Top Stories and Blog Review – Tuesday 13th Jan
Nationwide
Funding Halted For Stem Cell Research.
Tories Back in Double Figure Poll Lead.
Army Must Confront Barrack Culture.
£10,000 Golden Handcuffs Offer for the Best Teachers.
International
Ban Ki-moon pleads for peace in Gaza.
Bush defends his record in office.
Obama Will Close Gitmo in First Week in Office.
French Intellectual Tries to Solve World Poverty.
DAILY BLOG REVIEW / by Douglas Johnson
The Lay Scientist - lays into spurious medical claims.
Poliblog Perspective - reviews online archives of British election material. Gave me almost as much a thrill as this.
James Hooper - deconstructs the Pro-Life.
Splintered Sunrise - on Unionism’s strange affinity with invaders.
The Daily (Maybe) - Israel has effectively banned Arab MPs from sitting in the Knesset. Even those who think Israel should exist. Hamas must be pleased.
New Direction - 76% of Mail readers have racist tendencies. ORLY?
Join us at the Convention on Modern Liberty
Are you concerned about the increasing threat to our civil liberties from this government? Do you fear that our culture is becoming too accommodating of authoritarian sentiments? Do you worry about how much power the police are being given every day?
Do you want to fight for your liberties? Do you want to meet with others and get organised? Well, the time has come for that.
On 28th of February a group of people and organisations from across the political spectrum are holding the Convention On Modern Liberty across Britain.
This isn’t just about the triumvirate of big issues such as ID cards, CCTV and the DNA database (42 days is thankfully out of the picture now but still in the background). It also incorporates other issues such as collecting information on football fans, increasing police powers not just to snoop on us, but also on terrorism related legislation.
continue reading… »
Malcolm Gladwell and the social mobility white paper
Polly Toynbee’s column today enthusiastically reports, as Labour’s biggest idea for 11 years no less, that today’s white paper on opportunity and social mobility will announce government plans to introduce a public duty on public bodies to address class disadvantage. The dynamics of advantage and disadvantage in Britain today are complex. But we can not understand them without bringing class back in.
A Christmas present from my brother meant that I read Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Outliers’ over the holidays, a book whose pre-publication buzz included the author selling out a theatre. Gladwell is very readable, as those who read his long form journalism in the New Yorker (see www.gladwell.com) will know. And I have little sympathy with the criticism that he popularises research. This is A Good Thing: he seems to me to play very fairly in citing and crediting academic sources.
What surprised me is how political – and how essentially social democratic – a book it is. The broader Freakonomics phenomenon often strikes me as a rather apolitical series of conjuring tricks. I was expecting something similar here: Gladwell’s ‘ethnic theory of plane crashes’, the focus of his stage talk, was much discussed in the media.
The smugness of the right
The smugness pours through Iain Dale’s article at the Guardian’s Comment is Free site, as Dale tries to assess how much of a competitor Derek Draper’s Labour List is likely to be to sites such as Conservative Home.
Liberal Conspiracy is too serious, according to Dale, so there is room open on the Left for a big blog, but the smugness threatens to choke off whatever point Dale was making when he says, “It would be good…to have some real competition for a change.”
In the words of my forefathers, what an arrogant little shoite Iain Dale is. What I’d like to know is this: by what standard can Conservative Home or the Spectator Coffee House be judged as more successful than any individual or collective Left effort? More visits? By that definition, the websites of the mainstream meedja have us all beaten – but the very reason we bloggers write in the first place is that we don’t want to read inane drivel. Quality matters – not just popular appeal.
continue reading… »
Obama’s 100 Days for Human Rights
Effective online campaigns often draw in supporters by asking them to do something simple, such as signing a petition or sending an e-mail. Effective lobbyists often ask for small, well defined, incremental steps, that a Government can act upon for a quick public releations “win”.
Amnesty’s Obama’s 100 Days Campaign uses both these insights (from the field of behavioural economics, all the rage in 2008) to lobby the incoming administration on Human Rights. Despite the fact that Obama is massively popular, he still requires a great deal of political capital to push back some of the human rights abuses enacted during President Bush’s eight disastrous years.
