Twitter Bullying

Everyone and their Mother has had a comment on Ricky Gervais and the "Mong" debate this week. I'm not going to comment much on it here, read Richard Herring blogging on it as he puts it well. Just a couple of things from me, the first being Gervais' comment about how the meaning has changed, look it's in urban dictionary. I'm not sure if he just looked that up to support himself but what the whole thing looks like to me is a 50 year old trying to talk like he's still a teenager and still cool, which is a little pathetic. You could say any word, let's say the N word, being careful how I phrase things here, and say it means something else, then put up a definition to say it doesn't mean what you think it does, it means this. If it doesn't mean what you say to the people you were talking to then you're being offensive. Offensive can be ok in comedy if you're funny enough but in this case I don't think he was. Purely my view.

And we come to the second point here. What happened when he was challenged on the use of the word was that he RT'd the comments and then a whole load of followers decided to attack. From comments on twitter from Richard Herring today he had several thousand people attacking him for daring to query Gervais and his response about the meaning. Quite a few abusive. Which was in a way encouraged by Ricky Gervais. And that to my mind is bullying. There were other people who took it up with him, and some of them also received abuse, I heard someone on the radio yesterday who had been a victim of this as well. Just for disagreeing with someone, and saying they thought he was wrong.

This isn't something that's come out of nowhere, I've seen it happen or heard from other people I follow on twitter that it happened to them. And I don't get why people do this. They follow a celeb, fair enough I follow a few myself, but when someone disagrees with them, or says something they don't like they RT it and then an attack seems to start. I don't understand why people do this? Why go into attack another person because they disagree with something someone else said? They're generally not being abusive, in most cases although some are, and they're only making a point that isn't nasty to anyone else, but thousands can descend on them because of one comment or RT by someone else. There is general nastiness from individuals as well, but when you get a large number of people doing it, that is bullying, led by a sneering idiot usually. It mystifies me why people do this, why you start sending messages because a celeb you follow says something. Do you think you're helpful, do you think you're defending them when you attack someone else, are you being verbally abusive for a reason other than an ego thing, saying I'm defending this person, because I know them, do you think you're friend with the people you follow on twitter? Don't understand it, I really don't.

Trial by Twitter

So Amanda Knox is innocent and now free, despite what the Daily Mail said very briefly on Monday night although this explanation does tell you how they screwed that up. And as much as I despise the Daily Mail, it's fair enough. But the thing that interests me is the comments that were getting made on Twitter when she was released and are still going on, by a huge number of people who know about as much as I do about the Italian Justice system, (I assume this is true for most of them anyway), which is pretty much nothing. But it struck me again that people believe what the propaganda is, and that there may yet be an issue with that.

Now there are still questions to answer in that case, Meredeth Kercher was murdered by someone and the Kercher Family do deserve answers, which they are not getting. In my view there are many unanswered questions about the case, and they may be able to get some from Knox and Sollecito if they are prepared to tell them, or what they tell the press. But this isn't what I'm talking about here, I'll accept the Courts verdict on guilt or innocence. But plenty others do't seem to.

We had the same kind of comments when Rebecca Leighton was released. People assumed guilt, mostly based on what was said in the press. There is an assumption of guilt when someone is arrested. People talk about not trusting the police, but they seem to automatically assume that when someone is arrested for a high profile crime that they must be guilty and it's ok to pronounce on that. I saw comments when Rebecca Leighton was freed that said how can they let her out when she's guilty, the comments were accusing her of Murder, with no evidence despite the fact the police have confirmed there wasn't evidence of it, people were still screaming that a murderer had been released. There were other cases you'll probably be aware of, mostly based on biased press reports and assumptions made by people hearing the news and not thinking properly.

I don't understand why we slag the press off so much and then accept much of what we're told as fact without thinking about it. When people are arrested and charged they are not guilty at that point, but people seem to accept that the police don't arrest anyone without cause for serious crimes, except when it is someone like them, or related to a cause the believe in, or something they follow. And even then they believe the papers, despite the general criticism of the police that they may make every day. We buy into hype too easily, and I'm not sure why that is for some people. It's just annoyed me. I'm not making a point here really,  I'm just thinking out loud, and there's no-one here listening.

