Apathy Sketchpad

Asked again on Sunday whether Sarah Palin is ready to be president, Sen. Joe Lieberman went one step further than he has in past remarks — virtually pledging to voters that John McCain “will live to 85 at least.”

I’m just saying.

Apparently, a fool by the name of Gary McFarlane has been fired from his job as a sex counsellor for refusing to do it. The Daily Mail reported this under the following rather brilliant headline:

I was sacked from Relate … just because I’m a Christian who refused to give sex advice to gay couples

It’s hard to see how you could more clearly spell out his argument and everything that’s wrong with it in a single sentence. He’s impressively dim. I’m not even prepared to blame religion for it; he’s just thick. Look at this…

“Christians seem to have fewer and fewer rights. Relate needs to be forced to work through stuff like this.”

Yeah, they don’t have the right to be openly and discriminatorily homophobic, they don’t have the right to burn people at the stake for no good reason, they don’t have the right to wage bloody war against the infidel nations… It’s tragic, really.

Mr McFarlane, a solicitor, said he was ’sad and disappointed’ with the ‘bigotry’ he had experienced at the Bristol branch of Relate from ‘a group of people with their own agenda’.

This is true. I hear some of them hate the gays.

At the moment, there are 27 comments and only one of them takes McFarlane’s side, so sometimes the Mail’s readership’s arbitrary prejudices do coincide with reality.

About 25 minutes ago, a tweet appeared in my Twitter timeline:

Hillary Clinton: I never would have guessed Governor Sarah Palin had a style team. Her outfits are so hideous and her hair is quite unprofessional looking.

Sun Oct 26 23:23:10 2008 from web

It is (at least, as far as I can tell) Hillary Clinton’s real, official, genuine and usually much duller Twitter account. I tweeted about it and almost immediately was told that my link didn’t work. This is because she deleted it.

Class act, our Hillary, isn’t she? Shame Twitter search archives everything. She tweeted it twice.

1. People who think that if they pretend to rub their face while making offensive gestures that only the people they want to see will realise what is happening.
2. People who assume that that is what I’m doing when in fact I’m just rubbing my face. How do they think that started?

There’s literally no excuse for making a whole website in Flash. It’s just not how you do these things. It’s like uploading a YouTube video of scrolling text, or making a Twitter account connected to nothing but an RSS feed. It won’t work on screen readers, most phones or many computers. It will need more CPU and more memory, you can’t usually link to individual pages, they load slowly, you have to implement things like scrollbars from scratch which means mouse-wheels, trackpad scrollers and keyboard shortcuts don’t work and the scrollbar itself behaves strangely or incompletely, most search engines can’t crawl it, browser functions like in-page find don’t work, often you can’t copy-paste from it, and it won’t reshape itself to unusually sized windows. There’s just no excuse.

Cleverer people than corporate webmasters have designed web standards over two decades and by now they’re pretty damn good (though still way off ideal). You can do very impressive stuff without even invoking Flash, and the sheer arrogance of these people to think they can design a better site from the ground up is bewildering.

Probably, many of them are just following orders from managers who want Flash sites and don’t understand the issues with them. I don’t care. That’s not an excuse. It didn’t fly at Nuremberg and it won’t fly here.

Twitter have, for the US election, launched a sub-site which constantly feeds you the latest tweets from or about the candidates. It’s pretty good, but by far the most entertaining thing is the horde of Republican trolls who appeared out of nowhere with absurd opinions when the McCain mob realised that every single post was pro-Obama. Here are a few from around now:

moms4prezpalin Looks like Obama is an anti-semite, just like Buchanan http://tinyurl.com/4fl7e8 #

wataboutRONPAUL Obama winning in polls by morons who play Second Life who are too lazy to vote anyway. Who cares. McCain will still win. #

Yes, what about Ron Paul? Since that’s the question literally nobody is asking.

captured1 because you don’t think clearly enough to vote. Media lies constantly, Banks have OUR MONEY-not theirs – Whats right? McCain is ONLY choice #

I have literally no idea what this one is about.

omgiamgoingnuts The only way obama wins – he cheats. Period. ACORN #

McCain’s supporters do seem to love using the word ‘acorn’. None of them ever feel the need to explain what it might mean. Don’t they know about confirmation bias? Obama supporters aren’t going to look it up if it might make Obama look bad. I have looked it up, but I don’t understand what the problem is.

mjelli01 McCain has one powerful thing on his side – people that pray!!! Good Night #

Please rely on that.

