Wis[s]e Words

Kickstarter: threat or menace?

Published on July 20, 2012Leave a comment

Tom Spurgeon is uneasy with traditional publishers using Kickstarter to fund their projects:

I’m really uneasy about publishers using that mechanism, and I’m not even sure I can explain all the way why. It’s almost like that I feel the old model of doing things is being circumvented, somehow. Like these publishers are switching over to that mechanism because they’re not doing the other one well, not because the new one presents specific opportunities. I’m not sure, I’m really inarticulate on the subject and I need to firm that up because that moment in history is here. What makes it difficult is there are things I’m thinking about trying to crowdfund, too, which I’m not sure should make my opinions suspect but it should make them open to extra self-scrutiny.

The first worry with a publisher (or any other established business for that matter) using a mechanism concieved for independent creators to get funding is that it doesn’t inspire confidence in their financial state. If you have to get your readers to fund you in advance, you’re doing something wrong as a publisher. It feels like a flight forward, rather than a well thought out attempt to make use of new possibilities.

The second worry is of course how stable the Kickstarter funding model is. There is always the possibility that one or two high profile disasters will turn off people and, let’s face it, the possibility of such a disasters is always much higher in comics than anywhere else. Worse, what with fan dollars not being inexhaustible, there’s also the possibility that crappy, greed driven projects will push out more worthwhile, creative endeavours.

Which brings us to the feeling that using Kickstarter this way is cheating, that companies like this aren’t supposed to use this, that it should be kept for struggling young cartoonists. I’m not sure that’s a reasoned objection though, even if I share this feeling.

Ian Tomlinson killer walks off scotch free, has previous form

Published on July 20, 20123 Comments

It took two years to to even get him before a judge, so it’s no great surprise that Ian Tomlinson’s killer has been acquited:

A policeman has been acquitted of killing Ian Tomlinson during G20 protests in London by striking the 47-year-old bystander with a baton and pushing him to the ground as he walked away from police lines.

The jury at Southwark crown court on Thursday cleared PC Simon Harwood, 45, a member of the Metropolitan police’s elite public order unit, the Territorial Support Group, of manslaughter following one of the most high-profile cases of alleged police misconduct in recent years.

Harwood told the court that while in retrospect he “got it wrong” in seeing Tomlinson as a potentially threatening obstruction as police cleared a pedestrian passageway in the City on the evening of 1 April 2009, his actions were justifiable within the context of the widespread disorder of that day.

Speaking outside the court, the Tomlinson family said: “It’s not the end, we are not giving up for justice for Ian.” They said they would now pursue a civil case.

It remains hard to convict a copper of anything, especially things done “in the line of duty”, even when said copper has previous form:

The jury at Southwark crown court, who took four days to clear PC Simon Harwood of manslaughter on a majority verdict, was not told that the officer had been investigated a number of other times for alleged violence and misconduct.

Harwood quit the Metropolitan police on health grounds in 2001, shortly before a planned disciplinary hearing into claims that while off-duty he illegally tried to arrest a man in a road rage incident, altering notes retrospectively to justify his actions.

He was nonetheless able to join another force, Surrey, returning to the Met in 2005. In a string of other alleged incidents Harwood was accused of having punched, throttled, kneed or threatened other suspects while in uniform, although only one complaint was upheld.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission described the chain of events around Harwood’s rejoining his old force before becoming part of its elite Territorial Support Group as “simply staggering”.

Emphasis mine. You wonder if the verdict had been the same if the jury had known Harwood had been investigated for assault previously, and was allowed to escape prosecution for it. But of course they were not allowed to know this:

The Metropolitan police attempted to keep the disciplinary record of PC Simon Harwood secret from the family of Ian Tomlinson, the newspaper seller he struck with a baton and pushed to the ground at G20 protests, it can now be reported.

Lawyers for the force tried and failed to argue that disclosing the litany of complaints about Harwood’s conduct would have breached his privacy, saying the officer’s disciplinary history did not have “any relevance” to Tomlinson’s death.

Harwood, 45, who was found not guilty of Tomlinson’s manslaughter on Thursday, had repeatedly been accused of using excessive force during his career, including claims he punched, throttled, kneed and unlawfully arrested people.

The jury in the trial were not told about the history of complaints, despite a submission from the Crown Prosecution Service, which argued that in two of the disciplinary matters he was accused of using heavy-handed tactics against the public “when they presented no threat”.

The application was rejected by the judge, Mr Justice Fulford, who said: “The jury, in effect, would have to conduct three trials.”

