the disgust of the reader.

The three other most prominent elements on the page were a photograph of a Red Cross nurse tending a casualty on a rubble-strewn pavement , a portrait of a blonde seven-year-old pulled from the ruins of a bombed house , and a report from Glasgow about a pair of convicted war profiteers with the un-Hibernian names of Max Schönbach and Benjamin Brazil”.

This was 29 October 1940, and the paper was the Daily Mirror.

Similarly, while the Mail is made famous for a “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” headline in 1934 – which features in the Mail’s Wikipedia entry, the Mirror ran – in the same month – a piece entitled “Give the Blackshirts a helping hand”.

You won’t find it featured in the Wikipedia article about the Mirror, though.

So, am I defending the Mail?

No, just pointing out the weakness of any argument which has to pick up a label from almost a century ago to try and win an argument in 2011.

That no more wins a debate than does pointing out that John Reid or Lord Mandelson used to be Communists before they grew up, or that George Osborne had an interesting ‘dalliance’ at University.

I was going to put in a photo of the whole Mirror page in this article, but I was thwarted by our wonderful new British Newspaper Archive which was all over the media yesterday. The archive, created by the taxpayer-funded British Library from a taxpayer-funded National Archive, turns out to be charging taxpayers to look at the things which already belong to us. In any case, they have not yet reached 1940.

By contrast, the Library of Congress from the Land of the Evil Capitalists applies no significant restrictions to its online newspaper archive.

Back in 2003 the Independent ran an article by Chris Horrie, author of “Tabloid Nation: From the birth of the Mirror to the death of the tabloid newspaper“, which explored the subject of the Daily Mirror’s ‘forgotten’ history.

 On Monday, 22 January, 1934 the Mirror ran the headline “Give the Blackshirts a helping hand”. The paper went one further than the Mail, urging readers to join Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, and giving the address to which to send membership applications.

“As a purely British organisation, the Blackshirts will respect those principles of tolerance which are traditional in British politics,” the Mirror told readers, complaining that “timid alarmists” had “been whimpering that the rapid growth in numbers of the British Blackshirts is preparing the way for a system of rulership by means of steel whips and concentration camps”.

This was nonsense, the Mirror said, the result of ignorance of the reality of “Blackshirt government” in Hitler’s Germany: “The notion that a permanent reign of terror exists there has been evolved entirely from their own morbid imaginations, fed by sensational propaganda from opponents of the party now in power.”

The paper added that anyone who had visited Germany or Mussolini’s Italy “would find that the mood of the vast majority of their inhabitants was not cowed submission but confident enthusiasm.”

The Mirror’s Sunday sister paper, then known as The Pictorial, followed up with a Hello!-style picture essay showing uniformed blackshirt paramilitaries playing table tennis and enjoying a sing-song around the piano while off duty inside the Black House, Mosley’s barracks-cum-dungeon on London’s King’s Road.

The Mirror and the Pictorial also planned a photographic beauty contest aimed at finding Britain’s prettiest woman fascist – though Mosley personally objected to this, saying the paper was trivialising his movement.

This article has vanished from the Independent website, but not the Google cache – so I have uploaded a copy here.

(*) I recommend Matthew Sweet’s the book in small chunks; it’s an extended gossip about goings-on at high end hotels in the war years. A good one for the lavatory, like Private Eye, that is a bit much in chunks bigger than about 10 minutes.

Dark side of the Daily Mirror is a post from: Anna Raccoon

The Independent, being a clever newspaper for intelligent, liberal, thinking people – the kind who check things out before reacting – has a section on it’s website recommending the ‘most viewed’, ‘most shared’, and ‘most commented’ articles.

Just like sensible blogs, in fact – you increase readership by making it easier for your readers to find interesting articles.

Good thinking, Batman.

However, on Saturday night (I spotted it at about 10pm) the Independent website was recommending a selection of articles published from roughly 1995 to 2000.

Bad thinking, Robin.

Nearly a day later the Indy is still recommending must-read stories from 15 years ago, and  it is self-reinforcing because everyone reads the recommended stories. And round it goes.

Legs Eleven

Respectively, these stories are from Wednesday 20 September 1995, Thursday 23 February 1995, Wednesday 26 May 1999, Monday 07 November 2011 (and I thought Ozzy Osbourne was dead), and Friday 30 April 2010 (right).

