andy – Page 10 – Digital Apocrypha

Extremists

There has been a lot of debate over the last few weeks about the BBC’s decision to allow the leader of the British National Party, Nick Griffin, to appear on the Question Time programme. I wanted to set-out some of my thoughts on this.

To be clear: I hate and dispise the BNP. It is vile, racist, anti-semitic, hateful, and I do not want to share a country (or planet) with it or its moronic supporters.

So, what to do?

The BBC’s position appears to be that the BNP is a legal political party with a significant body of support, and, as such, they should be represented in BBC current affairs programming in the interests of ‘balance’ and ‘fairness’. The BNP seems to agree, while presumably also believing that the BBC are leftist commie race-traitors who will be first up against the wall…

The opposing view is that the BNP is an extremist organisation and should not be legitimised by an appearance on a high-profile, respected television programme. The phrase “oxygen or publicity” gets used a lot here.

Reading blog comments on the BBC News site, the Guardian, and others (such as the Guido Fawkes’ blog), a lot of people seem to be saying “freedom of speech… let Griffin onto the programme and everyone will see that he’s a nazi.” This is the “give him enough rope” approach. Maybe he will expose his and the BNP’s true nature, live on national TV. That would be a great result.

But what if he doesn’t?

Nick griffin isn’t stupid. Yes, he holds truly vile opinions, but he’s not stupid either. He’s also a relatively seasoned public performer and is articulating a world-view that is, unfortunately, highly plausible to a significant number of of my fellow citizens. Almost one million people voted for the BNP in the lst European election. When he apperas on TV tomorrow evening he will know that he’s not in the back-room of some pub where he can say what he really thinks to people who think the same way. He’ll be bland and moderate, with maybe just a bit of “straight-talking victim of the liberal political establishment” thrown in, because his sole aim will be to be accepted as just another politician. Someone that ordinary people can vote for. He want to be legitimised.

What if that is the outcome? Well, France discovered how this plays-out back in 1984. Voting BNP will become acceptable. We’ll see our first fascist MPs not long after that, and the history of 20th-century Europe tells us where this can lead.

If the BBC is correct that they have an obligation to provide a platform to all legal political parties, and I suspect that they are, then the BNP must cease to be a legal political party. I am aware that this can be interpreted as elitist: “some people are just not smart enough to see what the BNP really is, and so ‘we’ must protect them for their own good.” Maybe it is, but sometimes a state (society?) must recognise the inevitability of human failbility and protect its people from the consequences of their own actions.

How to do this? I don’t want politicians deciding that other politicians should be banned. Thats just a short-cut to the sort of society that the BNP want to create. Instead I’d like some kind of socially-agreed ‘filter’. If an organisation can pass through the filter then they have the right to be treated as legitimate, and can enjoy the priviliges that that brings (like arguing on Question Time). If they can’t then they stay illegitimate (which is not necessarily the same as illegal) and the police/MI5 keep an eye on them.

The criteria for the filter should be decided by society as a whole. I suggest that prerequisites are a commitment to democracy, equality, and freedom under the law. Any party that wants to remove rights from their fellow citizens, as the BNP does, would fail. Formulating this filter would be difficult, especially an a diverse and fractured society, but if nations can agree on constitutions and human-rights treaties and acts, then we could do this.

I really hope that tomorrow night the country sees Nick Griffin and the BNP for what they really are: hate-filled fascists. But I am afraid that a process has been started, and I fear for the future.

Conversation with my five-year-old son

Him: Daddy. My brain knows the answer to every question!

Me: (Thinks) Ok. Is it possible to factor any number in linear time?

Him: (Without stopping to think) Yes!

Me: How?

Him: … I don’t know…

Me: Ah. Well… Which painting is better – the Raft of the Medusa or the Mona Lisa?

Him: The Daft of the Haducer?

Economy. Stupid.

I love it when this thing forces me to think.

The blog post that would have been here – about the economy no less – is sitting safely in the drafts folder until I figure-out a way to express my opinion on that subject without it being full of logical holes and arguments that are just… well, wrong.

Its probably because I know next-to-nothing about economic public policy, but it would be nice if I could realise that without having to write 300+ words first…

—

Meanwhile…

If you want some useful perspective on the economic situation then you could do worse than read about how Barclays Bank got a senior High Court judge out of bed in the middle of the night to prevent the Guardian from publishing Barclays internal memos detailing systematic, large scale tax avoidance by Barclays.

