Category: Social media

The magic of Twitter

Dominic Frisby, at 1.30 am this morning:

Morning all, I am compiling a list of irritating people on the telly (US or UK) for a routine. Would you mind posting below the name of anyone who gets up your nose? The more the better.

PS Please don’t use their twitter handles.

Dominic Frisby, one hour later:

Thank you!

I have plenty.

I’m guessing that the trick of Twittering is learning how to make use of it for your own purposes, without letting it drive you mad. Note in particular the bit about not using Twitter handles. The suggested celebs were not told about this operation. They therefore had no chance to get mad, and then to try to drive Frisby, or anybody else, mad.

When gossiping malevolently, I think it’s always kinder to do it behind people’s backs and without their knowledge. Why by gratuitously hurtful?

This is not a Cape Sugarbird

I’m talking about this:

What chance does Western Civilisation have if people get basic facts like this wrong?

It’s a Malachite Sunbird.

This is a Cape Sugarbird:

This being a South African bird disagreement, nobody thinks to comment on the amazing plants that the above birds are perched on. They’re just … plants.

But, if 6k (that link being to a bird photo that 6k photoed in London a while back), who visits this blog from time to time and via whose Twitter feed I learned of this Sunbird/Sugarbird confusion (now flapping about all over Twitter before the truth can even get its feathers on), can tell me about the vegetation in the photos I have displayed, I’d love to be thus enlightened. I mean, those Orange Things. That Sunflower-like flower. Amazing.

My favourite tweet today

This:

There should just be a simple checkbox in twitter for “Are words violence?” The people who say “yes” only see tweets from people who agree.

Two things I’m not clear about are: whether it’s twitter or Twitter (I say Twitter); and whether it’s tweet or Tweet (I say tweet).

My attitude to Twitter is that for as long as it exists, I will occasionally cherry pick it, and thus adorn the blogosphere. Twitter is very temporary, and will soon collapse, I think. A small group of people has the power to collapse it. Eventually they will. The blogosphere is dispersed in its management, and will endure as long as our civilisation does.

This blog may even endure for quite a while. Even my old blog endures, for the time being, and even though it doesn’t now work properly.

Twitter LOL

Nicky Campbell:

Because of the level of fuckwittery by a tiny minority on here I have decided to take a break from Twitter. I am genuinely sorry it has come to this. Back in an hour.

Every so often, it behoves the blogosphere to acknowledge that the Twittersphere can, sometimes, contribute something truly entertaining.

Other creature news

In among all the vile bile, Twitter continues to serve up good Other Creatures news, especially in video form.

Here, for instance, is evidence that when it comes to shifting stuff around, while simultaneously showing a bit of common sense, robots would appear to have some way to go before they will be entirely replacing the working class.

Here is a delightful photo of two pigeons, who are checking out a photographer who is trying to photo a ceiling.

And, in otter news, here are otters doing something very strange, under a tree, in what turns out to be Singapore.

Meanwhile, via (the rest of) the blogosphere (David Thompson to be exact), an amplified cat and dogs who ate bees. The dogs look so happy, especially given how very unhappy they must feel.

On a more melancholy note, Mick Hartley tells of the Soviet whale “decimation” of the middle of the twentieth century. Decimation however, is surely the wrong word. It was far worse than that. The writer whom Hartley quotes seems to think that decimation means killing nine out of ten, because he talks of whale species being “driven to the edge of extintion”. But decimation wasn’t killing nine out of ten members of a Roman legion. It was killing one in every ten. It was to punish, not to extinguish, a legion. That verbal quibble aside, there can’t be too many reports of what an insanely destructive economic system the USSR imposed upon all its victims. And its victims were not only human.

A strange political graphic

Yesterday I voted, in the EUro-elections. You probably know which way I voted, but that isn’t my point here.