The Indy readers are the best, though.

Between them those top 3 stories and a couple of others about education – “Education: Degrees that almost guarantee jobs” (from 1997) and “Why I wish I’d dropped out of university” (from October 2000) have received almost 2500 recommendations on Facebook and hundreds of Tweets.

That will surely help all those jobless Occupy LSX protesters looking for opportunities.

Those clever Independent readers are engaging in highly erudite and well-informed debate about such questions as whether the chappie who was refused entry to medical school in 1997 after conning his way through sixth form at the age of about 30, has been discriminated against under Equal Rights legislation brought in more than a decade level:

Depending on how the statement was made, Dundee University Medical School may have laid itself open to an action against it for age discrimination, unless Scottish law differs in this sphere.   Any clarification from someone conversant with a the law in Scotland?

Facebook, Twitter Recommendations

Under the piece about sex discrimination at the London Club:

Oxford and Cambridge universities may resort to the courts in an attempt to strip an historic London club of its name and coat of arms if it continues to refuse full membership to women.

there’s an entire debate in the last day that hasn’t noticed it fully integrated in 1996:

Next we shall have an elderly Moslem imam suing the Young Womens’ Christian Association for discrimination on the basis of age, gender, and religion.

Oh, stop being so precious. Good grief, you should ignore the fatuous nonsense about your names being affected by the right the club implements in its relationship to the status of females within it.  You are merely adding more power to the left wing mantras of “equality and diversity” and the obsessives that inhabit politically correct land.

Bunkum.!

Brilliant stuff!

There are also plenty of people pointing out how silly it all is, though:

WTF Indy — did someone get into the airplane glue and get a head full again? This article is 17 years old you failed breeding experiments!

What happened, and is still happening?

My theory is that it was  Simon Kelner, the Indy Editor-in-Chief who has just been kicked upstairs, having made a dog’s breakfast of developing Johann Hari into a journalist with a shred of reliability or competence.

I wonder if they have discovered he is no good at running the company either, and have put him in charge of the website.

Perhaps somebody should get Andreas Whittam-Smith to do an investigation and write a secret report.

Independent of History is a post from: Anna Raccoon

There’s been a road accident, in case no one heard.

A huge, ‘ginormous, road accident.

On the M5, on Saturday 5th.

As the BBC put it yesterday afternoon:

Police probing the M5 crash which killed seven people have said a firework display next to the road is the “major line of inquiry”.

Avon and Somerset Police Assistant Chief Constable Anthony Bangham said his focus was the Friday night event.

He said “a bank of smoke” had been across the M5 at the time of the crash.

Initial indications are that the cause was a sudden bank of fog or cloud of smoke severaly affecting visibility on the M5.

Do we know how fast they were going? Nope. Not yet.

Do we know what the traffic conditions were? Nope. Not yet.

Has there been an investigation which has lead to a firm conclusion? Nope. Not yet.

But do we have any indications? Yep, that it was caused by a sudden loss of visibility from a cause not yet firmly identified.

Meanwhile, from ROSPA:

Jo Bullock, spokesman for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, said: ‘We have said from the beginning that we would not support an increase in the speed limit.

‘Higher speed means less time for drivers to react to what’s going on around them. Our concern is that there will be more serious accidents.’

And Ellen Booth, from BRAKE:

“Government policy should not be doing anything to increase the number of man-made, unnatural deaths occurring,” says Ms Booth.

She continues: “It’s relevant to today’s story [the M5 incident] because if you raise the motorway speed limit it sends out the message that it’s ok to go faster on our motorways.”

Nice one, ladies.

Why let any of this prevent you from jumping on the charnel-wagon, when a few dead bodies in the mortuary provide good ammunition for a campaign which well may have nothing whatsoever to do with the causes of this accident?

In a more sensible world we’ll probably be looking at bonfires, firework displays and wind direction, and thinking about families and behaving thoughtfully before we launch our media Exocets.

And then we’d have a sensible debate about an 80mph motorway speed limit.

But this is not a sensible world, and least for so-called ‘road safety campaigners’.

Ho-hum. 

[Update: Jo Bullock, of ROSPA, has responded to LongRider making the same point as I have, here.]

Photo credit: Daily Mirror.

