Feeding The Fish

What? You mean that’s not what the Spectator’s Coffee House blog thought was worth saying?

Here are the numbers:

“Would you support or oppose there being areas of Britain in which some element of Sharia Law is introduced?”

All         34 and under         35 and over
Support:     38              44                        30
Oppose:     46              39                        54

These numbers are worrying. As Paul Goodman, the Tory shadow minister for Communities and Local Government, said in a Spectator interview last summer: ‘Moderate Islam has as its core not wishing to see different people living under different law. Not wishing to see sharia incorporated into British law.’

Now, obviously not all these people who would like to see elements of sharia introduced are extremists. Many are probably thinking of sharia-compliant mortgages and the like. But it does show just what trouble the Archbishop of Cantebury and the Lord Chief Justice are stirring up with their ill-thought out remarks on the subject.

Yes! Very worrying! 5% more young Muslims  (and not even a majority!) gave a positive answer to a woolly question! This is important! The fact that we’re talking about such a small difference or that the next column over shows that overall more Muslims OPPOSE it are of course, bad facts as  they question what we know to be true.  Also, note that there’s a link at the beginning and end of the post to Peter Obourne’s dispatches programme which talked about how the media is again and again artificially creating and distorting stories in anti-Muslim directions. My irony detector is smoking on the floor.

As far as I can see, all survived the server move intact. All existing feeds and links in and out should be unaffected.

Merry Christmas to all those readers out there! As a Christmas gift I’m going to share with you a gem of a story: A robbery solved by a picture of the suspect being placed in a newspaper…directly below a picture of the same person complete with name.

That morning, page 1A ran two substantial photos: In one, a husky man in a black-and-blue checkered coat is seen hanging Christmas decorations in a shop window. In the other, a surveillance camera shows a convenience-store customer’s unattended wallet being swiped by
. . . a husky man in a black-and-blue checkered coat. Local police noticed the similarities, and quickly arrested the hapless criminal mastermind for felony second-degree theft. If the charges stick, we’ll gladly take the credit for the collar.

The actual front page can be seen here. This is so inadvertently brilliant that it comes in just under the wire to make my favourite story of 2007. Enjoy!

Our current system where the PM decides they have a good chance of winning (having just won a war or adjudged the interest rates perhaps) is clearly stupid. Not only does it lead to time and money wasting non-events like this November, it’s just a power asking to be abused.

The danger with fixed terms is it gives campaigns something to work towards and allows the for absurd US campaigns that have been in full power for months, despite the election being a year away. The advantage of the British system is that campaigns are short and (relatively) inexpensive.

We need more than a fixed date, we need a random number generator. You could set criteria to prevent it happening a week later, perhaps you could also make more full use of the percentage of the vote the government received (or opinion polls) to make less popular governments shorter (an automatic national vote of no confidence).

Whilst I quite like the idea of an complex and mysterious process (it would have to be to prevent second guessing), there are some quite obvious flaws here. The usual standard of Open Source for the program would be important to prevent it being obviously highjacked, but with said mystery there’d always be that uncertainty.I doubt we’re ever going to get to the point where people feel good trusting a computer with this vital function, and this distrust will be important in the inevitable robot uprising.

Still, It’d be pretty neat.

Today the Telegraph published this delightful article entitled “Scrap Christmas, says New Labour think tank” OMG THOSE COMMUNISTS ARE GOING TO BAN CHRISTMAS!

Of course, if you actually read the article you’d end up with a dreadful opinion of whatever sorry excuse for an editor read this story and decided it made sense. The group, of course, make no recommendation of banning Christmas, they merely state that perhaps other religious festivals should be publicly celebrated as well.

If we break it into sections we can see exactly where to disconnect happens:

A group has said that other religious festivals should be marked as well as Christmas.

Then there’s a quote from the group stating this conclusion as well as DIRECTLY stating they don’t want to ban Christmas.

“If we are going to continue to mark Christmas - and it would be very hard to expunge it from our national life even if we wanted to - then public organisations should mark other major religious festivals too.

Now Ann Widdecombe stepped in to tell us that to ban Christmas would not be a popular move. Yes! It would not be a popular move, which besides the fact it’s a stupid idea, is why this report doesn’t say we should. (Also Ann the more you remind people about the established church which doesn’t even represent a plurality of Christians any more let along the country, the more we care about disestablishment).

Then the campaign against political correctness joins the debate by saying that that anyone who wants to ban Christmas is “off their political correct heads”. Yes, quite possibly, thankfully the report recommends no such thing, so we’re all safe from those evil politically correct fairies for another day.

Way to keep journalistic standards high Telegraph! Unfortunately this is but one example of the annual attempt by various hack journalists to tell the masses that Christmas is under attack from political correctness, when no such thing is true. The Labour Humanist did an excellent job here of drawing together the absurdity of this annual myth of the war on Christmas.

I’m sure it’s at least slightly ironic that the last people who actually did ban celebrating Christmas weren’t scary atheists, but Cromwell’s Puritans. As it turns out, the last people to ban Christmas were Christians.

