andrewducker | Interesting Links for 14-06-2012

Crossposts: http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2733409.html

Interesting Links for 14-06-2012

Coventry launches electric bus services
(tags: uk buses electricity )
Goodfellas mobster Henry Hill dies aged 69
(tags: movies mafia )
The BBC block UK access to some pages produced by BBC Worldwide. What the fucking fuck?
(tags: uk bbc EpicFail )
Some interesting discussion/analysis of the new top level domain applications.
(tags: internet google amazon )
An editor explains how ebook licensing works, and why you can only buy most ebooks in some countries.
(tags: publishing ebooks )
Is the Guardian the most bigoted newspaper in Britain?
(tags: uk media guardian bigotry palestine israel )
What happens when the DRM on digital projectors kicks in (a terrible tool-chain)
(tags: drm copyright movies digital )
35mm Film is About to Die – Studios Plan to Go With All Digital Projection by 2014
(tags: digital cinema )
The govt’s work programmes are pure exploitation: here’s the evidence (anyone got some counter-evidence?)
(tags: welfare work uk politics )
Skype to feature massive in-call ads. Microsoft tries to sell this as a _good_ thing.
(tags: skype microsoft advertising )
Chinese mindfulness meditation improves brain white matter and mood.
(tags: psychology emotion brains meditation )
Windows Phone market share expected to surpass Apple's iOS in 2016 (expected, in this case, by analysts on crack)
(tags: windows microsoft mobile_phones apple )

They're blocking stories about vacuum trains?

Accessing that story in the UK gets you:
"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com."

I'm sure there's complication over how to get people from the UK to pay for stuff which isn't covered by the license fee, but just blocking people seems dumb.

especially since I just read it for free.

Are there adverts on that page?

It might be that it's not so much about preventing UK people from seeing the content, but from being subjected to ads. There's maybe some stuff in the BBC's rules about not ever using ads in the UK.

35mm Film is About to Die – Studios Plan to Go With All Digital Projection by 2014
This makes me a little sad - my wife and I met while projecting 35mm film at our university film society.

In the future, couples will have to meet while working out how to hook up projectors to laptops :->

Same here.

this is the nicest 'how we met' story i've heard of lately.

Wow, Robin Shepherd has written a lot of anti-Muslim/pro-Israel stuff.

I feel like the music stopped, and all the people with anti-Muslim opinions and all the people with anti-Jewish opinions sat down, but there weren't enough chairs in one place, so they ended up confusingly scattered across the political spectrum. And now I don't understand the political landscape any more :) (In truth, this is mostly my awareness, not a change in real life :))

Generally left/liberal circles, prominently including the guardian, definitely have an awful anti-Israel sentiment that spills over into anti-Jewish sentiment, which is rather awful.

But also, Israel has done some really really awful things to Palestinians, and if there's a "wipe Israel away" sentiment, that's pretty inevitable. And I don't agree with Hamas' rhetoric, but I'm not sure they can be ignored out of being a problem, and their main complaint is probably widely shared in palestine. (I might agree publishing it uncritically in the guardian is bad, if that's what happened.)

A thousand times this.

Thank you

I think the article about the guardian massively overstated the case here. I mean it is "published uncritically" -- in the sense that there's no editorial "beware, here be dragons"... however, what he published does not appear to deserve such editorialising in any case.

The original article is here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/08/palestinians-reclaiming-our-destiny

On the other hand, the article linked does go some way to mislead, for example, including the Hamas constitutional promise to wipe out Israel without including Ismail Haniyeh's statement that he would be willing to accept a peace based around the 67 borders. So they include a general statement from the party without including the much more conciliatory statement by the author they are criticising.

Then take
“ We do not want more blood. We want help in achieving justice for our people who lost their land and freedom decades ago, and in providing security for a region that has long endured oppression and suffering.“

All lies, of course. Israel has never attempted to wipe out the Palestinians.