Road Safety Ambulance Chasers is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Irresistable.

Source.

Occupy the Motor Trade! is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Take good note of the face above – it belongs to Nick Pisa, professional journalist; one of that breed of trained fact gatherers and disseminators of trustworthy information essential to society – without such valued souls, we should be reduced to getting all our information from mere bloggers, and that would never do would it?

Last night, young Nick filed a story as Italian ‘expert’ fact gatherer on behalf of the Daily Mail. He was covering the Meredith Kercher story for the Daily Mail.

In a lengthy article published at 8.50pm Nick gave us a first hand account of the scene as ‘Amanda Knox looked stunned’ as she dramatically lost her prison appeal against her murder conviction. He was on the scene to witness this you see….he detailed how ‘she sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably while her family and friends hugged each other in tears’.

How can any mere blogger compete with such an emotive personally witnessed account?

He even had useful on the spot quotes to pad out this distressing scene, as Prosecutors said ‘it was sad two young people would be spending years in jail’.

He witnessed and recorded Knox and her co-defendant Sollecito ‘taken out of court and escorted by prison guards […] into a waiting van which took her back to her cell at Capanne jail’.

He stood in the crowd outside and heard as ‘Mr’ Bongionrno, Sollecito’s defence lawyer, was abused by shouts of ‘shame on you’.

Presumably these were cries of ‘shame on you’ for appearing in the Italian Supreme Court in drag, for ‘Mr’ Bongiornmo looks remarkably like a woman in all the photographs available of him/her – and ‘her’ Father seems to be under the impression that he has a daughter, rather than a son.

The trouble is, as any blogger worth his/her salt will tell you today, that the entire account was incorrect.

If Pisa witnessed Amanda looking stunned, or sinking into her chair ‘sobbing uncontrollably’, it was because she had been found not guilty – nor could the Prosecutors have made any such statement regarding her spending ‘years in jail’ following the court hearing – he had either made the entire thing up, or was employing an earlier quote from the original trial out of context.

Amanda Knox was freed last night, not taken back to spend years in her cell in Capanne jail!

It is scarcely the first time that the Daily Mail has been guilty of outright lies, nor is it the first time that Nick Pisa has been the man on the spot recording the ‘truth’ in all its glory…

Indeed, he must be an expert in the goings on at the Perugia court, so much so that he can perhaps sit at home and file stories without bothering to witness the scene – here is a selection of his previous stories.

“Compulsive Liar Foxy Knoxy Now insists she wasn’t at House of Horrors” “Lesbian Sex Plea to Knoxy”

“Foxy Knoxy plays the field from her jail cell with new romance”

“Revealed: Foxy Knoxy’s sisters posing happily for ‘macabre’ photos at the house where Meredith died”

“Hayden banned from seeing sex monster Knox”

I am particularly fond of Pisa’s ‘Vatican’s fury as EU court bans crucifixes’ which managed to turn the European Court of Human Rights into an EU institution – against all informed opinion in Europe, something which seems to have eluded our man on the spot.

Does it matter if journalists make up ‘on the spot’ descriptions of scenes which never occurred, and record quotes which they could not possibly have heard at the time and place stated?

It certainly mattered where Johann Hari was concerned, is there any reason for the Daily Mail not to hold a similar inquiry into Nick Pisa’s reportage?

Journalists have great power to influence our beliefs and actions, surely time this power of Pisa’s was leant on?

The Scheming Power of Pisa. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Well done The ITV!

How clever of you to find some way of making the turgid new series of ‘The Only Way Is Downton Abbey” actually watchable by cleverly cutting to the gripping tale of “Gary The Aviva Biker” during what I think you’ll find we all expected to be run-of-the-mill ad breaks!

As the billed hour-and-a-quarter broadcast of ‘TOWIDA ‘progressed, I realised that The ITV had pulled a clever trick and was catering for two audiences at the same time – and getting paid a handsome, prime-time fee to boot! Experts at The ITV must have known that throughout Britain there’d be legions of middle-aged men just busting their expanding guts to settle down of a Sunday night to watch the love lives of a few hoity-toity-bygone-age types played out on their bedroom telly, much to the annoyance of their lardy-midriffed wives who, as any fule kno, can’t stand that kind of telly!

