Numpties

If there was a retard cup, FC Groningen would’ve won it

Football, funny, Numpties
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Quick question: if you are a football club and one of your main rivals comes over for a game, not long after they bought three of your best players, would you think it was a good idea to hand out thousands of bogrolls? No, I don’t think so either, but FC Groningen thought this was a marvelous idea to allow it, as “a fun way to say goodbye to those players going to Ajax”. Even the fire brigade allegedly gave permission for this stunt. So of course the obvious happened. Some nutters thought it would enhance the party mood if they set fire to those bogrolls, more and more people started throwing lit rolls and before you know it, there was a fire and panic. Worse, the firehoses available in the stadium turned out not to have pressure on them, the fire retardant chairs didn’t turn out to be so fire retarding and finally some or all emergency exits were locked.

That winning combination of club incompetence and hooligan violence has led to incredible disasters in the past. Remember Heizel stadium? Fortunately here, despite the fire and the panic, the worst that happened was a complicated ankle fracture for one unlucky fan. No thanks to FC Groningen though. Stupidity all around.

Frank Fields: a noxious kind of stupid

Autoritarianism, Numpties, War on Terror
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The Week in Westminster, BBC Radio 4’s Saturday look back at what happened in politics this week is on right now and the subject at hand is Gordon Brown’s plan to extend the period a terror suspect can be held without charge. Member of Parliament Frank Fields is asked to comment and he made the following comparison, allegedly something a constitutent said to him, whose husband lost his legs in one of the London bombings. Nobody or nothing can give this man his legs back, but somebody who has spent time in prison as a wrongly accused suspect can be adequately compensated for this, so therefore extending the period somebody can be jailed without trial as a terror suspect is not a big deal.

Even when taking this argument at face value, there’s a huge flaw. The idea is that you can compensate for time spent in jail, but compensation cannot bring back legs lost in a terror bombing. However, no compensation will bring back the time spent in jail while innocent either, nor the accompanying lost of reputation.

Apart from that, Field’s whole atrgument is nothing more than hiding behind the righteous halo of innocent victimhood; he’s taking his constituent’s torn off legs and appropriating them for himself, in order to push through his agenda of extending the period you can be held as a terror suspect, without being charged. The one has nothing to do with the other. Locking up innocent people without charge will not prevent equally innocent people from losing their legs in terrorist bombings and guilty people can be charged. The only thing this extension will do is make for even more lazy police work, as they can just throw everybody who looks suspicious in jail and only then start looking for evidence.

Frank Field’s whole argument is based on a noxious kind of stupidity, one that wants us to believe that the price of combatting terrorism is that sometimes the wrong people will be locked up without a charge, that if we want no more legs blown off we cannotafford to be precious about civil liberties. It’s noxious, because so many people want us to believe it. It’s stupid because it’s just is not true.

Steve Gilliard and Wikipedia

Activism, Numpties, Wikipedia
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Sadly this past weekend, Steve Gilliard died, which lead to an outpouring of grief in the leftwing part of the blogosphere and also to a long needed Wikipedia entry. Unfortunately, this started another Wikipedia clusterfuck, as the article was nominated for deletion, after having been speedily deleted and then restored first by an editor who was slightly too quick to judge. Needless to say, this did not sit well with the people mourning Steve’s death. The resulting discussion on the proposal for deletion page was an …interesting look at what happens when two online cultures clashed.

On the Wikipedia side, those editors who supported deletion kept hammering on notability as the reason why the article should not be included and that notability should be established by citing respectable sources. What this means is that for Wikipedia, having a popular, much read blog is not enough: it has to be proven this blog has an influence outside itself, preferably by being cited in sources that are not blogs themselves, like newspapers or books. This is not in itself an onerous requirement: most blogs are just vanity vehicles after all, with little impact on the wider world or much to say about them. And while his readers knew how influential Steve was, ths still needs to be established for those who did not know him.

On the blogging side, this all seemed like nitpicking and worse, disrespectful for a much loved blogger who had just died, with several people thinking this was a rightwing attempt to “obliterate [his] memory”. Warnings about this debate therefore quickly spread through various blogs, which lead to an influx of people wanting to register their disgust and/or voice their support to keeping the article. This in turn set off the Wikipedias again, whose more experienced editors know very well how often deletion debates have been derailed by malicious trolls.

Fortunately, there were still sensible people on both sides, with various Wikipedians patiently explaining the policies developed over the years for notability and such, while bloggers went and established this, leading finally to a decision to keep the article. Yet all this uproar had not been necessary had the original editor who proposed to delete it not been so quick to jump the gun and actually investigated Steve first…

There are some lessons for Wikipedians to be learnt from this. First, we should remember that there is life outside of Wikipedia. Vast, cool unsympathetic intelligences may be watching your perfectly legitamite actions on Wikipedia and think you a villain. Recently, Wikipedia has clashed with webcomics fans over the deletion of a whole range of entries about webcomics for not being noticable, with science fiction fandom for thinking James Nicoll was not worthy of inclusion and Teresa Nielsen Hayden wasn’t an expert on sf and now with leftwing political bloggers for the ill advised attempt to delete him from Wikipedia. These actions may all have been undertaken with the best of intentions, without any malice towards the subjects in question, but that is not as it comes across. We need to realise that and be more careful in such conflicts to explain ourselves.

Which leads to the second lesson: Wikipedia is almost impenetrable for new users. It’s supposed to be the encyclopedia anybody can edit, but if you want to do more than just do some little copyediting on some innocent little article, you need to start learning about a lot of policies, a lot of jargon and unfortunately, a lot of politics. In situations such as this therefore, with huge numbers of new people getting their first taste of Wikipedia behind the screens, we need to make sure (again) to explain what we mean, what the policies are and how things work.