I find it hard to believe that even the most pro-Israeli viewpoint could deny that at least some Palestinians lost some land. Weirdly the writer counters instead by refuting an allegation the author does not make (he nowhere claims that the Israeli's tried to wipe out the Palestinians).

So, I guess I risk the accusation of a typical left-liberal bias to Palestine, but I found the article being criticised was much more even-handed than the article crticising it.

I was gonna say, "My, but this is pro-Israel pandering worthy of mainstream U.S. media!"

And I'm an American Jew who doesn't think Jews have a god-given right to so much as a clump of dirt.

I'd be very wary of anything written by Robin Shepherd and especially anything published in The Commentator. It's a right wing rag run for and by a bunch of increasingly lunatic libertarians, with an agenda to attack the state at every opportunity. They *hate* the Guardian with a real passion, and love nothing more than discrediting it whenever they can.

I'm happy to be wary of them - but I'd much rather have an actual rebuttal of what they said, with evidence, if such a thing is possible. I generally prefer argument based on facts, rather than who the arguer is.

Yes, but a comment piece like that will pick, choose and skews its facts.

That picture they have at the top of the piece... it doesn't exactly lend itself to a fair discussion of facts.

Is it a photoshop? If it's a picture of a Hamas supporter at a Hamas rally then it goes to support the thrust of the article.

And the caption that it's a Guardian reader?

Clearly very silly?

I didn't take it that way, seemed rather crude and a mud-slingy. Put me in a frame of mind where anything in the text that followed was going to be perceived as on the rabid side. Which is maybe what they were after?

I expect so. The person writing the article was clearly frothing at the mouth.

Looks photoshoppy to me. If not, he's holding an awfully large placard with his tiny tiny hand in a really awkward place.

Maybe it's pinned to his chest.

Every comment piece, and 95% of all reporting chooses and skews its facts.

If the facts are incorrect then they deserve rebuttal.

Which facts are you referring to?

Ooh that sounded confrontational - I just mean I'm confused as to who's rebuttal of what you mean.

As in, if the facts in the article are incorrect then they should be rebutted.

Saying "Pieces like this skew their facts." or "The people that publish on this site are lunatics." isn't actually an argument against anything this piece says. If the piece says things that are untrue, then they should be rebutted. If the things it says are true, then they should be believed. Anything else is just handwaving.

I've spent too long trying to write a coherent reply to this.

I don't think any of the actual facts are in question. The guardian did publish that article. The guardian's stance on Israel is somewhat racist. The Hamas documents do say all those things about wiping Israel out.

But I think he's trying to smuggle in non-factual premises like "obviously everyone agrees that publishing that article was totally unforgiveable, it's so obvious I don't even need to justify it". Or "the guardian giving a platform to Haniyeh is characteristic of their level of bigotry and everything else they say is suspect."

For instance, wikipedia says Haniyeh is "a senior political leader of Hamas and one of two disputed Prime Ministers of the Palestinian National Authority". The article mentions the first (with possibly a mild exaggeration), but not the second. Is publishing an article by someone who's been a terrorist leader AND a democratically elected prime minister better than publishing an article by a terrorist leader? I think most people would say it's a lot more understandable, because whether the views are heinious or not, if they're widely represented in the population, they almost certainly will have to be engaged with somehow, not just ignored out of existance.

For instance, he says "Is the guardian the most bigoted newspaper?" He obviously wants to implicate the guardian's bigotedness as much as possible. I agree the guardian is rather racist about Israel. But I'm not sure that's clearly worse that people (such as Robin Shepherd himself) who automatically assume Muslim citizens of Britian are a dangerous reactionary problem to be fixed, rather than possibly equal members of society with everyone else.

For instance, the caption to the picture implies that the guardian probably agree with everything in the Hamas agenda, but even if they're wrong to be sympathetic to Hamas and very anti-Israel, I think that's unlikely.

Unfortunately, this sort of implication can be made faster than it can be rebutted, which makes talking about it especially time-consuming.