A genious stroke, then, The ITV to interweave the tale of ‘Gary’, his bike accident, his hospital stay, his delayed return to work and – genious stroke – his salvation by Aviva thanks to him having paid some accident insurance premium!

Terrific stuff and I can tell you it’s the only thing that kept me sane between 21.00 and 22.15 hrs! The juxtaposition of Gary’s story (every 7 minutes or so!) was so cleverly woven in that Mr Smudd – a sucker for th0se dreary J. Fellowes ‘period pieces – almost didn’t notice the parallel tales being told! Even I, who was ‘with’ “Gary The Aviva Biker” every step of the way, wasn’t sure at times which production had been the subject of several pages in the TV Times!

So, The ITV, keep up the good work and make sure that less than one hour of ‘TOWIDA’ continues to occupy 75 Sunday-night minutes and that discerning viewers can, as the series drags on and on, watch a decent bit of drama – that of “Gary The Aviva Biker” and his salvation by a benevolent insurance company – without it causing ‘terse words’ in the bedroom!

I shall continue to tune in each and every Sunday night to watch as the tale of Gary unfolds. At last, intelligent broadcasting. Hurrah for The ITV.

SBML: Blatently nicked from a comment by Gloria Smud in a previous post.

The Only Way is Downton Abbey is a post from: Anna Raccoon

[Update: To reflect that the work is all done by the staff at Total Politics - to whom our congratulations - the title has been updated.]

We’ve just had the final results of the Total Politics poll out, and the HMS Raccoon is at number 15 overall, which is nice.

We’re also no 19 in the Top Media blogs:

Number 2 in Libertarian blogs:

And number 8 in Group blogs:

We’re also the top blog with Raccoon in the name, the top blog which starts with the Letter A and the top blog which is an anagram of drug smuggling:

Anon Ran Coca  

And that may or may not be part of Anna’s ‘full rich life’, but I couldn’t possibly comment; though I might tell certain people if there was a chance of them getting arrested by the Metropolitan Police in search of sources.

And also – interestingly – we seem to be the Top Blog with a Lady Editor, though round here it’s more Egypt-under-Cleopatra than Spare-Rib. The sisterhood must have been too busy complaining about teeshirts, or having a go (*) at Richard Dawkins, or something.

Congratulations to Cranmer, who is the most voted-for blog run as a single-person operation, and I wonder whether anyone knows what happened to the Third Estate, the home of Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, which seems to have vanished.

There’s a bit more to say on this, especially about the Top Political Bloggers who keep Stick Insects as Pets category, which seems to have gone missing, and to highlight interesting new blogs which have appeared, but we’ll return to that.

(*) The account I have linked to by Emma Band is highly coloured, and a little imaginative.

[Update: Guido just tweeted these interesting comments]

Total Politics blew our trumpet is a post from: Anna Raccoon

The beauty of Google, here demonstrating the flawless ability of our favourite pundit to predict the future.

For the record, Jacks has 3000 or so followers, and last Tweeted on September 5th.

The article highlighted has some interesting bits, and was written in August 2009, but also some marvellous semi-polemic:

The proportion of 15 to 24 year-olds using a social networking site has fallen from 55 % in the first quarter of last year to 50% in the first quarter of this year. But the number of 25 to 34 year-olds has risen and among 35 to 54 year-olds there was a big jump, from 28% to 35%.

This is not a huge shift, and social networking mania remains remarkable. A third of British adults have a social networking profile and half of all Britons who use the internet have a Facebook profile. Even those teenagers who are giving up Facebook are still spending time online. They’ve moved on, but not to Scrabble.

Nevertheless, the changing age profile of Facebook is interesting. It confirms something I’ve noticed: the slightly desperate enthusiasm among some parents to develop their online profiles. It’s one thing to be doing it as a way of spying on their children (not admirable, but understandable). It’s quite another, unnatural and mildly cringe-making, when the middle-aged say they love nothing better than Twitter, or demand that you become their “friend”. Thank you, but no. If I want to tell you what I’ve been doing, I’ll tell you. If I want to show you some pictures, we’ll meet for coffee. And I’ve got plenty of friends, as opposed to “friends”.

Friends in my book are people I meet in real life because I enjoy their company. Middle-aged cybermania, by contrast, is just people trying to boast about how wonderful their lives are now. It’s bald former public schoolboys telling you they’re into hip-hop. No wonder the poor teenagers are fleeing.