It's a Conspiracy

Started watching a programme on crop circles the other night while flicking through the channels before going to bed. Most of it was just various people talking about how they're from another world, or how they're faked, and showing how they actually do the fake, but there was a section in there about a video someone had made. He claimed it showed a crop circle being made by 2 balls of light. He'd faked it, obviously, but there was someone on there who appeared otherwise rational, who said it was real, and that the guy had recorded it and then lied after he'd been got at by the people covering these things up to say it was fake. Never mind the guy and his mate actually recorded themselves faking it and then confessed later they'd done it. Nope they'd been got at by someone (I assume government but I kind of missed who the someone was, if he said). The argument was no-one else had ever seen a video like it, and no-one had ever made another one as it was too difficult, so it had to be real, and that seems a little odd, why would you repeat a fake seems a better one to me. Took the production team less than 2 hours to replicate on the same kind of software so the no-one could fake it argument went. Although I doubt that bothered his argument too much. Evidence can generally be ignored where it doesn't suit your worldview.

What it set me thinking about was general conspiracy theories, there are a hell of a lot of them out there. And they're mostly bullshit. I say mostly, I suspect they may all be but there's probably one somewhere where some is right about some minor thing, which then allows all conspiracy theorists to say see, told you there was a cover up. The thing is there is rarely a cover up for anything. We had the 9/11 conspiracy theories getting an airing earlier this month, and the ignorance of evidence there. People believing there was no reason for the towers to go down because they were hit by a plane. I don't think they stress tested for a 747 coming into the building, there was no reason for them to stay standing. It's lunacy to suggest that the government organised these attacks as some do, considering the American government can barely organise their budget now, there is no way something that would have required that many people to pull off could have been covered up successfully. It just isn't possible with people talking, someone would know and tell, they can't kill everyone, no matter what you think. They really can't.

Conspiracy theories are a bit of a mystery to me, I understand why you might go there, but I prefer to look at the evidence personally. Generally you can find something that explains what you don't understand, and if you can't it's worth looking again. I don't know if people who believe strongly in them are missing something in their own lives, but it's odd that people can't accept reality. The word But is a good one to use sometimes, but mostly when the truth is told you can tell, and when you can't, you find out quite quickly, especially nowadays. Don't accept bullshit but you should know when it's being spouted.

One final thing, if you believe 9/11 or UFO conspiracy theories are the work of wingnuts, do a search for either Celtic or Rangers and referee, or maybe just SFA. "The Refs are a' Masons agin the bhoys/He had a Cross on his whistle." These are the work of the mad. Much more than anything else you read.

Trolling

There are too many people calling trolling at the moment. Dom Joly is particularly bad for this on my twitter feed, exposing trolls when they are not trolls in my view. They're people shouting abuse, possibly flamers if that term still exists. nothing more or less than that.

To Explain, my definition of trolling would be put in another way, shit-stirring. You're throwing a comment out for the reaction you get, you're saying that Star Wars is crap where Star Trek is the dogs bollocks, and waiting for people to rise to it, and getting off on the reaction. I've never got why you would but apparently some do, which is ok but you don't feed them.

To make what I think clear, this is not a troll, whatever the telegraph believes. He's a wanker, yes, he's a flamer, he's an obnoxious prick, but he is not a troll. There is some thought behind trolling, and it shouldn't just get a reaction saying you're a stain on humanity, it should make people think about what they believe. Trolls should stir it up, they shouldn't abuse people. Please remember that.

Bring back the Cane?

Was listening to Jeremy Vines show on Radio 2 this lunchtime and caught the piece on bringing back Corporal Punishment in schools. They had someone on arguing with the same phrase everyone uses when they argue for it, "Never Did Me Any Harm". You need to define harm as what it actually seems to have done is that it's made you into someone who can't see anything wrong with hitting a child because you can't make them listen to you.

Basically the argument seems to be, when I was young things were better and kids were better behaved in class, we had the cane in schools when I was young, therefore things were better because we had the cane. A kind of odd circular logic, that takes no account of any changes in society in the last 20 to 30 years, and places all worsening behaviour in the context of teachers not being able to thrash the children, rather than looking at any other reasons for it. Drives you mental.

We never had the cane when I was at school, or the belt or anything like it. Was banned in my primary school before I went, and I went to Secondary school (in Scotland) in 1988. I don't remember anything like the problems people speak about today then, although I do believe they're exaggerated in a lot of cases anyway, but it didn't cause any problems to my teachers not being able to hit us. Or didn't seem to anyway, as I remember. Some of them were better teachers than others, some of them couldn't manage a class too well, but it was never an issue that led to violence in the classroom, or any major problems. So why do you need corporal punishment, how will that help anything do you think? Without looking at whats causing the problems you're telling us about, it's just more unjustified violence in my view.

