02/02/2006
Scumbags united
"I hate Illinois Nazis!"
[Jake Blues, "The Blues Brothers" (1980).]
Following that line, the Blues Brothers drive their car directly through
a crowd of heiling Nazis, scattering them into the river, completely
destroying their master-race image and making them look as ridiculous as
they really, underneath the swastikas, are.
Sadly, a
similar fate did not befall Nick Griffin today, and it's a shame.
This, not jail, is what he and his crowd of tinpot hatemongers really
deserve - full, humiliating, public embarassment.
It's interesting to contrast this with the current furore over the
Prophet Muhammed cartoons - made by a Danish newspaper specifically to
piss people off in about September last year, riled up by a few Internet
tossers as a 'freedom of speech against those Ay-rabs' issue, now so
successful in doing so it's destabilising the European role in the
Israel/Palestine peace process. Both the cartoons and Griffin's BNP are
at the harsh edges of freedom of speech - they may cause great, great
harm by being there.
As a small-l liberal, I have to consider freedom of speech to be one of
the values I hold most dear. People like the BNP do not make this easy.
I note, with some irony, that they don't want us to have our
freedom of speech - they're
involved in the current will-not-die iteration of the Jerry Springer:
The Opera saga. At the same time, I have to concede that while
Muslims do have genuine grievances over the cartoons - the one with the
turban bomb is truly appalling racism - their leaders really shouldn't
be trying to make it a nuclear issue; although the normal boycotts,
complaints, protests etc are absolutely fine if done in a legal and
proper way. It's not like Jerry, where the complaints were
unjustified and the protesters scummy - this is a much more even affair.
Anyway, on the Mohammed cartoon stuff, Bloggerheads
and Chicken
Yoghurt are both very good. Oh, and considering that Mark
Collett - Griffin's co-defendant - has admitted being involved with
Redwatch, the British Nazi version of a animal-rights/anti-abortion
style 'post the addresses and knock them off' hitlist (in both Secret
Agent and, istr, in the 2002-ish 'Young, Nazi and Proud' Channel
Four film) shouldn't he be in jail instead of praising himself as a
"victor" for "freedom of speech"? Only in a just world, I think.
|
10/11/2005
Traitors and treason
The Sun today is somewhat out of step with the other newspapers: calling
everyone who's against 90-day detention a 'traitor'
is a bit much, really. I thought that kind of inflammatory bollocks was
going to be too low for them - I was expecting it from the Express and
St*r, though - but you
never fail to be surprised.
[NOTE: Bloggerheads
explains link. Nudge nudge, wink wink.]
I was watching the debate, and one of the Tories (having finally found
their spine) catcalled Police State at Blair; his response,
"We're not living in a police state!", didn't exactly ring true, because
if the bill had passed we damn well would be. Even in the modified
version it's a bit much. Personally, I don't think anyone who supports a
fair justice system with as few opportunities for the police to get
trumped-up charges as possible is a traitor (not that our wonderful
police forces would ever ever beat a confession out of someone, of
course, especially not one of those Arab types), but that's just my
opinion.
Oh,
and that of quite a lot of MPs of course. Ian Paisley actually
voting against internment is hysterically funny, for some reason. All
the Lib Dems managed to get their policies in order. And at least George
Galloway managed to vote this time, which says... something.
Good comment at
Davblog: really rings true somehow... And as for treason: that stunt
Blair and Clarke pulled, withdrawing the bill and saying they're going
to "make concessions" and then bringing it back intact a week later and
saying "no, f you, three line whip" really does count as betraying
Labour MPs, doesn't it? It almost certainly contributed to it being as
big a loss as it was. Good lesson to Blair: don't screw your own party
over, or you'll live to regret it.
|
09/11/2005
Home computer Battlefront
I've just had a phone call from one of my brothers, who's just bought Battlefront
2. Having gone through the DVD installation process, he ran the game
only to get an error message complaining about "emulation software".
Now, this means stuff like Daemon
Tools or Alcohol 120%,
software which provides "virtual" CD drives based on hard-drive stored
images. This is actually an entirely legitimate use - having lots of CDs
on your hard drive means less scratching of your original discs, they're
faster, they mean you can keep a centralised "jukebox" so your kids'
copies of The Sims or whatever don't need to be replaced at EA
prices, that kind of thing. Unfortunately, like all good technologies
this can also be used for piracy, and as a result a lot of copy
protection systems now refuse to allow the game to be played even if
such a program is installed on your system. Doesn't bother checking
whether the game itself is mounted on the system, just quits out
if it even detects the existence of Daemon Tools or Alcohol.
