RosieBell

Bunkering up with Julian Assange

Andrew O'Hagan tells a fascinating story of what it was like to ghost write Julian Assange's autobiography.  He did this under contract with Canongate Books, a hip publisher based in Edinburgh.

O'Hagan has got hold of a character who could be one of fiction's great monsters with a toddler's grasp of other people's motives and rights.  Assange holed up talking without interruption for 3 hours at a time is strongly reminiscent of Hitler in his table talk and his lashings out at everyone as he sits in one of his bunkers (Ellingham Hall, the Ecuadorian Embassy) has been portrayed in Downfall.  He has real enemies and he has imaginary ones as well.  The many people who fall out with him do so because of envy or malice.

His paranoia has its comic side:-

He appeared to like the notion that he was being pursued and the tendency was only complicated by the fact that there were real pursuers. But the pursuit was never as grave as he wanted it to be. He stuck to his Cold War tropes, where one didn’t deliver a package, but made a ‘drop off’. One day, we were due to meet some of the WikiLeaks staff at a farmhouse out towards Lowestoft. We went in my car. Julian was especially edgy that afternoon, feeling perhaps that the walls were closing in, as we bumped down one of those flat roads covered in muck left by tractors’ tyres. ‘Quick, quick,’ he said, ‘go left. We’re being followed!’ I looked in the rear-view mirror and could see a white Mondeo with a wire sticking out the back.

‘Don’t be daft, Julian,’ I said. ‘That’s a taxi.’

‘No. Listen to me. It’s surveillance. We’re being followed. Quickly go left.’ Just by comical chance, as I was rocking a Sweeney-style handbrake turn, the car behind us suddenly stopped at a farmhouse gate and a little boy jumped out and ran up the path. I looked at the clock as we rolled off in a cloud of dust. It said 3.48.

‘That was a kid being delivered home from school,’ I said. ‘You’re mental.’

There are some good moments with Assange, the expert hacker and courageous activist:-

At the time of the Egyptian uprising, Mubarak tried to close down the country’s mobile phone network, a service that came through Canada. Julian and his gang hacked into Nortel and fought against Mubarak’s official hackers to reverse the process. The revolution continued and Julian was satisfied, sitting back in our remote kitchen eating chocolates.

That is why I didn’t walk out. The story was just too large. What Julian lacked in efficiency or professionalism he made up for in courage. What he lacked in carefulness he made up for in impact.

But on the whole the Wikileaks endeavour suffered from that symptom of the internet age, the short attention span, the hook, the click-bait and the Twitter storm of petty feuds:-

He’s not a details guy. None of them is. What they love is the big picture and the general fight. They love the noise and the glamour, the history, the spectacle, but not the fine print. That is why they released so many cables so quickly: for impact. And there’s a good argument to support that. But, even today, three years later, the cables have never had the dedicated attention they deserve. They made a splash and then were left languishing. I always hoped someone would do a serious editing job, ordering them country by country, contextualising each one, providing a proper introduction, detailing each injustice and each breach, but Julian wanted the next splash and, even more, he wanted to scrap with each critic he found on the internet. As for the book, he kept putting it off.

Assange makes a virtue of scientific journalism, where readers take the raw data and process it for themselves.  But of course we can't do that any more than we can make our laptops from oil, metals and silicon.  We need context and background information to gauge whether a piece of information is significant or trivial.

I thought, if Julian was serious and strategic, that WikiLeaks should not only bale stuff out onto the web, but should then facilitate the editing and presenting of that work in a way that was of permanent historical value. Perry Anderson of Verso Books had the same thought, and I put it to Julian that the WikiLeaks Map of the World should be a series which provided for a proper academic study of what the biggest security leaks in history had revealed, with expert commentary, notes, essays and introductions. It would provide the organisation with a lasting, grown-up legacy, a powerful, orderly continuation of its initial work.

Julian came to lunch at my flat in Belsize Park. Tariq Ali came and so did Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review, as well as an American editor for Verso called Tom Mertes. Anderson’s idea was that Verso would publish a series of books, or one book in which each chapter showed how the US cables released by WikiLeaks had changed the political position of a particular country. A writer who knew, say, Italy, would introduce the chapter and the same would be done for every country and it would be very meticulous and well-made. Julian gave a big speech at the beginning, the middle and the end. He clearly liked Tariq but had no sense of him as someone who knew a lot more about the world than he did. Although the idea for the book had come from Verso, Julian preferred to give a lecture about how most academics were corrupted by their institutions.

