Delicious LiveJournal Links for 3-2-2010

[andrewducker]

• BNP high-up claims that there's nothing wrong with rape. Or hitting women.
  (tags: rape bnp uk politics EpicFail)
• 50% of Americans believe women should be forced to change their name when they marry
  (tags: feminism marriage relationships patriarchy)
• God Watches You Google
  (tags: google history search privacy)
• What Were The Best Comics Covers Of 2009?
  (tags: art comics warrenellis)
• Sense at last - Eurocrats mandate maximum charge for data roaming
  (tags: Europe data telecoms mobile broadband)
• Mobile data - a guide to its pastn present and future.
  (tags: mobile 4g technology broadband wireless data internet)
• Clackamas man exercises free speech rights by giving cops the finger
  (tags: politics freespeech usa)
• Gobekli Tepe: The Worldâ™s First Temple? Over 6000 years older than Stonehenge
  (tags: history religion turkey archeology culture anthropology science)
• Using Math to Turn Lo-Res Datasets Into Hi-Res Samples
  (tags: algorithms compression math image mathematics mri graphics)

Comments

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Wow, God Watches You Google was excellent - thank you. Those searches told such a sad story!

[andrewducker]

I know! And I liked that the attitude of the person writing it wasn't to judge the people involved, but to question his own feelings and actions.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

See, this is why I'll never marry. It doesn't matter a fig what the financial inducements are.

It wasn't until 1991 that the law finally decided that a woman did not actually irrevocably "give up herself" to the man in sexual matters, for pete's sake, and it sometimes seems to me that half the Western world is still working on that presumption.

In the final landmark case one of the nobel judges remarked of the state of the common law, "it can never have been other than a fiction" ... I sort of see marriage as the same sort of fiction. One day, we'll all wake up and realise we don't need or want it.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

Are the BNP just trying to be a parody?

How many people can they exclude and still get voted for?!

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Enormous numbers.

The BNP have correctly identified that the mainstream parties don't have the best interest of the working class at heart. Which is pretty much how capitalist politics works. Of course, the BNP don't have the best interests of the working class at heart either, but they are very good at appearing to frame the problem ("those darkies are taking your jobs") and the solution ("less darkies").

When the mainstream parties aren't even recognising the existence of a problem, the lying bigoted racist assholes who acknowledge a problem, pretend it's something different and offer a bogus racist solution will get the votes.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

... and, because one should never state a problem without a solution, the solution is this:

1. No platform for racists. The media should stop giving the BNP free publicity. Showing them on Question Time was a disgrace.

2. Offer a politics which isn't designed to benefit the middle/upper classes (those with the power to hire and fire) at the expense of the working class. This means more activism by the left (the real left, not Labour or the Lib Dems). More unions, more anarchist groups.

And some concrete actions include:

1. Complain to the media when they platform the BNP
2. Protest and disrupt events where the media platforms the BNP
3. Protest and disrupt BNP/EDL marches, preferably repelling them entirely
4. Get involved in local left-wing activism
5. Join a union!
6. Get involved in union work once you've been a member for a while

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

I still don't know that I can get behind "no platform for racists". Defend to the death your right to say it and all that. (I agree with everything else you say, though!)

[xquiq.livejournal.com]

I'm inclined to agree - if anything Griffin came across as slimy & incompetent on Question Time.

I'd be interested to see whether the appearance made a difference to their support.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

> I'm inclined to agree - if anything
> Griffin came across as slimy & incompetent
> on Question Time

... to you. I'm guessing that he wasn't talking to you, though. His audience heard him loud and clear, and he raised genuine concerns of theirs, albeit answering them in deceitful and hateful ways.

[xquiq.livejournal.com]

Oh absolutely - I am nowhere near his target demographic.

It probably did strengthen the support from his existing voter base, which is a bad thing. These are the people who aren't being engaged by the mainstream politics.

What I'd be interested to know is whether the appearance resulted in BNP appeal expanding beyond the core support base of working class voters in areas with high levels of both unemployment & ethnic minorities.