…

It’s like the caricature of the Japanese rist with the cine-camera who spills out of the bus and doesn’t stop to look at a cathedral, painting or sparkling bay, because they are so busy filming it. Likewise, if you are watching yourself and reporting on yourself, how can you fully feel, when everything is mediated? Reality takes second place to a life in which you become the star of your own dull movie, and the director too.

Who’d-a-thunk-it?

Since Jackie’s now on Twitter, she can explain how she can feel fully when she has become the star of her own movie.

I can’t wait.

Jackie Ashley on Twitter is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Johann Hari has apologised personally, and Twitter is currently full of people congratulating him on coming clean – again - just like after the last apology.

Here’s Sally Bercow:

*This* is how to apologise. Respect & best wishes to @johannhari101 >>> http://t.co/oWEaVqI #weallscrewupsometimes

September 14, 2011 19:17 via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@SallyBercow

Sally Bercow

That he might have failed to address everything that he has done hardly matters when compared to something else (the war, the war!), because he campaigns for particular causes,  because he’s ‘better than other journalists’, or because he is a “brilliant writer” anyway.

@bradleyc27 coz he's a bloody brilliant writer IMHO. I hope he makes his way back to the top. #weallscrewupsometimes

September 14, 2011 19:42 via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@SallyBercow

Sally Bercow

This time Hari has admitted to two things ‘over the years’, reusing quotes (my response in italics):

The first concerns some people I interviewed over the years. When I recorded and typed up any conversation, I found something odd: points that sounded perfectly clear when you heard them being spoken often don’t translate to the page. They can be quite confusing and unclear. When this happened, if the interviewee had made a similar point in their writing (or, much more rarely, when they were speaking to somebody else), I would use those words instead. At the time, I justified this to myself by saying I was giving the clearest possible representation of what the interviewee thought, in their most considered and clear words.

This was debunked last time, and Hari is failing to recognise what he has done. He has also repeatedly lied about the context of quotes, which he has recorded as being given to him – complete with scene-setting little details. See, for example, Jeremy Duns’ comments.

He is also failing to recognise the import of taking a quote from up to five years before and transposing it into a different context, sometimes taking and people’s words and changing the meaning.

and anonymous, sometimes malicious, editing of Wikipedia:

I started to notice some things I didn’t like in the Wikipedia entry about me, so I took them out. To do that, I created a user-name that wasn’t my own. Using that user-name, I continued to edit my own Wikipedia entry and some other people’s too. I took out nasty passages about people I admire – like Polly Toynbee, George Monbiot, Deborah Orr and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

I factually corrected some other entries about other people.

But in a few instances, I edited the entries of people I had clashed with in ways that were juvenile or malicious: I called one of them anti-Semitic and homophobic, and the other a drunk. I am mortified to have done this, because it breaches the most basic ethical rule: don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you. I apologise to the latter group unreservedly and totally.

Does Hari really think that professional journalists, whom he has admitted to systematically smearing in the most public arena where their biographies appear, and whose careers he has deliberately sought to damage, are going to walk away quietly when he can’t even bring himself to mention names?

(These above are Cristina Odone and I think Nick Cohen, but there are plenty of others. There’s a lot of mileage in 890 contributions.)

Hari is taking some precautions, though, and has deleted certain articles from his own website- for example the one in November 2004 entitled “Johann accused of being part of a conspiracy by Cristina ‘madwoman’ Odone”, from his website.”

He has also excluded the whole thing from the Internet Archive, but you can read it all here.

Here, I’ll stay off Hari’s spamming of dozens of Wikipedia articles to promote his own website.

And Johann Hari says that the “worst part of this is for me” is the detriment caused to readers  and fellow-campaigners:

The worst part of this for me has been thinking about two sets of people.

The first are all the readers over the years who have come up to me and told me they like my articles and believe in the causes and the people I’ve been championing. I hate to think of those people feeling let down, because those causes urgently need people to stand up for them, and they need their defenders.

Personally I’d say that’s partly the readers’ fault, especially where they believed alleged facts in opinon pieces uncritically, but it’s certainly true that there are a lot of deceived individuals out there. There are dozens of them posting “it’s all admitted, now lets move on” messages on Twitter this morning.

and to his work colleagues:

The second are the people here at The Independent, whom I have watched for the past eight years working phenomenally hard to get their stories right and to produce world-class journalism.

