Extreme event warning: IG Miranda

After slamming into the northern Queensland coast, Tropical Cyclone Yasi seems to have triggered a related extreme event, Intemperate Grizzleguts Miranda:

“Anna Bligh makes a good news anchor”

This is thought to be the same IG Miranda that in 2006 wreaked the following in the wake of TC Larry:

“This is no New Orleans, so enough with the whingeing”

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Giving ideas a fighting chance

George Monbiot reports on the lengths some people go to online to propagate their “ideas.”

For his film (Astro)Turf Wars, Taki Oldham secretly recorded a training session organised by a rightwing libertarian group called American Majority. The trainer, Austin James, was instructing Tea Party members on how to “manipulate the medium”. This is what he told them:

“Here’s what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in ‘Liberal Books’. I go through and I say ‘one star, one star, one star’. The flipside is you go to a conservative/ libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars. … This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in ‘Movies on Healthcare’, I don’t want Michael Moore’s to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click. ... If there’s a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That’s how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance.”

(via Antony Loewenstein)

The following is how amazon.com stipulates what it expects from users of its online services:

Visitors may post reviews, comments, photos, and other content; send e-cards and other communications; and submit suggestions, ideas, comments, questions, or other information, so long as the content is not illegal, obscene, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, infringing of intellectual property rights, or otherwise injurious to third parties or objectionable and does not consist of or contain software viruses, political campaigning, commercial solicitation, chain letters, mass mailings, or any form of “spam.” You may not use a false e-mail address, impersonate any person or entity, or otherwise mislead as to the origin of a card or other content.

(my emphasis: JAS)

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Fish Friday

Video and Code Provided by WhoIsTheMonkey.com

Only Kiwis, only Kiwis...

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Thought regretted

I’d almost overlooked this, but it’s such a fine example of how the Muftim’s Tim Blair’s followers can be such a credit to him.

Blair regular Mentalfloss, commenting on a well-known leftist, um, academic, demonstrates the blairbots’ general level of commitment to healthy debate:

It makes me fear for what I might do if I were actually to hear the words this, this plasmodial myxomycophyta whilst in the same room.

Guess I’m lucky I left my 9mm Baretta in the US when I moved here. It jammed every fifth shot, but that’s about the number of Faculty Heads in a given department...

Oh, how very delightful! — in the immediate aftermath of yet another campus shooting spree in Mr Floss’s native US.

Perhaps in recognition of this, less than a half-hour later this character had second or maybe third thoughts:

The last paragraph was in very poor taste and I regret posting it, much less thinking it.

Oh, how very enlightened! We all have regrets, and one can only guess Mr Floss in his earlier comment was shooting from the hip... um... shooting first and asking questions later... er...

But it’s okay, peer-group pressure can be very powerful, and one may well understand the impulse to sound off in a manner to which one’s cohorts expect of one.

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That’s when she fell for...

... the leader of the pack jihad.

When you become Muslim, you so-o-o admire people with knowledge.

It’s like — ohhhhh! — be still my heart!

When he talks about jihad!

Arabic he speaks!

That’s for us!!

It’s not like, mmmm, y’know, “He’s a bit cute,” or y’know “He drives a...” — That’s not really important to us.

But if he’s going to stand there with his beard and his sword, and say, y’know, “I’m into jihad!”

That is extraordinarily attractive!

So speaks Dubbo-born-fifth-generation-Australian, Muslim-convert Raisah bint Alan Douglas — ‘misrepresented’ in her own words on the ABC-TV program Jihad Sheilas — describing her first meeting with her second husband (of five).

Sounding for all the world like some adolescent, airheaded Aussie sheila gushing over her infatuation with young Johnny, the ‘misunderstood’ town hood, this is one of the more ... um ... memorable quotes from a program in which Ms bint Alan Douglas seeks to illuminate for us infidels the life-choices she has made over the past 30-or-so years.

Substitute ‘knowledge’ for ‘cool’, the beard for sideburns, and the sword for a flick-knife or motorcycle drive-chain, and her life-story could perhaps be splendidly told in the form of a musical along the lines of Grease, by way of The Lords of Flatbush, with a classic rock’n’roll soundtrack:

Just because he doesn’t do what
Everybody else does
That’s no reason why
I can’t give him all my love
He’s always good to me
Always treats me tenderly
’Cause he’s not a ter’rist — no no no!
He’s not a ter’rist — no no no!
— To me-e-e-e-e-e!

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Much explained

Tim Dunlop boils down an experiment that illumines much observed phenomena in the blogosphere:

Groups of people were brought together and divided according to their political views (left-of-centre and right-of-centre, or “conservative” and “liberal” in US parlance) and the groups were then invited to discuss amongst themselves various key social and political issues. The issues included civil unions, global warming, affirmative action and others...

The results were simple. In almost every group, members ended up with more extreme positions after they spoke with one another. Discussion made civil unions more popular among liberals; discussion made civil unions less popular among conservatives. Liberals favored an international treaty to control global warming before discussion; they favored it more strongly after discussion. Conservatives were neutral on that treaty before discussion; they strongly opposed it after discussion...

Aside from increasing extremism, the experiment had an independent effect: it made both liberal groups and conservative groups significantly more homogeneous—and thus squelched diversity.

Kind of explains the sort of stuff that occurs, for instance, here, here and here.

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Give a dictator an even break

In a recent column Greg Sheridan pleads, “If only Pervez were more like Suharto.”

Sometimes the word dictator can prevent clear thinking in the Western liberal mind, as often does the word war. But, as George Orwell observed, wars have results, and different wars have different results, depending who wins.

So it is with dictators. There are more and less ruthless, bloodthirsty, legitimate and effective dictators. The quality of the dictator influences profoundly the quality of the nation.

Ooh, Sheridan has my head spinning with all this ‘realist’ talk of mach politik... but I will persevere and take the plunge with him.

Sheridan denounces Musharraf as “a weak, ineffective and foolish dictator” because, for instance, he has failed to stem the rising tide of Islamist extremism in his country. Apparently such extremism in Indonesia is not an issue for Sheridan, forgetting that it’s almost certainly an issue for the victims of the Bali bombings and their families.

By contrast, Suharto was presumably a strong, effective and astute dictator, a veritable pin-up boy of dictatorhood by Sheridan’s lights.

Suharto was a dictator and there were many bad things about his rule, especially his human rights record. But here’s the complex bit: he built a modern Indonesia that was capable of sustaining democracy.

It may not occur to Sheridan, but it may be the case that Indonesian democracy survived despite Suharto, thanks to the aspirations and dedication of millions of his countrymen.

But okay, giving the much-maligned Suharto the benefit of the doubt, surely Sheridan doesn’t need it pointed out to him that Suharto had over two decades, not to mention thousands upon thousands of bloody corpses, head-start on Musharraf.

It’s early days yet, so Musharraf may yet earn his place in Sheridan’s pantheon of benevolent despots. Give a dictator an even break!

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