Following the awful, awful news of the massacre in Conneticut, the gun-control debate has begun afresh in the USA.
The canard from those who support the current, ridiculous status quo, is that the problem lies in “evil people doing evil acts”, and not the availability of weapons. How do the pro-gun advocates reconcile this argument with the doctrine of American exceptionalism?
If one holds that permissive gun laws have no causal connection to the frequent massacres, and that the daily murders are simply caused by evil of people… then one is left with the heretical conclusion that there are simply more evil people in America than elsewhere. This does not sit well with the idea of America being intrisically better than other countries.
Shibboleths collide! Call for Doctor Pangloss!
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Parliament, 17th December 2012
Excuse me if I go off on a technical rant for a moment. I find it very irritating when people don’t use HTML mark-up properly. I can forgive the occasional user, or those relying on WYSIWYG editors, but for large, professionally coded websites, there is no excuse for mark-up which does not apply standards correctly.
What has vexed me so? The Houses of Parliament website. In many ways this is a great resource. They offer video of parliamentary debates, and the Hansard of the previous day’s proceedings is posted promptly the following moring. However, the underlying mark-up is flawed. Continue reading
David Beckham, Bradley Wiggins and the Dutchess of Cambridge at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year, ExCel, 16th December 2012
I want to draw attention to something particular regarding the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award 2012. It’s best encapsulated in this tweet from Sunder Katwala, who is director of the British Future thinktank:
I love the suggestion that sports people might ‘bid’ for the Sports Personality of the Year trophy, as if it is an Oscar nomination or Presidential campaign that must be plotted and strategised years in advance. The humour lies in the idea that winning a world championship or a gold medal is simply a false peak, a means to an end, with the ultimate pinnacle actually being that little trophy of an old-style TV camera, on a polished wooden stand. Continue reading
https://twitter.com/steishere/status/278802769559818241
Ste complains that a steam train has caused delays to his commute. I find it amazing and bizarre that the station or the rail company have seen fit to pre-record a message, saying that delays are caused by a steam train. Is that a regular an occurrence?
One thing I have always thought particularly sad is that the rail companies have a pre-record for “due to a fatality on the line.” It is clearly a frequent enough occurrence to be a necessary annoucement to have in the library, which is sad in itself. And yet it also offends that something so serious and sombre should be delegated to the robotic system. Perhaps I am being an old fashioned ‘digital immigrant‘, but it feels like the sort of thing that should be announced live. I suppose it is a harsh thing to ask the station managers to do.
My worry stems from the fact that there is a cadence and a timbre to a real voice that a pre-record does not have. When we cede these tasks to a machine, we lose a whole set of human interactions. We only notice this when the subject matter is something so exceptional as a death.
Is this just modernity? Am I being overly sentimental about routine and repetitive information? It is not as if most of these announcements are declarations of love or philosophical debates.
(See also: my piece ‘Encountering the Submerged‘ from almost exactly seven years ago, on the aftermath of a railway suicide I saw in Glasgow; and ‘The Best People Aren’t People‘ about non-human tweeters with personality).
Right. We all got a bit distracted there for a moment. What were we talking about? Oh yeah…
Almost all the debate about #Leveson so far is over whether the Government should introduce statutory regulation of the press. The other grave issues covered by the Inquiry, and Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendations for how to fix them, seem to have prompted less discussion.
The tunnel vision of the political class, and it’s obsession with press regulation, is partly to blame for this. But it is also the fault of Lord Justice Leveson himself. He offers a detailed plan for how a new self-regulatory body might be emboldened by some kind of law… but fewer ideas on how to regulate the way the media interacts with the police and politicians.
This is a shame, because the ambivalence of the police to the practice of phone hacking (if not outright collusion) was the most shocking of last year’s revelations. It was the failure to properly investigate the phone hacking that made this controversy into a bona fide ‘gate’. Had the police done their job, and not sought friendship and favour with the News International titles and other tabloids, then the entire controversy would have amounted to nothing more than a few criminal prosecutions. Continue reading