I often find myself in accord with my friend Victor Billot. His piece on the UK General Election can be found here. And yes, Britain, this is how many of us looking in see it—like Victor I have dual nationality (indeed, my British passport is my only current one, having been a little busy to […]
Read More… from Victor Billot on the 2019 UK General Election
I thought I could be archaic on a few things—I still use diphthongs in text in our publications (æsthetic, Cæsar), the trio of inst., ult. and prox. in written correspondence, and even fuel economy occasionally in mpg (Imperial) because I am useless at ℓ/100 km and too few countries use km/ℓ. However, even I had […]
Read More… from When you let amateurs like Rees-Mogg write style guides
I didn’t read this thinking of Trump, which is what the Tweeter intended. I read it thinking of New Zealand. Heard the ‘If you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?’ bullshit a lot—I dare say every immigrant to this nation has. English-born American columnist Sydney J. Harris, in 1969, answered it better than […]
Read More… from ‘If you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?’
Facebook’s woes over Cambridge Analytica have only prompted one reaction from me: I told you so. While I never seized upon this example, bravely revealed to us by whistleblower Christopher Wylie and reported by Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison of The Guardian, Facebook has shown itself to be callous about private data, mining preferences even […]
Read More… from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: the signs were there for years, if one only looked
How right Kalev Leetaru is on Wikipedia’s decision to ban The Daily Mail as a source. This decision, he concludes, was made by a cabal of 50 editors based on anecdotes. I’ve stated before on this blog how Wikipedia is broken, the abusive attitude of one of its editors, and how even luminaries like […]
Read More… from Fifty editors at Wikipedia ban Daily Mail based on some anecdotes
Above: Facebook kept deleting Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph each time it was posted, even when Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten did so, preventing its editor-in-chief from responding. There’s a significant difference between the internet of the 1990s and that of today. As Facebook comes under fire for deleting the “napalm girl” photograph from the Vietnam […]
Read More… from The big difference with the internet of the ’90s: it served the many, not the few
I’ve been reading this Grauniad interview with Rory Stewart, MP, referred by Jordan McCluskey. I’m told that Stewart, and Labour’s Frank Field are the two worth listening to these days in British politics. On Stewart, someone who can speak with a Scots accent and has lived in Hong Kong must be a good bloke. […]
So James Murdoch has announced the end of the News of the World. It’s no biggie: as others have discovered, a domain name for The Sun on Sunday has been registered, and if this is by an agent of News International, it simply makes sense for the Murdoch Press to consolidate its tabloid brands and […]
I don’t think there are too many people prepared to condone the News of the World’s alleged hacking of the cellphone of murdered 13-year-old Milly Dowler in 2002. Not only did the Murdoch Press paper hack the phone, but when her voicemail filled up, The Guardian alleges that the News of the World began deleting […]
Read More… from Will we dump tabloids now we know more about the Milly Dowler hacking?
Monika Flückiger/Creative Commons And people thought I was de-Googling my life or being mean to Google. What about Mr Murdoch and his entire firm? We all know his comments about how he wanted to block Google News’s bot and had spoken out against that. While little happened on that front with the exception of […]
Read More… from Rupert Murdoch has it in for Google more than I ever could