Posts Tagged ‘online life’
Playing whack-a-mole with ‘da media’
‘Da media’ cops a lot of flak. I heard someone complaining on the radio today about the saturation coverage of the Rugby World Cup … every possible angle explored and elaborated upon. Those who work in news and its many-fangled tributaries make a big fat juicy target. Generic criticism rains down on them. It’s instructive […]
Birds of a feather part 2
Ha! A couple of days ago, I commented how a google search led me to a website offering training courses in pick up lines for women … and, judging by the ads on the site, punters in the market for that valuable, um, service also appear interested in paying to learn Gambling tips. Today I […]
Confronted with information indicating we are wrong, we get ‘cranky’
I listened to a brilliant lecture with Q&A on iTunes U last night by Eli Pariser, the author of The Filter Bubble. He was talking about the ideas in his book as part of a London School of Econmics Summer 2011 Public Lectures and Events. (Here’s the iTunes U URL [1 hr 20 min]. He’s […]
Drunken yobos spit in MP’s face, then skite to their mates like idiot schoolboys
Just yesterday I said “As I see it, [Trevor] Mallard cops flak from haters and nutters simply for being part of Labour’s online presence…” Here’s a case in point, from last night — via Cameron Slater and Twitter. How it looks to me: A pair of adolescent drunken yobos (Clint Heine and anonymous ‘inventory2‘) hassling a […]
Privacy? Not if you use Gmail
From Read Write Web … Google Hands Wikileaks Volunteer’s Gmail Data to U.S. Government Gmail users got a hefty dose of reality today when it was revealed that Google handed over one user’s private data to the U.S. government, who requested it without a search warrant. The contacts list and IP address data of Jacob […]
Coincidence
I swear every word of this is true. A couple of days ago I tweeted a link about a ‘Blogger whose poos don’t smell …’ … referring to my post that day about [update:] recent tactics of the VFC anti-MMP campaign … Well, today after I picked him up from school, my son and I […]
Doing the anti-MMP campaign’s dirty work
I’ve been critical of partisan attack blogging (which I called “fixated, credibility-eviscerating attack blogging“). I am troubled (but not ‘shocked‘ or ‘outraged‘) by a demonstrated lack of what I called ‘fair-mindedness’ and the occasional deployment of untruthfulness (I regard that as a far more serious breach) I observe in some political blogs, some of whom […]
David Farrar showing WhaleOil how it’s done
Bloggers* David Farrar and Scott Yorke gave a master class in fair and reasonable political discourse and commentary on Jim Mora’s Afternoons show on Radio NZ National yesterday, which I listened to using the Radio NZ iPhone App late last night. In the context of my conversation with Cameron Slater (via our blogs) — where […]
Claims of ‘Integrity’ in the anti-MMP Campaign accompanied by smear tactics
Are smear tactics compatible with claims of ‘integrity’? I don’t think so. Especially if you piously declare you’re ‘above’ smear tactics and won’t use them … before you do. In context of an earlier discussion about allegations of ‘secret funding’ (Tribalism), I found myself again considering the lobby group Vote For Change Campaign, dedicated to […]
Tribalism
One of the perennial themes of this blog is an exploration of the ‘reasons’ for prejudice and conflict between different groups. See my 2009 post Q: Where does conflict come from? which records Tajfel’s social psychology experiments … Henri Tajfel is perhaps best known for his minimal groups experiments. In these studies, test subjects were divided arbitrarily […]