.... . Anyone else would have jumped at the chance of the Verso project but as Julian drove off in a taxi I knew he would never call Tariq about this or lay any of the groundwork they’d agreed. Julian was already more concerned about claiming the idea for himself, an idea that he would never see to fruition. The meeting had called for responsible action, when what Julian loved was irresponsible reaction.

Everyone has one rule for themselves and another for  the rest of the world but Assange takes this to the nth degree:-

Julian was getting a lot of flak in the press for making Wiki-employees sign contracts threatening them with a £12 million lawsuit if they disclosed anything about the organisation. It was clear he didn’t see the problem. He has a notion that WikiLeaks floats above other organisations and their rules. He can’t understand why any public body should keep a secret but insists that his own organisation enforce its secrecy with lawsuits. Every time he mentioned legal action against the Guardian or the New York Times, and he did this a lot, I would roll my eyes, but he didn’t see the contradiction. He was increasingly lodged in a jungle of his own making and I told Jamie it was like trying to write a book with Mr Kurtz.

He was in a state of panic at all times that things might get out. But he manages people so poorly, and is such a slave to what he’s not good at, that he forgets he might be making bombs set to explode in his own face. I am sure this is what happens in many of his scrapes: he runs on a high-octane belief in his own rectitude and wisdom, only to find later that other people had their own views – of what is sound journalism or agreeable sex – and the idea that he might be complicit in his own mess baffles him.

He has the common tendency to fight far more bitterly with those who share his world view than those who outright reject it:-

the Guardian was an enemy because he’d ‘given’ them something and they hadn’t toed the line, whereas the Daily Mail was almost respected for finding him entirely abominable. The Guardian tried to soothe him – its editor, Alan Rusbridger, showed concern for his position, as did the then deputy, Ian Katz, and others – but he talked about its journalists in savage terms. The Guardian felt strongly that the secret material ought to be redacted to protect informants or bystanders named in it, and Julian was inconsistent about that. I never believed he wanted to endanger such people, but he chose to interpret the Guardian’s concern as ‘cowardice’.

He's full of repugnant sexism and anti-Semitsm:-

They certainly had transcripts of our interviews, sittings in which he’d uttered, late at night, many casual libels, many sexist or anti-Semitic remarks, and where he spoke freely about every aspect of his life.

As well as wasting time to a heart-breaking degree, those who engage with Assange find themselves out of goodwill and out of pocket. Canongate tried to salvage the autobiography and published what they could.

Canongate Books, the Edinburgh-based publisher, has blamed Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's "failure to deliver" the book he was contracted to produce for plunging into operating loss.

Accounts, which have just become available from Companies House, reveal Canongate tumbled to an operating loss of £368,467 in 2011, from a profit of £1.08 million at this level in 2010. Canongate acknowledged this was its worst performance "in many years".

For Andrew O'Hagan it hasn't all been a minus.  He came out with a great story to tell, and that's enough pay off for any writer.

(H/T - HJ) 

New Year Resolution - Don't waste time and blood pressure with the Spiked stable

A handy synopsis to the Spiked team of writers, especially Brendan O'Neill.

1. [Subject] reveals a contempt for the working classes.

2. [Subject] is thinly disguised misanthropy.

3. [Subject] is merely an exercise in liberal self-congratulation.

4. [Subject] encourages a culture of victimhood.

5. [Subject] shows we’re governed by alarmist scaremongers.

6. [Subject] is an attempt to censor dissent.

If I ever met the person who wrote that, I'd buy them a drink.

Happy New Year!

Lord of the Trees

As everyone knows, ash dieback has arrived and may wipe out tens of millions of ash that make up about 30% of Britain's trees.  Even for those who couldn't tell an ash from an oak, this is a terrible thought.   Britain is an urban nation and its people use the woods and countryside for refreshment.  The favourite activity among the British people is a stroll in the country.  Some of the those strolling will be gardeners, or know something of botany and be able to name the trees, but many will only see the "trees" - bare and budding, green or yellow leafed, according to the season.

Larkin, who caught British attitude to their churches (affection, residual wonder, ignorance) in Church Going also caught the city-dweller's view of trees.  "The trees are coming in to leaf"  he says about the signs of spring approaching that the workers in a city will comment on along with the lengthening days and the crocuses in the park. What trees he doesn't specify - oaks, beech, lime or whatever else grows in a city park. Their relations to human beings are symbolic - that of life renewing  - begin "afresh, afresh, afresh."

