More war on jokes

Jokes. Not necessarily funny jokes. Just things said in a lighthearted way. Who’d have thought the internet would kill them off?
Not Jokes with a punchline, clearly labelled as jokes. Or funny viral videos. Or internet cartoons. Or footage of comedians on YouTube. I think these are all OK.
Just the sort of things that you might say to your friends. Not real jokes. Banter. Mockery. Using figures of speech: Irony; Sarcasm; Hyperbole; Metaphors; Similes and so on. Exaggerating things for effect.
Whatever you do, don’t try this on the Internet. Don’t even react to other people doing it.
On today’s BBC site:

Labour councillor suspended over Facebook ‘Tory bomb plea’

The story is outrageous. A comment was posted on a Facebook site in July 2010.

It read: “We are appealing to the IRA to find it in their hearts to bomb the next Tory conference.” (from the BBC story)

That’s obviously a joke. Or, an amusing aside, rather than a “joke.” It’s elegantly phrased (“find it in their hearts”). It’s witty. I would even say that I liked it, if the consequences mightn’t be so horrendous. Because apparently, among twenty six people who Facebook-“liked” it in the following half a year (rather than people who just may have liked it unofficially) one was a local councillor, Florence Anderson.
She was suspended. She didn’t even write the joke herself. She had just responded to an elegant expression of frustration by casually clicking a button on a Facebook site. Clicking a button.
I don’t know anything about her record as a councillor but she looks like someone who’s devoted many years to working for her party and her local community. She probably never even made the Sunderland Evening Advertiser before. And here she is getting rewarded by getting suspended from her role and plastered over the BBC’s website because she once may have clicked on a “like” button.
Comedian Al Murray wrote about the ongoing saga of the Robin Hood Airport trial in last Saturday’s Guardian. Total respect to Al Murray and the other comedians who have kept this issue alive and raised the money for Paul Chambers’ appeal. (Paul Chambers was convicted of sending a “threatening” message after a jokey twitter comment that even the prosecutors admitted no one would have seen as a credible threat. After conviction, he lost his job and his life was pretty well destroyed).

This week I went to the Royal Courts of Justice to offer support to someone who is in a lot of trouble because of a not particularly funny joke. As an erstwhile pedlar of some not particularly funny jokes (just ask the Guardian’s comedy critic, he doesn’t dig what I do at all), this matters to me a great deal. (from Al Murray in the Guardian)

In the face of the all-out war on banter, Al Murray suggested that anyone using any figure of speech in banter might now have to put the tag #joke# around anything not meant to be taken literally, for the benefit of the hard of thinking.
This seems like a plan. It would cut down on prosecutions for banter. However, it would have the side effect of raising idle banter to the status of “joke,” which few items of banter could carry off successfully. The reader would usually be left thinking “Well, that’s a bit amusing but I don’t think it has much of a punchline”.
In any case, it wouldn’t have helped Florence Anderson. She didn’t even have an opportunity to acknowledge that she didn’t believe it was a serious attempt to direct Republican terrorists to the Tory Party assembly. Nor that she thought for one minute that dissident Republicans would take orders from random blog posts.
Hence, I suggest that Facebook and Google Plus etc should provide buttons that say “I would quite like this, on the understanding that I am only liking it as banter”
Who are these mean-spirited reporters-to-the-authorities of twitter banter or Facebook clicks. Who is policing people’s “likes”? Why don’t these enemies of free speech turn their attention to private conversations and start calling in Swat teams anytime they hear “Don’t be late or I’ll kill you” on the bus? Is it the scary magic of the internet that makes them unable to distinguish between the use of a figure of speech and a statement of intent? If so, let’s ditch the internet, human beings haven’t evolved enough to use it.
Tip for any one with any enemies:
If you really hate someone who may now or at any time in the future hold any public office or have a job that needs a clean criminal record (ie anyone) set up a honey trap Facebook page, fill it with seemingly lighthearted banter that could be misconstrued by someone who doesn’t really speak your language then encourage your enemy to express appreciation. You’ve destroyed them right there.

(You wait ages for a post and then two come along at once….)

Blog arrests

64 people have been arrested for blogging in the past 5 years, according to World Information Access report. The average jail time served was 15 months.

More than half the total came from China, Egypt and Iran, but the USA is in there with three and England, France and Canada can boast one blogger arrest each.

I understand most of the categories on a chart that’s made up of what appear to be casino chips, except for “other” and “violating cultural norms.” (Things like “using blog to organise political protest” speak for themselves.) The UK one is in the “violating cultural norms” category. Huh? Violating cultural norms? What on earth are they? Not saying “please” and “thank you”, not staying in line at the cash point, wearing brown shoes with a black suit?

