Quotulatiousness

October 23, 2012

The law, sexting, and shady website operations

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:41

Tim Worstall discusses the weird and disturbing online world of sexting teens, parasitical porn websites and the insanity of our current laws on the topic:

… the legal problems go much further than just young people losing control of images of themselves.

For we’re in the middle of a social hysteria over child pornography and paedophilia. And as is usual in such hysterias reactions desperately overshoot. For example, in my native UK it is entirely legal for a 16 year old girl to have sex with whichever consenting also 16 years or above human she wishes. Any thing from removing her top for her lover’s delectation through to any perversion you might care to think about. However, if said lover, with her full permission, takes a photograph of her without her bikini top on this is child pornography. Yes, even if they’ve been lovers for nearly two legal years a topless photograph of her at 17 and 364 days old is child porn. And it is here that the real legal problems start.

[. . .]

It gets worse, too. The general assumption in the law these days is that a picture on a computer is production of child pornography, not possession of it. The reasoning is that, before you looked at the picture there was one copy, on the server. Now, as you look at the picture, there are two. One on the server, the other in your browser (or cache, whatever). Thus there are now two pictures, you have made one of them therefore you are producing child pornography. And it’s not all that much of a surprise to find that the penalties for the production as opposed to the possession of such are markedly stronger.

Unnamed band about to get big media exposure through the “Streisand Effect”

Filed under: Business, Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

Ken at Popehat is looking for pro bono legal help for a music fan site that after years of faithful service to an unnamed band is now being “cease-and-desist”-ed by the band’s new management:

It’s time to put out the Popehat Signal on behalf of a threatened web site.

Today, I’m looking for pro bono help (or help at a modest rate) for the proprietor of a fansite for a band. The proprietor of the fansite has been running it for years, promoting the band and its appearances to its fans. Apparently the members of the band knew of this and were cool with it — until recently, when they hired new management, who used a Los Angeles area attorney to send a threatening cease-and-desist issue.

One has to assume that $BAND (or more likely the new management team) has never heard of the Streisand Effect, because they’re risking a classic case of it through this kind of action.

The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the internet. The term is a modern expression of the older phenomenon that banning or censoring something often makes that item or information more desirable, and leads to it being actively sought out to a greater extent than it would have otherwise been.

It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt in 2003 to suppress photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity. Similar attempts have been made, for example, in cease-and-desist letters, to suppress numbers, files and websites. Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity and media extensions such as videos and spoof songs, often being widely mirrored across the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks.

The tweet police are watching you

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:27

In sp!ked, Patrick Hayes points out that you don’t need to agree with — or have any sympathy for — BNP party leader Nick Griffin to recognize that the “twitch-hunt” against him is a very bad sign for all of us:

Nick Griffin, leader of the far-right British National Party (BNP), currently has 19,356 followers on Twitter. Given the events of the past week, it seems many of these are not following Griffin because they enjoy his rants on anything from fracking to Islamists. Rather, the majority are following him in order to monitor his newsfeed, seemingly just waiting for an opportunity to report him to the police for offensive tweets.

[. . .]

Without doubt, tweeting the address of a gay couple, and threatening to give them ‘a bit of drama’ in the form of a demonstration, is an idiotic thing to do. But did anyone really think that a militant wing of the BNP was going to swoop down to Huntingdon and pay the sixtysomething gay couple a visit? Certainly not the couple themselves, whose chilled-out approach — as Brendan O’Neill has pointed out in his Telegraph blog — contrasts sharply with the hysteria of the Twittermob. Any demo, the couple said, would be a ‘damp squib’. Furthermore, ‘it would be difficult for people to gather as we live in a small village and there’s nowhere to park’.

Such cool reasoning was not shared by members of the Twittersphere, or by some gay-rights campaigners. In the words of a spokesperson for gay-rights group Stonewall, Griffin’s behaviour was ‘beyond words, unbelievably shocking. It is a real example of the hatred still out there towards gay people.’