An earlier rural age, when writing about trees, knew their names and properties - the uses of the timber and the fruit.  So in Edmund Spenser's Fairie Queene you have one of those lists that medieval poets loved so much, whether of birds, animals, sins, virtues or mythological figures.  His people take shelter in a grove:- 

Much can they prayse the trees so straight and hy,
The sayling Pine, the Cedar proud and tall,
The vine-prop Elme, the Poplar never dry,
The builder Oake, sole king of forrests all,
The Aspine good for staves, the Cypresse funerall.

The Laurell, meed of mightie Conquerours
And Poets sage, the Firre that weepeth still,
The Willow worne of forlorne Paramours,
The Eugh obedient to the benders will,
The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill,
The Mirrhe sweete bleeding in the bitter wound,
The warlike Beech, the Ash for nothing ill,
The fruitfull Olive, and the Platane round,
The carver Holme, the Maple seeldom inward sound.

"The Ash  for nothing ill" - I thought that faint praise like calling someone "harmless" - then read this:-

The resilient and ubiquitous ash has always been respected for its benevolent or healing properties. At least three British saints threw their wooden staffs to the ground to see them sprout miraculously into ash trees.

Among the rituals associated with the tree is a widespread practice involving the passing of an injured or ill child through a cleft deliberately made in the tree, which subsequently heals over, as does the child.

There is usually a utilitarian aspect to such veneration, and ash wood has been used to make ploughs, axles, blocks (on sea and land), planks and all manner of sporting accoutrements, from tennis racquets to oars.

The ash then is the healing tree and the making tree.

Spenser's tree list is not what someone could realistically observe in a forest. Olives and beech are unlikely to co-exist on the same terrain. These are trees that are known and trees read about jumbled together, but it's an educated man of his time's view of a tree.  They are fine to look at and, being useful, are woven in to human life.   

But then came the Romantics and trees became part of Nature with a capital "N". Hopkins in Binsley Poplars. 

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,   
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,   
All felled, felled, are all felled;   
 Of a fresh and following folded rank   
 Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled   
Shadow that swam or sank   
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.   
 
O if we but knew what we do   
When we delve or hew—          
Hack and rack the growing green!   
Since country is so tender   
To touch, her being só slender,   
That, like this sleek and seeing ball   
But a prick will make no eye at all,         
Where we, even where we mean   
To mend her we end her,   
When we hew or delve:   
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.   
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve       
Strokes of havoc únselve   
The sweet especial scene,   
Rural scene, a rural scene,   
Sweet especial rural scene.

The tender and fragile country that needs protection.  It is a beloved being under assault from humanity, its foe.  But the rural scene - were these trees being cleared for factories, housing developments or as part of woodland management?  The "rural scene" is English countryside, where trees are felled, coppiced, pollarded and generally managed.   Felling trees is not necessarily wanton destruction.  But there are only two attitudes towards Nature in Hopkins - being her friend and fan or  her destroying foe.  We are here, the trees over there as separate being. 

The complete tree-worshipper was Tolkein.

Frodo . . . laid his hand upon the tree beside the ladder: Never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree's skin and of the life within it.  He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter. It was the delight of the living tree itself.

Tolkein's forests and trees are his most atmospheric writing - whether the gloom of Mirkwood, the malice of the willows in the Old Forest, and reached its apotheosis in the Forest of Fangorn with the Ents, who are half tree and half human:-

Some recalled the chestnut: brown-skinned Ents with large splayfingered hands and short thick legs.  Some recalled the ash: tall straight grey Ents with many-fingered hands and long legs; some the fir (the tallest Ents), and others the birch, the rowan and the linden."

Tolkein said of how he was inspired by trees:-

One of its sources was a great-limbed poplar tree that I could see even lying in bed. It was suddenly lopped and mutilated by its owner, I do not know why. It is cut down now, a less barbarous punishment for any crimes it may have been accused of, such as being large and alive. I do not think it had any friends, or any mourners, except myself and a pair of owls."

From the introduction to Tree and Leaf

So he gets fictional revenge on the cutters and loppers when the Ents and their arboreal infantry charge as a heavy brigade on Isengard, the evil fortress of the tree-killer Saruman. The tree-men rip down the hellhole of stone and metal like a tree's roots can split stone.  Nature takes revenge on the industrial revolution.

At the end of The Lord of the Rings the tree-killer Saruman has continued his evil work by felling trees in The Shire and replacing them with polluting machinery.  He is of course routed and the trees finally prevail.