If we ignore Robin Shepherd, would you characterise the main question as "was the guardian wrong to publish something by Haniyeh?" I think it quite probably was, but I'm not positive.

Yeah, I'd agree with all of that.

Thank you! I'm slowly getting better at this "talking about a controvertial subject in a way that doesn't inflame people" thing :)

I'd watch out for people that don't already have a somewhat nuanced attitude towards Israel/Palestine :->

(Mine boils down to "Oh for goodness sake, can you people not all just get along?", and wanting to bang all of their heads together.)

One of the asides I deleted was a minor rant at someone I'd seen on a message board who wanted the area to sort itself out or get nuked so neither side could have it. And he obviously didn't mean it literally, but I just thought "Seriously, thermonuclear war is what we're trying to AVOID. If your proposed solution is more violent than Hamas and IDF put together, you're not making the situation better"...

Footnote: I also point out that it's a common deceptive practice in newspapers to show a photo of one person at a rally who is not at all representative of everyone else (in some cases, someone actively opposed by everyone else), so it's quite possible for the picture to be literally true but also very deceptive. But in this case, I imagine the poster in the picture probably IS representative of a Hamas rally, even if not of the guardian.

I see what you mean - sorry I just genuinely wasn't sure what you were saying - ie that people commenting on this thread should rebut specific facts rather than saying that RS is stupid.

I think people have done that quite well already so will just say for the record that I do think any article that decries the Palestinians as anti-Semites without acknowledging the harm done to them by the Zionists should be intrinsically read with a wary eye.

You see, your problem, Andy, is that people set so much store in your posts. You may think you're sharing an 'Interesting link' but to the rest of us these are rules to live our life by. 'Hey!' we shout. 'Why is Andy telling us to live our lives according to some fact-skewer who is morally dubious [which, let's face it, is what most of your friends mean by 'right-wing', I certainly do]?!'

With great power comes great responsibility.

PS Spiderman could *so* sort out the Palestine problem.

I think you're right.

Sometimes, I even post links so that other people can point out the inaccuracies in them!

This sort of thing is why I have the tag 'comment' — I use it to mark things that are people commmenting on a given thing, as a way of saying "This is one person's opinions, not something I'm linking to say 'This is how this situation really is'.

Of course, I have no idea if people reading my linkposts get that, or have no idea.

That blank space:

I tried to add the geek tag "</ spiderman>" above, 'cause I'm dead cool and that.

LJ tried to parse it as actual html so stripped it.

Awesome.

As I'm special, I got to read it in my email, so I saw it with the <spiderman> in it!

I liked it :->

If you're talking about the comment piece, facts are irrelevant because it's opinion. The original comment piece is already what you refer to condescendingly as handwaving. If it was a news article, facts would be relevant.

Opinion, as you have said quite flatly to me before when I've linked you to contentious opinion columns, is just opinion.

Much of it is opinion. The fact that the Guardian published the article, who the article was written by, the contents of it, and the contents of the Hamas Charter are all facts. Any of those can be disputed.

Whether they add up to a reason to not publish the piece is, of course, just opinion.

Ah right - I thought you were talkign about the opinion piece itself, not the facts/falsehood of the article about the opinion piece.

Gotcha. Naah, I was wondering if someone would refute the piece I linked to, and say "That's an ancient version of the Hamas Charter, the updated one is all about how awesome kittens are."

Oh you weren't confrontational at all. At least not by the standards I'm used to :->

Maybe in the case of Israel/Palestine the issue is that the facts can be understood in very different ways by people.

I remember watching a documentary called Promises, which featured a US filmmaker talking to six or seven children from Israel/Palestine. One of the Israeli-Jewish children pointed to the 'fact' of their being granted the land by God, while one of the Palestinian children referenced a 1920s or 30s legal document his family had, indicating their ownership of a piece of land.

Oh yes, the interpretations by people are definitely a massive part of the problem.

Is the Guardian the most bigoted newspaper in Britain?

his argument seems to be that because hamas are suboptimal ranging to evil, their members/leaders shouldn't be allowed a voice ever? wtf?