Despite the efforts of Barclay’s clueless corporate lawyers, and the probably equally clueless judge, the documents are up on Wikileaks. The one about Project Knight (PDF) is particularly interesting. I wonder how many schools the tax that they avoided would have paid for? While you’re there, check-out the Guardian’s extensive investigation of corporate tax avoidance.

Me? Angry?

Test

This is a test of posting a blog entry from my G1 using Postbot.

Tweeting

I’ve decided to try Twitter and I don’t know why.

My tweets (that term is always going to sound wierd) are here, if you really want to know.

This is what happens when you get bored waiting for a train and you have mobile broadband web access in your pocket.

Ten years of MSDN Magazine could be yours!

I have ten years of Microsoft Systems Journal / MSDN Magazine (Oct 1997 to Feb 2007) taking up space in my house. The local universities have (wisely) declined my offer to donate them. If you want them and Google has brought you here then you can have them. You collect. I’m in South Manchester (UK).

After this I’ll try freecycle and then (reluctantly) they go in the recycle bin.

Being Mobile

Yesterday I bought a T-Mobile G1 – the “Googlephone”.

I haven’t had much time to play with it yet, but it seems like a great piece of technology.The broadband access to email and maps, the user-interface, and the general build quality are very good. I hear it also does phone calls. I hope to have more to say about it later.

But there’s a story here.

Some time in early 1998 I read the following on David Bennahum’s (now long-defunct) Meme mailing list:

8:30 am, mid-April, standing on the platform of Track 3, waiting for the Times Square shuttle to take me to Grand Central Station. About six hundred people are queued up, clustered in blobs along memorized spots where we know the subway doors will open. Most are just standing. Some are reading the morning papers. I’m downloading email through a metal ventilation shaft in the ceiling. I point my wireless modem like a diving rod toward the breeze coming down from the street above. I can see people’s feet criss-crossing the grate. If wind can get down here this way, I figure packets of data can too. (Link)

He was describing his experience of mobile, wireless internet connectivity using Palm Pilot with an attached (bulky) Novatel Minstrel modem. This image stuck in my mind. I had had net access since the late eighties as a student, and limited access at work (I’m a developer) since about 1993, but always tethered to a desk. This mobile internet idea was cool. I decided that I had to get some of this.

In late 1998 I bought my first mobile computing device – a Philips Velo 500. This was pretty curring-edge at the time: about as big as a thick paperback, it ran Windows CE 2, had a monochrome LCD display with a green backlight, and a “chicklet” keyboard. Crucially, it also had a built-in 19.2kb/s modem, and built-in browser and email client. I had great fun plugging it into phone lines and showing people “look… email… web…!”. It wasn’t all that impressive, though, and it was too big and heavy to fit into a pocket.I didn’t yet have a mobile phone, and the Velo wouldn’t have connected to it anyway. All in all, not really what I’d imagined.

In late 1999 I bought a Palm Vx. This was a significant improvement. Even with its tiny 33.6kb/s modem clipped on it would fit comfortably in a jacket pocket. I bought some third-party brower and email software. Then I got a mobile phone with an IRDA modem, and suddenly I could sit in Starbucks downloading my email like a proper alpha geek. For a couple of years that was my primary personal email system. It was slow, though – GSM data runs at about 9kb/s. Also, making sure that the phone stayed in line of sight with the Vx was awkward. But it worked.

By 2004 I had acquired an HP 4150 PDA and a GPRS phone. This was more like it! The 4150 had a colour screen with decent resolution and the Bluetooth/GPRS connection was quite fast. It was annoying that that I had to fiddle with both devices to turn bluetooth on before accessing the net, the data charges were pretty steep, and I now had two devices to carry around. The main problem, though, was that Windows CE was just plain awful to use. Hmm. Still not right.

So now I have this G1. It has a high-resolution screen, okay keyboard, always-on broadband, and its fairly small. Its my fourth personal generation of mobile internet device, and it finally seems that it might be what I wanted back in 1998 – although I didn’t know what that was at the time. We’ll see.

(I still have the velo and the Vx.)

Author: andy