Tolkein's forests are rather empty of other forms of life - very few birds (which a medieval poet would have had perching on every branch ) and scuttling mammals that I can find even in our fragmentary woods.  A more modern sensibility (post Rachel Carson) that loves the natural world sees trees as habitats and that the loss of swathes of trees is not just those trees gone but the ecosystem they sustained of birds, mammals, fungi, and invertebrates.  A whole world has been lost.

Lost worlds is of course the background of Lord of the Rings.  We are constantly told that Middle Earth has dwindled from an unfallen time when the Elves taught Ents to talk, and the warriors and heroes of this age are picking up the pieces from an earlier grander time. But this is fantasy for the child in us, not grown up tragedy.  Gandalf falls into a deep crevasse, everyone weeps and sings laments, but then he comes back to life.  (Can you imagine Hamlet springing back to his feet, or Lydgate in Middlemarch losing his obstructive wife and making scientific breakthroughs after all?) Along with the pseudo elegaic tone you get the fairy tale ending of all being put right.  The returning Hobbits thwart Saruman and Sam's magic powder makes saplings grow at four times their normal rate.

I remember the yellow marks like the cross on a plague victim's door on the trunks of elms which meant they would be destroyed.  A couple of weeks ago I saw a wych elm sapling in my local park - but I won't ever see the great elms again.  "Many fair things will be lost," says Elrond.  Many fair things have been lost - hedgehogs and sparrows, hedgerows and elms - and now the ash tree.  A percentage of the trees will be resistant to ash dieback and will grow again - but at a much slower pace than the Shire did. Evolution is a magic that takes time.  A species may prevail, but the individual will not be there to see it.

The First Blog - Blog Principles from 1927

I wonder if this was the first Blog.

I found the following in a novel called The Way Things Are  (published 1927).  The heroine, Laura Temple, is visiting her neighbour, Lady Kingsley-Browne, who has been badly upset by the behaviour of her wayward daughter Bebee.  Bebee has caused a huge scandal by moving in with a married man and his wife.

"I must tell you that Bebee, poor darling child, has taken up quite a new line." [said Lady Kingsley-Browne.]

"Oh, what?" exclaimed Laura, her tone of dismay betraying her conviction that any new line followed by Bebee must necessarily be a disastrous one.

"She is leaving him - in fact, she already has left him.  She has - it seems a most extraordinary thing, I know - but she has taken up religion. At least,  I suppose you might call it religion.  Do come nearer the fire, Laura.  I wonder if there any scones, or anything hot? . . .

"Thank you.  But do please go on-"

"It seems as though Bebee has so much personality, poor darling, that she has to express herself in ways that might, in anybody else, seem almost odd."

"Yes."

"It seems she has met a man - I'm sure things would have been just the same had it been another woman-"

Lady Kingsley-Browne paused, but as Laura felt equally sure that whatever "it" might be, things would not have been the same had it been another woman, she made no reply.

"It just happens to have been a man - Ernest Blog is his name, but Americans so often have names that we think odd - well, he has discovered, or invented, a tremendous new creed, and he has quite converted Bebee to it.  And the really bright spot is, that they are on their way to England, to - to try and spread it. . .  I can't tell you how ardently she has taken up this new creed."

"What, exactly, is it?"

". . Mr Blog lays down just one or two broad principles.  Nothing sectarian, you know - it rather reminded me of the Women's Institute movement . . . sort of guiding lines, that makes life simpler for all of us. . .  "

"I should like to hear some of the - the Blog principles, if you can remember them.  I am not laughing, really and truly.  It's only the name that - just for the moment - "

"I know," said Lady Kingsley-Browne forbearingly.  "It has a quaint sound, I am bound to admit.  But the principles seem very simple and beautiful.  She enclosed a sheet, with some Rules of Life written on it, put together by Mr. Blog.  Nothing dogmatic, you know.  Just: It is Better to Speak the Truth than to tell Lies, and Kindness is Right, but Cruelty is Wrong.  Things of that sort.  I liked all that part of it."

"Was there another part, as well?"

"Two other parts.  One was about diet, which always seems to enter tremendously into any new kind of religion. .  . His - Ernest Blog's - idea is nothing cooked.  Only things that have ripened in the sun - and, of course, in this country, that would limit one a good deal.  But anything in the way of drink, and as much of it as one likes.  Prohibition, you see."

"Not in England."

"I know.  Perhaps he'll modify that part of it over here."

"And what else?" said Laura.

"Free Love," said Lady Kingsley-Browne, as one accepting the inevitable.

