It looks like not enough people made the correct devotions to Hermes and now we are not going to try and upgrade the blog this weekend. Heather has been sidelined by a cold and a fair amount of work and my internet access time is approaching the bare minimum. When we have more time we will look at what is required with the upgrade and give it ago. Please, keep making sacrifices to Ukko though.
Monthly Archives: September 2007
Memetics
We’ve been tagged by the excellent no more hornets blog with another meme. This time it is the “Evolution” meme. I am tempted to say that whydontyou blog actually disproves Intelligent Design by its very nature, as it definitely seems to be the product of chance events.
It’s a pity that we don’t have visual records because the look of the blog has changed a good few times, losing visibility a good few times when we’ve tried to change the theme. We tried a few themes, altered them a bit and finally decided it would be better to have control over the appearance of the site. Hence, we’ve had to learn how to create WordPress themes in the meantime and have even released some into the wild. This has brought us a weird collection of blogs that carry our name in the “designed by” bit at the bottom, with most ironically, a number of religious and even fundamentalist blogs, as well as (I kid you not) a penis enlargement blog.
The very first post here basically said Welcome. The next post was a recommendation for a book on philiosophy. I see a bit of a theme starting there:
Throughout the book Jamie Whyte uses logic to expose the common fallacies
that surround us day to day – ranging from the false authority given to victims of tragedies through to sheer evasive lies from the rich and powerful.
TW’s next few posts are also pretty interesting, a lot more astronomy and tech-centred than they tend to be now. My own posts soon degenerated into whinges about search engines being rubbish, so I’ll draw a veil over them.
We were much slacker about blogging in 2006. Whole months passed without many posts. But then nobody ever commented except on Ajax or Linux posts and we had no idea if anyone else ever read the blog.
I know the meme wants 6 posts but I’d listed too few, so now I’m going to list too many. A few selected posts from the old ones are Atheist belief, Prove or disprove, Linux partial success Happy Easter
The earliest post that is still unaccountably getting hits every day is a couple of lines pointing to an online source for Viking names with a sister post about Anglo-Saxon kings’ names that never gets hits although it has some actual content of its own. A lesson there maybe.
Other unaccountably still-hit-daily posts are the ones on food, imaginary megaliths in Liverpool and our alltime favourite, How to defend religion because it got us called an “entertaining blog” on the Times (We were planning to get t-shirts made) and got so many hits it temporarily broke our server.
Throughout the rest of the 2006, the blog rambled along, with some good posts, some rubbish ones. Very early in the blog, TW started posting on some of themes that he’s stuck to – including rubbish shops, internet magazines and digital photography. On one post, showing a photo of the Mithraic Temple on Hadrian’s Wall, he made this blog’s possibly first reference to the Biblical rains that have become a feature of the UK in the past year or so.
There were also plenty of anti-religion, anti-ID-cards and anti-1984-in-the-21st-century posts. The anti-ID stuff is starting to feel increasingly like flogging the proverbial dead horse, as more and more civil liberties disappear down the pan, so I think we’ve eased up on that a bit – not through optimism that the issue is dead but through despair that anyone can prevent it.
From January 2007, we were on the Atheist Blogroll, courtesy of an invitation via the sainted Nullifidian. This started to bring in some actual regular commenters, who constantly put us to shame, almost always outdoing the post they are commenting on, with their wit and wisdom,. (Bastards.)
This inspired us to try to hold a comment week, in which we commented on everything we read and solicited comments from anyone who was willing. This worked out pretty well except for me, at least, having to interpret “comment on everything” I read as meaning comment on blogs I read that have an easy-to-submit-a-comment capacity. (Registering with a google username or registering to read someone’s blog don’t count as “easy” for me.) After a few abortive attempts to comment on blogs that I really enjoyed, I also realised that it’s very lame to just say “I really enjoyed this” or “good post” so I often didn’t. It’s much easier to comment when you strongly disagree, of course, but I did little of that either, not much caring to argue the toss with nutters.
We are supposed to tag another 6 blogs and, obviously naming already-tagged ones would be pointless. There’s a good chance that the tagged blogs won’t thank us either. And I can think of a good few more that I’d like to pick, but Ill stick with the first half-dozen that come to mind. So here goes.
Nullifidian
Atheist Perspective
X is ….