This, of course, is stupid, but then so are most game copy protection
systems - they quite often fail on certain optical drives, to the extent
where many software companies actually release patches to remove the
publisher-mandated copy "protection" as the very first thing they do (a
la Epic on Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004 - the first
patch for both removes the protection check). Valve's Steam system,
although much maligned, is a better idea; because it is user-centred
rather than disc-centred, it doesn't care whether you installed HL2 from
your disc, a copy or your disc or just by installing the Steam client
and downloading it off Valve, just that the game itself is registered to
your account.
What's worse is that you absolutely cannot copy these discs -
meaning that if something goes wrong and you want to play the game
again, you're probably screwed. The new SecuROM 7.0 system, which Battlefront
2 is protected with, blocks all kinds of software; worse, it also
blocks software that has nothing to do with piracy. A good example is
the piece of software that was actually causing my brothers' problem: it
wasn't DT or A120, because neither were installed, it wasn't CloneCD or
anything like that...
...no, it was SlySoft's AnyDVD.
A piece of software that has nothing whatsoever to do with piracy
of computer games - it's used to work around region code issues with
DVD-Video playback. Now, either SecuROM just crashes out if it finds
something unusual has hooked the Windows optical-drive readout mechanism
(in which case there's a lot of legitimate stuff it could crash on, like
random SATA drivers), or Sony DADC, makers of SecuROM, deliberately
blocked this software because... well... uhm... it hurts their movie
business? Uhm... get back to you later.
|
02/11/2005
How odd.
"Bad news buried",
claim Lib Dems.
Basically: Blunkett gets turfed, and at the same time a negative Home
Office-commissioned report on the way police answer phone calls turns up
early, under embargo for the morning papers - which will be all Blunkett
all the time, with a slight mention of how the Home Office just managed
to avoid getting whacked on the Terrorism Bill.
PR really is the art of slime, isn't it?
|
25/10/2005
There can only be one contender
...for International
Scumbag of the Year. There really is little other competition:
if there is a hell, Fred
Phelps deserves every last minute of it.
|
07/08/2005
The unavoidable death of Time?
The recent collapse of the Granville Technology Group has been compared
by many to the MG Rover collapse, and in some ways they're similar - a
large company, poorly managed to death - but it is, however, a unique
situation. In the case of GTG, we have a company which seems to have
aimed to alienate customers by deliberately selling them shoddy kit -
something which even the Phoenix consortium would have baulked at - and
then locking the customers in just to annoy them.
Time Computers, the brand used by GTG for most of its life, was never a
particularly good company - it sold machines on the cheap through
newspaper advertisements with cut-back components, overreaching software
deals and financing agreements. It was, however, a profitable one -
right to the point when its founder, Tahir Mohsan, not only became so
rich he ended up on the Guardian's young Rich List, but became president
of the Federation of Asian Businesses into the bargain; in fact,
recently he was listed by the Manchester
Evening News, on 31st May this year, as being worth £80m.
What exactly happened between the point when they were able to buy the
charred remains of Tiny back in 2002 (Tough It's Now
Yours, according to computer-repair slang) and the bankruptcy of
today?
Well, as we all know, they started pulling stunts. Before this time,
they were only slightly worse than every other direct retailer; only
using slightly worse components, with a tendency to overload software
and charge for tech support. Firstly, they started charging extra for
reload discs - so you had to pay GTG £60 if you even wanted to restore
the computer to factory condition - even if the system had been damaged
by a virus, Trojan or component failure. Insultingly, all the £60 CD-ROM
did was unlock a partition hidden on the computer in the first place
which contained the restore software; this was a stunt pulled by no
other UK computer vendor. Most don't supply original Windows CDs (with
the notable, and unusual exception of Dell), so the only recourse is to
wipe the system back to factory condition using the restore discs -
which come in the box. Time didn't do that, and this undoubtedly gained
them a huge amount of adverse publicity; especially since they also had
the most expensive technical support number in the UK computer industry,
a £1/minute 090 monster, which considering that Dell use an 0870 seems
to be outstandingly poor value.
I started to write about Time when the company pulled its most visible
and outrageous stunt, in late 2003. They had taken a practice previously
seen amongst US computer vendors (but not their European offshoots)
of locking the system's modem so it could only dial particular telephone
numbers, locked it to the numbers of their ISP offspring company - the
still-running and must-avoid Supanet (Internexus Group) - and
then for a time smugly told customers to go buy a USB modem if they
wanted to dial their own ISP. The modem was always a standard Conexant
HSF software modem - a piece of kit you can buy very cheaply online -
and all that was ever locked down was the driver; the modem was not
locked in hardware, it was entirely Time/Tiny's creation and definitely
not the "optimisation" their PR people later tried to claim it was. This
got me to put up my now-mostly-useless Time page
- in its original form, just a somewhat vitriolic "10 Reasons Not To Buy
From Time" list, which then quickly expanded as solutions to the locking
problem started to come out, GTG found a way to lock the driver harder,
and more solutions came through.
