Why I blocked Scoble and Kawasaki on Twitter.

I signed up for Twitter several months ago and, in trying to ‘get Twitter’, followed a handful of Twitterati such as Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki and Dave Winer. Trying to digest the deluge of tweets from this lot really didn’t get me any closer to getting Twitter – I could vaguely see how it might be useful, but I no more wanted to be overwhelmed by tweets than I would want to subscribe to an RSS feed of all of Google.

Imagine my surprise when both Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki decided to follow me – and without me having emitted a single tweet. I figured they were just going to try and sell my Twitter ID to some spammer king so I blocked both of them right there and then and, for good measure, I stopped following them too. Anyway, what’s with this numbers game? If there is going to be any value in Twitter for the user, it’s going to be in the quality and not the quantity of the information.

Since I installed TweetDeck a couple of weeks ago Twitter has started to make sense though. Having a number of finely tuned searches running together with a stream of those you follow and the ability to jump into any conversation at any time with minimum effort without being overloaded by detritus has lead me to some amazing and often unexpected links to the rest of the net and to the world at large. Now all I can hope for is that no-one ever finds a way of monetizing Twitter – I’d hate to have to click through an ad every time I follow a link. Ugh!

Of course Craig Murray is a sentimental so-and-so.

For me too, Peter Hain was a hero – I well remember how he helped to fan the flames of hope in South Africa in the early seventies while I was being brought up there. He was in a pantheon that included Nelson Mandela, Joe Slovo, and Robert Mugabe whom he bombastically criticises these days! Ironic then that the older, lesser Hain has become cowardly and treacherous while Mugabe has remained a staunch opponent of perfidious Albion!

While I would feel sorry for most politicians who lose their jobs over a party funding incident, Hain is not one of them. His demise simply means, if I ever came across him in a dark alley, I’ll be better equipped to resist the temptation to kick him in the, err, …shins.

Has Africa Confidential become nothing more than a scandal sheet?

A kind of Hello! magazine of African politics? In the latest issue (AC Vol 49 No 1)  its glee at the imagined prospect of Robert Mugabe’s imminent ousting is barely disguised. Its update on Zimbabwe starts with, “Political plotters in Harare and Johannesburg are injecting some excitement into the run-up to this year’s elections in Zimbabwe with talk about a ‘United Front’ against President Mugabe and the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front.” (my italics)

At a time when the worst floods for many years are causing havoc in all of Southern Africa, including the deaths of at least two dozen people in Zimbabwe with many homes, villages and crops destroyed, Africa Confidential prefers to see the funny side:

“At least it rained a lot over the New Year holiday, so the currency crisis, which meant a disastrous start to the year, may be followed by a comforting harvest.”

Could their source be the celebrity reporter, John Simpson? Are we to read about “Mugabe’s floods” in the next issue?

Dave Winer is right

“Israel is wrong” is a very important post and I’m grateful Dave has put it back after what must have been some pretty ferocious flaming. For a non-politician Dave’s analysis is clear and incisive – perhaps because he is not a politician….

Despite its military strength and the help it gets from the world’s only superpower, Israel is going straight down the path of self destruction. Apartheid South Africa, then also a nuclear capable Goliath, was eventually brought to its knees as a result of the military defeat it suffered in 1988 at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola at the hands of the Cubans.

In 2000 Israel was defeated by Hezbullah in the south of Lebanon after it had occupied that terrain for around two decades. What Israel should have realised is that oppressed people will eventually always rise up to overthrow their oppressors because there comes a point when they have nothing worth losing anymore. This time Israel has made sure both the Lebanese and the Palestinians have nothing left to lose and everything to gain in a bloody war. (Bush has done the same to Afghanistan and Iraq and is planning to do the same to Syria and Iran. Poor world!)

I predict that very soon the name Hassan Nasrallah will be revered as much as the name Nelson Mandela is today.

George Galloway on Celebrity Big Brother

“There are millions of people who are not particularly interested in politics. People who don’t read much other than a daily tabloid. People who have heard over and over again, year in and year out – and in the vilest terms – what a nasty piece of work George Galloway is supposed to be. On the whole these people watch Big Brother – at least the daily digest, often more. No matter how disinterested they might be in politics, no one is ever going to be able to persuade them again that George Galloway is evil. And the next time Galloway makes an “important political speech” it is likely to be listened to with more interest and less cynicism than that of perhaps any other politician. Then Galloway will truly look like the cat that got the cream. Power to the people!”

I participated with these words in the Telegraph’s debate on George Galloway. Neil Williams very kindly commented here and contributed to the debate himself.