Atheist ethicist
Clioaudio
Black Sun Journal
Upgrade Time
Just to let you know we are planning to upgrade to WordPress 2.3 over the weekend. As this is likely to change a lot of our plugins (such as Ultimate Tag Warrior), there may be some problems with the site while this happens. Please be patient and pray to Hermes that we get up and running again without any problems.
Success breeds Success
Abandoned Millstone at Prudhoe,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.
It is an interesting problem about the world of “Web 2.0” (and I hate that buzz word, I will make sacrifices to Odin as an apology), but one of the main promises it makes is let down by the fundamental way the processes work.
The web was touted as being able to democratise the world, allowing the most insignificant person the ability to have their message heard across the world. This was taken to a new level with the advent of Web 2.0 applications and now, everyone is supposed to be able to get video, audio or text out into the world with ease.
Partially, this is true. In the sense that pretty much anyone with a computer and net access can make a blog, upload video or audio tracks, the ideals of the Web/Web2.0 are sound. The problem lies with its finer implementations.
Think about your own browsing habits. Think about what blogs you read on a regular basis, what videos you watch on YouTube and what websites you visit. Think about how you find new things (Google? Yahoo?) and you can see that the vast majority of things will be the “highest ranked” for a given genre or search term. If you do a google search for something you are interested in, what are the odds you will delve to the seventeenth page of results and look at the sites there – much less link to them in your own sites and improve their page rank. Blogs are the same, Technorati page rank can spell a death sentence for a blog or, in equal but opposite measures, propel the blog to server breaking hits. Digg, Reddit and the like are all similar.
The basic flaw is a catch-22-like situation. Until your website/blog/whatever becomes popular no one can find it, but it wont become popular until people can find it. Certainly there are workarounds – for example, when Technorati indexed the Atheist blogroll it was a surefire way for otherwise low-profile atheist blogs to get disproportionately high rankings – but these are far from certain. However, once a blog or site (or whatever, I will use the terms interchangeably to mean generic things on the web) gets that high ranking, the success will breed itself.
This crops up in many areas: for example, on Technorati the most popular blog is engadget, so more people read its posts and more people favourite or link it, meaning it gets more popularity. Moving away from blogs themselves you get situations like the “Top Five / Most Emailed” on Scienceblogs – these posts get more exposure to the general public and, as a result get more hits and remain in the top five. It gets to the stage where a “Popular” item can be an order of magnitude away from the “normal” items, simply because its success breeds more success.
Moving to the picture starting this meandering, Flickr has a variety of ways in which you can grade your pictures – interestingness, most comments, most views or by the number of times they have been made a favourite by someone. The picture from Prudhoe Castle (above) is the winner of the “interestingness” stakes. Despite being on flickr for months, it has only generated 98 views, 2 favourites and 5 comments – but this is enough to top the polls over pictures which have had more views, more favourites and more comments. So, in the interests of breeding further success, I am posting the picture here to see if it gets more comments, more views or more favourites. To see if the effect is repeatable, I am also including the picture which currently has the most comments (and a lot of views, but no where near the most).
Whatever happens, on the web as in real life, it seems that the more successful you are, the more successful you become. Breaking into that “winners circle” is not an easy thing. Despite the golden hopes that the web would democratise everyone, the reality is that (with the support of Google et al), the web is concentrating the provision of information into small, partisan, groups.
Is this a good thing?
[tags]Democracy, Web, Web 2.0, Internet, Philosophy, Society, Culture, Success, Random Thoughts, Prudhoe Castle, Prudhoe, Castle, Photo, Flickr, Photographs, Technology[/tags]
Terrible Pipex Service – Fiasco Continues
Well, I will try to keep this short and I promise to try and find a new topic to complain about, but surfing the internet at snails pace is painful.
I mentioned yesterday the fiasco I was having with Pipex, and their final suggestion was to do some tests for 24 hours then call back. Well, I carried out the tests and called them back. If only it had been that simple.
After a short lifetime listening to a bored “we value your call” (obviously they value it, I am paying to call them….) I got through to an operator who went through the questions required by the data protection act (I assume if it wasn’t for that darned act, they would happily give my details out to every one…) and once more I was asked what the problem was.
I explained, in detail, what had happened and the tech support creature started to ask me the standard questions about “had I checked the filters…” (etc). Fighting the urge to scream, I reminded him that I had already gone through all this and I was just calling with the test data so they could escalate it to BT. Rather than ask what the data was, he asked me “what sort of speeds” I had been getting “over the last few weeks.” I was stunned. So much for the 24 hours worth of tests nonsense. Anyway, I told him that before the “fix,” I’d been getting a consistent 4 (and a bit) mbps downstream and the line reported it was an 8mb connection and since BT fixed the exchange I was now on a line which reported itself as 500kbps. Then it got really comical.