The Price of Fuel

Yesterday they announces that the EU had approved a plan to try to reduce the high cost of petrol which especially affects those of us in the islands of Scotland. Today our petrol prices went up. Again. You can have an argument about fuel prices for the entire country being too high, due to taxes etc, but as Brian Wilson put it in his comment piece in the West Highland Free Press this week it's the price differential that causes us issues up here. About 20p a litre on city prices I think, now up to £1.50 a litre at my local petrol station, or near £7 a gallon.

I also found another comment from Brian Wilson in 2003, when he was an energy Minister in the Labour Government - "There is a danger of price increases at the pump becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy in circumstances which do not justify them.". Also says about prices surging to 90p a litre. Remember that and weep. I will. I just looked up the prices when I passed my driving test in 1994, around 50p a litre. Even allowing for inflation it still makes nasty reading.

But the differential is the particular problem that we see here. I've heard a number of excuses for it over time, it's the cost to get the fuel to the island, or the lower volumes put through the pumps that causes the prices to rise. I've yet to hear a definitive theory that actually makes any sense. There isn't a huge difference in the cost to get fuel to other remote areas of Scotland, or to the volumes but there is still a differential even there. In the Wilson piece he uses Fort William as an example, similar volumes sold, and fairly remote to get it to, but much cheaper than here. The fuel comes to the island by Tanker, direct from Grangemouth I believe, which isn't particularly different to how they get it to other places, but it costs us more to fill up.

The major problem as I see it is that someone is ripping us off on fuel prices, and no-one wants to properly investigate who. Why not? There may be all sorts of reason, investigations have looked at if the retailers here were operating a cartel, but no investigations have ever looked at the suppliers. I certainly don't know why it costs so much, I'd like someone to tell me but I won't hold my breath for it. I do have a feeling I'll be getting fitter with walking so much more from now on though.

The Performance of Grief

There's been a lot of comments, blogs, TV programmes today about 9/11 on the tenth anniversary of the attacks. My personal memory is that I was working, in Glasgow in an office in the science park out the far end of Maryhill Road. Would have been just after 2pm when one of the managers came down and said that a light plane had crashed into the World Trade Centre, which was what the first reports said as I remember it. Then everything in the office went quiet. There wasn't a phone call coming into the place, the only call we had all afternoon was from one customer who was in Brazil, and he was just told to put on the TV. He called back 3 weeks after if I remember right. And we all sat there watching the TV for the afternoon and seeing events unfold just as a group. One of the girls I worked with was trying to contact her parents that afternoon, as they were supposed to be flying from Boston that day. She found out they were ok hours later as I remember. And I can't tell you anything else about that week, or even that evening. What happened after everybody knows, eventually we wound up fighting in Iraq as an ultimate consequence of events that day, or that was one of the excuses used at least.

The thing is that it seems to be the amount of commemoration and talk about it comes across as almost a celebration of the events, and that should not be. It's not so much the overkill, and the amount of TV programmes, especially on the History Channel this week, but it's the way it's being done. I don't have any personal connection the the events, no-one I knew was there, I know no-one who died or was injured, so I don't feel any grief for those who died. Sympathy for the families yes, sorry for the loss of people but not actual grief for their deaths. I see grief as a personal thing, you need to know someone to feel it when they die, anything else is just sympathy, not real grief. You can appreciate the sacrifice of Soldiers and that kind of thing, but it's not really grief for their deaths.

But we seem to have come to a point where everyone has to grieve, this I think started with Tony Blair when Diana, Princess of Wales was killed in that car crash and he was saying the stuff about her being the peoples Princess. It's a national mourning thing that occurred, when everyone was supposed to be grief stricken for the loss of someone they saw in the papers but didn't know. I've never quite understood it, it seems to have taken on it's own life and become a performance of something you were meant to do and were not allowed to question.  In a sense it's the same with the meeting of the dead coming back from the war that Blair and Bush started at 9/11. In Wootton Bassett they were lining the streets when the bodies were repatriated. That started as a few people stopping to honour the dead as they returned, that being fair enough and a personal thing. But it then took on it's own life and it became a ritual, and in doing so it lost a bit of meaning. When it came to an end it was handed over to another town. That had become a performance, not a thing that was done for peoples own reasons, but just a performance that was put on without thought. It began another way, but that's how it ended up. Just a show. People may believe that it's right, and I'm not going to argue, we respect those who fight for us, or we should anyway, but I'm not sure that something being automatically done helps, I hope I'm never in a position to find out.