‘Out there’ — it is a revealing phrase. It seems that this Twitter-stoked furore is not just about the loon Griffin, who has for many years developed notoriety for spouting offensive rubbish. It speaks also to the fear of some sort of silent, bigoted majority that Griffin supposedly represents. All it takes, it seems, is a tweet from Fuhrer Griffin and the gay-bashing hordes will arise. They won’t, of course, because they don’t exist. Yet, that someone widely known as a bit of a nutjob is seen as a ‘real example’ of hatred towards gays says more about a culture of offence-seeking than actual attitudes towards homosexuals in twenty-first century Britain.

October 22, 2012

The “unbridgeable gap” of Gerald Caplan

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

In the National Post, Jonathan Kay pokes fun at Globe and Mail columnist Gerald Caplan:

… the plucky Caplan is still at it. And his theories remain ambitious and apocalyptic. Over the weekend, for instance, he grandly declared that Canada “is no longer a united county.”

“Why? Because an “unbridgeable gap” has opened up between “extremists” and people who are “level-headed.” Caplan suggests the former category is composed of Canada’s equivalent of “The Tea Party, the Koch brothers [and] the National Rifle Association.” The latter category, meanwhile, is composed of people who think like Gerald Caplan.

A few paragraph later, Caplan tells us that “Many Canadians believe the Harper government has shattered the historic mould. Harperland is a place many Canadians do not recognize as theirs. Mr. Harper seems not to share many traditional Canadian cultural values.”

Values like what, precisely? I wondered. Universal health care? The welfare state? Equalization? Bilingualism? Gay marriage? The land of unregulated abortion?

None of those have changed.

Or maybe Caplanites feel alienated in a country without a Wheat Board and a long-gun registry. But that’s like saying you don’t “recognize” your house since your wife rearranged the tupperware drawer.

Warren Ellis on celebrity license and the price of silence

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

In his weekly Vice column, Warren Ellis explains how celebrities like Jimmy Savile can set things up to get away with awful things:

My drinking companion had, I think, just finished telling me about this — unless that was someone else, some other time, because, hey, drunk — and, after another drink, said, “and then there’s Jimmy Savile.”

Jimmy Savile, later Sir Jimmy Savile, was a radio DJ, television personality and tireless charity worker, raising many millions for causes like the storied children’s ward at Stoke Mandeville hospital. He was still best known for his TV show Jim’ll Fix It, where he made dreams come true for kids all over the country.

“Jim’ll fuck it,” said this person I was with. “Jimmy Savile’s a nonce.” If you had the misfortune to grow up outside God’s Own Country, “nonce” is a term for paedophile.

“Bullshit,” I said. “Jimmy Savile’s been around forever. He would have gotten caught. Radio 1 Roadshows? Doing Top Of The Pops on TV since the dawn of fucking time?”

“What do you think the price of silence is?”

“What? How could he not get caught? He looks like a nutter. Dripping in gold chains, long silver hair, shiny tracksuits, gurning at cameras with his ‘now then, now then’ like he’s a fucking glam rock Yorkshire miner? Bollocks.”

Update:

October 19, 2012

Why James Bond drove an Aston Martin instead of a Jaguar

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

At The Register, John Oates looks at 007’s motor cars over the years:

What car should James Bond really drive? It’s a hotly disputed question.

Our man on film is closely associated with the Aston Martin, the DB5 initially and DBS V12 of late. Clearly the producers of recent Bond outings hope to identify their character with the spirit of an earlier time regarded as iconic and special. And they should, because the DB5 is both of these.

All of which is rather odd, because the book that introduced James Bond — Casino Royale — referred to a 4.5 litre Bentley with an Amherst Villiers supercharger. However, this is Bond’s personal car, and hobby, rather than work vehicle. We’re told he bought it almost new in 1933 and stored it through the war.

“Bond drove the car hard and well and with an almost sensual pleasure.”

[. . .] Jaguar’s E-type had set the world on fire that year. It had a slightly smaller engine at launch than the DB5, but was 500 pounds lighter and looked like no other car before it. By 1964 the engine had increased to a 4.2 litre brute not far off that in Bond’s Bentley.