The establishment takes care of its own. If this had been an ordinary murder and the suspect had previous form, wouldn’t that have been admitted to court as relevant information? You would think so. Then again, a civilian who had been accused of assault and abuse would not have been allowed to escape prosecution in the first place…

Steady, as She Goes

Published on July 19, 2012Leave a comment

Sometimes there are pieces of incidental music that you’ve been hearing for years without knowning where they originally came from, until you stumble over it one day. The theme to Radio 4’s Saturday Live is one such piece. I didn’t know it was taken from the opening bars of The Raconteurs’ “Steady, as She Goes” until I heard it on the radio just now, but now I know.

And knowing is half the battle.

Minimise, Doubt, Excuse,Shift Blame

Published on July 18, 20123 Comments

I’m sure somebody else will have written about this in a much more clever way, but when has that ever stopped me before? There has been an uptick in stories about harassment, sexual, racist, or just plain hassling the weirdo. These are all three examples of relatively mundane harassment, of the kind that is experienced on a daily basis by thousands of people, but which is relatively invisible to anybody not directly involved as either victim or bully, not being obviously outrageous stories of injustice. Reading these stories and the comments that they attracted, I began to notice something.

It’s of course no secret that any such story of harassment will attract skeptical commenters, who for some reason or another want to deny or excuse the harassment. Few of those, certainly not in the more enlightened environment of e.g. Metafilter, will excuse or agree with the racism or sexism directly. Instead, there are four main techniques which skeptics use to discredit bullying victims: Minimise, Doubt, Excuse and Shift Blame.

Minimise: don’t deny the incident, but deny its importance and the need to talk about it. (Frex) What this does should be obvious: if an incident isn’t worth talking about, it can’t be used as evidence of sexism, racism, bullying etc.

Doubt: just straight up start questioning whether the incident really happened or whether there is another side to the story (frex). This can be done under the guise of keeping an open mind, not wanting to judge on hearsay and “innocent until proven guilty” and all that good stuff, but what it really does is denying the victim their experiences.

Excuse: the other side of the doubt coin, explaining that there are reasons why what the victim thought was harassment wasn’t actually, or wasn’t intended as such, or couldn’t be helped. There are several examples of it in the Livejournal thread about the woman who was hassled at Readercon, with some commenters speculating that the harasser might have Aspergers or ADD or something. What this does is to again doubt a victim’s experiences as well as remove the responsibility for the bullying from the bully.

Finally, shift blame: it wasn’t the bully’s fault that this happened, it must have been something the victim did or did not do which made them do it. This is on full display in the thread about Stephen Mann, where he’s described as provocative and not telling the whole truth (doubt again). You also see this a lot with any story involving cops killing or harassing innocent people, where it seems to be as much fear as hatred driving people to argue that there must be something the victim did to deserve their treatment.

There’s one other technique that helps with each of the four main techniques to delegitimise experiences of harassment: nitpicking, doubting every detail of the story the victim tells. This works well because few people are able to be one hundred percent right or precise when writing down their experiences…

These are all techniques that should be known to anybody who has spent some time on internet threads about bullying, or police brutality, or any other story where you have people wanting to deny the reality of it, but I thought it would be good to write it down for a change, to make it explicit.

“Now is not the time to play the blame game”

Published on July 17, 2012Leave a comment

As some government spokesfucker said on PM this afternoon.

So when is it time to blame G4S for their fuckup and inability to deliver the security personnel they were paid for? Not to mention those who thought it a good idea in the first place to contract a private security firm for such a sensitive assignment? Because really, it’s typical that once again the public sector has to make good the failures of oh so efficient free market:

The G4S chief executive, Nick Buckles, has told MPs that he regrets ever signing the Olympic security contract that has turned into “a humiliating shambles” that has left his company’s reputation in tatters.

But Buckles made clear that he is not going to fall on his sword and resign his £830,000-a-year job before the Games are over and astonished MPs by insisting that G4S is not going to waive its £57m “management fee” despite accepting 100% responsibilty for the security debacle.

The G4S chief executive clearly dismayed MPs on the Commons home affairs committee by saying he still couldn’t guarantee that all the 7,000 security guards the company is contracted to supply will turn up on the opening day of the Games. He disclosed that a further 500 troops could be called up if the 3,500 put on standby last week don’t prove enough.

The G4S boss confirmed that his company will pay all the extra costs faced by the military and the police for replacing private security guards when they fail to be supplied, including accommodation. He also made clear that the company will now also consider paying £500 bonuses to armed forces personnel whose leave has been cancelled to cover for the Games.

Really, at this point what needed to happen was to a) yank G4S off this contract and b) replace their employees with proper police and such while c) billing them for the costs and not paying them for anything they’ve done so far. Preferably the few security guards they actually did manage to hire/train should be transferred to the olympic organisation itself. I really don’t understand why, since their head honcho can’t even say how many people they will have available, anybody is still counting on them to deliver anything.

It really is privatisation in a nutshell: take the money, fuck up, fuck off and let the public sector clean up your messes.