I am horrified to think that what I have done has detracted from the way they get it right every day. I am sorry.

That’s fair enough, if he means it, though the ‘new Indy guidelines booklet‘ will make them remember him every time they fill in an audit form.

But nary a mention of the real people who feature in his articles.

Though I’d say that the worst aspect is Hari’s complete non-concern for ‘little people’ and interviewees he has sensationalised, and into whose mouths he has put words they did not say.

How many of these have received blowback – from security forces or enemies – as a result of Hari’s inventions?

Johann is returning the Orwell Prize, but stands by his articles:

So first, even though I stand by the articles which won the George Orwell Prize, I am returning it as an act of contrition for the errors I made elsewhere, in my interviews.

Dishonest, and a mere gesture.

The last time I checked, 3 of the 5 submitted had been comprehensively demolished, and a fourth (about a trip to Greenland) contains at least one quote culled from a Guardian Report from around 2005.

[Update: My memory here was actually the 3 pieces Hari submitted for the Martha Gelhorn Prize - The Eevils of Dubai, Greenland/Global Warming, and British ex-Jihadis. Of these, the Dubai piece has been demolished, and the Greenland piece contains the stolen Guardian 2005 quote. I have not seen an examination of the British ex-Jihadis piece.] 

He’s going on a Journalism course:

I am going to take an unpaid leave of absence from The Independent until 2012, and at my own expense I will be undertaking a programme of journalism training. (I rose very fast in journalism straight from university.)

Possibly useful, as far as it goes, but you do not rehabilitate a decades long faker by sending him on a course, and it is not the qualification that creates the character or the drive to report accurately, objectively, and honestly. That only helps.

Laurie Penny has a journalism qualification – an NCTJ, and look at how vivid imagination she often has on display.

Does Hari have the personal character?

And he’s going to ‘footnote his articles’ when he returns:

I will footnote all my articles online and post the audio online of any on-the-record conversations so that everyone can hear them and verify they were said directly to me.

This is the one aspect I find encouraging, but that is a matter for the Independent, which published perhaps 1000 articles by Hari.

When he wrote them he was acting as their employee; when they published them they took responsibility.

When Jayson Blair, the New York Times faker who was of nowhere near Hari’s seniority, and worked there for 4 years not a decade, and had a comparatively small quantity of 600 articles published, imploded, the New York Times put on a major investigation and published a 7000 word front page story. And that what when they’d found only about 40 articles with problems.

The NYT called it “a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper.”

And the Independent are calling it “a private matter“.

Overall that isn’t going to hack it, nor should it.

It’s still all about Johann. It’s all about his friends, his colleagues, and his fellow travellers. It’s about saving face for the Independent, covering Simon Kelner’s – the editor throughout Hari’s employment – backside, and letting business continue as usual.

Hari appears not to give a toss about those who are the real victims of his journalism – the people who’s words he has invented or sensationalised.

He has specialised in campaigners as well as celebrities. How many of his interviewees, whether for set pieces, or ‘little people’ he identifies by name as props in his stories, have had sensationalised words they did not say read back to them in police stations?

An Independent colleague can mope over the new ‘guidelines’ at the local pub; not so the people in the stories.

The Independent itself has said nothing about Simon Kelner’s dodgy editorial practices. They didn’t have in place systems to stop the paper publishing so much imaginary, exaggerated or simply made-up material.

And Simon Kelner himself has said nothing about his statement on National Radio (Radio 4, the Media Show) that the Independent had never received a complaint about Hari’s articles. This statement is untrue, or as Splintered Sunrise puts it a little more strongly, a Black Lie:

Simon Kelner’s assertion that, in ten years, nobody had ever complained about the Hari column is a black lie.

So where does that leave it?:

• Hari is not facing up to everything, and does not seem to have even perceived what he’s done.
• The Independent is – so far – attempting to cover up the damage.
• Simon Kelner is cowering in his office with a dictionary down his trousers.

Does it matter? One question:

Do 1500 articles riddled with unidentifed misrepresented facts, made up or copied quotes, and untrue smears, in a national newspaper, by a columnist who has been treated as an authoritative source (by some people) across the world, matter?