Later, Time put up a page containing software to unlock the modems,
which I'm sure was due to Internet pressure; but it still required the
user to create a Supanet account to access, if they weren't lucky enough
to have a mate with a knowledge of what to do, and had several
suspiciously unnecessary restrictions. These meant that if a user has
one of the last Time PCs, they cannot unlock the modem using Time's
software even if they find someone that's kept it - the unlocking
software has a challenge-response protection which requires a key
generated by Time's now-nonexistant website. (Plug: my Time page still
has the registry-based unlocking method, despite pleas from GTG to
remove it, which should hopefully still work.) It's almost like they
wanted to give their customers one last screw.
I received many emails from Time employees during the page's existance,
which were the main reasons it was kept up - the company was not only
screwing customers, it was screwing its employees too. I also had the
entertainment, on occasion, of GTG's Internet PR team showing up in the
page comments (having followed the link from the pro-unionisation ITEF
site) - now sadly lost by HaloScan, I promise you I didn't delete
anything - making occasionally salient points about the page's vitriol
but otherwise parroting a one-note "We didn't do it" song, easily
disprovable with Romulus2 and Watchdog. I'll leave it to an ex-employee,
posting recently, to give the gist of much of the commenting:
I am not sorry nor surprised to hear of the collapse of Granville
Technology! I worked for the company for 2.1/2 years, 3 months in the
Legal Dept, the rest of the time on the front line customer service team
and the Supanet Dept.
In 40 years of employment,(I resigned voluntarily in January 2001) I
have never worked for a worse company - it was difficult to decide who
was treated worse: customers or staff. The management were abominable.
(Neil Foster, 31st July 2005, comments)
Many of the comments before this, now lost in HaloScan's black hole of
doom, were in the same vein.
I made a comment on the 21st of April update that I hoped Time wouldn't
become "the MG Rover of the British computer industry" as long as they
fixed themselves. At this time, I really didn't know that Time were
going to become the MG Rover of the UK computer industry - they'd been
losing £2m a month since January and it's been suspected by some that
they were insolvent even at the time I wrote it (they were taken down by
defaulting on a HSBC loan, taking out their credit card facility for
their High Street stores and killing off the company.) They'd sold a
dodgy line of plasma screens under the Tiny brand name that had a
lot of people very, very angry (AV Forums thread - I hope you don't
need registration), they were pulling all the usual stunts, and people
weren't taking the bait anymore. They'd finally started to run out of
marks; but too late for many. And that's what's so sad about the demise:
the fact that unless you bought using a credit card (which should always
be done for >£100 purchases, but too many people don't realise this),
you will have paid hundreds or even thousands of pounds for either hot
air, or faulty kit, and there's nothing you can do about it except
complain at somewhere like tinycon.com.
It's the biggest shame of the entire affair - that the people most
responsible for the death of GTG are those who will be least affected by
the consequences. Isn't that just so sad?
[EDIT: Grammar and sentence construction corrected. *Sigh*.]
|
30/05/2005
Random stupidity #(∞-1)
Courtesy
BBC, an article showing off exactly how you can rather easily ruin a
hundred schoolchildren's Friday:
More than 100 GCSE pupils received a last-minute call to sit an exam
two weeks early after a mix-up meant they were given the wrong date...
Pupils were contacted when the error was discovered on Friday
morning, and the exam was allowed to be delayed until that afternoon.
That afternoon? Wow, how generous. You've been expecting to have
your totally unimportant RE exam two weeks in the future, so probably
haven't revised yet. You have, in good faith, been given an exam list
which states in bold Helvetica TWO WEEKS IN THE FUTURE. You probably
haven't even started revising yet and then you get a phone call on
Friday morning - "Oops, sorry, it's today. Can you come in this
afternoon?" I'm surprised 80% of them turned up - that's an abominable
way to treat a student.
Take a look at the sidebar, too; there's a recent history of this. This
sort of thing is getting common because no-one checks anything anymore.
There's a really lame excuse in the article: "The error had been made at
the school, but not by the examinations officer." Well, if so, why
didn't the exams officer recheck the book, or ask the question: "Are
they sitting Paper A or B?" to someone like, say, their teacher? It is,
after all, their job. Oh well.
