Apathy Sketchpad

So I was reading a blog-post called Fuck Shit Arse Twat Paedophile Coprophile Custardcopulatory Cuntwad. As you do. It’s about a Guardian article (thanks to the Internet, what newspaper is in my house and what newspaper I read are almost totally independant variables) that says:

Web providers to be named and shamed over offensive content

Politicians are ready to introduce league tables naming and shaming the speed with which internet service providers take down offensive material. The culture minister, Barbara Follett, and her Tory shadow, Ed Vaizey, have backed the idea that web providers must be embarrassed into dealing with violent, sexually explicit web content.

Fuck right off. Essentially, your suggestion is that in order to protect children from porn, there must be no porn. That’s ridiculous. If we ban anything inappropriate for children, we’ll all be stuck watching The Lion King over and over and that will be considered relatively edgy.

We allow adult films and TV shows and computer games. It’s always been the parents’ role to decide what’s appropriate for their children and to filter it for them. The companies should do whatever they think best. The state has a role only when there is good evidence that actual harm will be caused if they don’t (although it gives parents a hand with film ratings, and that’s fine because the parent is free to then show the film to their kids anyway). I’m unaware of any evidence that pornography is harmful to anyone. ProtectKids.Com claims to have some, but ironically the whole site is hidden by a 403 error. I can’t find any. It may exist, but the people who try to stop it never seem to mention any, and it would seem to me that children will probably grow up best if you let them basically do what they want in most cases. When you read a sentence like “exposure to pornography shapes children’s sexual perspective by providing them information on sexual activity”, it’s easy to think that the writer might not be arguing rationally for the child’s best interests. Heaven forfend that anyone should base their perspective on something as dangerous as information.

The article does say “she also insisted there was not yet compellingly persuasive evidence of a link between watching violent video games and subsequent acts of violence”, but all that proves is that Follett hasn’t quite understood the point of videogames or pornography, or equally possibly that Patrick Wintour at the Guardian sometimes just pastes in sentences at random.

Follett said she wants to see the pre-screening of material on sites such as YouTube, as occurs at present on MySpace.

That sounds like a relatively small and feasible job and an idea which has been totally thought through. MySpace is the Censorship Capital of the Internet. It’s not a good model.

Follett said: “Many people have said that the internet is like the wild west in the gold rush and that sooner or later it will be regulated. What we need is for it to be regulated sooner rather than later.

It already is. What you’re asking for is censorship. That’s not the same at all. That said…

The proposal for a “take-down” league table is backed by Vaizey. He said: “The government is in a position to put out the information, and it is up to the internet service providers to react to it. If they are happy to be 55th in a league table of take-down times so be it.”

I’d be all in favour of this, though. I chose my webhosts in no small part because of their extremely liberal acceptable use policy which basically says ‘if it’s legal, we’ll host it’. It’d be handy to have a list of all the companies that could be relied upon to actually do their jobs instead of wussing out and pulling your content to avoid offending idiots.

If this happens, I will personally write a script to regularly download that league table, flip it on its head, and host the corrected version under the title ‘ISP Credibility Ranks’.

That’s right, two Crackpot posts in a row. And they said it couldn’t be done.

This month, it’s everyone involved in the most pointless argument I have ever heard of:

Holocaust survivors said Monday they are through trying to negotiate with the Mormon church over posthumous baptisms of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps. … ”We ask you to respect us and our Judaism just as we respect your religion,” [Ernest Michel, honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors] said in a statement released ahead of the news conference. “We ask you to leave our six million Jews, all victims of the Holocaust, alone, they suffered enough. … Baptism of a Jewish Holocaust victim and then merely removing that name from the database is just not acceptable,”

Essentially, among the less insane beliefs of the Mormon church is that in order to be reunited in the afterlife, you need to retrospectively baptise your ancestors. A group of Jews are angry at this, even though they presumably believe that a Mormon baptism is just a meaningless set of rituals that has absolutely no effect on reality. The Jews say this isn’t good enough because according to Michel

100 years from now, how will they be able to guarantee that my mother and father of blessed memory who lived as Jews and were slaughtered by Hitler for no other reason than they were Jews, will someday not be identified as Mormon victims of the Holocaust?