Broccoli supposedly called Jaguar to ask for a couple of E-types — the car had come out the previous year and was welcomed by Enzo Ferrari as the most beautiful car in the world. It cost half the £4,175 an Aston-Martin would set you back.

So Broccoli rang Jaguar boss Sir William Lyons and asked to borrow a couple for the film. Lyons told him to get stuffed. To be fair to Lyons his firm was already struggling to make enough E-types to satisfy the public clamour for the car.

So Broccoli phoned Aston Martin and Bond ended up in a DB5 instead.

October 18, 2012

The rise of Britain’s cybercensors

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Brendan O’Neill in Reason on the sad state of online freedom of speech in Britain:

What country has just sentenced a man to eight months in prison for wearing an anti-police t-shirt, and another man to three months in prison for telling an “abhorrent” joke on Facebook? Iran, perhaps? China? No, it’s Britain.

Something has gone horribly wrong in Britain in recent years. The birthplace of John Milton (“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience”), and John Stuart Mill (“Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service”), has become a cesspit of censoriousness.

The frequency with which the police and legal system now throw into jail anyone judged to have committed a “speech crime” is alarming.

On October 11, Barry Thew, a 39-year-old man from Manchester, was sentenced to eight months in jail—eight months!—for the crime of wearing a t-shirt that said, “One less pig — perfect justice”.

[. . .]

Social-networking sites are being subjected to the most stringent censorship. In July, a 17-year-old boy was arrested and questioned by police after he sent insulting tweets to British Olympic diver Tom Daley. The 17-year-old was spared jail but was issued with a “harassment warning.” In March, a 21-year-old student called Liam Stacey was sentenced to 56 days in jail for making crude jokes on Twitter about a then very ill footballer called Fabrice Muamba.

Last year, following the summer riots that rocked many English cities, two young men were jailed for four years for setting up a Facebook page called “Smash Down Northwich Town,” a reference to the town in Chester where they lived. The page was all about how cool it would be to have a local riot. No one accepted their invitation to riot, though; there was no “smashing down.” Yet still the two men were convicted of a public order offense, criminalized for being fantasists effectively.

Update: Rowan Atkinson is calling for the censors to back off:

Rowan Atkinson is demanding a change in the law to halt the ‘creeping culture of censoriousness’ which has seen the arrest of a Christian preacher, a critic of Scientology and even a student making a joke.

The Blackadder and Mr Bean star criticised the ‘new intolerance’ behind controversial legislation which outlaws ‘insulting words and behaviour’.

Launching a fight for part of the Public Order Act to be repealed, he said it was having a ‘chilling effect on free expression and free protest’.

He went on: ‘The clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.’

October 17, 2012

The real story of the London Beer Flood of 1814

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

When the story isn’t quite as juicy as the recounter would like, there is a common tendency to make shit up to amp up the tale:

I can stake a tenuous family link to the Great London Beer Flood disaster of 1814, which took place exactly 196 years ago today. My great-great-great-great grandfather on my mother’s side, Maurice Donno, was living in Soho, a minute or three’s walk from the Horse Shoe Brewery off Tottenham Court Road, when a huge vat of maturing porter at the brewery collapsed violently and flooded the surrounding tenements, killing eight people. Most, if not all, of those who died were poor Irish immigrants to London, part of a mass of people living in the slums around St Giles’s Church, the infamous St Giles “rookeries” (later to be cleaned away by the building of New Oxford Street in 1847). Maurice Donno was very probably Irish, his surname most likely a variation of Donough or something similar (which would make his first name a common Anglicisation of the Irish Muirgheas). Perhaps he knew some of those who died, or were injured, in the Great Beer Flood, or knew people who knew them. It seems very likely he would have gone across the road at some point after the tragedy, to join the hundreds who came to see the destruction wreaked by that dreadful black tsunami of beer.

[. . .]