There's a difference between banning people from speaking, and actively giving them a forum for their views.

I'm all for (for instance) Neo-Nazis being allowed to print leaflets. I am not in favour of my local newspaper giving them a page to talk about themselves.

I think this is very different. Whatever their views, Hamas are more significant than a local neo-Nazi group. They're a major political force that is usually not given a voice in the western world. I'm with Sven's implied point here.

That article is, in itself, wildly biased in the other direction. Separately, via MetaFilter, I read a pretty biased interview with Noam Chomsky on the subject, which made me sad. It's really hard to find objective perspectives on Israel. I do think Judaism and "the Jews" needs to be left out of it on both sides though: Israel is a nation, and dealing with it in any other terms does the issue a disservice.

Pet peeve, for example: being in favour of a Palestinian state and simultaneously not in favour of the Israeli government's policies on the issue does not make one an anti-semite. I know plenty of people of Jewish descent that sit in that camp, and would happily discuss it over Seder.

Ethnicities and cultures are not exactly equivalent with nations. I'd argue that making that equivalence is in itself racism.

Edited 2012-06-14 14:59 (UTC)

I think that one problem there is that being critical of Israeli government policies, or of Zionism, is too often then taken as being anti-Semitic. It's seeing things in binary black/white, either/or terms rather than as a continuum or shades of grey.

It's very hard to leave Judaism out of it, when it's so heavily intertwined with Israel's history, and even now with some of its laws.

Which doesn't make objecting to Israel's policies anti-Semite, of course.

Absolutely this. The article in The Commentator was ludicrously biased -- I think the writer hoped that you'd read that and not actually look at the Guardian piece. The article in the guardian was polemic sure.

"Hamas are more significant than a local neo-Nazi group. They're a major political force that is usually not given a voice in the western world. I'm with Sven's implied point here."

I didn't mean a local one, I was thinking more of groups like the Far Right political organisations in France, Germany, etc. Or the BNP. I believe in free speech for the BNP, but I wouldn't let them have a post on my blog to put their side forward.

I also agree that Hamas aren't the BNP. They're closer to Sinn Fein before the ceasefire, where the ridiculous system of not allowing their voices to be heard was a mockery.

Totally agree with the Sinn Fein comparison. Not a group I'd ever want to support, but not giving them a voice is counter-productive at best.

Agreed. I mean, if The Guardian was producing an article on Palestine/Israel then I'd expect there to be information/statements from Hamas in there, because it's an important part of the story, and they represent a lot of the people involved. I'd also expect them to have statements from the Israeli government, of course, to hear their side.

(The perfect rebuttal to the post would, of course, be to link to The Guardian hosting an article from Israel talking about their wish to make peace.)

I suspect some of the anti-Israel sentiment comes from people who (subconsciously) think of Israel as a modern western nation and anti-semitism as a thing of the past, and then get horrified when they realise what Israel's done. And also, Israel got a lot of uncritical acceptence from the west on the grounds of (a) being a sort of anti-holocaust and (b) being more like western nations in several respects, and I think there's a subsconscious feeling of "everyone knows all that, so to balance it up, we just have to keep pointing out that israel's done awful things, everyone knows anti-semitism is bad, it's not like we'll be anti-semitic by accident, oh oops, fuck"... :)

A lot of anti-Israeli (while not anti-Semitic) sentiment seems to be based around the nigh-unconditional acceptance of whatever Israel does by the United States, be it war crimes, criminal occupation, the ghettoisation of Palestinians, the current discussion around immigration and foreigners and the treatment of certain ethnic groups. Given that the politics and media of the US have such a massive global reach and influennce on the Western world, people can see it as important to voice their feelings if they aren't pro-Israel or neutral since Israel has the backing of a superpower.