Kathy Krajco’s Attempt at Censorship

A while ago, in response to this post by Kathy Krajco, I left a comment on her blog asking her a few questions because, while she was appealing to the reader’s sense of the blatantly obvious in an attempt to demonise George Galloway, she seemed oblivious to one or two axioms herself. I was also somewhat irritated by her infantile reliance on seeing the world divided between good guys and bad guys.

Unfortunately my comment was deleted within about 24 hours after posting it so I cannot recall my exact wording but what I asked was roughly this.

“Are those who illegally invade another people’s country not terrorists? Are those who defend themselves against the subsequent occupation not the good guys and are the occupiers not the bad guys?”

Ms Krajco’s little attempt at censorship indicates to me that she had difficulty in answering my questions. However I am grateful to her because it was this incident which got me thinking that I should perhaps start blogging beyond issues strictly related to Really Learn Spanish.

US air marshalls kill bomb alert passenger

“US air marshals yesterday shot and killed a passenger who claimed to be carrying a bomb in a bag, as he run [sic] down a mobile jet bridge from a plane just after it landed at Miami International airport.” My italics.

Rupert Cornwell, the Independent’s embedded reporter in Washington, happily cites no source for this assertion. It reminds me of when the British police recently shot dead an innocent Brazilian public transport user in London. Then, many of Mr Cornwell’s colleagues uncritically reported that the victim wore a suspiciously bulky jacket and jumped a ticket barrier when confronted by the police.

It was subsequently admitted by the police that he was not wearing a jacket, he jumped no ticket barrier and he was not confronted by police until one of them pumped eight bullets into him while another of his colleagues had him pinned down.

Do these “journalists” have no shame?

PS This post like the one before it originally appeared on my other blog, Really Learn Spanish. I believe the title of this post mirrored that of the article cited above. However the article’s title now reads “Passenger shot dead in airport bomb drama” and the content may also have changed – I don’t know because now one has to pay to read the complete report – not the case when I first came across it.

The Wonderful Wicked WikiPedia!

Dave Winer points to Michael Gartenberg who writes that what WikiPedia lacks, amongst other things, are ethos. He doesn’t mention the other things but that’s OK, I’ll settle for the lack of ethos. My immediate thoughts were, “Thank goodness for that!” The last thing I want are the ethos of one individual or one cabal. Don’t we have enough Rupert Murdochs, Conrad Blacks and other moguls who are quick to tell us what to think? And spare us the ethos of a Robert Woodward or a Judith Miller! The fact that we cannot consume their media output without drowning in their establishment ethos does not stop us from being lied to over and over again.

Was it WikiPedia who persuaded billions that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction, ready to destroy the “free world” at a mere 45 minutes’ notice? Was it WikiPedia who told us that George Galloway took handouts from Saddam Hussein? Was it WikiPedia who has been telling us for years that Fidel Castro is about to die from one fatal disease or another? No Sir, it was the Miami Herald and the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor and Time and Newsweek and the (British) Guardian and the (British) Daily Telegraph and CNN and the BBC who all happily lied to us. Lied to us with ethos, that is!

WikiPedia and the other hand, just like life itself, is a collection of everybody and therefore a distillation of the world’s ethos. And yes, there are people who are going to end up feeling slighted – and rightly so – but the amazing thing is, from that chaotic morass of everybody’s opinions emerges a shining jewel of incredibly handy and comprehensive if, at times, slightly flawed information.

Whenever I come across something new or am reminded that I don’t quite grasp the meaning of Web 2.0 or feel the need to see how others regard a concept I feel I know well, I dive into WikiPedia knowing that within seconds my itch will be pretty well scratched. But since I know WikiPedia is written by anyone who feels like it, I know that what I get is a starting point, a brief explanation, a collection of really useful links and probably, if they exist, references to an authoritative work or two on the subject in hand. The great thing is I know I’m not consistently being fed the official line!

Now, I’m not unsympathetic to victims of the WikiPedia – those who are maligned or even deliberately excluded from history. It is ironic though that, until these last few days, I have never heard of John Seigenthaler Sr or Kevin Marks but now that I do know about them it is that the former is a highly respected ageing but living writer who had nothing to do with any assassination plots and the latter is not only a Technorati guru but a seminal figure in the history of podcasting.

However I do think that, except in certain well justified cases such as when there is the possibility of being transported on a US ghost plane to Europe or Afghanistan for what horrors lay in wait at a dark and secret location, WikiPedia would be a better product (in the mathematical and not the commercial sense) if authors were expected to identify themselves. I haven’t read the FAQs so I don’t know the rationale behind allowing so much anonymity – the answer is probably what Donald Rumsfeld would call an unknown known.

While people should have the right to say whatever they want, they should also be prepared to be identified as the creators of their public utterances. Otherwise we get situations where a media celebrity like Adam Curry becomes publicity shy and we really cannot have that!