Thank you, Eugene Tolstov, for pointing to my mistake, and for not laughing too much at my inability to multiply 3,555 by 36 by 10 and divide by 2,240. But at least my narrative on probably the worst industrial accident involving a British brewery was more accurate than many. The late Alan Eames, for example, in The Secret Life of Beer, claimed that the vat burst “with a boom heard five miles away” – not mentioned in any of the many sources from the time that I’ve read – while “eyewitnesses told of besotted mobs flinging themselves into gutters full of beer, hampering rescue efforts” – no, newspaper reports of the rescue don’t support this at all – and “many were killed suffocated in the crush of hundreds trying to get a free beer” – again, the contemporary reports don’t say this – while “the death toll eventually reached 20, including some deaths from alcohol coma” – no, the newspaper reports from the time make it clear that only eight people died, all women and children, and all killed by the initial huge wave of beer and the destruction it caused to the buildings in the tenements behind the brewery.

Similarly there’s a myth arisen that when those injured after the vat burst were taken to the nearby Middlesex Hospital, “patients already there for illnesses unrelated to the beer disaster smelled the ale and began a riot, accusing doctors and nurses of holding out on the beer they thought was being served elsewhere in the hospital”, while another myth claims that when bodies of those killed were taken “to a nearby house for identification”, so many people turned up to see them that “the floor collapsed under the sheer weight of onlookers” and “many inside the building perished in the collapse.” None of this is in any reports of the accident from newspapers in 1814, and if any of it had happened, you can bet one of them would have written about it.

Matt Gurney on Iran’s anti-Canadian coverage

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:17

A pair of former First Nations chiefs have been on Iran’s Press TV to denounce Canada and Canadian treatment of natives:

Friends, I have a double dose of bad news for you. There’s no easy way to say it. So here it is. Not only is Canada set on exterminating a whole segment of its population. That would be bad enough. It also turns out that we frankly aren’t very good at it.

These painful revelations come to us from Tehran courtesy of Terry Nelson, formerly chief of the Roseau River Anishinabe nation south of Winnipeg, and Dennis Pashe, of the Dakota Tipi nation. Both men have plenty of time to travel these days, having both lost their jobs as chiefs. Nelson lost his after his own band council gave him the boot, for the third time, last fall. Pashe was fired by Ottawa in 2003, after the federal government sent in a third-party manager in the face of corruption allegations and violence on his reserve, compounded by Pashe’s refusal to call elections.

[. . .]

But ignore Tehran’s pathetic attempts to portray Canada as worse than Iran (or ask some of the protesters gunned down, raped or tortured during the post-2009 election protests what they think about the two nations’ comparative human rights records). The truly sad thing about Nelson and Pashe’s trip is that there are, indeed, systemic issues facing Canada’s native population, and Nelson and Pashe have made a mockery of them.

Nelson isn’t wrong to point out that many native women are missing. Or that natives are overrepresented in the prison population. Or even to point out that many resource extraction projects, including petroleum sites, are on or near native reserves. And many Canadians, native and otherwise, agree that many reserves are essentially designed to fail, and that the living conditions for natives there are unacceptable. These are all fair things to say.

October 16, 2012

Asking for help against bullying may be impossible

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:57

Matt Gurney in the National Post pointing out that the instinctive response of many to bullying just isn’t a viable alternative for many or even most victims of bullying:

The federal NDP has reverted to type, calling for a national strategy to combat bullying. School boards and educators will no doubt develop strategies and zero-tolerance procedures. Counsellors will want to chat about mediating the disputes. Well-intended suggestions, all. But they all suffer from the same fundamental weakness — they can only spring into action once the victim further victimizes themselves. For many, the solution is as bad as the problem.

I’m referring, of course, to the mere act of asking for help. Bullying is an intensely degrading assault. It strips power and dignity away from the victim. Sometimes it’s crushing and sudden, other times it’s gradual, with the victim’s mental defences whittled away piece by piece. The end result, as we all know, can be a victim utterly convinced that everyone is staring at them, laughing at them, enjoying the defenceless, pathetic state they’ve been reduced to. The bullies themselves feed off the crushing of their victims, but the keen attention of the mob is what makes it so humiliating for those targeted. It’s not just a humiliation. It’s a very, very public one.

And it is in that moment of maximum vulnerability and humiliation that the students are supposed to further compound their embarrassment and signal their total defeat by appealing for help from a teacher or counsellor? Or even a parent?