Later on when Dr Ernest Blog appears he is described as being "exactly two foot high".

So that's the proto-Blog or the  Ur-Blog.  Short, American, cranky, and advancing platitudes as daring originality.  However, you can't really object to the principles of Truth being better than Lies and Kindness than Cruelty - though you can find plenty of writers, on and off blogs,  ready to do so.

The first Blog follower was an egocentric air-head and flake.

(Extract from Chapter XVI of The Way Things Are by E M Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady has never been out of print.  The Way Things Are is republished by Virago Modern Classics.)


E M Delafield on the cover of Life.

Random Blog Irritation

So you do the flaneur's wander round the internet and via a hyperlink at one of your haunts, you settle yourself down at a post.  Modern life. . .

And this is what you find:-

Simon Cowell has only one true love - himself

Why does the hollow, narcissistic king of karaoke have such a hold over our lives?

One of those "we" "our" references - speak for yourself and your loser mates, Mr Paid-Blogger.  So Mr P-B goes on to write his 1000 words about the mental energy he has spent on Simon Cowell is mental energy that only a society in the state of decline would thus have him spend:-

Perhaps the end approaches for the Cowell Dominion, as it did for Mr Blair once he decided that Britain was too insignificant and tried to crack the US. The Cowellite stranglehold on TV audiences, on both sides of the Atlantic, appears to be weakening. Yet it is folly to write him off while he still fascinates so deeply that one cannot read about his preference for black toilet paper – a peculiar choice of hue for reasons plainly unsuited to your breakfast table – without borrowing Metternich’s question about Talleyrand’s death to ask: “Now what did he mean by that?” There is no answer. The only lesson taught by examining the intimate life of Simon Cowell is the hackneyed old one about ourselves. We remain marooned in a time of such gruesome fin de siècle decadence that Mr Cowell’s perplexing taste in loo rolls must, like everything else about him, be analysed for clues to its wider implications as if it were a Supreme Soviet pronouncement at the height of the Cold War.

If this is the fin de siecle decadence, "we" are for horrors to come, and "we" will look back on "our" time when we analysed Cowell's anal-wipes with the same nostalgia as the post-World War I generation for the golden summer of England, 1914.  Also, isn't it grand to be out of the Cold War, and in more frivolous times?  Mr Paid-Blogger will soon be evoking rationing and the blitz as being better for our characters than gaming and Madonna's stage costumes.

Paid-Blogger hasn't got the honesty to say, "I am really interested in Simon Cowell and so are a lot of my readers."  No, he's writing serious analysis on what it means to be interested in Simon Cowell, putting it in a cultural context. He's not a writer for Heat, but a sociologist.  That is a trick that The Guardian pulls and now it has spread to the Daily Telegraph.  I wish it stuck to its old Tory guns and went on about cuckoos and herbaceous borders. 

I can't be bothered reading the thread - "we" have such short attention spans - but I do hope some High Court Judge is there asking, "Who is Simon Cowell?"

If you are idiot enough to want to read more, here's the link.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea minima culpa

I confess to almighty God
and to you, my brothers and sisters,
that I have greatly sinned,
in my thoughts and in my words,
in what I have done and in what I have failed to do,
through my fault, through my fault,
through my most grievous fault;

The Act of Contrition (c1100) is really a model apology.  You say you are greatly at fault, you don't offer excuses for doing what you did, and you don't say, by the way, I did other good stuff and  my intentions were fine.  Also, it is very short.

Not like Johann Hari's apology.  He starts by explaining why he plagiarised - because the people he interviewed didn't produce good copy:-

The first concerns some people I interviewed over the years. When I recorded and typed up any conversation, I found something odd: points that sounded perfectly clear when you heard them being spoken often don’t translate to the page. They can be quite confusing and unclear. When this happened, if the interviewee had made a similar point in their writing (or, much more rarely, when they were speaking to somebody else), I would use those words instead.

He was doing them a favour you see.  He was wanting to make a nice job of it.  Just as an engineer, if he found a few cracks in a bridge he'd constructed, would put on extra thick paint to disguise this ugly appearance. 

In my work, I’ve spent a lot of time dragging other people’s flaws into the light. I did it because I believe that every time you point out that somebody is going wrong, you give them a chance to get it right next time and so reduce the amount of wrongdoing in the world. That’s why, although it has been a really painful process and will surely continue to be for some time, I think in the end I’ll be grateful my flaws have also been dragged into the light in this way.

