You might have heard of a campaign to move the UK onto the same timezone as Central Europe. There are a number of groups campaigning for this (see, for example, Lighter Later) and the proposals are going to be discussed in parliament on December 3rd.
Now, I don’t have any particularly strong feelings either way on this, but the arguments about saving a lot of energy by changing the time seem pretty persuasive to me. Of course not everyone is an ambivalent as I am and today the Mail on Sunday publishes an article by Peter Hitchens called “Don’t let them force you to live your life on Berlin Time”. The title makes it quite clear the direction that the article is going to take, but it’s astonishing just how ridiculous the article is. The blatant xenophobia is amazing.
But it is easy to see that since 1893, when Kaiser Wilhelm II’s arrogant and expansionist new ¬German Empire adopted Mitteleuropaische Zeit (Central European Time to you), German power has been forcing its ideas of time on the rest of the Continent. First in 1914, and with redoubled force after 1940, the conquered nations of the Continent were instructed rather sharply to shift their clocks forward to suit the needs of German soldiers and German railways and German business.
A map of the present Central European Time Zone looks disturbingly like a map of a certain best-forgotten empire of 70 years ago. Would it really be silly to suspect that the neatness and standardisation fanatics of Brussels and Frankfurt, who have abolished almost every border in Europe, devised the European arrest warrant and the Euro passport and the European number plate and the European flag – and imposed a single currency on almost every state – would not also like a single time zone?
In a particularly nice touch, there’s a black and white picture of someone adjusting a public clock with the caption “Forced change: The Nazis made occupied nations adopt German time”.
Now, there may be good reasons to object to this change but if there are, Hitchens seems to have missed them completely. Bringing the argument down to this disgusting “who won the war, anyway?” level is surely a tacit admission that Hitchens has no reasonable arguments against the proposals.
Hitchens does, at least, mention the benefits that supporters of the change expect to see, but he decides that “many of these claims are pretty much guesswork”. To back this up he points out that:
Shifting the clocks about changes less than you might think. The amount of actual daylight remains the same. It is just available at different times of day.
This is, of course, indisputable. But what Hitchens forgets to mention is that supporters of the changes know this. It’s the redistribution of the daylight hours which brings the benefits, not some (scientifically improbable) lengthening of the day. It’s a straw man of the most obvious kind.
The most offensive part of the article is the way that Hitchens seamlessly merges the EU with the Third Reich. He ends with this chilling warning:
If we are foolish enough to hurry down this path, it is by no means certain that we shall ever be allowed back if we decide we do not like it. Once we have fallen in, who would be surprised by a quiet Brussels Directive making the change permanent, whatever Parliament does? Now is the time to save our own time.
I’m all in favour of a debate about these changes. No-one would suggest making a change of this size without a full discussion taking place first. But surely those opposing the changes can find better arguments than this poisonous nonsense.
Twitter is used a lot for sharing links. In fact that might be one of the main things it’s used for. And because of the nature of a lot of the discussion on Twitter, those links tend to be to either blogs or news sites many of which have a very similar structure. They will have an individual page for each story and a front page which lists the most recent stories. Of course there might also be time-based or category-based archive pages, but those aren’t important for this discussion.
If you find a story on one of these sites that you want to share with people, then the most sensible approach is to link to the individual page for the story. If you just link to the front page of the site then that is going to make sense whilst the story is near the top of that page but as new stories are published, your story will sink down the page and eventually it will vanish off the page completely. At that point anyone trying to follow your link from Twitter is not going to understand what you’re talking about.
The front pages of web sites change regularly. That’s their purpose. The individual story links will always link to their particular story. They’re called “permalinks” for a good reason – they are permanent links to a particular entry on the site.
So if I want to draw your attention to an entry on Tim Ireland’s blog, I’ll link to the individual entry, not to the front page. Perhaps it’s worth looking at those two links in more detail so that you can see the difference.