All this exists in the Independent’s archive, and on their website, but they seem – so far – not to care, and not to think that it has anything to do with them.

And Hari will – again – be held to account by media people who care about standards, and legal people who care about law, not by political allies who care more about their political causes.

Meanwhile, he keeps digging down in the hole where he buried his reputation.

Perhaps he should take his journalism course in Australia.

[Update: Johann Hari supports this article]

Haripology: Bury the Bodies and Walk Away is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Gosh, Hansard can be exciting.

Just watch the Indian born Conservative Peer Baroness Shreela Flather fluttering her wings around the everlasting flame of partitional racism last night.

Gasp in wonder as The Sun gets hold of the quote (not yet, The Sun hasn’t risen yet!)

Feel the angst of a maligned community. Wait for the quotes from ‘Community Elders’.

Enjoy the sigh of relief from the ‘Single Mother’ estates of South Wales.

Possibly the inevitable ‘resignation’….

13 Sep 2011: Column 706 The minority communities in this country, particularly the Pakistanis and the Bangladeshis, have very large numbers of children and the money that follows the child is an attraction. Nobody likes to accept that or to talk about it because it is supposed to be very politically incorrect. Well, I am politically incorrect, and there is no doubt that six or seven children give you a far larger income than three or four. I think it is about time that we stop people using children as a means of increasing the amount of money that they receive or of getting a bigger house.

In the countries of origin, these people-Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and even Indians-have large families because there is no safety net. When you get old, it is only your children who are going to look after you. That does not apply here. Every old person will have their pension and will be looked after. It is time to introduce the pattern of this country and to tell people that they must start following it. At the bottom of the education league tables are the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, and top of the league are the Chinese and Indians. Indians have fallen into the pattern here. They do not have large families because they are like the Jews: they want their children to be educated. This is the other problem: there is no emphasis on education in the Pakistani and Bangladeshi families. If there was, there would be no problem. But we have a large number of young people, particularly young men, who have very few skills and very basic education and they are not really skilled to do any work even if the work were available.

It concerns me that we do not say anything, we do not do anything and we do not send any message that this is not acceptable.

Now 78, Shreela Flather was born into a prominent Indian family and came to London to read for the bar. In 1952, she married English QC Gary Flather, now 66, by whom she has two sons, and feels that she is thoroughly anglicised to the point that: “It’s too much trouble to cook Indian food. I prefer to use Loyd Grossman’s sauces.”

Discuss.

Like a Moth to the Flame. is a post from: Anna Raccoon

The blogosphere is used to being quoted by the Daily Mail, sometimes without attribution (here, we certainly are), and sometimes with attribution but without prior permission, even though they sometimes pay up if you invoice them afterwards.

This morning the Mail have a corker of a story about Health and Safety at Work accidents happening at the HSE. It came from a Freedom of Information request; an excellent idea.

And I’m lifting bits of it to quote here, with attribution. Here are a few choice excerpts:

… staff at the Health and Safety Executive could perhaps do with reading their literature a little more often.

Its employees recorded a total of 53 accidents at work last year, according to figures released after a Freedom of Information request.

Fan those fingers:

If you want some more serious coverage of Health and Safety, you may enjoy a Guest Blog series, mainly by H&S Professionals, I posted way back in 2007.

The best Health and Safety story I have concerned the Health and Safety of workplace goldfish.

When I was working near the Attenborough Nature Reserve in Nottingham, there was an attractive courtyard in the middle of our new office block; the courtyard contained a goldfish pond, which was discovered by a pair of herons from the reserve.

The site management introduced a set of aerial cables strung across the courtyard from the roof to keep the herons out, on the same principle as barrage balloons and the Luftwaffe in the London Blitz.

Unfortunately, unlike Londoners, they were too late and all the goldfish had gone by then.

Each time an audience gathered around all the windows to watch; a superb way of not working.

While we’re on Health and Safety, this week Mr Grayling emphasised a Press Release from the HSE about the “Top 10 Bizarre Bans“.