The “technician” asked what sort of download speeds I was getting. I said 350 – 400kbps on average. He then explained to me how 350 – 400kbps was “about 4 meg.” This jaw dropping announcement left me silent for a moment or two while it really sunk in that he thought three hundred and fifty kilobytes per second was “about” four megabytes per second. What abstract definition of about do they use at Pipex? When I, politely, explained that 400kbps was “about” half a mbps he went quiet for at least 30 seconds. The silence became painful after a while and I genuinely wasn’t sure if he was still there.
Eventually, he found his voice again and said he would carry out some tests. After a few (silent) minutes where all I could hear was his frantic typing on a keyboard he confirmed the line was reporting it was a 500kbps and he would escalate it to BT – who would deal with it “in 1 – 6 days.” Wonderful, now I know that this time next week I will call Pipex again, who will say “sorry, BT had a problem, they will investigate in 1-6 days” and so on, ad infinitum.
Fundamentally this shows yesterday’s tech “support” person was lying through his teeth when he asked for the tests to be carried out. Today’s person didn’t care about my results and ran the test himself before sending it on to BT.
It amazes me that Pipex is still getting such rave reviews from people when they, basically, have untrained buffoons running their call centres and spend more money getting a low-life Z-lister like David Hasslehoff to front their campaigns than they spend on providing a service. As far as I am concerned Pipex is the worst ISP I have ever used (it is now even worse than Tiscali who used to be top of my List of Hate, comically Pipex’s fall from grace came when Tiscali bought them…) and I have no idea why every few weeks I get an email telling me how popular they are, how good their service is (for everyone else, obviously) and how I should recommend them to my friends. To be honest, there isn’t anyone I hate enough to recommend Pipex to them.
Please, feel free to spread the word.
[tags]Pipex, Bad Shops, Bad Customer Service, Pipex Sucks, Pipex Bad ISP, Bad ISP, ISP, Internet, Rant, Technology, Network, Tiscali, David Hasslehoff, Internet Service Provider, BT, ADSL, DSL, Modem, Networking, Orders of Magnitude, Bad Mathematics, Bad Networking[/tags]
Zero sense
Zero tolerance is a pretty stupid policing strategy, closely associated with the American right-wing, so it’s had to understand how it is that the Home Secretary, Jaqui Smith, has decided it’s a good choice for the UK:
Jacqui Smith today announced a “zero-tolerance” crackdown on anti-social behaviour, burglary and drug and alcohol misuse. The home secretary’s tough message to delegates on the final day of the Labour party conference in Bournemouth was designed to outflank the Tories’ renewed push on law and order.
This is quite a confusing collection of activities to lump together under a “zero tolerance” banner. It mixes together a range of things from serious crimes to legal personal choices. A helpless drunk might be annoying, even frightening, but locking him/her up is not going to stop you getting your home burgled.
The Home Secretary is obviously being advised by people with a limited knowledge of criminology but a good ear for a soundbite. And a sharp eye for the opinions of the Daily Mail readership.
The introduction of local crime data is designed to address the fact that, despite a 35% fall in the national crime figures since Labour came to power, most people believe that crime has gone up. Ministers hope the provision of local crime data will make clear the real situation and reduce fear of crime.
Correct me if I am misunderstanding here, but doesn’t this suggest that current laws and policies are associated with a reduction in crime? However, the media – what other source could people have for their beliefs about the prevalence of crime, given its comparative rarity? – are giving people a false perception that crime is increasing.
Hence, government policies have to change to match the false perception rather than the reality and must provide whatever the media are demanding.
Does this mean that a grateful media will then report crime as falling, even if it rises?
Clearly not. That voracious part of the media that thrives upon keeping the British public in a state of constant fear will not be sated so easily. It will continue to oppose any (especially a Labour) government on its crime record, because that’s just what a large part of the media does.
Sadly, in the course of Jaqui’s finding out this simple fact -which should be obvious to anyone with the slimmest grounding in GSCE social science or media studies, let alone with an Oxford degree – ever more people will find themselves labelled as criminal and ever greater numbers of poor communities will be alienated by heavy-handed policing.