Not many people have signed the petition yet. Why not add your name to the list?
continue reading… »
Top Stories and Blog Review – 12th Jan
Nationwide
Cameron refuses to rule out Clarke despite Eurosceptics
Heathrow’s third runway to fall foul of EU rules
BBC chief backs merger of Channel 4 and Five
Prominent British Jews call for ceasefire in Gaza
International
Carbon cost of Googling revealed
Palestinian death toll tops 900
Few in U.S. see Al-Jazeera’s coverage of Gaza war
Emphasis on economy, Obama looks to history
DAILY BLOG REVIEW / by Jennie Rigg
Charlie Brooker is looking for a wife. He can bog off if he thinks he’s having mine.
Renegade Evolution on Jacqui Smith’s proposals re: prostitution, with some notes on some feminist bloggers (note to the uninitiated: Ren Evol is a porn star, and is somewhat sweary. She’s almost certainly NSFW).
Hagley Road to Ladywood has a sterling post on how to deal with trolls.
(Probably not) The Daily Mail reports on Twitter’s inability to spot a parody (hat-tip: Helen Duffet).
The Honourable Lady Mark is wondering if frugality would help him to survive the credit crunch, and how to go about obtaining this frugality stuff.
Julian Hall posts about political comedy.
Political Betting‘s Forecaster of the Year 2009 competition is live.
And finally, Perlmonger wants to know who you think would be the last home secretary standing, if all the surviving ones were locked in a room with nothing but water and very sharp knives till they ate each other (my vote is for Ken Clarke).
Vatican in rampant misogyny shocker!
Vatican releases official statement saying that women’s wee is unholy.
“We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill,” he said, without elaborating further.
Another day, another scare story designed to misinform the public about the dangers of oral contraception when the real problem here is that the forces of conservatism just don’t dig female reproductive self-determination. continue reading… »
Government spending: what people want to cut
One interesting question in the most recent YouGov survey (pdf) asked people to decide “If the Government did decide to cut back on its plans for spending, which two or three of these would you most like it to cut?”
The answers should give all of us some pause for thought.
continue reading… »
Save the UK blogosphere’s reputation
Admittedly, the Weblog Awards are already sullied by the fact Neil Clark won last year’s Best UK Blogger award. If that wasn’t bad enough, Melanie Phillips is this year’s front-runner. I have no time for awards usually but honestly, that takes the biscuit. The close runner-up is Created in Birmingham, so do the British interwebs a favour and vote for them, daily. Obsessively if necessary.
The misogyny of New Labour
Thought I might as well enter the fray – please see Cath Elliiot’s excellent post below for a questioning of the legitimacy of some of the groups I reference.
Again, New Labour trades women for votes… I’ve been meaning to write about this for some time.
One issue that us feminists must get our myriad acts together on this year is the legal status of prostitution.
In the coming weeks, Jacqui Smith – a politically-expedient goody two-shoes, if there ever was one – provides us with a golden opportunity to unite in favour of keeping all aspects of prostitution legal (and I DON’T include include kidnapping, trafficking, or rape in that catch-all, as you’ll see at the end of this piece*).
As many of you will know (debate has raged on a range of great feminist blogs and at the marvellous Shiraz Socialist, where you’ll find a comprehensive background) Smith’s 2009 wheeze is to squeeze further votes out of the righteous arm of the voting public by tightening prostitution laws at the next readings of the Policing and Crime Bill. Sex workers themselves are opposed to Smith’s proposals – they believe, rightly, that criminalising sex work will exclude them from police help, legal recourse and support, and society itself.
It’s the flagrant dismissal of women that gets so many of us: women are utterly expendable in New Labour eyes. The English Collective of Prostitutes and the International Union of Sex Workers reported that they weren’t even contacted by the Home Office about Smith’s proposals.
continue reading… »
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» The real agenda behind Telegraph’s abortion investigation
» How Scotland Yard monitors prying bloggers and journalists
» When disabled people want to work – employers can hold the back
» Revealed: the reality behind Workfare and why it doesn’t work
» Job snob? No, I’ve got the T-shirt
» Why country-by-country reporting matters to our wellbeing
» If Unions want to become stronger, they need to modernise
» Why work “reforms” in Spain are a warning for workers across Europe
» Five things you need to know about the NHS bill
» Bigger. Fatter. Gypsier. More Racist.
» Laziness levels in Britain getting lazier, wails government
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