And in today's random education stupidity roundup, we return to the City
Academies - nothing less than the Government's attempt to privatise
education without the advantages of doing so. In case you're not
familiar with the way the scheme works, it's quite simple: Peter Vardy
or some other scumbag contributes £2m, the Government contributes the
remaining 90% of the school's building cost and 100% of the running
costs, and then Vardy runs the school, including full curricular
control, forever. Seem fair to you? Not me either. Vardy is using his "Emmanuel
Schools Foundation" academies to teach creationist
crap in science classes, and others are just using them as a licence
to print money; most new schools on PFI deals, for example, have
near-permanent unbreakable contracts with Sodexho/Scolarest/Initial, and
don't even have a kitchen let alone the capability to make edible
school food.
The bad news
is that it isn't the Emmanuel Schools Foundation one that's failing in
Middlesborough, it's the one run by a construction company... and
guess who's going to take over... Stupidity in the extreme, isn't it?
|
20/05/2005
On the occasion of seeing several hundred too many Jamster adverts on TV...
Once a day is too much. Twice every ad break on every single commercial
channel is taking the piss. I watch TV with sound piped through my
hi-fi, and it doesn't have a remote control; as a result, and also
because I don't own a PVR yet, I have to rapid-switch the channel when
the frog and friends come on. Unfortunately my TV provider is Telewest
Broadband so it takes about five seconds to get to a safe haven like,
say, News 24. Five seconds of frog to suffer through is five seconds too
much, and with the BBC strike on Monday almost certain to trigger a N24
shutdown I have a feeling I may well be about to go insane.
ITV have had 600 complaints since they started striprunning Crazy Frog
every...single...ad-break...twice, but they won't willingly give up a
source of revenue just because real viewers are pissed off about it
(only the BARB raters count, although at least they're not watching Celebrity
Wrestling either). And the ASA, which has real power, won't listen
to Crazy Frog complaints about their frequency, which is supposedly up
to the broadcaster; and they rejected these months before they
did the ITV deal and started pushing it harder than an American crack
dealer. So complain, complain, complain to OFCOM, with a quickie dropped
into the ASA about the outrageous £3-a-month small-print scam they're
pulling (earning them millions.)
And if you want to hurt them financially, don't buy a tone from them,
complain at every opportunity, switch your domains away from Network
Solutions (Jamster is part of the Verisign
family), and don't buy your digital certificates from
Verisign/Thawte (two sides of the same coin). Make sure to let them
know...
|
19/05/2005
PSA: Kill the Asylum and Immigration Bill
New
Labour's asylum bill is lethal.
Successful asylum seekers will no longer gain a permanent right to
remain, but will be awarded temporary leave of up to five years.
It's a spiteful little measure for the Daily Mail crowd that will damage
the people who most need sanctuary in this country and will do nothing
to stop illegal immigration; it panders, in fact, to the DM crowd's
belief that asylum-seekers are taking our jobs etc., which couldn't be
further from the truth (in fact, they're not even allowed to have one).
There isn't even anything positive about the bill - most of the
rest of it, points system and all, is truly vile populist
immigrant-baiting of the kind I despise the most.
In any case, Britain needs immigrants of all types - we are suffering a
skills collapse - and measures like this are truly unwelcome. We treat
asylum seekers badly enough already - we're better than Australia, but
that's not saying much - and we really shouldn't be caving in again
to people who are one step away from joining the BNP. But then, I don't
believe in bigotry...
|
04/05/2005
This really does say it all...
Jamster, the scumbags (do a search)
behind every other advert on UK digital TV, are
owned
by VeriSign.
This is appropriate, since VeriSign, just like the godawful characters they
advertise, are really bloody annoying... Also, it's not the first time
VeriSign's tried to con anyone with misleading T&Cs and hidden extras,
or tried to stop people from getting away from the service (something
which NetSol are notorious for). Shame, isn't it?
And, in case you're wondering who I'm voting for, the answer is 'Lib Dem'.
So blame me if the Tories get in in Edinburgh South West, I don't
care - they probably won't, though, considering how crap they are...
Since I'm going to attempt to stay up tomorrow evening, you may or
may not see Election Blog 2005. Hopefully.
|
26/02/2005
Idiots Of The Week #3: Stephen Green ('Christian' Voice)
Remember the ignorant
bigots at 'Christian' Voice, the ones who posted the BBC executives'
home phone numbers on the web for all to see during the Jerry
Springer: The Opera fiasco? Well, they're even more ignorant than
we thought they were, and much, much more bigoted.
First, Stephen Green creates a publicity disaster for himself by phoning
a local-to-me cancer charity (Maggie's Centres) that was about to accept
£3000 from a special performance of Jerry Springer: The Opera,
and telling them that he and his pack of loudmouthed bigots would
protest outside their cancer centres about how they would be going to
hell for accepting the cash if they didn't refuse it, and then going and
crowing about it in the press when the charity (regrettably) followed
his advice. Of course, he
isn't replacing the £3000 out of his own pocket;
apparently, that's for "women and wimps". Blackmail is just so Christian
a virtue, isn't it? Well, only if Stephen Green does it, apparently.