And just in case you thought our society had more than enough electronic surveillance and biometric data on record, the police are now to be issued with hand-held computers and portable weapons-detecting and fingerprint-taking devices……
Pipex – Terrible ISP
Long rant – if you are reading this on Planet Atheism / Planet Humanism (or just aren’t interested) and you don’t want to know about my troubles with a UK based ISP please skip this 🙂 If you know anyone thinking of getting a new ISP, simply tell them to avoid Pipex at all costs.
My problems with Pipex continue unabated. I am in the process of trying to move away from them and get Sky Broadband but I am hitting hurdle after hurdle.
Following on from the fiasco where I had an entire month without internet connection, despite repeated false promises by the customer services staff and the only offer Pipex could make to placate me was to promise me an extra months connection for free – when this free month will be is anyone’s guess, I am still being billed each month – the connection still sucks. Pipex technical support have reached new levels of incompetence and it is getting to the point where I am tempted to simply cancel this phone line and get a new one…
Firefox Memory Hog
Now, for almost as long as I can remember (yes, I have a short memory), I have been a big fan of Firefox. I work on web applications so I have quite a few browsers installed, but generally I stick to Firefox for most browsing, with IE as a “backup” for those odd little sites which are cabbaged in other browsers. Opera is installed, but it doesn’t get used as often as the “big two” and the Seamonkey / Mozila etc browsers are hardly touched (anyone use Amaya for browsing?).
Recently, Firefox informed me that it had been updated and needed a restart. I dutifully complied and everything seemed to run fine.
As the hours and days passed, I noticed that my system was becoming slower and slower – web pages were taking an eternity to open and when I was running Photoshop or other system intensive applications everything really was starting to slow down. For reference, my system is an Athlon 64 x2 3800+ (Dual processor) with 1gb of ram. You would hope, that it would be fast at web browsing and basic office applications. It was, until recently…
Some initial research revealed that crap-shop-crap-ISP Pipex was providing me with a fraction of the broadband service they claimed, which explains the slow web pages (somewhat), but the problem remains in locally hosted pages. Despite my disgust with Pipex, they can’t really be blamed for everything else slowing down either.
Eventually, I cracked and bothered myself to look into this. Opening task manager reveals a possible cause of the problems. Firefox is a massive memory hog. I mean massive.
An example I had Firefox open with nothing other than this blog displayed. IE was running with this blog, Flickr, eBay and gmail tabs open.
Firefox was using 164mb of RAM vs IE which was using 98mb. IE had more tabs open and the tabs had more data-heavy pages.
What on Earth has the world come to. I tried opera with the blog page and flickr open and it hardly registered a byte. Blimey.
It seems that firefox, at least with this current “Upgrade” has become a worse memory hog than IE. Opera is like lightning in comparison to Firefox, but it always has been – seeing IE more responsive and less memory intensive is pretty shocking. I am going to look into this a bit more, but I would be interesting in hearing any other experiences on this subject.
[tags]Firefox, Mozilla,Internet Explorer, Opera, IE, Technology, Web Browsers, RAM, Memory, System Resources, Computers, Computing, Software, Problems, IT, Upgrade, Pipex, ISP, Amaya, Internet[/tags]
Real men don’t eat quiche
According to worldnet daily human sexual orientation results from consuming the wrong legumes.
You think i’m making this up. I can tell. (Granted it’s not news, it’s a post nearly a year old. I spotted it while looking at other tosh on worldnet dialy. It was such a bizarre headline that I had to read the piece.)
How about
Soy is making kids ‘gay’
I know there are some reasonably strong arguments that soya-based foods that haven’t been fermented in the traditional ways, are dubious and not just as a source of estrogen-like compounds. (Quite apart from the facts that they almost inevitably taste crap and that farming them attracts massive agro-industrial subsidies and can involve clearing forest.)
However, it’s a whole other world to assume that this proves to the general effects that Jim Rutz claims – some of which would surely get any medicine banned instantly, let alone a food product. But the “soya makes kids gay” argument is in a class of its own…..
I assume the gayness applies only to males and is the supposed outcome of taking in phyto-estrogens. Cast aside any other thoughts you might have about this bullshit.
Doesn’t it suggest that these wingnuts have to stop ranting against gay men if there is any internal consistency in their arguments? It treats gay men as unwitting victims of hormone imbalance. So demanding that they stop being gay would be like demanding that the congenitally blind make the bloody effort to see.