My point here is this extraordinary graphic, which the Labour Party and its supporters were plugging on social media, in the days before the vote:

The above graphic distorts the reality that although Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and Gerard Batten all favour Brexit, only one of them (Farage) is a member of the Brexit Party. They’re trying to lump them all together. Otherwise, why that distinctly Brexit Party turquoise colour? Why no reference to UKIP purple?

There was another one, featuring Brexit Party candidate Claire Fox, along with some rather distorting words about her belief in freedom of expression.

But the verbal trickery is not the biggest oddity of this and related graphics. It’s the pictures. A confident political party doesn’t fill the world with pictures of the people it opposes and fears. It proclaims the faces of its own leaders and heroes. I mean, I only discovered Batten’s actual christian name (I thought it was “Gerald”) while I was concocting this posting. It’s like they’re really trying to big up the very people they’re fearful of.

And a confident political party especially doesn’t proclaim the faces of the people it fears, while saying that it is against fear and wants fear to lose. This graphic is the politics of fear. I genuinely don’t get how they could have okayed this thing. Were they actually seduced by the triviality of “fear” rhyming with “here”? Was it that dopey?

Not that there is anything wrong with the politics of fear. I voted the way I did yesterday as much out of the fear of what I didn’t and don’t want, as I did because I am especially hopeful about what I did vote for.

The Mississippi Basin

I have never seen this map before:

I sharpened it a bit, so that I could read, with my Getting Old eyesight, the smaller river names with a bit less difficulty.

It is map number 7 of these 45 maps. A Twitter posting last night, now way down in my feed, showed one of these maps.

My favourite piece of geography there is probably Chicago, where it seems that they have a river which flows into the Mississippi. Blog and learn.

Attached blurb:

You may have heard that the Mississippi River is mighty, but if you ever doubted it, just take a look at this map. You’ll see that an extraordinary number of the United States’ rivers and tributaries send water into the Mighty Miss.

Quite so.

I love the names. Milk. Yazoo. Republican. Canadian (nowhere near Canada). Powder. Smoky. In general, I love the names of American places and geographical features. They seem impossibly exotic compared to the names of places in England. (But I’m sure that, for quite a few Americans, it must work the other way around.)

England has no big rivers. The Thames would hardly merit a name on the above map. I recall that one of my better pieces for Samizdata was about how the application of steam power to river transport entirely passed us Brits by. We went straight from stationary steam engines in coal mines to steam engines on locomotives. Unlike America. Yes, here.

“I also blamed Jewish people …”

Sara Gibbs:

When I was younger I also blamed Jewish people for all my problems and thought they were part of a conspiracy to control and ruin my life. Turns out they were just being good parents.

I got to this because I follow Stephen Pollard on Twitter. The more serious point is that Pollard tweets a lot about the anti-Semitism of Corbyn and his followers. Good for him.

Here‘s something I wrote about that last year, for Samizdata.

Robot trains for Glasgow

I don’t trust Twitter enough to ever want to rely on it for anything, because it might suddenly turn against me and my politics. (I hate Islam, etc.) But I follow various people on Twitter, and by this means, I recently learned that Glasgow is about to have a new fleet of robot underground trains. The first such in the UK, apparently. I don’t know why this appeared on my Twitter feed, but it did:

Having only very recently taken a couple of trips on the D(ocklands) L(ight) R(ailway), I know that robot trains can work very well, and I wish Glasgow success with theirs.

In one of my recorded chats with Patrick Crozier, I expressed skepticism about robot cars, especially robot cars in cities. The right place for robot vehicles to be making their debuts is in highly controlled and controllable circumstances, in places all owned by one organisation, able to impose the necessary disciplines on all concerned or threatened. We made mention of certain mines, where robot lorries already operate, and of Amazon warehouses, where robot package-fetchers-and-carriers now bustle about successfully. Or, like railway networks.

Then, maybe, any year now, make a tentative start on robot lorries on motorways.

Robot cars in cities? I recommend, and I predict: Not any time soon.