I’m not trying to be some kind of internet policeman here. I’m not saying that you have to do it my way. I’m just saying that this seems to be a sensible approach and if you carry on linking to the front page of sites then you run the risk of people who discover your link some time after you published it getting confused when it doesn’t show them what it showed when you published the link.
It seems to me that there are three reasons why people wouldn’t make the effort to publish permalinks.
Firstly, they just don’t understand how the internet works and don’t really know what they are doing. That’s ok, of course. We were all beginners once and hopefully this post will go some way towards showing them how things work.
Secondly, they know how it works but they can’t be bothered to go to the extra effort to dig out the real permalink. I mean, often you read these stories on the front page of a site and that’s the address that is sitting in your browser location bar, so that’s the address that you cut and past into Twitter. You might also think that Twitter is a transitory medium and people will only follow your link within a few hours of you publishing it. To these people I can only say that Twitter isn’t transitory and your tweets can potentially be read months or years later. I think that it’s really worth making that little bit more effort in order to make your historical conversations easier to follow.
Finally there might be people who deliberately don’t want to publish links to specific articles as they don’t want to be called on what they linked to at some unknown point in the future. These people have worked out that Twitter isn’t a transitory medium and, instead, they rely on the transitory nature of web site front pages to make their tweets seem transitory. It’s the internet equivalent of the person who gets angry if you try to get him to substantiate an off-the-cuff remark he made half an hour ago. This is a deeply cynical and unhelpful view of the internet and I really hope that no-one reading this fits into this category.
So please make an effort to give permanence to what you say on Twitter. It’s really quite easy to do and it makes a huge difference to the quality of the discussion.
Starting with something a bit different. A nice drop of Thomas Tallis (and a few other things) in a local church. The Sixteen are great – but I’m not sure why there were eighteen of them singing.
It seems amazing that it’s ten years since Kirsty MacColl died. This tribute concert brought together many famous names to sing Kirsty’s songs with her backing band. It was good to see that it wasn’t just old gits like Billy Bragg, Eddi Reader and Alison Moyet who wanted to play tribute to her. There were plenty of younger people like Amy MacDonald and Ellie Goulding there too. Shame Macgowan was supposed to be there but he was indisposed. No-one was surprised.
Michael Rother was one half of the German band Neu in the 1970s. Hallogallo is the name of the first track on Neu’s first album. Hallogallo 2010 is the name of a group that Rother has gathered together to play some Neu music along with other music in the same style. The style got a bit monotonous at first, but eventually monotonous turns into into hypnotic and I found myself being drawn in. I’m not sure I’d rush to see them again, but I’m glad I was there.
I’ve been listening to various combinations of the Waterson/Carthy family for decades. I’ve seen Eliza Carhy about four times this year already, but I hadn’t seen Norma Waterson for several years. They’re on tour together as they’ve just released their first album as a duo and very nice it is too. The Union Chapel was the perfect setting for this evening of two fabulous singers singing some great songs.
This was postponed from last year for reasons that I never discovered. The first half was the album Talk Talk Talk played all the way through and then after a very short break the band came back and played pretty much every other Furs song that you wanted to hear. It’s always a bit worrying seeing old bands like this as there’s a strong likelihood that they’ve lost it. But, happily, that’s not true of the Furs. They put in a great performance.
I love African music and I love Irish folk music – so what’s not to love about a band who fuse the two forms together and make irresistible dance music? This was their first time in London for something like seven years and they were very good. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much dancing in the Barbican Hall. Oh and a tip to other bands – the Afrocelts were selling t-shirts for a tenner. That’s how you get me to buy one.
Another blast from the past and another “has he still got it?” moment. And he has. Rather than a band, Cole now plays with two other chaps and all three of them play acoustic guitars. This means that the old Commotions stuff needs to be drastically rearranged and some of the new versions work better than others. But I’d never seen Lloyd Cole play before and I’m glad that I have now. It made me think that maybe I should track down some gigs by Edwyn Collins or Roddy Frame.
