unspeak

A question, inspired by this ruckus in Jamie Kenny’s comments. Is the notion of a manufactured controversy analytically useful? I can see that the ideas of fake consensus, or fear-uncertainty-and-doubt, are useful. But manufactured controversy presumes that someone is manufacturing the controversy. Presumably they are doing this to make a point of some sort, unless…

Read More manufactured controversy

Shouldn’t this story be getting just a little more air? So the editor of the News of the Screws is found by an employment tribunal to have bullied one of his reporters to the point that it seriously affected his health, to have tried to exert influence on his doctor, while both the sports editor…

Read More I am now surrounded by liars, clowns, fools, drunks, sycophants and the desperate

OK, so I’ve been off line quite a bit due to a weird perversion called “moving house”. This means that my constituency MP is no longer Philip Hammond, which almost makes it all worthwhile by itself. Hammond was one of the most annoying features of living in wonderful Runnymede & Weybridge; an immensely self-satisfied and…

Read More I heard a rumour that someone got Philled in…

I didn’t grok the significance of “Debi Jones”, a Tory councillor quoted by the Sindy‘s latest WLAN pseudoscience scare piece, until I checked in on this row at the Ministry. In a box-out that doesn’t appear on their website, Jonathan Owen quotes “Debi Jones, Tory councillor for Hightown in Somerset” as saying that: “It seems…

Read More Digital Dave signs up to WLAN psuedoscience

So Dave from PR’s got a vlog, then. Well, that’s only realistically going to be crap, isn’t it? It almost amounts to a definition of blogging that, if you issue a press release to the nationals before you start, that’s not it. May I recommend, instead, one of many fine British blogs? Daniel “Dsquared” Davies…

Read More Three far better things to read than Diddy Dave