A quote from Mr Rutz’s page 3:
My larger concern is that the increasing number of less robust 15-year-olds who are already “struggling with their sexual identity” will be shoved over that thin line into homosexuality. No, they won’t wake up some morning with floppy wrists and a nasal lisp, but they may begin to gravitate toward social circles where they feel more comfortable — and less expected to be rowdy or brag about a string of sexual conquests. And once a teen is ensconced in a homosexual milieu, breaking free from it could mean abandoning his best friends.
What a disturbing picture of “gay” and “straight” teenage boys here. Non-estrogenised straight boys are expected to be “rowdy or brag about a string of sexual conquests.” Oddly, this stereotype almost defines for me the very picture of a lad “struggling with his sexual identity.” But maybe that’s what counts as normal for wingnuts.
Sued God fights back in court
In the court case in which Ernie Chambers is suing god, it seems that God has now decided to defend himself. Libby Purvis says in the Times that:
God apparently left a robust response on his lawyer’s desk. Theologically, it’s actually quite sound…if you ever accept theology as sound.
(I followed the link on the words “robust response” just to see what theist apologetics might look like straight from the mouth of God but I just ended up at Forbes magazine. Don’t tell me God edits Forbes magazine. Then again, that might explain a lot. You’d certainly have a better chance of a compensation payout if you decide to treat Forbes magazine as God’s representative on earth for legal purposes)
Indeed, Libby Purves has been putting out some interesting posts recently.
For instance:
PC users holier than Mac fans
An analytical blog has discovered that Windows users are 20% more likely to read religion stories online than Mac users. “Could it be that the occasional brush with a “blue screen of death†gives the Windows user a greater sense of their own mortality? ” it asks.
Is the world flat discusses the astonishing rubbish talked on The View
I do not think this mindset would be socailly acceptable on TV if it were not for the Creationist extremes in the US which reject other facts such as evolution. It’s enough to make Dawkinses of us all…
The last Libby Purves post mentioned here sparked some creationists to spout their stuff in the comments. You know the “uncanny sense of deja vu”………
Pining for a miracle
In an uncharacteristic display of wanton scepticism, the RC Church has rejected a group based around the worship of a pine tree which is claimed to show an image of the Virgin Mary’s face, according to the BBC.
The Family of the Divine Innocence was founded by a jewellery designer from Surbiton after she saw a vision of Mary in a tree. She then started channelling messages from the tree/Mary, such as demand that aborted foetuses be baptised as martyrs. However, the RC Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
was “not convinced” by the “substantial” content of the messages allegedly communicated to Mrs de Menezes.
Blimey, these messages sounded completely legit to me. I mean it’s not as if we don’t know exactly what Mary is supposed to look like, given the wide use of digital photography in the world ca 0 AD. So it would be easy for a holy designer of jewellery to recognise her instantly.
It would naturally be completely unlike the standard Rorschach-style thing every non-holy person does when they look at trees or clouds or bread. (See comment by no more hornets on GI food post here)
All the same the BBC was definitely cheating in the choice of picture on this story. It shows a picture of a Madonna and child icon, with gold leaf and attendant angels or butterflies or somethng. This picture carries the title “The tree is known locally as Our Lady of Surbiton.” Well, no. While I suspect that the tree may be called that beautifully bathetic name, I think you can be pretty confident the tree “image” looks nothing like the picture. You would definitely have to kiss your lifelong atheism goodbye if it turned out that anything looking remotely like a full colour painted medieval icon had magically appeared on a tree.
Anyway, shame on you, RC hierarchy. Once you start setting a lower bar for things to be too ludicrous to accept, who knows where it will end?
This atheist blog will boldly go where your sceptical RC selves fear to tread. Straight to the website of the Divine Innocence of course. You may think the images of El Morya look comically sickly-sweet. I defy anyone to look on this “baby Jesus with lamb” image without retching. You will be begging for the mildly sinister saving grace of the El-Morya Bin Laden visual undertones just for a bit of artistic complexity.
I couldn’t actually read the text right now. There is only so much you can face after a day’s work. So I am reduced to suggesting that if this picture epitomises the artistic flair of the designer, I ‘ll definitely know where not to go if I ever get struck with an uncharacteristic desire for jewellery.
Ghetto religion in the UK
There’s a bit of a UK theme to Pharyngula’s posts recently – what with blogs about a councillor calling for creationism to be taught in Lisburn (NI) schools and a reminder that schools are legally obliged to have a broadly Christian-themed assembly. Talk about making us look at the mote in our own eye.
