Robert Sharp

We discussed ‘bloodlines‘ earlier this week. Here is Presidential hopeful, Senator Barack Obama:

The mixing of races, and the making families with people from elsewhere, from other cultures: It is at this level, I think, that multiculturalism works best. Noting the differences, noting the similarities… and enjoying the fact of both.

More on multiculturalism within a person, here. David is interesting too.

Following last night’s drama in Moscow, I can only reiterate how important the run-up is to penalty-taking. Over half of the spot-kicks taken last night were actually quite shoddy, with both Van der Sar and Cech getting their fingers to most of the shots. However, a strong run-up from the shooter meant that the power was enough to carry the ball into the goal. Meanwhile, Ronaldo, Terry and Anelka were all hesitant.

There’s probably a Gordon Brown metaphor to be found somewhere in all this, but I really can’t be bothered to pick it out.

I’m glad someone has taken Magnus Linklater to task over his cavallier use of Google:

Sir, Magnus Linklater quotes 1.5 million Google entries matching “I hate Gordon Brown”. But to reach this number of hits requires the words to be entered without the quotation marks. When you add them Gordon attracts only 143 entries. It may be some comfort to the Prime Minister that “I hate Tony Blair” retrieves 836 and “I hate Thatcher” 525. They all pale into insignificance against the 22,900 for “I hate George Bush”.
Cyril Berkeley
Kuala Lumpur

As I have said before, typing something into Google and reporting how many hits it receives is not evidence of everything. I repeat, let us do away with this cliche, please.

My del.icio.us links: 12th May to 16th May

• My gateway to infinity - Clive James again: "It can talk about value, saying not just “This is what I have done” but “This is what others have done, and I find it valuable beyond price”.
• clivejames.com
• Music Gives Me Hope - Daniel Barenboim on the decline of Israeli socialism and the unifying power of music: "Before a Beethoven Symphony, all human beings are equal"
• USA political election logos 2008 - 1960 - I think Nixon's use of a full stop is particularly interesting.
• normblog: Israel at 60 - “Those who cannot celebrate the existence of Israel but only criticize it, put themselves beyond all sense of sympathy with the legitimate concerns of the Jewish people - as if these had no basis, no rationale, no historical genesis; as if Israel’s history was solely about usurpation and error; as if it was not itself born under the threat of annihilation, a threat that is ever renewed.”

(Generated by Postalicious)

There is a section on Harriet Harman’s Commons Leader website called ‘Your Voice‘, where citizens are invited to submit their thoughts on the Government’s Draft Legislative Programme (a.k.a. Draft Queen’s Speech).

The speech was launched yesterday in the House of Commons, with an event immediately afterwards in which Gordon Brown and other Cabinet Ministers went to Bermondsey to meet local people. This concentrated use of ministers was similar to what Hazel Blears had suggested on Tuesday, in a speech to the SMF:

why shouldn’t the Cabinet meet in locations other than the Cabinet Room at Number Ten Downing Street?

Just imagine if the Cabinet meeting took place at the British Legion, Swindon, the Town Hall, Grimsby, or the Victoria Community Centre in Crewe.

Regardless of whether you think this is a cynical publicity stunt or a genuine attempt to listen to the people, it is clearly an example of direct democracy. People are being invited to converse with Ministers directly, without mediation. Via the Commons Leader website, they are now being asked to write to Government directly.

Surely this undermines representative democracy (see my earlier worries about citizen juries). Rather than provide new ways for the Government (which even the most committed statist would admit is a sprawling bureaucracy) to interact with sixty-five million people, why not strengthen the channels by which citizens can already speak to the state, via their MPs? Why not award Members of Parliament a larger office budget, say, so they can maintain more staff in constituency surgeries, so that problems could be dealt with in more detail, and quicker?

Why not budget for MPs or Councillors to convene some kind of constituency convention, or panel, at which citizens could feedback thoughts on the DLP? Individual MPs could compile a summary of local feeling, in much the same way as select committees and independent commissions summarize the testimony of their witnesses. Do it over the summer recess, say, just before party conferences, and you would have a pretty comprehensive snap-shot of what the country thinks… but without the tiresome bother of an undersubscribed yet expensive web-tool which has no visible method of actually engaging the citizen in dialogue.