The Murdoch Times this morning has an article on how he's been
copying his American fundamentalist brethren (who he is very much in
thrall to) and is about to start protesting
outside abortion clinics. The good news is that 'Christian' Voice
probably don't have all that many members, as proven by their somewhat
weak protests outside Television Centre during the JS:TO debacle. The
bad news is that they know how to work the news media, and as Marie
Stopes points out in the article there are already
anti-abortion protesters in the UK. Green's organisation will provide
them with their publicity.
So I have just visited their site, out of need to 'research', and the
first thing I see is a lovely little banner ad, telling me that I am an
"enemy of God" because I don't follow their teachings
(even though I think Jesus was a pretty swell guy, but apparently I'm
too strong on the whole equality thing.) Clicking on the 'About Us' link
gets us a series of teachings on stuff like how we have, in a line
stolen from Ian Paisley, "given away the Queen's sovereignty - owed to
Almighty God alone - to the European Union." So not really a fan of
democracy, either, is he?
Oh, and we've legalised trading on the Lord's Day, which gets almost as
big a bill as the gays on this page (although he gaybashes freely
elsewhere on the site: look at his amazingly distasteful parody of a
police anti-discrimination webpage, "The Site The Gay Police Association
Want To Ban!", which links to all sorts of American fundamentalist
'ex-gay' crap and overriden parts of Exodus.) He'd have a heart attack
if he came up here, which he might have done to 'protest' Maggie's
Centre - Scotland has liberal Sunday trading laws, where places like
ASDA are actually allowed to open 24 hours, all week. This
despite the Wee Frees. It's a law England should have had a long, long
time ago...
[If you want to explore further, I recommend Nick
Barlow's article on much the same subject.]
And I notice a link on the side entitled 'Our Own Holocaust'. Uh oh -
sounds like an abortion reference, it's the kind of thing the
fundamentalists love (see: their hitlist of abortion doctors, featuring
names, addresses and phone numbers and crossing out the dead ones in strikeout,
entitled 'The Nuremberg
Files'). Whaddya
know: [warning, link actually goes to 'Christian'
Voice]
In Britain today, to kill an unborn baby after 24 weeks is illegal,
unless the baby is diagnosed with a handicap, which as we have recently
seen, can be as trivial as a cleft palate. We compel the owners of the
smallest public building to construct ramps for the disabled, whilst
trying to eliminate disabled people before they are actually born.
Disabled people cost money to look after, and the Nazis would have
appreciated the logic of our position.
Um... Stephen? Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a
24-week abortion in the UK? (Not to mention that the 6m number he quotes
is all abortions, not 24-week ones...) As you may be aware, the
criteria for allowing a post 24-week abortion are:
-
The continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the
pregnant woman greater than if the pregnancy were terminated.
-
The termination is necessary to prevent grave permanent injury to the
physical or mental health of the pregnant woman.
-
There is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would
suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously
handicapped.
>
> (source: Woman's
Health, linked to from directgov. Also see here.)
In other words, he's talking bullshit. This is easily disproven, with
the aid of National
Statistics. Just taking one year, say 2001, post-24 week abortions
total 119 (mostly under the handicapped baby rule - and usually, this is
serious stuff), from table 8. Out of 176,364 other abortions. Talk about
corrupting the statistics or what...
Oh, and look under cleft palate, in table 23. The number? One. It
would have to be pretty serious in order for two doctors to sign off on
it, and that's even before the 24-week limit kicks in.
These statistics weren't hard to find, either. I searched for 'abortion
statistics UK' on Google. It's the first hit.
Why do I get the feeling that people like Stephen Green want Vera
Drake to be the future, not the past? There will be lots of Veras
if abortion gets banned, because it won't go away; and there will be
lots of people not nearly as nice as Vera is performing them.
Women could die because of Stephen Green, and people like him, and I
simply can not countenance that. It is, after all, to do with their
bodies; and no-one else's to have a say over.
But then, Stephen doesn't believe that, does he:
[Women] should be in the home. The man should be the leader in the
family and the woman should be the daughter or wife under the authority
of her father and then her husband.