It’s good to be reminded that religious idiocy is as liable to appear in the self-satisfiedly irreligious UK as in what we can too easily see as the ranting fundamentalist USA.
Most of the UK comments on the post are saying either that UK schools’ obligation to provide a religious assembly is more honoured in the breach than the observance or that having had it made them atheist anyway.
I admit to having been completely confused by a seemingly serious comment by Monado that ended with the odd words:
OTOH, I didn’t do me any harm to proclaim “I pledge allegiance to my flag and to my Queen and country” every morning.
You can say what you like about the enormous variety of forms of “assembly” in UK schools, but one thing that never happens is a “pledge of allegiance.”
I can say this with a strong certainty as my own childhood memory from living on the north American continent for a couple of years was of a 7-year-old’s shock and revulsion at having to salute a flag and repeat a pledge every morning. In fact, I used to intone my own subversive anti-mantra, confident in the knowledge that noone could understand my Bridish accent even if they had heard me.
One commenter pointed out that a much more currently serious matter – given that the effect on belief is either minimal or negative – is the rush to provide even more faith-supported “faith” schools. Ironically, these don’t share the obligation to provide broadly Christian assemblies, which would be a bit of a problem to Islamic schools and would be like telling boiling water to be hot to Catholic and Protestant schools..
I see the spread of Islamic schools as part of a general provcess of ghettoisation.
I live in an area which has recieved huge quantities of EC money for reconstruction. This area has clearly been zoned as Muslim ghetto. Many empty houses have been reclaimed as “sicial housing”. There is now a Muslim family in every one. No new families have moved into the area who are not Muslims. White, black and mixed families are just getting housed elsewhere.
Any refurcished shops have become Muslim grocery stores or callshops or cafes. Muslim community centres have been established. A fair number of the kids wait for special school buses that hint that the madrassa operates at other times than the weekend. A fair number of women in my street are veiled or never appear in the street.
Until recently, there were plenty of Muslim individuals and families in the area. They just mixed with everyone else. It was an area where people from anywhere and of any type or ethinicity could feel reasonably comfortable – at least that they wouldn’t get picked on just for who they were, which is far from the case in the rest of the city. (There were plenty of other causes for trouble. I didn’t say it was paradise. Its name was once well nigh synonymous with urban unrest.)
The chances of this natural integration happening get slimmer by the day. With blanket Muslim residence, the power of the local mosque’s influence gets ever greater.
This is not an accident. There have been deliberate local and national government policies – directed, I assume, at buying the support of “community leaders” – that have made vast amounts of public money available for concentrating muslims in a ghetto. If this boosts the power of the saudi-supplied imams, our politicians seems completely unconcerned.
And now, faith schools are another segregation tactic. I don’t think the politicians are doing this on purpose. They just want to buy a few votes. They think they are meeting the needs of diverse communities. It doesn’t occur to them that this sort of thing is giving up the goal of achieving real integration.
We are indeed “sleepwalking into segregation”, to quote Trevor Philips, if we send UK society down that mad Northern Ireland route of keeping kids from natural contact with other kids who have been taught different beliefs. That faith school worked out so well in Northern Ireland, didn’t it?
Let Muslims and Catholics and Protestants and scientologists or whatever do their indoctrination to their own time and spend their own money on it.
Wrought’s comment on Pharyngula’s post reminded everyone who lives in the UK to sign the anti-faith schools e-petition. I would like to say the same, although the track record of these e-petitions is pretty abysmal.
Atheist saint
Good news if you’ve ever felt that your chances of achieving sainthood are slim non-existent, due to the small fact of being an atheist.
Che Guevara is regarded as a saint in part of Bolivia and is the subject of devout prayers, according to the Guardian Online.
McCanns, Double Standards and Murder
Well, it seems that the media furore around the plight of poor, missing, Maddie McCann wont be dying down any day soon. As I have said in the past (more than once) the whole deal around this incident infuriates me. It must be interesting / infuriating / exciting lots of other people as well, because around 1/4 of all traffic to this blog last week was generated by people looking for comments about the McCanns being murderers. Not surprising really, given the massive amounts of media coverage.