After a few oldies, Tunng brings us right up to date. I hadn’t even heard of Tunng until a friend recommended them to me about a year ago. Now I have all of their albums and, on the evidence of this gig, I’d definitely go and see them again. I think this was the end of the tour so there was a bit of a party atmosphere going on. There was also a special guest star – former member Sam Genders joined them on stage for a few numbers. It’s a modern kind of folk music with a bit of other bits and pieces thrown in. I like it a lot.
Bringing us right up to date, last night I was at the Royal Festival Hall to see The Divine Comedy. Actually, these days that’s just Neil Hannon performing solo. It’s been over ten years since I listened to a new Divine Comedy album, but it was great to hear the songs live – mostly played on piano but occasionally on acoustic guitar. Hannon is a great entertainer and he loves to chat to the audience both between and during the songs. I’ll certainly be checking out some of his more recent work.
Last night over on the bizarrely named “Tory Totty Online” blog I was almost accused of suffering from OCD. I say “almost accused” as the author played that silly game of not quite joining the dots. She defined OCD, she said “certain bloggers seem to be having recurring obsessive thoughts about other certain bloggers” and then she drew on some examples from my web presence before ending with:
Now, I’m no shrink, and far be it from me to suggest that there’s any sort of ‘obsessive behaviour’ going on here.
But it was just a thought.
And that’s a classic get-out clause. If I say that she said I have OCD then she can say “no I didn’t but, hey, if the cap fits…”. But it’s pretty obvious what conclusions she expects her readers to reach.
It’s a serious accusation to make, so it’s worth examining the evidence. In my day job I’m a programmer and attention to detail is an important part of what I do every day. Many great programmers are good at their job because they are mildly OCD or autistic. It wouldn’t be a huge surprise if I exhibited some of the symptoms.
The two posts that seemed to annoy Tory Totty so much are two weeks old. Yes, they’re my most recent blog posts (well, until today) but does that sound like an obsession to you? Nadine Dorries has been on cracking form over the last two weeks. There have been plenty of reasons to write blog posts about her. But I really could be bothered. Doesn’t sound much like an obsession to me. In comparison, the front page of the Tory Totty blog (which currently has posts from 25th October to this morning) has four stories that mention Nadine Dorries.
On the basis of this flimsy evidence, I’m going to have to plead “not guilty”. Obsessed with Doctor Who, maybe. Obsessed with getting these bloody builders to finish the work on my house, probably. But obsessed with Nadine Dorries, I really don’t think so.
There’s a serious side to all of this though, of course. Firstly, there’s the idea that Tory Totty would use something like OCD as an insult. It shows rather an unpleasant attitude to people with disabilities. And then there’s the idea that by labelling an opponent as mentally ill, you don’t need to address their points. I had hoped that Tory Totty (@CateyMaxx on Twitter) was going to be interested in an intellectual debate (I know that her choice of pseudonym made that sound unlikely, but I’m a glass-half-full kind of person) it’s a shame that she has lowered herself to this level.
Wow. That went on longer than I thought it would. I’m starting to realise why Tim Ireland’s blog posts are always so long. Anyway, to cheer everybody up, here’s one of my favourite songs from my long distant youth. It seems somewhat appropriate.
Summarising @Nadine_MP‘s “informed consent” ideas: A woman can’t have an abortion until a christian nutter has tried to scare her out of it?
That’s the content of a tweet that I sent just before 6pm last night. I thought it nicely summed up the reasons behind Nadine Dorries’ recent speech in Parliament. I didn’t, of course, expect everyone to agree. I wasn’t prepared for the response I got from one corner of the internet.