> -- quoted in Times
article, above
Jesus Christ.
|
23/02/2005
Spyware-shilling scum threaten Spyware Warrior and others
Suzi at Spyware Warrior has
received a legal
threat from the people behind the iSearch spyware toolbar, spread-blasted
around a load of spyware information sources (note her letter threatens,
dumbly, her domain registrar, because they're offering a cloaking service
where her name doesn't show up on the domain). Nevertheless, it's a
fairly scary move - especially after both Aluria and Lavasoft's hijinks
with WhenU, who also have threatened people who claim their spyware
is.
iDownload/iSearch, of course, claim that their product is not malware,
despite the fact that the licensing
agreement (warning: link goes to iSearch, although the page doesn't appear
to contain an installer) contains this:
By installing the Software, you understand and agree
that the Software may, without any further prior notice to you, automatically
perform the following: display advertisements of advertisers who pay a fee
to iSearch and/or it's partners, in the form of pop-up ads, pop-under
ads, interstitials ads and various other ad formats, display links
to and advertisements of related websites based on the information
you view and the websites you visit; store non-personally
identifiable statistics of the websites you have visited; redirect
certain URLs including your browser default 404-error page to or through
the Software; provide advertisements, links or information in
response to search terms you use at third-party websites; provide search
functionality or capabilities; automatically update the Software and install added features or functionality or
additional software, including search clients and toolbars, conveniently
without your input or interaction; install desktop icons and installation files;
install software from iSearch affiliates; and install Third Party Software.
and this:
However, to enable iSearch and/or it's partners to provide and operate
its Software, iSearch and/or it's partners may collect certain types of non-personally
identifiable information about individuals who install the Software. This
information may include your Internet protocol (IP) address, your domain,
your operating system, your browser version, type and language and your Internet
Service Provider.
[...] iSearch and/or it's partners may also collect
and may use certain other types of non-personally identifiable information,
including: certain of the web pages that you view, the
amount of time that you spend on certain websites, your responses
to ads served by iSearch and/or it's partners, certain
software installed to your computer and software characteristics
and preferences [isx: like Spybot S&D, maybe?] ,
non-personally identifiable information on web pages
and forms, software usage characteristics and preferences, and
your ZIP code.
Gee, sounds like spyware to me. Sounds like a Trojan to
me. And, of course, with your IP, domain, webform entries and postcode,
you are personally
identifiable, so they're lying to you.
This
amusing thread at Wilders Security shows that Microsoft AntiSpyware
(actually a rather good piece of software - it's what used to be GIANT
AntiSpyware, it's going to be free, and it's permanently resident)
spots and stops iSearch installation, so iScum are going to have
to go up ahead the world's biggest software company if they want
to stop their piece of shit software being 'libelled', he he. So
instead they're threatening a blogger, one who doesn't even
make a software product.
Way to go, iSearch. Now, can you piss off?
|
21/01/2005
Idiots Of The Week #2: BBC Reporting Scotland, Luke Mitchell
(Yes, a running series! And why not? Gives me a reason to write.)
Those of you who don't live in Scotland may not be familiar with the
Jodie
Jones murder case, not having had it hammered into their heads over
the last three months, so I'll refresh your memories. A couple of years
ago, the said Jodie Jones (a 14-year old teenager from the Easthouses
council estate, an area of Edinburgh I know fairly well) ended
up missing after going out to meet her boyfriend, a neddish
scumbag by the name of Luke Mitchell. Later on, the body ends up being
discovered just off her route to Mitchell's house, Mitchell made an
absolute ass of himself both at the funeral and on Sky News, and the
police process the information.
Of course, as it turns out, she did meet her boyfriend... (at least
according to majority verdict.)
The Scottish media
have not exactly been forward with their tact - all the
newspapers had a shot of somewhat childish glee at revealing that Mitchell
was the one charged with the murder pretty much the second he turned
16 - and they're even less likely to gain it now. It has been like
this throughout the long, sordid, endless trial - every single night
on Reporting Scotland we got a trial update, despite the fact that
the evidence was always the bloody same. Just think of what the
front pages are going to be like tomorrow...
And bad things are going to happen because of this; in fact, the trailer
for Up Next on Reporting Scotland is what triggered me
to write this. Because Jodie was one of the supposed subculture who
call themselves 'goths' and consider themselves to be 'individual',
and Mitchell claimed
to be too, the media has found a Blame Target. And it's the same blame
target as the US media found after Columbine - Marilyn Manson. As they
just said: "Did the music of the rock star Marilyn Manson really
influence the killer's actions?"
Well, let's see...
A) MM's painting of the Black Dahlia murders, shown on his website, isn't
exactly unique to the genre. No-one's even proved to me that Mitchell
even visited the website...
B) As the BBC Scotland article I linked to just above admits, but Reporting
Scotland doesn't seem to be, Mitchell bought the Golden
Age Of Grotesque album-with-free-DVD featuring images vaguely like said
murder two days after Jodie was murdered. Oops.
("This DVD may explain how he
became...a cold-blooded killer" says the idiot reporter, right now. DO
THESE PEOPLE ACTUALLY READ THEIR
OWN REPORTS?)