The head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique has been saying that

Some European-made condoms are infected with HIV deliberately Maputo Archbishop Francisco Chimoio claimed some anti-retroviral drugs were also infected “in order to finish quickly the African people”.

I’d say I was shocked, but I’m really not anymore. It’s sad that this is exactly the kind of thing I’m coming to expect.

Telling people that one of the most effective ways to combat AIDS in fact causes it is more than false, it’s disgusting. Because of this man and his groundless accusations there will be more people who die from AIDS than would have otherwise.

I’d like to think he really believes this and its merely stupid and destructive rather than the other angle that could be taken - by spreading rumours like this he encourages people to stick to the church’s own ineffective line of AIDS prevention through abstinence. Anyone who plays with people’s lives for doctrinal reasons can only be called evil and I hold hope that this isn’t the case.

It wouldn’t be the first time however, figures like Archbishop Trujillo have been saying HIV can get through the ‘holes’ in condoms for years, despite endless evidence and outcry to the contrary. Actual facts aren’t important in this debate.

People have died, are dying and will die when it can easily be prevented. But Condoms are evil and that’s that.

Whilst this tone is slightly broken by the flaming car driven into Glasgow Airport a few hours ago, this clip is an interesting watch, in it ex-cia intelligence expert Larry Johnson concludes that if the car bombs found in London yesterday had gone off, they would have made a big boom, but unless you happened to standing literally right next to it, they wouldn’t have been that dangerous.

In some ways the climate of fear even ineffectual bombs create makes them just as potent as the real thing (with the advantage that no one gets hurt). Hopefully this won’t be jumped on as another reason to push through more ‘anti-terror’ measures like ID cards. I’ll accept that there may be times where a trade off between liberty and security can be acceptable, but in those rare eventualities not only should we err on the side of liberties (because once given away, they’re hard to take back), we need to see evidence that they do actually make people more secure, something notably lacking (or in some cases evidence actively points the other way) in many measures introduced so far and those planned for the future.

BBC NEWS - Two-tiered net could be coming

…This is net neutrality! I didn’t think this was an issue in the UK. Worth keeping an eye on.

• Giant, armour-planted flying fish
  These really are terrifying.
  (tags: telegraph fish bizarre)
• The ReDistricting Game
  Ever wanted to rig a district to suppress opposition voters? This is your chance!
  (tags: elections politics games education)

Andrew Keen was on NewsNight last night promoting his new book ‘The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy’. His basic premise is that the Internet has allowed too many amateurs into the game and the traditional ‘cultural gatekeepers’ - reporters, editors and the film industry have fallen by the way-side.

This is so elitist it’s frightening. It works on the assumption that the old means of deciding whose views deserved to be heard was better. That people who aren’t in the select few should just stay out of the whole thing and leave the important job of thinking to the professionals.

“[They] can use their networked computers to publish everything from uninformed political commentary, to unseemly home videos, to embarrassingly amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays, and novels”.

People who use the internet will see past Keen’s point immediately. Yes, there is an awful lot of twaddle on the Internet, but there is an awful lot of gold that you don’t need to look too hard to find. There is plenty of excellent music on the internet, some excellent novels, well-produced videos and many many well-written blogs. There are plenty of experts on the internet, the difference is that no-one chooses who they are except the viewers. ‘Uninformed political commentary’? How about the personal blogs of politicians? The voice of our elected officials untampered by commentators? Isn’t the average citizen better informed now that there’s Wikipedia available (which contrary to what Keen might think, has surprisingly efficient quality control) at the click of a mouse rather than having to shell out for Britannica ? How can this be a bad thing?

The Internet is not just a new medium, it’s a far better medium because it’s active rather than passive. The great advantage of the Internet is the so-called ‘infinite canvas’, bloggers aren’t limited by column length to make their point. Take whenever a documentary like ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ emerges, a newspaper can run something giving the highlights of why it’s crap, but a blog can go point for point, saying exactly what’s wrong, and if it’s wrong, there will be another blog explaining why. The blogosphere has proved a far better medium for checking the mainstream media than it ever was itself.

If that’s not good enough, how about the Internet allowing collaboration on a far larger scale? The success of online collaboration has allowed the open-source operating system Linux to (nearly) match the power of windows, and can be used for free. In turn, this makes it possible for the OLPC to design a laptop that costs $100 to give the power of the technology to the world’s poor. The ability for charities and pressure groups to organise on a far larger scale than ever before. Keen might moan the ‘democratisation’ of the media, but you get the feeling he’d probably have been one of those bemoaning the extension of the franchise. After all, if the masses don’t have anything interesting to say, who wants them deciding who’s in charge?

The end of cultural gatekeepers? It’s about time. The time when a few decided what our culture means is over. The internet far from destroying our culture has become our culture. It tells people that they can aspire to be more than intellectual consumers and can have their own voice. I for one can’t see that as anything other than one of the most important steps our culture has taken in a long time.