Having sent the tweet, I went out for the night. Had it not been the era of the smartphone, I would have been completely cut off from the internet for the next few hours. But as I arrived at the venue I checked Twitter to find three tweets from CateyMaxx. For those of you who don’t know, CateyMaxx has been one of a small number of people who have been supporting Nadine Dorries over recent weeks. She said:
CateyMaxx: @davorg lol evening Dave – your usual Stirring self I see! You don’t believe that crap so why on EARTH do you say it? [6:28]
CateyMaxx: @davorg & also – what’s with the ‘Christian nutter’ jibe? @Nadine_MP is advocating informed choice – where do her religious beliefs come in? [6:30]
CateyMaxx: @davorg always presuming, of course, u know & understand her religious beliefs b’cos I certainly don’t! Maybe u’ve had a convo with her? [6:31]
Over the next ten minutes I sent her some replies – which she, in turn, replied to. I think I’ve reconstructed the order correctly here, but we’re often typing across each other.
davorg: @CateyMaxx We already have informed choice [Yes - I meant "consent", not "choice"] – just not of the kind Nadine wants to see. [7:20]
CateyMaxx: @davorg I’m sure you know all about the choice that’s available to pregnant women? You’re so unnecessarily pedantic. [7:21]
davorg: @CateyMaxx She’s definitely a christian – she has said as much. And she hangs around with mutters [Typo: that should be "nutters" - I hope that's obvious] like Christian Concern For Our Nation. [7:23]
davorg: @CateyMaxx Informed concent is already a legal requirement before any major medical procedure. [7:27]
CateyMaxx: @davorg ok, so let’s be clear – you say ‘Christian Concern’ (who @Nadine_MP as u put it ‘hangs around with’ are nutters? Can you elucidate? [7:27]
CateyMaxx: @davorg but it’s the TYPE of information which is accessible to ppl that matters . .surely. All @Nadine_MP is trying to do is make more [7:28]
davorg: @CateyMaxx Anyway, I’d love to chat more but I’m at a gig and the first band is about to come on. Have a nice evening. [7:28]
CateyMaxx: @davorg info to a wider no. of ppl – so they no the mental, emotional aswell as physical implications of abortion. What is wrong with that? [7:29]
And that’s where we left it. Or, at least, that’s what I though. I dipped back into Twitter a couple of hours later whilst waiting for the headliners to come on, only to see this:
CayeyMaxx: New Blog Post: Tory Totty Online: Is OCD Sweeping the Blogosphere? http://bit.ly/91JJsf[9:17]
I replied as soon as I saw it and we got into another conversation.
davorg: @CateyMaxx Nicely done. Writing an attack on me like that when you know I’m busy and won’t be able to respond for 12 hours. [9:39]
CateyMaxx: @davorg Havent written an ‘attack’ on you – merely reported what’ on your blog. Why? What’s up? [9:40]
davorg: @CateyMaxx And missing out my side of tonight’s conversation was a nice touch. You’ve been learning from the masters [9:42]
CateyMaxx: @davorg thats because you LEFT the conversation and didn’t answer me lol Its all there in b&w. No-ones attacking u – dont be so sensitive [9:43]
davorg: @CateyMaxx I wrote 4 or 5 replies to you which are missing from your blog post. That’s hardly balanced reporting. [9:47]
davorg: @CateyMaxx Hope your blog comments are working early tomorrow morning [9:48]
CateyMaxx: @davorg in that case . . .I will go back and have a look and then put them in the post . . . . the comments are working fine. Feel free. [9:53]
CateyMaxx: @davorg Oh yes – I’ve found them. Will add them to the post now ok? [9:54]
davorg: @CateyMaxx Thank you. I’ll a comment tomorrow. Must go again. Tunng are about to come on. [9:57]
And at that point, I settled in to enjoy Tunng and CateyMaxx wandered off to do whatever she does at that time on a Saturday night (I think it might involve watching the X Factor results programme).
Obviously I’ll come back to this later today and respond to the points that she made, but I just wanted to start by setting the scene and getting the full conversation written out in the order that it happened.
