Spalpeen

The British National Party’s membership list got leaked. For people not familiar with the Party, it’s an extreme-right wing group that is based around racist policies (they only allow whites as members, and want to kick everyone of any other ethnicity out of the country). You can download the BNP Membership list over at Wikileaks.org.

I’ve been poking around the list, and found some interesting figures about the members. At a brief count, there are the following numbers of people in “important professions” on the list.

-1 currently employed Police Officer.

-1 currently employed NHS Doctor.

-17 former or retired Policemen, including one detective, one inspector, and one who claims to be a “human rights lecturer” which I don’t quite understand.

-15 people currently employed as full or part-time teachers, or with teacher qualifications, including secondary school teachers in subjects like Maths, English, and Physics.

-12 former or retired teachers.

-114 ex-servicemen. Army, Navy, RAF, Intelligence, MoD Police. 

-18 current servicemen. Army, RAF.

Check the Google Maps mash-up of the BNP membership.

I support Obama for President (the opponent would be a disaster for America and the world), but this video the campaign aired recently is essentially propagandist drivel. Who would in their right mind sit through a 30 minute commercial?! I expect that it’ll come off cheesy for uncertain voters, and probably patronising for most supporters of Obama. The only group I can see actually sitting through it are hardcore fanatics of Obama, but they would have watched this if it had been published solely online. Seems like a waste of money to broadcast this on the networks. Then again, most of this $1 Billion “race” to the White House comes off as a waste sitting from all the way over in the U.K.

Some points about The Guardian’s Tomasky videos. First, let it be known that I really enjoy this series. It’s a very level headed take on the U.S. election, and follows the latest developments very closely. I also admire The Guardian for jumping into this field.

However, there are some technical issues with the way the video is being published.

-Why is there no link to the NYTimes columnist’s story in Tomasky’s latest video? If not in the video, then it should be linked to in the notes.
-Why is there no way to respond with a video comment? Plenty of online services out there solve this problem (Seismic being one - although I personally don’t like their solution).
-Why is the flash player lacking other basic features (full screen mode? download link? RSS/subscribe?)
-Where are the links to previous videos? A link to Tomasky’s blog on a sidebar isn’t enough.
-Why aren’t these videos being distributed on every other video platform out there? (Go to TubeMogul and send this video to 10+ top video sites, for nothing).
-Why is the title/tagging/description of this video not SEO friendly? The Guardian produces some great video content, and this should be up there on the most popular search topics. It’s not going to be if the meta data is as vague as it currently is.

-Also, pre-roll ads? Ugh, but whatever.

I friggin’ love The Guardian’s content, but this is yet another example of a newspaper company getting A for effort, but C for achievement when it comes to publishing on the web.

It’s also why Tina Brown is a complete idiot when she says “I’m not completely sure how a printing press works, but that never stopped me” as a way of justifying her naive entrance into the world of internet publishing. Sorry guys, if you don’t know SEO, you ain’t gonna win the internet.

Jeff Jarvis writes on the subject of open source polls: “I say that if we could easily poll people about, say, indecency, we could counter the assertions of pressure groups that there’s an outcry — sufficient to threaten the First Amendment — when, in fact, there is no such outcry, only media spin and hype.”

Would that really work? If the media has published that there is an outcry, then it usually has the byproduct of creating one. Newspapers and media in general need to stop relying on polls, which, thanks to the nature of statistics (73.53% of all statistics are meaningless, don’t you know?) can be manipulated to show one point of view. An open source poll would guarantee the reliability of the statistics, but those statistics can always be interpreted to show the other side’s point of view.

The problem isn’t necessarily with the practice of polling, but with the actual implications of polls. The Guardian in particular seems to be fond of flashing headline stories based on poll results (Google reveals dozens of matches, and you can bet on seeing at least one front page story based on a poll result every week). I’d be very surprised if the data behind these polls was gained in an actively manipulative way, but I also know that all polls have an inherent bias: if not in the collation, then in the interpretation! Besides, nine times out of ten, the “controversial” poll tends to disappear from the headlines within the week, only to reappear the next time another controversial point of view is garnered from another commissioned poll.

Polls, like petitions, give the impression that society as a whole cares about things (and believes it’s possible to change the situation). The reality is that Government tends to do whatever it wants if it can reasonably expect to get away with it. The fundamentally ambiguous nature of polls and petitions means that they can never be considered a limitation on the power of Governement. An open source poll solution would be great of course, but just don’t expect it to be the solution to end all solutions.

Two of the first books I’ve been recommended to read by Prof. Noel O’Sullivan at Hull:

Gordon Graham’s The Internet - Buy here, read an academic review here. Note that this was published in 1999. The web has changed an awful lot since then.

From the review: ” … even if the Internet is a new world it is not a world unto itself for its members are already members of this, our non-cybernetic, world. The world of the Internet cannot, in short, supplant our world; at most it can grow out of and assume an enormous significance within our world. But its shape and character are determined by, and can be controlled by, the forms our present world choose to assume.” I think this viewpoint (that the internet was never designed to replace reality) has been accepted now. People acknowledge that sites like Facebook only compliment real life activities. Possibly this is why concepts such as Second Life are failing: they seek to emulate the concept of the “3D Internet”, a silly concept where people replace their real physical lives with an artificial world.

Another interesting quote from the review: ” … the worldwide web, for all its puffed social and political ramifications, is principally a world of commercial activity.” I love this quote, because it questions the concept of the web as a force for unequivocal good. Commercial activity is tied inexorably to making money. It’s arguable whether that can ever be “good”, no matter what the optimistic college student CEOs in Silicon Valley think.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire - Buy here. Also first published over 7 years ago in 2000. Interesting review here: ” … the book is a breathtakingly incoherent hash, composed of loopy 1960s utopianism, apologetics for the Soviet Union, paranoia, and sheer blood lust. Neither author appears to have really been prepared to handle a book of this attempted scope.”

“Mr Blair says he has not kept a diary of his time in Downing Street, but hints that once he leaves he will try to understand the world of the iPod and text messaging which, he acknowledges, is also changing the medium of political debate.”

Wow, just wow. Is there really hope for any kind of integration of a democracy that utilises the web when dinosaurs like these are still in power? If he can’t grasp the concept of text messaging or iPods (this quote is from the middle of a podcast, no less) then the prospect of concepts like blogging becoming integrated into the political process don’t look too great!

Read - The Guardian

I’m taking part in an interesting debate over at the Volokh Conspiracy (great blog, subscribe to this!) regarding whether or not an armed citizenry would actually prevent a dictatorship from taking hold in a country like America. I’m arguing no. That’s a photo of victims of the Kristallnacht, in case you hadn’t noticed.

The topic meshes nicely with my Extremist politics module at Hull where we recently discussed the psychological and historical evidence for how people behave when subject to authority.

I didn’t know that John Prescott was a waiter at one point in his life before I read this blog entry. I always had a lot of respect for the man, and I think this just increases it. The fact that he’s had to stand up to such immature and unimaginative insults from the Tory side makes me think even less of that upper class establishment. I value the perspective of someone who’s worked hard their entire life far more than someone who has lived off their parent’s estate. Besides, as the BBC article points out, “the job of a waiter in the 1950s had its fair share of glamour - travelling to exotic destinations like America, Canada and Australia.”