Zimbabwean election monitors could oversee the next British general election:
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – The Pan-African Parliament is in talks with the EU on sending monitors to the European elections in June, in a project that could see Zimbabwean politicians oversee voting in the UK.
Seems oddly appropriate somehow.
Ever wondered what would happen to a crowbar in a blender? Or a hockey puck, or golfballs? Well, wonder no longer, your curiosity is about to be satisfied.
This is a commercial vlog using icky Flash from the people who make Blendtec blenders, but the video is just so interesting I have to post it.
Like the man said, don’t try this at home.
Read more: Weird internet stuff, Science, Blenders, Video
Charlie Whittaker at perfect.co.uk thinks they might be:
Astroturfski
Political landscape. It?s not a bad metaphor. Landscapes can be complex but they don?t change quickly. They?re large and engrossing; you can spend time getting to know them. To an outsider (someone from Missouri, or Windhoek, perhaps) we might seem obsessive (?all politicians are like that – what?s so bad about your guys, really??). Well, it?s our scene, OK. The Euston Manifesto. The Big Conversation. The Spectator. Upsetting if you?re not used to it, but all perfectly normal. Leave us to handle it.
And then a Russian emigre gets irradiated (cack-handedly, by the looks of things) and everything is different. Overnight, the stream of political consciousness flowing into sites such as Comment is free ? and the BBC?s Have Your Say goes from slightly peaty to shit brown (and all the fish die):
We’re well used by now to comment threads getting highjacked by Zonist operatives: it’s got to the point where only the most wilfully naive bother to engage them any more, they are such obvious paid trolls. But the Russians copying this information warfare tactic is new. Charlie Whitaker goes on to give an example from the Guardian:
There will be no implications on the UK-Russia relationship because there is no evidence that Kremlin had anything to do with it. The media is for some reason stirring anti-Russian feelings which is certainly not productive. Russia is getting richer and more influential and some people obviously cannot stand it. Mr Litvinenko has served under president Yeltsin, when some individuals got extremely rich through dubious dealings with the regime. I?m sure he has created many enemies during that period.
– Alex, London (Have Your Say)
The same thought occurred to me when I was reading Comment Is Free and , but I reckoned the moderators’d be on it sharpish. Besides, if I could see it was astrotrurf, surely others could too? And they did:
There was some discussion behind the scenes before this post was written. That?s unusual (although obviously you?ll just have to take my word for it, Matthew). The UK blogging community – this end of it, at least – is stubbornly autonomous. We ?talk? to each other by blogging, so what you see is usually the extent of what?s being said. But when you come across something truly odd – and the Litvinenko killing is truly odd – you find yourself doubting almost everything you read. And none of us really wants to mad the place up by going off on some random hunch (although if we were all like Chris Dillow we?d just wink and tell you – Cretan paradox style – not to trust us). So, that said, here are some thoughts about the Litvinenko astroturfski and just why it is that every British person has vanished from the Comment is free ? Litvinenko threads:
Most internet discussions relating to Israel / Palestine are at least twice as paranoiac and propaganda-filled There are lots of Russian emigres in Britain and they still stick up for Mother Russia Some American nationalists are just as bad Berezovsky is not quite like Rupert Murdoch but it?s still possible to hate and fear him because he?s rich (and a traitor) The Russian tendency to ?sprout authoritarians like flowers after rain is too consistent not to have some roots in the national psyche? (thanks, Tom) We remember iraqwar.ru The Russians do propaganda None of which brings Litvinenko back to life, of course.
I’ve not written anything about the Litvinenko poisoning myself as yet, it’s all too hazy to make out any pattern other than that someone is sending a very strong message that they can kill openly anytime and anywhere and there’s nothing our police or intelligence services can do to stop them.
Plastering the comments boards of the UK media with pro-Russia sentiments is just another aspect of that: to paraphrase a recent internet meme, what Russia is saying to Europe is “WER IN UR COUNTRY DOIN WHATEVER THE FUCK WE LIKE”.
No change there then. Taking Bush’s lead, they’ve just got a litle more blatant about it.
Read more: UK politics, Russia, Litvinenko posining, Astroturf
In my longwinded and rambling post yesterday I alluded to the tendency in some US blogs to form ingroups and cliques, but I neglected to provide actual data to back up my thesis.
I don’t know, is it something about unresolved high-school popularity issues that leads to this forming of cliques? Is it that there’s an innate tendency in US society to want to form exclusionary groups and chains of influence whatever the venue? And why is there always money at the bottom of it? Sociology to the white courtesy phone please…
Then like manna from heaven, lickety-split via those kind people at Lawyers Guns & Money, in comes a walking example. If only all research worked in this halfassed way…
So thanks, Ann Althouse. You do indeed provide a useful function. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different.
I haven’t added Sitemeter to this blog and I’m thinking of avoiding it. Ah, but no sooner did I write that then I felt a pull to enter the address of this blog in Technorati. And don’t you want to know what level of evolution you’ve reached on the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem? I was a Flappy Bird (over there on my other blog), then I got to be an Adorable Rodent, then somehow I had fewer links and I was a Flappy Bird again. These are like cliques in a high school–it was like I was one of the Theater Kids again. This was all (or most of it) said in a conversation today with a colleague who used to be an Adorable Rodent like me but is now a Marauding Marsupial. We discussed the feeling we get when the Popular Kid says hi to us: Instapundit linked to him today. Oh, and I’ve be linked by Instapundit five times, but it’s like: the Popular Kid never calls me any more. And so I’m checking Sitemeter referrals and Technorati like a teenager in love checking to see if the phone has a dialtone.
I rest my case. Can I have my Phd. now?
Read more: Internet, Blogs, Blogging, Blogrankings, Althouse
I see that the Official Vice-Presidential Dyke is expecting a baby with her female partner: I wonder who the other biological parent is? Which rabid wingnut supplied the sacred jizz or, horror of horrors, did they use liberal sperm? Was it bought online, or was it one of those snowflake babies?
And if not the latter, why not? Or maybe it was cloned…
Also they live in Virginia, which has some of the most restrictive and bigoted anti-gay marriage laws in the US, which effectively make Ms Cheney an irresponsible single parent and the child a godless bastard.
Isn’t it bad enough already the poor mite’ll have Dick & Lynne Cheney for grandparents?
Read more: Cheney pregnancy, Gay marriage, LGBT rights, Snowflake babies, Artificial insemination