Websites are a fantastic way for individuals in relatively small networks to communicate with each other. But I’m not sure it is the most efficient way for the Government to enter into a conversation with its citizenry. A basic online form definitely falls short.

An interesting post on the Daily Dish about miscegenation:

For older people, and people who live in areas that have long been predominantly white, the miscegenation issue is the last bastion of knee-jerk racial identity. And whites are not alone in this. Every well-defined racial and cultural group has this taboo actively at play, even today, regardless of political bent.
…
[When] a young West Virginian hankers for someone a bit more “full-blooded” than Obama, they are using code-words for the ultimate threatening “other”, the other that sneaks into your home and screws your daughter and destroys your bloodline.

The idea that there is any value in a pure ‘blood-line’ in has to be one of the most evil concepts invented by man. As Hanif Kureishi reminds us, “purity is incestuous”. Worrying about your ‘blood-line’ is against nature.

Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris, with parliamentary colleagues, at an event in support of the Human Fertility and Embryology Bill, which will protect and extend the right of scientists to perform crucial stem-cell research.

My del.icio.us links: 9th May to 12th May

• all streets - Ben Fry presents a map that is comprised of all the roads in the USA and nothing more
• Let Them Eat Arugula - Bill Clinton recently declared, "The people in small towns in rural America, who do the work for America, and represent the backbone and the values of this country, they are the people that are carrying her through in this nomination." The corollary–that
• 50 More Excellent Blog Designs - Smashing magazines present some unique blog designs. Food for thought for when I get around to redesigning my own place. Some seem rather generic, though.

(Generated by Postalicious)

A colleague of mine had a leaving party last weekend, so we all went out and got drunk. I spent most of Saturday in bed, and for the rest of the bank-holiday weekend I felt bad that I had squandered a day of my precious, finite life.

I was drinking cocktails and lager, but it is Magnus Linklater’s history lesson about Gin Lane that provides an excuse for me to link to Clay Shirky’s excellent speech on Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. Shirky’s thesis is that television did for the late 20th Century what gin did for the 18th Century - it masked the sudden and inconvenient “social surplus” that new technologies had brought:

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation… And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today… It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom.

It is an important essay that is already being discussed online, so please do go and read the whole thing. Shirky goes onto describe how we actually have a vast amount of “cognitive surplus” - that is, spare thinking time - that is currently wasted watching TV sitcoms and adverts. He rails against those who ask “where do they find the time?” innorder to mock gamers and bloggers. Shirky points out that the whole Wikipedia project took about 100 million man hours to complete. Yet the USA watches 100 million man hours of advertisements, every weekend.

So perhaps society is behaving a bit like I was over the bank-holiday. Wasting time, horizontal, unwashed, in our pajamas, watching TV… when we should be doing something more creative. New technologies are slowly allowing us to unlock our potential.

Spam-mail celebrates its 30th Anniversary this week. The first piece of mass junk e-mail was sent three decades ago, to the 393 users of the Arapnet system, by a marketeer named Gary Thuerk.

On a related note, it is more than a decade since I personally introduced the concept of spam e-mailing to the innocent readers of The Times:

Tackling Junk Mail - 28th July 1997

From Mr Robert Sharp

Dear Sir, Sir Edward Peck complains of junk mail via his fax (letter, July 19).

I believe the newest form of junk mail is that received by e-mail. I have been “on line” for a matter of days, yet I have already recieved 11 unsolicited e-mails.

While this type of intrusion is perhaps the easiest to dispose of, my hopes are dashed when I find that the eagerly awaited “new mail” is only junk mail from the United States, advertising, for example, sunglasses.

Yours etc

Robert Sharp
July 19

Re-reading that letter, I see no mention of any formula to “make her faint when she sees your enormous schlong,” so I suppose I must have been fairly innocent too.