[. . .]

If there is a way forward on bullying — I’m not sure there is, as much as we’d all like one — it will have to recognize the inherent advantage bullies possess. Their victims don’t want help. They might desperately need it, but asking for it is, for most, a step too far, an added injury they simply cannot contemplate. The only effective means of deterring a bully may lie with the observing mob becoming enforcers of an anti-bullying code. And as that seems unlikely, outrage notwithstanding, this is probably a problem we’re stuck with.

October 15, 2012

Jonathan Kay on bullying

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:38

In his National Post column, he responds to a fellow journalist’s column on the topic of bullying:

The appetite to bully cannot be treated as a social sickness, or the product of maladaptive psychological development — which is how it is universally depicted in the media, and in government-funded public-service announcements. Bullying is in our genes. And any effort to fight it must reflect that fact.

The reason that bullying has become part of human evolutionary psychology is that it works — for both males and females — as a strategy to increase one’s attractiveness to the opposite sex, one’s perceived social status, and the cohesiveness of one’s social alliances.

In movies, bullies are shown to be wounded individuals whose bullying is a perverse symptom of the pain that’s been inflicted on them by abusive parents inhabiting poor and broken homes, or by more dominant figures in their social pecking order. There is no evidentiary basis for this stereotype. In fact, research cited by Anthony Volk, Joseph Camilleri, Andrew Dane and Zopito Marini in a 2012 Aggressive Behavior journal article indicate that bullying-induced social dominance is correlated with reduced stress and improved physical health. Amazingly, “bullying is also positively linked with other positive mental traits such as … cognitive empathy, leadership, social competence, and self-efficacy.”

[. . .]

The strategy works: Studies show that boys who bully other boys, on average, gain status with girls, who perceive the boys as more dominant. And girls who bully, on average, receive more positive attention from boys.

As the aforementioned authors report, “Dominance has been found to be positively associated with both bullying and peer nominations of dating popularity among adolescents. Bullying is also positively correlated with peer nominations of power, social prominence, student and teacher ratings of perceived popularity and peer leadership” — all of which translate to social capital, which in turn means social or mating opportunities with the opposite sex.

An earlier post on this topic is here.

October 14, 2012

Imagine if Eric Hobsbawm had been a Nazi apologist rather than a Communist apologist

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe:

Hobsbawm […] was a lifelong Marxist, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party from his teens until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Long after it was evident to even true believers that the Bolshevik Revolution had unleashed a nightmare of blood, Hobsbawm went on defending, minimizing, and excusing the crimes of communism.

Interviewed on the BBC in 1994, he was asked whether he would have shunned the Communist Party had he known in 1934 that Stalin was butchering innocent human beings by the millions. “Probably not,” he answered — after all, at the time he believed he was signing up for world revolution. Taken aback by such indifference to carnage, the interviewer pressed the point. Was Hobsbawm saying that if a communist paradise had actually been created, “the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?” Hobsbawm’s answer: “Yes.”

Imagine that Hobsbawm had fallen in love with Nazism as a youth and spent the rest of his career whitewashing Hitler’s atrocities. Suppose he’d refused for decades to let his Nazi Party membership lapse, and argued that the Holocaust would have been an acceptable price to pay for the realization of a true Thousand-Year Reich. It is inconceivable that he would have been hailed as a brilliant thinker or basked in acclaim; no self-respecting university would have hired him to teach; politicians and pundits would not have lined up to shower him with accolades during his life and tributes after his death.

Yet Hobsbawm was fawned over, lionized in the media, made a tenured professor at a prestigious university, invited to lecture around the world. He was heaped with glories, including the Order of the Companions of Honour — one of Britain’s highest civilian awards — and the lucrative Balzan Prize, worth 1 million Swiss francs. His death was given huge play in the British media — the BBC aired an hour-long tribute and the Guardian led its front page with the news — and political leaders waxed fulsome. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair called him “a giant … a tireless agitator for a better world.”

“I would hate to live in a world where every dumb ass thing I did from 13 to 30 would be captured forever for those who Googled my name”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:27

James Joyner on the phenomenon of internet privacy — and the growing reality that it’s pretty much an illusion.