Stopped in my tracks from an incipient rant about denial of freedom of expression when I see that the arrested UK blogger seems to be a turd in human form. The Luton and Dunstable On Sunday News says

Racial hatred arrest for internet blogger

So, I’m a bit torn. I get really irate about bigotry. On balance, though, I still think that these sorts of lunatics are a price we have to pay for “letting a thousand flowers bloom” on the Internet. It’s not as if they disappear when they can’t express themselves. It’s probably not even as if they’d get more than half a dozen hits a day. (Which is where I am sort of cheating, because I might feel more moved to think this was justified if he represented anyone but himself.)

But, what a buffoon.

His photo shows him standing next to a dummy in Crusader costume. I assume that he intends us to identify with the image of the Crusader (which would in itself show a truly pitiful grasp of medieval history) but I took it as him identifying with the dummy

Paul Ray, who uses the pseudonym Lionheart on his provocative online diary, was arrested two weeks ago after returning from South Carolina, America where he was seeking political asylum……..

“I was arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred. They questioned me on parts of my blog. Compared to what’s happening out there I haven’t done that much.

“I’m a Christian – that’s my defence

Political asylum in America? I’ll have to use the LOL word, sorry.

And being a “Christian” is a “defence”? Excuse me while I LOL again. In this case, certainly he isn’t talking about the Christianity of Desmond Tutu or Martin Niemöller. He’s not even talking about the Christianity of the televangelists and creationists. He’s talking about the Christianity of the medieval crusader knights, which bears about as much relationship to a philosophical system as a light bulb does to an Ordnance Survey map of Luton.

All the same, it’s easy to defend the right of self-expression of people who oppose corruption or repression (most of the arrested bloggers.) It’s a lot tougher choice to defend the rights of fools and knaves, but it’s still probably necessary.

Shoot the messengers

An Indianopolis teacher faces suspension over a book. She introduced a book (Freedom Writers) containing language that the school board didn’t like.

This incident is obviously not the only instance of book-banning.

The American Library Association says the number of books banned or challenged at public libraries increases every year. Along with titles with obvious references to sexuality, violence and vulgarity, the Harry Potter series and classics like “Of Mice and Men” and “Huckleberry Finn” rank among the most-challenged books.(MSNBC)

What!

I looked at the Freedom Writers site. Well, it’s not “Of Mice and Men” but it seems exactly what you’d expect conscientious English literature teachers to be encouraging kids to read. But, it seems that the conceptual conscientious English literature teacher is facing a threat to her job because she did just that.

There is a strange process at work. Many of us believe that we can deny the existence of disturbing aspects of reality if we can stop children seeing them. This doesn’t actually make the bad things go away. It doesn’t even protect children. It just stops them being able to discuss unpleasant things openly.

The US is a haven for Protect the Children nutters. Black Sun posted an interesting, if chilling, blog about the Parents Television Council last week.

The UK isn’t immune from Ms Lovejoy syndrome. In the past few days, UK newspapers and magazines have been getting exercised over a silly Miss Bimbo game, the object of which is to make your character into the “coolest bimbo.” You do this by making it take diet pills, get plastic surgery and silicon implant its chest. The Times, the Daily Mail, the Metro and the rest all seem to have lost any appreciation of irony. At least they don’t credit any young players with any sense that this is mocking.

All the papers seem to be quoting from the same press release, although they differ about whether the game will be played by girls “as young as” 6 or 9. (Note the non-accidental use of as young as 6 rather than aged 6) I guess that the “as young as” bit also comes from a single press release, from the previously unheard-of parents organisation (“parents’ rights group Parentkind”)* that is complaining about this game.

What a marketing coup for the makers of Miss Bimbo and Parentkind. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were the same people.

The true irony is that the papers that are throwing up their arms in disgust that this game promotes dangerous role models for girls are the very same papers that cannot produce a single issue without promoting anorexic, surgically enhanced, shopping-obsessed, intellect-challenged gold-diggers on every page.

* I know every organisation in the world isn’t Googlable but you’d think Parentkind would be, given that they seem to be on every news editors’ quotable list. I found something called The Parent Organisation with a blank web page labeled Parentkind. The page says “The Parentkind Directories are currently under development.” If you are not British and were to visit this site – which I am only assuming to be the source of Parentkind – you may think the address is some obscure joke. I can assure you that the places, at least, are legitimate.