I, for one, don't believe that dragging other people's flaws into the light is motivated by a desire for their reform.   Dragging other people's flaws into the light doesn't need lofty motives - it is jolly good fun, immensely gratifying and much practised by our opinion writers, professional and amateur.  Think how many people would be pissed off if the targets of their criticism turned over new leaves.  What would they have to write about in happy self-righteousness?  (By the way, this gratitude for having one's flaws exposed is reminiscent of a prominent evangelical Christian caught with a tart and furry handcuffs saying that this is a visitation from the Lord to humiliate them and bring them low and closer to Him, Hallelujah). 

As well as creating a succinct apology, the middle ages had a line in thorough penances.  For inciting the death of Thomas a Becket, Henry II walked to Canterbury Cathedral in sack cloth and ashes and got the monks there to flog him.   

Not so Johann Hari:-

So first, even though I stand by the articles which won the George Orwell Prize, I am returning it as an act of contrition for the errors I made elsewhere, in my interviews. But this isn’t much, since it has been reported that they are minded to take it away anyway. (I apologise to them for the time they’ve had to spend on this.) So second, I am going to take an unpaid leave of absence from The Independent until 2012, and at my own expense I will be undertaking a programme of journalism training. (I rose very fast in journalism straight from university.) And third, when I return, I will footnote all my articles online and post the audio online of any on-the-record conversations so that everyone can hear them and verify they were said directly to me.

After this he will no doubt appear on the Piers Morgan show, saying how this was a humbling experience but he has really learned from it and hopes he is a better person and a better journalist now.   

A few months job training, a career at the end of it and a bit of journalism with footnotes?   A bit flabby, Johann.   No, we need the full-blown medieval pentitential work-out.   Here's what you should do for you plagiarism, misrepresentation and lies. 

Retrieve every article where you interviewed someone and then added words from the interviewee's own works or from other interviewers.   Go through the articles and highlight every phrase that you have interpolated.  Publish results on web.  Leave the comments open and unmoderated. - the modern equivalent of the stocks. 

Better still, act out your interview.  For instance this one with Toni Negri:-

He looks at me very closely, with mild displeasure. He says in a level voice: “I never made an attempt on anyone’s life.” Then, with a shrug, he says to his translator: “I was accused of having committed hold-ups.” So, was that accusation accurate? He takes a long drag on his cigarette. “Stealing money, if it’s necessary, I can understand.” I wait for him to continue, but the sentence hangs there, like his fading smoke. Did you rob banks? “Brecht said that it’s hard to know which is a greater crime, to found a bank or to rob one,” he replies. More waiting, more smoke. He pushes his glasses on to the top of his head with his taut middle finger. “I agree with Brecht,” he says, waving his hand as though to physically push me on to another question.

So you can perform as Negri, with a cigarette as a prop.

Record this and put it on Youtube,  Leave the comments open and unmoderated. 

After a week or so  read  each comment aloud and record yourself reading it.  Put that on Youtube.  Leave the comments open and unmoderated.  And so on . The sadism and schadenfreude of a chunky percentage of internet commenters is up there with our ancestors who chucked things at miscreants sitting in the stocks and cheered at heretic burnings.

Lazy and incompetent journalists who make stuff up to cover their laziness and incompetence are as old as journalism itself.   Young Scrubbs was supposed to cover the parish meeting, couldn't be bothered, invented some copy and sent it in, only to find that at that meeting the parish hall had burned down and the mayor collapsed with a heart attack.  But Hari's other crime, that of using sock puppets to edit Wikipedia entries, really belongs to the internet age.

The other thing I did wrong was that several years ago I started to notice some things I didn’t like in the Wikipedia entry about me, so I took them out. To do that, I created a user-name that wasn’t my own. Using that user-name, I continued to edit my own Wikipedia entry and some other people’s too. I took out nasty passages about people I admire – like Polly Toynbee, George Monbiot, Deborah Orr and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. I factually corrected some other entries about other people. But in a few instances, I edited the entries of people I had clashed with in ways that were juvenile or malicious: I called one of them anti-Semitic and homophobic, and the other a drunk.

What is the pre-internet equivalent of that?  Sending anonymous letters about your enemies to their spouses and employers?  But how crazily malicious that sounds.  Gossiping about them to all and sundry can be dangerous as it may blow back on you, so it is a crime that needs the anonymity of the internet and the invention of Wikipedia.

Hari says of this:-

I am mortified to have done this, because it breaches the most basic ethical rule: don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you. I apologise to the latter group unreservedly and totally.