In the first instance, a bad person is likely to have his real life — including his ability to make a living — upended by the conscious act of a reporter. In the second, two young people who did nothing more than join a school club had their biggest secret exposed by a well-meaning person who made the mistake of trusting Facebook, a data mining company that makes billions by getting people to give them their personal information.

[. . .]

I’ve been active online now since the mid-1990s and have, by virtue of this blog, been a very minor online public figure for almost a decade. For a variety of reasons, including the fact that my professional career is one that encourages writing and publishing, I’ve done virtually all of my online activity under my real life name. As such, I’ve long been aware that my family, friends, co-workers, bosses, and prospective employers might read everything that I put out there. That’s the safest way to operate online, in that it avoids the sort of disruptive surprises that Brutsch, Duncan, and McCormick received. But it also means, inevitably, that there’s a subtle filter that makes me more cautious than I might otherwise be. That’s likely both good and bad in my own case.

But I continue to worry about what it means for a younger generation, for whom Facebook and other social networks are part and parcel of their everyday existence from their teenage years forward. By the time the Internet was a public phenomenon, I was a grown man with a PhD. I would hate to live in a world where every dumb ass thing I did from 13 to 30 would be captured forever for those who Googled my name.

I have generally used my real name — or at least not tried to actively conceal my real identity — in most of my online activities. Some of this has been because there wasn’t a pressing reason to remain anonymous, but as in the writer’s case, it was a strong suspicion from the start that it would be difficult to maintain that degree of privacy over the long term (information wanting to be free, and all that).

We’ve got to move these deer crossing signs to less heavily travelled roads!

Filed under: Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, who sent me the link to this item at Ace of Spades HQ, suggesting it was a former co-worker calling in.

October 12, 2012

McArdle: Biden won debate, but constantly risked going “full frontal jackass”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:57

I didn’t watch either the Presidential or Vice-Presidential debates, but Megan McArdle seems to have the most even-handed analysis of the Veep sock-fest:

Biden launched into the eye rolling and the smirking, the head shaking and the laughing, and of course, the constant interrupting, nearly as soon as Ryan started talking. I assume that means it was part of their debate coaching. I mean, I don’t think that he intended to come off as an obnoxious eighth grader heckling a classmate, or to actually shout himself hoarse with his constant interruptions. I’d guess they told him to come across as genially disappointed, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, and he kind of went off the rails.

Both candidates looked far overcoached for this debate; you could hear the hesitations as they desperately tried to overstuff their responses with canned lines. And that overcoaching showed up in their demeanor. Paul Ryan was speaking so slowly that it sometimes sounded as if he was reading off a teleprompter set at half speed; this made him seem uncertain of his memorized answers, not deliberate. And Biden — well, we seemed to be watching him going through a second puberty, complete with voice changes.

Yet I suspect that MSNBC was right: this was what the Democratic base wanted to see. Yes, they also wanted to hear him defend their issues. But they already agree with him on the issues. Their biggest desire was just for someone to express their disdain for the Republican Party, and particularly its rising young star — to display their collective contempt in a public venue. I’m not sure exactly why this is so important, but I seem to recall that the same dynamic from Republicans in 2004. There’s a lesson there about where American politics is headed, and it’s a pretty grim one.

[. . .]

But unfortunately I thought Biden threw that away that lead with his behavior. It’s hard to get enthusiastic about a candidate who apparently might go full frontal jackass at any moment. I’ve seen a bunch of progressives dismiss this as conservative carping, but watching CNN’s ticker of undecided voter sentiment, it seemed to me that every time Joe Biden started talking over Paul Ryan, Ryan’s ratings went up. And it was the first thing that the CNN hosts, most of whom I guarantee are not Romney/Ryan voters, commented on. The panels of undecided voters also brought it up — and none of them said, “It made Vice President Biden seem really authoritative and in control”. Some of the commentary this morning seemed so suggest that if progressives just insist sufficiently loudly that it was awesome, everyone else will have to agree. I think this rather overestimates both the ability to “work the refs” in the media, and also, the power of doing so.

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