Ministry of Truth

Imagine you work for the Australian government. There you are, sitting in your work cube in front of your PC, staring into space. You’ve finished estimating next year’s value of Western Australian lamb exports per acre. What will you do in the seemingly infinite 40 minutes till lunch-time?

Ah ha. Skim through Wikipedia. Try for the “random” entry. See something you know something about – your specialist subject, in fact – the development of the Perth Railway Modellers’ Club, 1990 to 2002.

But the entry shows the name of the 1997 Chairman as Ken Brewster and you know it was Ben Baxter!…. Blimey, you can’t allow this blatant misrepresentation of the facts. Future historians of the Perth Railway Modellers Club will be completely misled. So you make a quick correction.

Go forward a few weeks. Wikiscanner becomes available. Everyone can find out what organisation’s IP address has been used to make a wiki-edit.

This sparks a media-led conspiracy frenzy over evidence that people from various corporations or government agencies have edited encyclopeadia pages.

Oh look, surprisingly (not), people from the CIA have edited entries. People working for the BBC. And, – oh my Poseidon! – people working for the Australian government have edited entries. Oh dear…. You get called into the boss’s office and shouted at. …Misusing your internet privileges…. Bringing the government into disrepute, and so on…..

Largely because some people eitehr never learned, or are incapable of applying, the most basic tests to judge the validity of information. E.g:

  • Does this seem inherently reasonable?
  • Who said it?
  • Is this information contradicted or supported by other sources?
  • Who benefits if I believe this?

Are you surprised that CIA employees have edited pages that concern the CIA or that workers for the Australian government have toned down critical articles?

If so, then it’s about time you took some courses in critical thinking and analysing information. Because you lack even the most basic skills at identifying propaganda.

Indeed, Wikiscanner might serve as a basic tool for identifying potential misinformation or propaganda, going some way towards giving an answer to the second question above.

But even so, some people sit in work reading, even editing Wikipedia, Some of these people work for corporations or government agencies. Some of them are carrying out their master’s instructions. Most are just bored workers tryng to interject some purposeful activity into the boring functionary’s day.

Some are even acting as whistleblowers.

Do we want to shut up the whistleblowers just because we are too idle to develop the thinking skills to detect spin or outright lies?

The outcome of this editing-Wiki frenzy is, surprise, surprise, that more workers get their internet access circumscribed.

In a BBC story, the Australian Prime minister reacted to the story that government employees had made edits by ruling that:

…. the department said on Friday that it had acted to block staff from editing the site.
“Defence has closed personal edit access down, though employees will still be able to browse Wikipedia for information purposes,” a spokesman said.

Throughout the world, internet access is getting curtailed for employees. In the UK, for example, at the beginning of August, the Defence Department ordered members of the armed forces to get the permission of superior officers before they blog.

The Ministry of Defence last week ordered British soldiers to stop blogging, putting videos on YouTube, joining online chats or sending text messages without a superior officer’s permission. But the soldiers carried on regardless, posting caustic commentary on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was a mini digital mutiny.
I’m surprised the MoD has taken so long to deal with the problem of khaki samizdat. Censorship is part of military life. Imagine if Tommies had been able to blog about the trenches in October 1914. There would have been an outcry back home. The war could well have been over by Christmas.

“Oh look, this is from a government computer. It must be part of an evil government plot!” Come on. Let’s learn to evaluate information properly to protect ourselves from propaganda, rather than shut people up or jump at the first half-baked conspiracy theory that fits our prejudices.

Will ill-judged kneejerk conspiracy theory reactions based on the IPs of Wikipedia editors become the pretext for more internet censorship? Well, yes, it looks like they have. What a great win for free speech…

Be careful what you blog

Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman – an Egyptian student with the nom de blog “Kareem” – has been jailed for four years for insulting Islam and the Egyptian president, as reported by the BBC How depressing is that?

Here’s a brief summary of the BBC report. Abdel Soliman is a secularist, who was expelled from his University law studies for criticising religion. The University was responsible for reporting him to the police.

Mr Nabil had declared himself a secularist who does not fast during Ramadan and he criticised al-Azhar, the most prestigious institution of religious learning in the Sunni Muslim world.
He accused it of spreading radical ideas and suppressing freedom of thought.

Well, that’s certainly proved his point then.

The BBC claims that Egyptian bloggers have gained an influence that greatly outweighs their numbers and have been instrumental in exposing some true horrors carried out by the Egyptian state. This is rather humbling to the rest of us bloggers, who usually just about manage to expose what we think about the latest top-selling indie record.