C) As anyone who's actually listened to his music knows, Marilyn Manson
is taking the piss. If there is a message in his music, it's "don't
trust other people's bullshit", which is an excellent message and one
I approve of highly, especially in the case of Reporting Scotland.
The trappings around him? It's just theatrics. Look at his appearance
in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine,
for instance - "I wouldn't say anything to them. I'd just listen... because no-one else
did." The guy understands. He's just the new Alice Cooper, designed to piss
off your parents, so lay off him.
D) There is much, much worse out there than Marilyn Manson - and I suspect
Luke Mitchell may in fact known about some of it, or at least read
about it. But of course, MM's name is recognisable while most of the really seamy
end of the music scale isn't, so that's what gets in the media.
E) It's quite possible that angry music like MM's might actually help people
get over their rage against the society they feel mistreats them -
the whole 'punch in the air' thing. Radiohead and New Order did it
for me, but hey, everybody's different.
So the answer to the question is, of course, no. MM
is merely a symptom, as is Mitchell's self-professed 'Satanism'. Mitchell
is clearly a screwed-up character; the Satanism crap and attachment
to the weird end of the Gothic bandwagon is obviously a cover for real
psychological problems, none of which will be solved by sending him
to jail forever.
(My own suspicion? Jodie found about about his side
girlfriend, and he flipped out on her. Full
stop. And as Larkin said, 'they fuck
you up, your mum and dad', and Luke Mitchell's amoral, uncaring, truly
vile mother definitely fits the bill.)
The big problem is that this will cause a backlash, just like Columbine
caused a backlash, against anyone who doesn't fit in. Just when you
thought it couldn't get much worse for people who aren't 'normal' in
school, something like this happens and you know it's going to. Wear
black? Listen to Marilyn Manson? Use the Internet, not just for
MSN? Be a bit 'weird'? We'll keep an eye on
you! Never mind that you may have no intention of killing or hurting
anyone - like most fans, in fact, of Marilyn Manson, all of whom take
pride in being a 'rebel against conformity' by buying his albums en
masse - you're marked! Even those with problems (and most MM fans are
well adjusted members of society) only really need a little understanding;
but, by God, we'll give them punishment!
This is, of course, something that will create more problems than it solves
- because, of course, if the supposed 'goths' genuinely are persecuted,
they may develop complexes like Mitchell's about it and we'll get a
Scottish Columbine (with school layouts the way they are, it's very possible
- a big enough knife and/or the right bits of the Anarchist's Cookbook and
it'll take Armed Response to stop it), the media will blame it on Marilyn
Manson and/or the Internet and the entire thing will full circle again.
It's a horrifying prospect, and one that could very well be happening,
in Britain, right now. Isn't that scary?
[In fact, isn't the possibility of blaming it on the Net why the pigs scoured
the Mitchells' computers, discovering as a sideline that Luke's brother
was viewing porno at the time of the murder? I suppose when they found
that out at least some of the feeling was that of a missed opportunity...]
The best thing I can say is: the case is extremely abnormal, and can be
simply explained in two words. We shouldn't make it
normal, but our media looks like it's going to keep trying...
[I might as well, also, do this fine
Googlebomb for
Manic: we're all talking about the White House's
empty rhetoric. After
all, the ignorant bigots one was successful, so why not give this one a go? It's for a good cause.]
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12/01/2005
I'm doing my part! Are you?
It's been said before, but it needs to be said again: Christian Voice are
ignorant bigots.
(This fine Googlebomb originally suggested by Ivory
Sky here,
and propagated by Manic at Bloggerheads.
Please follow in their footsteps.)
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09/01/2005
Idiots Of The Week: National Rail Enquiries, Celtic 'fans' and more
Me: I hate National Rail Enquiries.
Ticket seller: Oh, we do too.
--- Verbatim conversation at a ticket office, somewhere in
Scotland, yesterday
So I've spent Christmas and New Year with my family, as you do, distributed
hauls of R3 copies of Hero,
The Bourne Supremacy etc. to my very pleased brothers, and the
university term looms. I decide, because of commitments, to stay up north
for as long a period as possible and head back on Saturday the 8th, i.e.
yesterday.
As the weather's
been kinda bad lately, I check up on First
ScotRail's site about an hour before the train's meant to come in. This advises me that due
to the weather situation, to only travel if necessary (my new term
starts tomorrow) and to call 08457 48 49 50 for further information,
not mentioning what the line actually is. I call it, and I get back
a "Thank you for calling National Rail Enquiries..."
NRE, after keeping me waiting for a fairly long time, tell me (after much
kerfuffle) that services on my line are suspended and a replacement
bus service is running. They cannot, of course, tell me whether the
bus service is even going to stop at my village railway station,
and I can't call either the terminus or Glasgow stations directly, so I end up
having to get lifted into town very quickly in order to catch said
replacement bus service.