Unfortunately, this can often lead to them voicing the same issues as actual anti-Semities, but for more valid reasons (ie reasons unrelated to Judaism or simple bigotry) or simply being cast as anti-Semites by the pro-Israel lobby as a simple way to discount their views without needing to argue against them. Also, due to the spectre of anti-Semitism in even reasoned political debate, some are afraid to talk about Israeli-related issues for fear of being labelled as such.

It is ironic that some outspoken Israeli politicians have more in common with European far right parties than the (real or supposedly) anti-Semitic detractors of Israel do.

Yeah, I was thinking of that, although I wasn't sure if the comparison would be welcomed or not. I assumed that there's been a lot more death more recently than in Ireland (although I don't know for certain), but it's another case of a terrorist organisation that also has a reasonable (but far from perfect) representation of the people.

Is the guardian the MOST bigoted... well, I dunno; the Guardian are often anti-Israeli-government/pro-Palestinian-statehood which doesn't have to be bigotry but that does seem to spill over into being anti-semitic unless policed very very carefully, and I don't think the Guardian are very careful about their policing.

On the other hand many other newspapers spew disgusting bigotry too. The Daily Mail for instance. Comparing one sort of bigotry to another sort is pretty foolish.

I have one counter-example to the work programme being exploitation - unfortunately, I think it's rather isolated. A friend of mine who used to work in web design has been out of work for a while, and was thinking about retraining, when he was told he had to work at a charity shop stacking shelves or lose his dole. He was unimpressed, of course - but at the last moment he got a phone call telling him they'd found him somewhere more suited to him, and they had. He's still not getting paid, of course, but he's working for a different charity helping them to set up a Unix server, which is something he wouldn't have been able to train himself to do alone. Plus, he actively enjoys having the work to go to, although of course he'd prefer to be paid.
I am depressingly aware that he is probably one of the very few to have been given a position that is actively helping him to gain skills he wants and would not otherwise have been able to learn, but for him, the scheme has worked so far. If he actually gets a job using these skills, it'll have worked properly.
Interestingly, I think it's a pilot scheme being run in Cambridge - it is part of the general work programme, but perhaps they're doing it differently or something. I don't have any more information on that, sorry.

Good for your friend, but what about the person who works setting up Unix servers and who has perhaps been denied that bit of work? If said server runs on Linux or BSD and your friend has a computer is there anything preventing them from downloading a few ISOs and experimenting with installing them, setting up SAMBA, LAMP etc? There are plenty of resources out there for the autodidact.

It's a very small charity, and there's no money. The boss wants the server set up, but it's not absolutely required for the charity to function. If my friend hadn't been helping them, there would have been nobody else doing it; it would have been one of those jobs left to rot on the backburner.

My friend does not autodidact. It's a shame, but some people simply can't learn that way. He should really have had more help in previous times but for various reasons (not all his fault) has not managed that. This is something I don't think he'd have got any other way.

Yeah, I think doing something voluntary definitely CAN be helpful. The problem seems to be, the government assumes there are millions of unfilled jobs out there that people could get if they just cleaned up their act and tried hard enough. But there doesn't seem any evidence for that: where are these shelf-stacking jobs desperately looking for an employee, but unable to find someone who can do it? It seems massively more likely that there aren't enough jobs (sample evidence: companies are laying people off because there's a depression).

So the policy generally seems to be "trick people into doing one of these schemes as punishment, and hope they give up on getting any benefits or get a job by sheer force of will".

I don't think it's NEVER useful. Just that it seems more harmful than helpful. (And has a lot of secondary bad effects.) Placing people to do charity work that would otherwise go undone is a good start -- it's still possible to cause serious problems, but if it works it's actually providing some positive improvement to society. (A good indication that this is what's happening would be that people who are ALREADY doing volunteer work or unpaid internships, especially ones related to their core skills, were rewarded and praised, rather than villified and punished.) It seems workfare does vary a lot by local region: if some ARE doing it better, that's a good thing (although it's been such a disaster, I'm not sure it's worth saving).

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Interesting Links for 14-06-2012

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Is the Guardian the most bigoted newspaper in Britain?

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