The final lesson is that maye, just maybe, the policies on notability are due for a drastic overhaul. They were originally drawn up to protect Wikipedia from spammers and vanity articles, but over the years they’ve hardened to the point that anything that’s obscure or too nerdy is automatically suspect. It doesn’t help that some editors seem to be more active in deleting articles than in writing them… We need to realise that Wikipedia can cope with having articles on semi-obscure webcomics, sf fans and political bloggers, that only true spammers or vanity articles should be deleted, nothing else.

Amis and 9/11

"Literature", Numpties
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I remember back in early 2002 or so reading a Guardian(?) interview with Martin Amis, in which he posed dramatically as The Novelist Who Had Lost His Faith in Novels Due to the Horrors of 9/11 and even then I thought he was a wanker. Since then he has only confirmed my opinion of him, as he has gone on his own peculiar little crusade against the Muslim menace, revealing himself as yet another bedwetter.

Now Ellis Sharp was so kind as to draw our attention to a Guardian Books article by Pankaj Mishra, which looks at how Martin Amis and other writers of his generation like Ian McEwan or Don DeLillo, have made of the September 11 attacks and its repercussions. These are writers who have said that they have been shocked awake by 9/11 into an uncertain world where what they used to believe in no longer seems relevant and who have written novels exploring this new post-9/11 world. Mishra doesn’t think they have succeeded in doing so, in honestly appreciating the effects of the September 11 attacks; comparing them unfavourably to what happened in European fiction after World War One. An interesting article. Not so much interesting, as appalling, are the quotes used at the start of the article, for their sheer pomposity and cluelessness:

Reflecting on the attacks on the twin towers in 2001, Don DeLillo seemed to speak for many Americans when he admitted that “We like to think that America invented the future. We are comfortable with the future, intimate with it. But there are disturbances now, in large and small ways, a chain of reconsiderations.” On September 11, terrorists from the Middle East who destroyed American immunity to large-scale violence and chaos also forced many American and British novelists to reconsider the value of their work and its relation to the history of the present. “Most novelists I know,” Jay McInerney wrote in these pages, “went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.” Ian McEwan claimed in a later interview to have found it “wearisome to confront invented characters”. “I wanted to be told about the world. I wanted to be informed. I felt that we had gone through great changes and now was the time to just go back to school, as it were, and start to learn.” “The so-called work in progress,” Martin Amis confessed, “had been reduced, overnight, to a blue streak of pitiable babble. But then, too, a feeling of gangrenous futility had infected the whole corpus.”

Amis went on to claim that “after a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation.” This is, of course, an exaggeration. Many writers had intuited that religious and political extremism, which had ravaged large parts of the world, would eventually be unleashed upon the west’s rich, more protected societies.

It’s the rampant narcissism on display here that appalls me. Amis and McEwans generation of writers rose to prominence in the eighties and nineties, when there were quite a few outrages far worse than the September 11 attacks. Yet it was because the latter happened on their doorsteps so to speak that they were finally forced to pay attention, so it galls to see Amis and McEwan hold themselves up as arbiters of moral worthiness now.

The Washington Post and Monica Lewinsky

Media, Numpties, US politics
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Just before the year ended,WashingtonPost article that perfectly encapsulated the ingrained sexism, stupidity and sheer spite of the Beltway establishmenttaking on its favourite target, Monica Lewinsky:

There are moments that make you question your fundamental assumptions about the world. One of them took place a few days ago, when news emerged that Monica Lewinsky had just graduated from the London School of Economics.

She did not!!

Lewinsky, 33, is known more for her audacious coquetry than for her intellectual heft, and the notion of her earning a master of science degree in social psychology at the prestigious London university is jarring, akin to finding a rip in the time-space continuum, or discovering that Kim Jong Il is a natural blond.

Even more staggering, the same bubbly gal who once described the act of flashing her thong at the president as a “small, subtle, flirtatious gesture” has now written a lofty-sounding thesis. Its title, according to Reuters: “In Search of the Impartial Juror: An Exploration of the Third Person Effect and Pre-Trial Publicity.”

Monica! We hardly knew ye!

The rest of the article is a lameoid attempt at justifying this childish sneer by Boboing some sort of pathetic social commentary out of it. It isn’t important. What is important is the view this article gives of Lewinsky:that of a stupid, sluttly little girl who cannot possible have enough brains to attend the LSE, never mind graduating. This has of course been the view the press always had of Lewinsky, portraying her either as a simple little girl caught up in a drama too big for her, the victim of Bill Clinton the Masher, or the homewrecking slut who set out to fuck herself a president.

None of them considered that actually, to become a White House intern you must have some brains, that it’s slightly different from interning at some well meaning local business, nor was any willing to admit she was actually a young woman who wanted and got a mature sexual relationshipwith a man she admired, liked and perhaps even loved. That’s just not possible in their world. The Great Unwashed for their part did see that once the details of their affair became known, but then they’ve always been more insightful than their alleged superiors inside the Beltway…

There’s also the insane jealosy of Bill Clinton, the Man they had Snubbed, of all people “bagging” a young pretty intern, something that neverhappened to any Republicans; they always had to buy their sex. It all added to Clinton’s undeserved to them popstar image, so that’s why they trashtalked and kept on trash talking Lewinsky. Look at that picture of her in the article: not very flattering, but fitting the image of “Lewinsky the dog”, the triplebagger they want us to believe she is. Reality is, quite a few of us would not mind having such an obviously intelligent, pretty young woman attracted to us…