The right-on comedians at Left Foot Forward (and their accurate reporting was featured here yesterday) were exceedingly cross with the Government about the HSE press release – “Grayling’s tabloid pandering gone mad “, and tried to whip up a frenzy about alleging that tabloid papers were whipping up a frenzy:

Some of these, and others, made it into last week’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) top 10 “bizarre bans”, gleefully picked up and redistributed by Chris Grayling, the employment minister. And to think he almost became home secretary.

Never mind a slow news day, these are the kind of stories you’d expect to read about on a no news day. Yet, the tabloids have gorged on them with a sense of delight and excitement at another chance to expose meddling bureaucrats and society’s lack of ‘common sense’.

Yep – a 750 word story about a non-story on a no-news day.

Imagine it – a politician using a Press Release from authoritive industry body to further his political objectives.

The horror.

Personally, I think LFF grabbed the wrong end of the wrong stick in a fit of Tory-bashing: I’m in favour of the HSE pointing out pointless or badly chosen bans that are bad practice, waste money, don’t help safety or encourage bad practice.

Accidents at the Health and Safety Executive is a post from: Anna Raccoon

The Guardian has a new content sharing / aggregation project, the Guardian Comment Network, where they are republishing content from partner blog-sites, including Amanda Marcotte‘s Pandagon.

The Guardian Comment Network brings you a selection of the best comment from our partners across the web

I’ll have a quibble with some of the sites selected, and the eccentricity of some of them, another time (Left Foot Forward – best comment? Really?), but as a project, it looks fine. Content swaps or cross-posts are an excellent way of increasing your coverage and ‘width’, reaching a different audience niche, or even preventing people writing for the Huffington Post or the Commentator, provided that quality does not fall.

When sharing or cross-posting my aspiration is (and yes, I know anyone will make mistakes sometimes) that quality should never come second to width, and when it does you need to be cutting back on the width not the quality.

But that cuts both ways, and authors can just as easily have their reputations damaged by bad editing as can a publication by running poor articles.

In the case of the Guardian, I think they do some fantastic stuff, but their headline writers for non-frontpage articles are, to put it kindly, variable. Particularly, they have a habit of turning nuanced shades of grey into black and white, and tentative suggestions or inferences into reported facts.

And that usually gets blamed on the author.

Which brings me to Amanda Marcotte, who blogs at Pandagon, a feminist controversialist with her own habit of sometimes shooting from the hip in the wrong direction, as here where Reason Magazine (which can be equally provocative) report on a post she deleted about the famous Duke University Alleged Lacrosse Rape case:

Even when the case began to unravel, the witch-hunters remained steadfast. After the most serious charges against the young men were dismissed, the prominent feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte, who briefly served as blog coordinator for John Ewards’ presidential campaign, opined that they were still “not angels” and that their defenders were “rape-loving scum”—because a different lacrosse team member had sent out an email with a nasty joke about killing strippers.

Today Amanda Marcotte has an article about the Tea Party on the Guardian Website, via the Guardian Comment Network, and she is on the receiving end of a mistake.

Marcotte’s original article, about organised attempts to control books used in schools in the USA, suggests a link between the Tea Party and these attempts, under a relatively careful headline:

The Tea Party’s influence felt on the local level, with book bannings

By the time the identical article reaches the Guardian’s website, wax crayon headline writers have transformed this into a definitive culture-war campaign being waged by the Tea Party (badoom, tish):

As might be expected, the Comment is Free Forum Furies will mutter some version of Amen, Sister and wander off with their prejudices intact. But there’s nothing in the article which supports the claim in the headline (which may or may not be true, but cannot be justified on the article presented). Amanda Marcotte is getting a degree of scepticism in the comments, for example:

and

But that won’t be news to many readers here.

Whether you agree with Marcotte’s thesis or not, and in general I don’t, she’s taking the flak for the Guardian headline-writers who made the mistake.

The lesson I take away is that even basic cross-posting has a price for both parties.

If we cross-post a piece here, the price for having an extra contributor with a different viewpoint may be more time spent editing than it would take to write our own piece, and we have to maintain sufficient lines of communication to keep the relationship strong. We also need to take time to give useful feedback.

On the other foot, the author needs to make sure that we aren’t headlining their article with a silly claim, and ideally to engage in the debate in the comments.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, even when the food costs nothing.

And the Guardian (and probably the rest of the UK Mainstream Media) needs to get its headline act together.

The Guardian Comment Network may damage your reputation is a post from: Anna Raccoon