First off, I am in complete agreement with the Archbishop of York that, for all intents and purposes Kate and Gerry McCann are innocent until proven guilty of murder in a court of law. Although he never said it, I will be charitable and assume that Dr Sentamu also included all other people charged with any form of crime – because that, basically, is what the law is supposed to uphold. What I may personally think about the McCanns is nothing more than my own opinion – unless by the will of Loki I am called up for Jury duty over their case (although if the Portuguese court calls me up for jury duty it would be bloody good evidence Loki existed…), nothing I think about them really matters.
The oddest thing I find about this whole saga, and I still find it odd even now, is how the presumption of innocence seems so strong towards Kate and Gerry McCann that people will go out of their way to show support for them. Total strangers, who can have had no contact with either of the McCann parents, stormed out of an Irish comedian’s act because he made jokes implying the McCann parents were murders. Foolish Patrick, if only he had stuck to jokes about race, war and so on – they are much more acceptable. People in countries across the world have put up posters “raising awareness” about missing Maddie (so obviously there is an assumption she is the last person on Earth who doesn’t need ten forms of ID to get on a plane…) and ordinary, poor, people have donated a fortune (over £1,000,000 so far) to support the parents in their round the world holiday awareness raising mission.
Not to be outdone, the rich and famous have joined in with this madness. Based on nothing more than Kate McCann’s hearfelt TV appearances (and the outpourings of their professional team of spokespeople…), Richard Branson has donated £100,000 to set up a defence fund to ensure they “have a fair hearing.” This nearly made me choke to death. Last Sunday, the BBC reported:
“Over the last few weeks Richard has been watching events as they have unfolded,” said his spokeswoman.
“There is a whole family involved here. When the McCanns made it known that under no circumstances would they touch the Find Madeleine fund, and discussed selling their house, Richard felt something had to be done.”
Sir Richard is a father himself and the most important thing for him is that a four-year-old girl is missing, the spokeswoman added.
“If he can help a little bit to take the burden off the family and extended family in this small way, then that’s all to the good.”
Wow. I never realised Sir Richard was in the business of funding suspected criminals in their defence – to ensure they get a fair trial. Are we to assume this is purely out of the goodness of his heart, and nothing to do with the fact the McCanns are middle class, Catholic, professional (white) people who have spent the last three months all over the TV and newspapers (often saying how innocent they are, so it must be true…)? If so, there is a long list of other people, the world over, who are at risk of not getting a fair trial because they cant afford £100,000 on legal fees… Where shall I start?
Not to be outdone, Cheshire-based millionaire Brian Kennedy has jumped squarely on the bandwagon as well. This time, saying “he felt compelled to help” the offer reads:
He said he was providing Kate and Gerry McCann, of Rothley, Leics, with the support of his in-house lawyer and their new spokesman, Clarence Mitchell.
Wow. They have a £100,000 defence fund and a top flight lawyer as well as a brand new “family spokesman.” They are sure to get a fair trial now, aren’t they…
Even if you leave aside, again, the issue of what an innocent family need with a “spokesman” the whole deal is madness. These otherwise intelligent and shrewd business geniuses are jumping to support what is basically two people who are suspects in a disappearance – there aren’t even any formal charges yet! – so one has to ask what is going on here.
The cynic in me (and it is a strong cynic) thinks this is nothing more than publicity stunts for the two tycoons – Virgin are going through a bit of a rough patch at the moment and, be honest, who has even heard of Brian Kennedy in the past? I am sure if the McCann’s were not worldwide media personalities now (will they be on Big Brother one day or, more ironically, “I’m a celebrity get me out of here…”?) neither of these two would have given a hoot about their legal status, nor any possible “Unfairness” over a foreign court.
However, I may be wrong. It is entirely possible that these two gentlemen are so “family orientated” that any case involving a missing or dead child, where other family members are suspects, will inspire them to equal acts of generosity. If we look through the recent news we should see boundless cases of parents accused of a crime, claiming they are innocent and then millions being thrown at them to ensure a fair trial. Sadly this is not the case.
Today, the BBC has a short article on a teenage mother who has been remanded to appear before Norwich Crown Court, charged with Causing or Allowing the Death of her daughter. Assuming she pleads innocent, will we expect to see a defence fund in her name set up? Or does Richard Branson think, because she is a teenage mother being tried in the UK, she is not worthy of his support? Will she have to suffice with legal aid because she doesn’t own a house to threaten to sell to cover her costs?
In August, the BBC had a report about a teenage girl who went missing (Natasha Coombs) which led with the heart rending:
An insurance firm manager whose only child went missing nearly a week ago, has spoken of his “unimaginable pain” at her disappearance.
