Dick Fedorcio is taking a little trip to Westminster to be quizzed. By Keith Vaz’s committee. How times change – Keith Vaz as the standard bearer of public integrity. It’s got to be more convincing to get your second chance after 10 years in the wilderness though.
Meanwhile, has anyone else noticed that the “#AskEdM” hashtag is a shamelessly obvious exercise in trolling? Think about it – how many people who aren’t either political obsessives following up a story or just looking for a fight, or else full-time rightwing howler monkeys, ever hang out in Paul Staines’s comments threads with all the coup fantasies and racebaiting and ZaNuLiebour and EUSSR? Nobody. Really.
So why not lure the torysphere out in the open, somewhere the majority can actually see them behaving in this horrible way? Like Twitter.
And if they notice it, they’ll get angry and look an even more repellent herd of shit-smeared zombies. It’s brilliant. As a side benefit, if Edelmans have managed to rig some network of semiautomated talking-points distribution bots, they’re bound to show up there so they can be identified. And if you were looking for a list of horrible spamming arsewits, Mike Gigglers trying to be hipsters but stuck at the brown-dwarf stage, ZaNuLiebour dittoheads, and other membrane fauna…well, here’s your chance to populate your blacklist. I added dozens. It was a lot of fun.
The only annoying thing is that as far as I know, although Twitter has “lists” that let you group other users and subscribe to their collected output (yeah, like XMPP Collection Nodes) it doesn’t have the inverse operation. So you can’t easily replicate the Team Cymru Bogons BGP feed and automate the process, even if we’ve already got a serviceable darknet.
Elsewhere, I put together a quick network diagram of the top Met-NI interactions. Nothing very surprising except that the commissioner is always sought after, and that John Yates appears to have an independent following with them (surprise!). Of course, your man Dick was probably at all the meetings in this chart.
Finally, some music.
You (Feat. Nina Sky) – Creep (Hannah Holland Remix) by Hannah Holland
I suspect Rushbridger’s letter to Stephenson of last night was designed to give Vaz some questions to ask. As well as to be perhaps the funniest thing ever: an object lesson in how, if you’ve done your homework, 1950s civil servant speak is far cooler than attempts at snappy movie wisecracks.
I’m feeling that the 1950s are striking back: the Age of Is is coming out of hiberation to explain to the Age of Seems exactly where and when it went wrong. These are good times.
Chris Williams