Of course it is a basic ethical rule taught to us as kiddies not to pull the cat's tail as how would you like it if the cat pulled your tail, but it isn't that which would stop most of us from inventing personae to edit people's Wikipedia entries.   Hari did this hundreds of times,  taking elaborate precautions and creating a whole cast of sock puppets.   Most of us wouldn't do this because it makes you look like a crazy and obsessive loser.  I can imagine some blog commenters that I know (in the internet sense)  doing this, but a writer with a prestigious job on a national broadsheet?  However, I was equally gob-smacked when Orlando Figes, a respected historian, did something similar.  There really is nothing queerer than folk.

So to continue Hari's penance, he can edit each Wikipedia entry where he defamed someone and re-cast it, writing about their sobriety, homophilia, brilliance, tolerance and general sweetness.  Also, since he sent his sock puppets around the internet to infiltrate threads where they abused his enemies and praised the works of Johann Hari he can retrieve each of those items and produce them in a handy compendium somewhere - eg seventhcircleofhell.blogspot.com.  Comments open and unmoderated as above.

One year of this should be enough.  By then he should be very sick of writing and the internet.  However, he should have learned that it's a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive and honesty is the best policy and all such things his parents neglected to teach him.   He may even become known as Honest Hari, the man who never tampered an odometer when he takes up his new career as a used-car salesman.

The Dabbler

The post below is also cross-posted on The Dabbler.

The Dabbler is a lively arts and culture blog.  One of the features I really like is the 1p book review which is a review of a book you can buy for 1p from Amazon.   New books are reviewed all over, will have their five minutes of attention and then most of them will go down the rubbish chute.   An older book that has staying power is worth hearing about.

Blogging Limited

Throwing up line after line of text my hard drive died on Easter Sunday.  No resurrection for it, the PC doctor says.  So until I get a new computer, blogging here will be limited.

Today I went to the internet café round the corner from my work.  I thought being a café they’d sell me a sandwich and I’d be able to eat and surf the net.    However, an “internet café” means a place where you can access the internet, and not necessarily one that sells coffee and snacks. 

Sue me for calling you an ****

I got this message from the Libel Reform Campaign:-

We need you to come to the Houses of Parliament next Tuesday, 23 March, for a mass meeting with MPs to convince them to commit to libel reform.

The Libel Reform Campaign has booked Committee Room 15 at Parliament, and MPs know that we’re coming. Please, if you can, come and join us. Simon Singh will be joining us to tell MPs about the real effect of our libel laws.

The political parties are on the verge of signing up to once in a generation reform of our libel laws. But we don’t have them signed up yet. This is our last chance to lobby parliamentarians before the general election.

So here’s the plan:

Mass lobby of Parliament

2 – 3pm

We’re trying to get as many campaign champions, press and MPs along as possible for a meeting 2-3 pm in Committee Room 15. You can come to this even if you don’t have an MP appointment. If you can, let us know you are coming by emailing us: [email protected]

3 – 4pm

You can email your MP and ask them to meet you between 3 – 4 pm in Central Lobby. Even if your MP has signed the EDM on libel reform it is still worth doing this.

I don’t know much about the libel laws except that they can operate to silence reasoned debate, as the British Chiropractic Association is trying to do in the case of Simon Singh. The libel laws used as loppers against the pointing fingers of criticism and ridicule have been active again in the last couple of days, this time from the man with a constant itch for litigation, Mr George Galloway, who is in the process of suing David Toube of Harry’s Place for a facetious remark David made on the Socialist Unity blog. (background here).

This differs from the action that Johanna Kaschke brought against Dave Osler for something someone said about her in the comments on Dave Osler’s blog. By the same logic, it should be Andy Newman, the presiding MC over at Socialist Unity who should be sued, not David, who doesn’t even mention Galloway by name. Anyway, we can all agree that if we were to be sued for abuse, jokes, smears, slurs and the general knockabout that happens on blogs we would all be poor, cowed and silent.

In the seventeenth century if a gentleman of standing like Mr Galloway thought that some scribbler had offended him with a squib, a lampoon or satire he would hire thugs to beat him up. These days honourable MPs go to libel lawyers in order to stifle remarks which bring them into disrepute.

My guess is that the Hamas groupie, dictator dick-sucker and eager hireling of the propaganda arm of a repressive regime has been rattled by Harry’s Place and hurt in his most sensitive place, i.e. his vanity. The impression Mr Galloway gives is of a man with a rich fantasy life – the revolutionary hero, the modern Saladin adored by 1.2 billion Muslims, the brave speaker of truth to power. However recently in his guise as the fearless agitator who faces down the tyrannical police state he was made to look like a complete arse.

