Today begins the 72-hour observance of the Climate Reality Project’s “24 hours of reality” info-event on the so-called “climate crisis” on Facebook and Twitter. I know, I know. Why call it “24 hours of reality” when you’re going to spend 72 hours doing it? Because SHUT UP YOU DENIALIST NAZI SYMPATHIZER!
I’m not on Twitter, but let me share what I’ve communicated to my friends on Facebook:
If ANYONE allows that fat bastard access to their Facebook account in order to spam me with their “THE SKY IS FALLING AND IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT, WINGNUTZ” crap; not only will I de-friend you and refuse to speak to your dumb ass strictly out of principle, I solemnly vow that I will mail a LIVE OPOSSUM to your house in a big box full of styrofoam peanuts.
LIVE. OPOSSUM.
Please don’t test me. I’m serious here. Much like me, live opossums don’t care about fake science. They’re more interested in breaking stuff and having panicked bowel movements on the top shelf of your china hutch.
“Russ from Winterset”, “My Response to ‘The Climate Reality Project'”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2011-09-13
September 13, 2011
September 10, 2011
Opposing the EDL as a way of expressing class hatred?
The English Defence League (EDL) has come in for a lot of criticism for its provocative approach to expressing their concerns about issues like immigration. The critics, however, are not all pure in their opposition, however:
This video, currently causing a stink on Twitter, rather confirms what draws many young middle-class liberals towards anti-English Defence League campaigning: it provides them with a semi-legit cover for expressing their fear and loathing of the white working classes.
In the video, two well-bred kids say things about working-class EDL supporters that could have been lifted straight from the pages of John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses, that exposé of early twentieth-century snobs’ disdain for vulgar little people. The anti-EDL campaigners describe a female supporter of the EDL as “the most tattooed, horrible scrote of a woman” they have ever seen and then laugh as they talk about how she was “kicked up the arse” by a left-wing protester. It’s not normally okay to hit women, they admit, but you can make an exception when it comes to female EDL supporters because “they aren’t women — they’re dogs”.
The video has proved enormously embarrassing for Left-wing campaigners against the EDL, who are desperately trying to distance themselves from the naked class hatred expressed by these two twits. Yet the fact is that a great deal of anti-EDL protesting is driven by a barely disguised hatred for that apparently ugly, uncouth, un-PC blob of white flesh that inhabits inner-city council estates. The two guys in the video have only stated it in a more explicit fashion.
August 18, 2011
August 11, 2011
July 22, 2011
Has Twitter entered the political sphere?
There has to be more to the story, but Erick Erickson is quite concerned:
Today, Twitter not only shut down the Empower Texans twitter feed, but it also shut down the twitter feeds of every individual who works for Empower Texans.
Twitter is a private organization. It can do what it wants. But I am very troubled that it did so without explanation and without anyone for Empower Texans to contact.
If this was an orchestrated effort on the part of others to flag Empower Texans as a spam account such that Twitter’s computer system would automatically can it, Twitter has a serious security problem.
It was a man made decision, Twitter has even bigger problems.
July 1, 2011
Guardian contributer learns not to confuse “sociopathy” with “social network”
Kia Abdullah will think twice before letting her inner sociopath out on Twitter in future:
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, three young British men were killed in a bus crash in Thailand, just days after starting their gap year travels. A deeply tragic case — and one that will have left many British parents sick with worry. Annually about 100,000 young Brits take gap years.
But here’s a Twitter reaction from Kia Abdullah, a Guardian contributor:
Even if you think this sort of thing, sending it out immediately over Facebook or Twitter is just asking for a landslide of public abuse to land on your head. People who work in media have the least excuse for this kind of absent-minded faux pas, as they often pounce on celebrity or politician errors of exactly this sort.
June 23, 2011
June 22, 2011
Carr: LulzSec versus the CIA
Paul Carr is somewhat dismissive of the hacking exploits of the LulzSec group:
For the past few weeks, a hacker collective called LulzSec has been leading American and British authorities a merry dance. The group’s targets are seemingly random – Sony, the CIA, contestants of a reality TV show, the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) – but their stated motive has remained constant: “we’re doing it for laughs”, or, to put it in internet parlance, “lulz”.
If one is to believe the media coverage – particularly here in the US‚ no one is safe from the ingenious hackers and their devilishly complex attacks. The truth is, there’s almost nothing ingenious about what LulzSec is doing: CIA and Soca were not “hacked” in any meaningful sense, rather their public websites were brought down by an avalanche of traffic — a so-called “distributed denial-of-service” (DDoS) attack. Given enough internet-enabled typewriters, a mentally subnormal monkey could launch a DDoS attack — except that mentally subnormal monkeys have better things to do with their time.
Even the genuine hacks are barely worthy of the word. Many large organisations use databases with known security holes that can easily be exploited by anyone who has recently completed the first year of a computer science degree: it’s no coincidence that so many of these hacker collectives appear towards the end of the academic year.