Of course, NRE wasn't exactly telling the truth, since the line was open
for business and had been for some time. A big oops there.
Thankfully, the ticket inspector was understanding when he accepted
my ticket, technically invalid for the first part of the journey, after
I explained NRE's cockup.
Other railway people were rather understanding, too, as when I asked for
an address for which I could complain to them, and the ticket seller
at Queen Street could only get me a phone number (0191 269 0305, fact
fans...):
Ticket seller: "They're useless."
Which pretty much says it all.
NRE can get away with being absolutely useless because they're the
only way, now, that a consumer can get information about the British
railway network - the telephone numbers of local stations were made
ex-directory some years ago, so all you see in the Phone Book is NRE.
This is despite the fact that to man the phone lines at a rural terminus
doesn't actually preclude you from doing other jobs at the same time.
Of course, you need to have a fairly similar amount of staff employed
to update the NRE system whenever, say, something like an extreme weather
situation happens, since the people you actually speak to are dumb
automatons in a call centre somewhere, but this doesn't figure to the
bureaucrats and plutocrats that run the British railway network nowadays.
If I had been able to call my local station, I'd have been able to
pick up the train at the village station and I wouldn't have forgotten
to pick up some of the DVDs I left behind. Grr.
Also see: out-of-hours GP phone numbers redirecting you to NHS
Direct (or the Scottish version, NHS 24), a call-centre helpline run
by nurses; banks making you call India instead of your local branch;
etc. It's all the same thing; idiot cost-cutting that doesn't actually
help anyone.
Admittedly, none of this was actually the fault of First ScotRail; they're
supposed to refer everyone to NRE, since it's the only Official Source
of this information. What wasn't the fault of First ScotRail either
was the gang of supposed football 'fans' that got on at the last stop
and were really, really loud, although they didn't exactly distinguish
themselves by attempting to control the situation either. By really
loud, I'm meaning "drowning out the music playing on my in-ear headphones"
loud. They were drunk when they got on the train, drank a lot whilst
on the train, and made the last fifteen minutes of my journey seem
like time spent in the very depths of Hell. What's more, these were
'fans' of the depressingly boorish, pissed, fucked-up, sectarian (pretty
sure I heard an IRA reference), and amazingly racist type ("There ain't
no black on the Union Jack! Sieg Heil!") that demonises Scottish
football - and this was the day before the Old Firm game, let me remind you.
I almost wished my Rio Karma had a record function so I could have posted it here -
this really was the kind of thing you never, ever wish to see or hear.
I lived in a Rangers area for a long period of time, really really hated the sectarian
aspects of it, and not liking football wasn't a way out of it. I ended up holding back
for a long time after the train stopped until I was pretty sure the
supposed 'fans' had dispersed; this was sensible plan, so I recovered
with the aid of a cup of coffee and set off for Edinburgh much more
relieved.
And then I watched Jerry Springer: The Opera, or as it really is Jerry
Springer: The Musical. Which was really funny, by the way: pretty much from the first
pseudo-operatic aria ("chick with a dick") onward. It's also not
blasphemous at all: the appearance of the diaper-fetishist from previously as Jesus
(although not a diaper-fetishist Jesus) occurs simply because the whole 'Jesus vs.
Satan' thing is a hallucination created by Springer's mind before he ends up actually
dying, and the Virgin Mary herself doesn't sing the 'raped by an angel' line
(it's the chorus, shown to be orchestrated by Satan), unlike what some
of the media publicity would have had you believe. You can even take
the ending to be a Christian redemptive message, if you like. The thing had so many warnings
strewed on it - including Kirsty Wark before each act of the play, and BBC2 continuity -
that it was almost impossible to miss it.
Oh, and the swearing? All the seven (not 280, that's counting the chorus)
'cunt's in the show are directed at the guy in the Christian religion
to whom the term most deserves to be used - i.e., Satan - and in a
single song, and the 'fuck' count doesn't even reach that of, say, Goodfellas,
Reservoir Dogs or Casino (all shown uncut by Channel Four.)
Mediawatch should really employ someone's who's done at least,
say, GCSE Maths to see whether their figures are actually right.
All in all, a storm in a teacup, don't you think? And the BBC have got a
nice 1.7m viewer total out of it. Now, all we have to do is hope there
won't be a Whitehouse v. Gay News repeat (especially since the BBC
have more lawyers and money than Gay News did), with the so-called
Christian Voice's private prosecution, and things should be well...
Bloggerheads has a nice series
of articles on the neat little relationship between Mediawatch and
the Daily Mail, and the JS:TO 'controversy' in general, here,
here, here,
here,
and here;
Mail Watch has a good piece too,
here.
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