NObama4thisMama Obama sued Citicorp (a bank) on behalf of ACORN to give out loans to the underdeserving. They foreclosed which led to the downturn. FACT! #

It’s nice to know economics is so simple. FACT!

jdbegg I am a real vet, disabled for that matter and Obama/Biden won’t do squat for this country. #

Essentially, you’re argument is that you understand politics because you were patriotic or stupid enough to get yourself badly injured in a war?

teddyroosevelt I’M NOT ANGRY. I BELIEVE SENATOR OBAMA IS A GOOD MAN, JUST NOT QUALIFIED TO BE PRESIDENT. DOES THAT MAKE ME AN ANGRY MAN? #

No, the fact you shout all the time makes you an angry man. teddy is a bit of a single-issue troll: every one of his tweets is about what he calls the “THE LONG UNANSWERED QUESTION, WHAT HAS OBAMA DONE TO QUALIFY HIM FOR PRESIDENT?”. (A real smart tack when your VP pick is Sarah Palin.) It remains unanswered because he cannot read, only write. I suspect his computer has a keyboard but no screen. Similarly,

ogerme Name one significant Barack Obama accomplishment, since being appointed to the U.S. Senate. #

I replied to this to say “He put the Federal Checkbook online — which Palin promised to do not knowing Obama already had.” Ogerme hasn’t tweeted since. This was about two weeks ago.

zettytwine is an interesting case because they’ve protected their updates but have no followers and follow nobody, so nobody can read anything they write. Presumably it still appears on the election feed, though.

mylittlehadji Does Obama support Sharia laws in the US??? Think about it folks #

No?

letstalkchange McCain’s idea for withdrawing troops was to do it after winning. Obama voted to lose a war. And this is good judgment? #

You really think that Iraq is something you win or lose, don’t you? You’d rather ‘win’ a war than ‘lose’ it, even if winning is actually worse?

…and so on. There’s so many of them out there, and many of the dumbest have had their accounts suspended already. They’re good fun though.

Snap Shots is a website which claims to be “the world’s most popular way to give your users a more fun and interactive experience on your site or blog”. What it actually is is a spectacularly annoying collection of boxes that pop up at random as you move the cursor about the screen. It neatly encapsulates all that is wrong with the internet.

For one thing, it’s enabled on a site-level by publishers. That’s great for Snap.com’s business model, but it’s a disaster for the end-user, because while some people may perversely consider the intrusions useful, and may want them to appear on this blog, I think that they get in the way, make selection difficult, and don’t add anything worth having, so I’m never going to install them — but I do have to put up with them on other people’s sites, because the ‘disable’ mechanism doesn’t work properly. (This is important: if for whatever reason you incorrectly like Snap Shots, please bear in mind that you are not offering your users a choice: you are inflicting your preference on them.) This sort of thing should be a browser extension, not a ‘feature’ of individual webpages. It’s either useful everywhere or nowhere and site-level activation makes no sense.

Also I don’t like their rhetoric:

Snap Shots Engage looks for certain key phrases within your site and connects them with the best content in the world. And you don’t even have to write a link.

With a dozen types of Snap Shots and counting, you’ll be able to ensure that your site is always at the leading edge of interactive contextual media by just adding one line of JavaScript.

Snap Shots Engage is an exciting development that could significantly change the way people write for the Internet by both recognizing the meaning of what they say and then enriching it with related content.

Piss off.

Mostly though, I just don’t accept the premise: I don’t think it’s useful for large frames to appear on a mouseover event. Links already have the status bar and title tags for this purpose, and the enormous ‘Snap Shot’ that appears is very annoying if I roll the mouse over a link accidentally or (gasp!) in order to click on it. Most link mouseover events are incidental, and anything beyond highlighting the link is a bad thing.

This sort of thing is quite enough to put me off visiting a website at all. If my experience of your website is that I get angry when I read it, I’ll just stop reading it.

I understand that it would be spectacularly dumb for Obama to start any kind of legal action against McCain’s campaign for any of the made up shit in his various propaganda, but even so, one would think that a system would exist to stop people from lying in TV ads. I’m sure such a system already exists, but why then is it never used? If I see a lie in a TV ad I can email the ASA and they’ll investigate and take action. I can only assume that an equivalent body exists in the US, and yet I’ve never heard a single report that started ‘the McCain campaign’s latest ad has been pulled after an adjunction following a complaint from a citizen’.

Seems strange to me, considering what is at stake.