May 30, 2011
May 29, 2011
April 18, 2011
March 18, 2011
February 27, 2011
Athletes in the age of Facebook and Twitter
John Holler makes several good points in this story about a couple of NFL hopefuls who are having to defend their reputations due to the wonderful rumour-spreading abilities of social media and the willingness of sports reporters to try to create controversy:
Saturday at the Scouting Combine in Indianapolis, we got our first intense view of this media “New World Order.” Cam Newton and Ryan Mallett are two of the top quarterback candidates in this year’s draft. Yet, both of them spent significant portions of their media access to address questions that have nothing to do with football.
Newton, who has been under the media microscope for the last several months, had to clarify a comment he made about wanting to be “an entertainer” and “an icon.” It was a flippant comment made by a kid who is going to turn 22 in May. In his case, the question should be, “Yeah, so?” not a sanctimonious rant by media “entertainers” and/or “icons” to pass judgment that he is not focused on being a football player, but more interested in being a rock star.
Guess what? Newton should have nothing to apologize for. If you’re a star in the NFL, you are an entertainer. People drop hundreds of dollars to watch you perform for three hours. There are thousands of people employed to discuss what you do for a living. There is little difference between Peyton Manning and Bruce Springsteen. They do the same thing — entertain packed houses wherever they perform. [. . .]
Mallett is a different story. He has been called to task by what everyone reporting on it claims are rumors that he not only has taken drugs in college (no!) but might have an addiction to the party lifestyle. If it is true, he won’t be the first and he won’t be the last college football player to do things he wouldn’t put on his résumé. The timing of the accusations, the week of the NFL Scouting Combine, seems interesting. However, his response was hard to justify.
If there was no basis to the accusations, Mallett should have been advised to come out aggressive — denying the charges immediately and owning the situation before he gets his 15 minutes with NFL teams. Instead, he deflected the questions, which only gives rise to more speculation. In the Facebook/TMZ world we live in now, you can bet that media members are going to be provided with information — some will pay for it, others won’t — that will portray a bad side of Mallett that he likely doesn’t deserve, but will surely have to answer to.
The stakes are high for both of these young men: a badly chosen phrase could lose them literally millions of dollars by lowering their chances of being a high draft choice. It’s tough enough for media personalities and politicians to tap-dance around awkward situations, but young 20-something athletes don’t have the experience to avoid falling into the verbal traps.
February 13, 2011
January 23, 2011
John Scalzi on Facebook
John Scalzi has been online for a long time. He even “handrolled his own html code and then uploaded it using UNIX commands because he was excited to have his own Web site, and back in 1993 that’s how you did it.” He’s not excited about Facebook. Not at all:
A friend of mine noted recently that I seemed a little antagonistic about Facebook recently — mostly on my Facebook account, which is some irony for you — and wanted to know what I had against it. The answer is simple enough: Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick. It’s a dumbed-down version of the functionality the Web already had, just not all in one place at one time.
Facebook has made substandard versions of everything on the Web, bundled it together and somehow found itself being lauded for it, as if AOL, Friendster and MySpace had never managed the same slightly embarrassing trick. Facebook had the advantage of not being saddled with AOL’s last-gen baggage, Friendster’s too-early-for-its-moment-ness, or MySpace’s aggressive ugliness, and it had the largely accidental advantage of being upmarket first — it was originally limited to college students and gaining some cachet therein — before it let in the rabble. But the idea that it’s doing something better, new or innovative is largely PR and faffery. Zuckerberg is in fact not a genius; he’s an ambitious nerd who was in the right place at the right time, and was apparently willing to be a ruthless dick when he had to be. Now he has billions because of it. Good for him. It doesn’t make me like his monstrosity any better.
[. . .]
I look at Facebook and what I mostly see are a bunch of seemingly arbitrary and annoying functionality choices. A mail system that doesn’t have a Bcc function doesn’t belong in the 21st Century. Facebook shouldn’t be telling me how many “friends” I should have, especially when there’s clearly no technological impetus for it. Its grasping attempts to get its hooks into every single thing I do feels like being groped by an overly obnoxious salesman. Its general ethos that I need to get over the concept of privacy makes me want to shove a camera lens up Zuckerberg’s left nostril 24 hours a day and ask him if he’d like for his company to rethink that position. Basically there’s very little Facebook does, either as a technological platform or as a company, that doesn’t remind me that “banal mediocrity” is apparently the highest accolade one can aspire to at that particular organization.
I have a Facebook account, but only really check it every few days. Twitter, on the other hand I’ve found to be an excellent tool for a blogger: lots and lots of interesting stuff has come to my attention first through a Twitter update from journalists, bloggers, celebrities, and just ordinary folks. And it doesn’t try to worm its way into everything I do.
Some folks felt John was being too harsh on Facebook users, rather than the site itself, so he posted an update later that day:
* In comments here and elsewhere there was interpretation of me saying that Facebook wasn’t for someone like me, but it was for normal people as a) a way to signal that I am awesome and smart and also awesome, and b) normal people are stupid and suck, and that’s why they use Facebook. Yeah, no. It’s not for me because the functionality doesn’t map well for what I want to do or have for my online experience, and “normal” in this case doesn’t mean “stupid people who suck,” it means “people who don’t want to make the time/energy commitment to run their own site.”
It’s always a problem with written work . . . some people will misunderstand or misinterpret what you’re saying — deliberately or otherwise — and it’s difficult to make something so clear that it can’t be twisted. Did I say difficult? I should have said impossible.