It seems to me that the clue is in the question there. I wonder if Michel routinely identifies people in the most passably-accurate-but-misleading way he can think of, referring to his family the way I might summarise a random internet contact if I want to pass on something from a blog that amuses me… I wonder if he has children and if so whether they tell their friends that they can’t come out to play because the honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors says they have to do their homework first. He should go on QI.

But no. According to the link I just posted, the standard Mormon defence is that the soul of the dead person doesn’t have to accept the baptism.

This just seems too surreal to me. I would have thought that Jews would ignore any rituals the Mormons did, believing them to be nonsense. I wouldn’t care at all if they wanted to baptise me. I’m pretty sure I’m already baptised into something, though I can’t for the life of me recall what exactly it is. Something with Jesus. I’d have thought that the Jewish faith, which teaches that the soul is already in heaven and not, as the Mormons think, in God’s waiting room watching the Holy Goldfish amble about for centuries on end and reading millenium-old magazines and cardboard books for four-year-olds, and so they wouldn’t even be told about the offer of baptism. I would have thought that, being dead, if the baptisee still has any existence then they’d have a pretty good idea if they’d picked the right religion by now and be in a far better place to make this call than their surviving relatives. This is like watching children try to argue semantics.

In fact, you know what this is like? I think I’ve found a parallel. (Bonus for regular readers: you may recognise the poster.)

First of all, I realise that technically it is November.

I had vaguely intended to give October’s award to this guy, a crazy US evangelical type who calls himself “The Hon. James David Manning, PhD” as if that’s a remotely plausible title and operates under the impressively crap slogan “All Jesus, All the Time”. I was shown the site by Friz, who linked me to a delightfully silly video of Manning explaining that the best way to defeat Obama was to refuse to refer to him by his real name, and instead to call him “TAAARZAAAN!” every time as if anyone at all would know who or what you were on about if you did. My second favourite part of the clip was his utter failure to follow his own rule even for the few minutes of video. My favourite part was the way he kept repeating the phrase “half-black, half-white, raised by an ape” as if people were going to believe that Barack Obama was raised by an ape if he did. (Strictly, of course, Obama was raised by a human, and a human is a type of ape, but Manning doesn’t strike me as someone who will accept either of those things.)

Sadly, the video has been taken down. So I thought maybe I’d give it to Tim Hastie-Smith, who thinks that we need faith schools to defeat the X-Factor, because of course policy that makes a modicum sense is so 80s.

But then, Hastie-Smith seems (other than his name) to be a rather dull man, whereas Manning is relentlessly mad. For one thing, he’s written a pamphlet called “Focus On Purgatory”, which is the same pamphlet as “Focus On Heaven” but it takes ages to download.

Actually, I can’t read Focus On Purgatory, because it costs $12 and there’s no amount of dollar devaluation that could make that sound like a good deal. Presumably, charging $12 for a shitty pamphlet is one of the tips in his other book, “God’s Business Plan”. Which is a shame, because apparently the pamphlet “offers concrete proof to the validity and purpose of purgatory”.

He also seems to have a hand in schooling. (”All Excellence, All the Time”. Honestly, it’s only slightly less stupid than Mr Burns starting a religion.) Here is the timetable (PDF):

• Monday - Write the Dictionary Day
• Tuesday - Remember the Dictionary Day
• Wednesday - Learn the Hymns Day
• Thursday - World Knowledge Day
• Friday - World Events Day

Sounds awful, doesn’t it? And yet I’m not going to use it as an argument against faith schools, because what we really have here is an argument against idiot schools. There does seem to be one advantage for the students, though.

The line between parody and reality is thin and it’s caught me out before (although I would argue that once something is indistinguishable from that which it aims to lampoon, that makes it a bad parody), but this would seem to be real even if lesson three is a rickroll. So I’m giving him the award anyway, hilarious Tarzan video or no.

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.