He was addressing a meeting to denounce police tactics at the Gaza demonstrations. A couple of Iranians began heckling, so he called the police to eject them. A video and pictures of the event was put up with a lot of glee at Harry’s Place.

Now, you can argue that the police have been heavy-handed at demos and that it’s reasonable to get some kind of security to shut up those who prevent a public meeting from carrying on. But even if Galloway had right on his side in this instance he still looks like a complete arse, the straight man in an inspired bit of situationalist comedy. Harry’s Place has evidently got under his skin, and so suing David T is one way of getting at it. (This is speculation on my part. I haven’t got actual entry into Galloway’s mind. There are some places you definitely don’t want to go).

If you want to know more about the libel laws, go and read what the knowledgeable say eg Tracey Brown, Managing Director of Sense About Science:-

Libel laws are not just a Fleet Street issue. We have heard from scientists, campaigners, writers, academics and patients that their discussions and publications are being shut down by the threat of libel action. Critical and open debates are vital in medicine and the public are badly missing out without them.

Reform the libel laws! Piss George Galloway off!

Plod and Blogs

Disturbing piece:-

At 10am on Sunday 29th November 2009, I received a visit from two policemen regarding my activities in running the Seismic Shock blog. [FFS! – why aren’t they in HQ filling in forms about something?  Or even kettling protesters?  This is really creepy.]. . . A sergeant from the Horsforth Police related to me that he had received complaints via Surrey Police from Rev Sizer and from Dr Anthony McRoy – a lecturer at the Wales Evangelical School of Theology – who both objected to being associated with terrorists and Holocaust deniers.

The sergeant made clear that this was merely an informal chat, in which I agreed to delete my original blog (http://seismicshock.blogspot.com) but maintain my current one (http://seismicshock.wordpress.com). [What powers have they got to tell you to delete a blog? And an “informal chat”?   It’s pleasant when you can have informal chats with the police, which I have when someone left my front door open and they came in to check that the house hadn’t been burgled.   But if they were coming to speak about my blog I would turn very formal on them.]  The policeman related to me that his police force had been in contact with the ICT department my previous place of study, and had looked through my files, and that the head of ICT at my university would like to remind me that I should not be using university property in order to associate individuals with terrorists and Holocaust deniers (I am sure other people use university property to make political comments, but nevermind).  [Bloody hell!  My work cuts off all access to blogging, reasonably if annoyingly as I can’t even do any posts or comments at lunchtime.  I can’t see them using the police as messengers in a matter of internal discipline.  So Seismic is being investigated?]

A Christian blogger – “Vee” of LivingJourney, who is based in Australia – linked to my blog as a resource for Christians to learn about anti-Semitism in the Church, including “lots of info on Stephen Sizer and Sabeel”.

Rev Sizer left her this comment:

Dear Vee,
You must take a little more care who you brand as anti-semitic otherwise you too will be receiving a caution from the police as the young former student of Leeds did recently. One more reference to me and you will be reported.
Blessings
Stephen

[That Blessings is so Christian-creepy.  I don’t hate the sinner, I hate the sin, as I stoke up the flames.]

Seismic points out that he did not in fact receive a police caution, and anyway would the Australian police leap at the word of the Reverend? I hope they would tell the Pommie dog-collar wearer to can it.

I’m not going to delve through the works of the Rev Stephen Sizer in order to pronounce on his anti-Semitism, but going by his behaviour towards Seismic and his threatening letter to an Australian blogger he is an authoritarian little shit with crappy ideas of what political debate is and one to give his religion a bad name.

Rev Sizer would have been bad enough if he had got lawyers to write letters to Seismic and his service provider in order to shut him up.  Getting the police involved and then using them as a threat to shut up other bloggers about his political activities is how a cowardly louse behaves, and it’s outrageous that the police didn’t tell him that that wasn’t their job to harass bloggers.

Seismic seems unsure of his rights in this case. It is evident that this government has extended the powers of the police, the police are taking advantage of it, and getting into the mindset where they poke around blogs for speech and writing crimes.  Using the anti-terrorism laws, they have been stopping and searching photographers for taking photographs.   Photographers held a mass demonstration against this yesterday.

The political history of this country is of the government extending its powers, the people pushing back.  A mass repetition of Seismic's story on all blogs would be one small shove.