It's pretty clear that Griffin recognises the need to expand their voter base & I'm not sure to what extent the Question Time experience will have contributed to that objective.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

I think the BNP will expand their voter base by first securing their existing base. That gives them more legitimacy (since our country seems to be fine with giving racists a share of power) which leads to more coverage and free advertising, which then gives more opportunities to decorate the paper layer over their real politics while maintaining the dog-whistling. They'll get better at it - they already have in the last few years, which is why they managed to get as far as QT in the first place.

[andrewducker]

I'm hoping we never get as bad as bits of Europe (like France, which had a NF candidate come second in their presidential race in 2002), or Austria's Freedom Party, which got 18% of the vote in 2008.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Sure, Griffin's got a right to say what they like. I'm not going to go walking into their house and punch them for being a racist. But should organisations choose to give him a platform? That's not his right to speak - that's his free publicity (e.g. Question Time).

I hear where you're coming from; I was conflicted about this for a long time. It took the repeated platforming of Julie Bindel to say bigoted things about me and mine before I began to understand the policy better and I now support it strongly.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I feel conflicted over this one, and I definitely come down more on your side over it. If there's a mandated right to airtime for party political broadcasts then the BNP shouldn't be excluded. But that doesn't mean that newspapers should be seeking them out to give them space for their views.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

> If there's a mandated right to airtime for party
> political broadcasts then the BNP shouldn't be
> excluded.

No, though they should be excluded from the set of "political parties". The media wilfully refuses to get their head around the workings of the dog whistle politics used by the BNP. If the BNP said in plain language what they're currently saying in code, I can't imagine they'd be allowed to form a legitimate party. But the media will jump at any excuse to let them off the hook, and the coded language is just enough to do that.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

No, it's just that the illusion of respectability they are trying to project is slipping to reveal the rather nasty people who have always neen there underneath.

[lizzie-and-ari.livejournal.com]

Re the name change thing: First of all I think it's blindlingly obvious that anyone who at any point wants to change their name to anything, they have the right to do so. Even if it's entirely ridiculous (I came across a man in a temping job once who had changed his name to Alpha Null Charstar Tetrachloride. Takes allsorts)

But on this specific point: there are loads of comments saying that women have found it empowering or even just convenient to change their name eg to get rid of stupid initials, to rid associations of a bad history. The other side then jumps in and says 'yes, but men never do that.'

Apart from the point that, yes, men do sometimes do that, has anyone thought that the issue is maybe that men are scared that they won't be socially accepted, will be thought odd etc etc and that perhaps men need to be encouraged and empowered to not be scared of their social construct and to do it, rather than criticising women for not having that empowerment when they are in fact making an informed choice.

I know certainly by UK law if either part wants to take the other's name, or to hyphenate any part, that is an automatic right on production of a wedding certificate. A start, surely?

[andrewducker]

Just wanted to say I entirely agree!

[matgb]

BNP story is from 2008, and he's been expelled from the party now. Still an arsehole, but, y'know, dated...

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

I actually cannot think of one single argument for having it *required by law* that women change their names when they marry. Anyone care to enlighten me?

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Because it supports traditional patriarchy / the idea you are property?

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

No I mean I know why they *think* it, I just can't work out what arguments you'd get if you asked someone who thought that to explain why.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Well, more seriously, the idea that things have 'always' been this way, that it's tradition and that is good enough.

After all, how many people who follow a religion have consciously chosen that religion as an adult, rather than just going along with family and culture unthinkingly? I've often thought there should be a Which religion that lays out the presumed benefits and costs for each for the consumer...

[andrewducker]

I believe the correlation between parental religion and child religion is 0.6. Used to be higher, of course.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Do you have a link? I'd be interested in seeing if this varies by parent religion and, if so, where the correlations are highest and lowest.

[andrewducker]

I don't have a link, and looking around I suspect I've merely read something somewhere and believed it without any justification, as I can't find anything to back it up.

[andrewducker]

So that we know who you belong to, of course!