Despite this, there was no fund set up to raise awareness about her status, after she was found dead on the railway line there was no fund set up to help either the family or prevent further deaths – certainly no billionaires stepped in to help and eventually when the mother could take the loss no longer, there is still no public outpouring. Cruel though it may sound, the McCanns still have each other and two other children, Gary Coombs really does have nothing left.
Searching through the news to find similar cases is, sadly, all to easy. Almost daily there is a case where a child goes missing (or dies) and a family member is under suspicion. Unfortunately lots of these are in working class or ethnic minority households. While I am not going to suggest that we, as a nation, have such deep seated double standards that this impacts the perception, it is strange.
The question I would love to ask Sir Richard or Brian is what makes the McCann parents special? Why do they deserve this support when no one else does? If I could ask the public this, I would, but I think the answer would be a lot less coherent.
[tags]Double Standards, Catholic, Catholicism, Church, Murder, Kate McCann, Gerry McCann, Maddie McCann, Sir Richard Branson, Richard Branson, Brian Kennedy, Gary Coombs, Natasha Coombs, Killing, Violence, Society, Culture, Racism, Philosophy, Legal Aid, Trial, Fair Trial, Defence Fund, Patrick Kielty,Portugal, Portuguese police, Law[/tags]
Customer focus and Blackwater
Blackwater being rather topical, I thought I’d find out something about who or what Blackwater is. In the last couple of days, CNN has been bursting with stories about the reported activities of Blackwater employees, with the shooting of Iraqi civilians being only the cherry on a large unsavoury cake.
On 2 August, James Meek, writing in The London Review of Books reviewed “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army” by Jeremy Scahill, thus showing an impressive degree of prescience regarding their future news value.
Even in this privatisation-hardened age, even in the United States, the notion that military installations are a monopoly of government remains so ingrained that in 2003, when the Chilean-American arms go-between José Miguel Pizarro Ovalle first saw the real-world mercenary processing centre run by the private firm Blackwater in North Carolina, he had to reach for the imagery of Cubby Broccoli. ‘It’s a private army in the 21st century,’ he gushed to Jeremy Scahill.
The whole tone of the article refers constantly to the fantasy James Bond villain-style of the organistion
It is a private military base, spread over seven thousand acres, near the town of Moyock and the Great Dismal Swamp, with firing ranges, tactical exercise areas and an armoury (containing more than a thousand weapons, according to the Virginian-Pilot, the local newspaper, though there is no law preventing Blackwater stocking as many as it wants)
The book relates how a public sector contractor became a private sector nation-state without (much of) a landmass.
it was the al-Qaida attacks of 11 September 2001, and the subsequent US intervention in Afghanistan and invasion of Iraq, that turned the taxpayer cash flow from a dribble to a high-pressure jet of dollars. It also gave Blackwater the chance to transform itself from a company that trained government employees to shoot into a company that supplied its own, private shooters for service anywhere in the world.
Al-Qaida attacks may have been tough on the victims but they were the perfect business opportunity to Blackwater. It’s an ill wind that blows no good, as the old saying goes.
Someone needs to explain the whole philosophy of privatisation to me again. I naively assumed the general argument is that state-run companies don’t have to compete and so provide inefficient services and so on.
So it must be that the US Government started to feel that its boring old state monopoly army wasn’t customer-focussed enough. Someone thought “What this army needs is some competition.”
What a brilliant idea. Why not carry on and have dozens of customer focussed go-ahead armies, focussed on the bottom line, rather than old concepts like the nation state, which admittedly have hardly distinguished themselves in practice.
And there’s more of a plus. They could compete between themselves to carry out contracts. The cut and thrust of the marketplace needn’t just be a metaphor. They can start shooting it out over who gets to rule the next bit territory. Last company with a surviving chief executive wins. Bidding wars over contracts can become non-metaphorical.
As well as its cutting edge customer-focus, it’s not without a noble historical precedent, either. Every other minor lord could call a few hundred disposable peasants to back them up in medieval times. And they were so peaceful, weren’t they? Hey nonny no.
Companies can send any junior executives without a hope of becoming CEOs to the Middle East to take territory there. There are so many pre-modern echoes here it feels a bit like stepping into a VR Crusades museum.
Actually, I’ve just remembered that some experimental organisations like this have already been established among the civilian populations. I believe they are called gangs.