Why the Samaritans' Radar is bone stupid.

TW SUICIDE

The Samaritans have launched a Twitter Bot - those annoying things that follow you for no other reason than you once quoted a Beatles lyric or what have you - which will alert people's followers whenever they use a word or phrase on a list identified as having connotations of potential suicide.  I don't deny that this is a well-intentioned thing, but nonetheless it'll do more harm than good so I'm going to deconstruct it here.

1)  The Invasive Argument

  If you contact the Samaritans and they intervene then they are serving their purpose with your consent.  If you do not contact them, if you want nothing to do with them and they intervene anyway then that is an invasion.  Corporations can ask to be "whitelisted", ie the bot will ignore them, but in a shockingly arrogant display of paternalism individuals cannot.  You cannot in any way direct this thing to leave you alone.  If you are on Twitter then it deems you as being on its radar, and it will interfere in your business.

  We have this idea that all people who are contemplating ending their lives are lost souls in need of heroic salvation.  Some are, some aren't, but we cannot force this upon people from afar or we will ultimately achieve nothing.  Those who are genuinely bent on suicide will require something more than tweets to talk them down, if at all.  Those who want help, who want to be talked down, will often as not phone the bloody Samaritans!

2)  The Data Protection Argument

  This bot will end up sitting on a great list of tweets it has sent to people.  Essentially it is gathering links to personal data into a coherent archive without either the consent of those whose data it links to or any lawful authority to do so without that consent.  It is also potentially alerting people to the likelihood that someone has a mental illness, which is arguably a breach of Data Protection, the Equality Act, and accepted counselling ethics, and it'd be a daft judge that would consider the Samaritans to be acting as anything other than a counselling agency.

  Consider also that many people are followed on Twitter by their employers!  Telling an employer - rightly or wrongly - that an employee is suicidal could end up costing that employee their livelihood!
3)  The Equality Act Argument 

  Because disabled people, the mentally ill (as a subset of disabled), and LGBT people all have higher rates of attempted suicide and actual suicide than the rest of society, the negative effects of this bot will be disproportionately felt by these communities (and any others I've missed out), potentially leading to a civil breach of the Equality Act.

  If it inadvertently outs a person as transgender then that could arguably constitute a criminal breach of the Equality Act, which is highly likely given as one in three transgender people attempt suicide.  Furthermore:  a small subsect of feminists who notably use feminism as a front for transphobic bigotry has a proven track record of hounding transgender people to suicide.  The Sandyford leak happening at the same time as the release of Radar essentially hands these people an automated hit list.  All they have to do is follow the email addresses contained in the leak and see who pings the Radar, then lean on that person.  This is not a paranoid fantasy, this is a very real concern with genuine historical underpinnings.

4)  The Desensitisation Argument 

  If every time someone uses the language of bog-standard depression they get flagged to their mates as a suicide risk then their mates will turn the bot off or block it or what have you.  They'll grow sick of it and come to regard its warnings as spam, no different to the "Nigeria Letters".  When eventually the person is at genuine risk of suicide there will be a boy-who-cried-wolf effect in play and the warnings will likely go unheeded.

5)  The Own-Goal Argument

  Consider the arguments under 3 and 4, above, with suicidal people being encouraged or ignored.  Consider the argument under 2 with people's jobs being jeopardised (by the Samaritans, no less, who they might otherwise speak to after being laid off).  Consider the argument under 1, with vulnerable people feeling violated by the bot's interventions.  You have a person who is already at risk of suicide, who has had additional stressors, who has been dissuaded from reaching out to others, whose friends have been desensitised to their plight.  You've turned a person who might waver into someone more determined.  This has the potential to increase the rate of suicide in Britain.

For all these reasons I see Radar as nothing but a menace.

On the EDL

I've just seen this article on Facebook.

  Persons unknown - but safely presumed in the present climate to be members or supporters of the EDL - have torched a boarding school with 128 kids sleeping inside.  Everybody was evacuated and nobody died, but this could well have become one of Britain's worst ever domestic acts of mass murder.

Is this who the EDL are defending us from?  Children?

  They like to think of themselves as soldiers in some kind of war for England.  A white, straight, mildly obese England where your plumber definitely isn't Polish.  Fair enough, each to their own, but do you know what?

Attacking a soldier is an act of war.
Attacking the politicians who gave that soldier his orders is an act of war.
Attacking innocent children is not an act of war.
Attacking innocent children is something else, something far worse: it is a crime against humanity.  It is genocide.  It is terrorism.

  We have this idea that today's terrorists are brown.  This is a fallacy that our politicians and journalists are extremely keen to propagate.  Terrorism however does not depend on race or religion.  Terrorism is defined by a person's actions.  The recent spate of arson attacks - which have now escalated to attempted mass murder, attempted crimes against humanity - make the EDL the most prolific terrorist organisation in Britain today.  Certainly there have been as many attacks in the news with some tenuous, alleged link to the EDL as there were bombings on the Mainland by the IRA.

  It is high time we shamed these white terrorists and rejected them from our communities!

On the tension in London

Here's the score: for twelve years now, successive administrations from Blair's New Labour onwards have been playing divide-and-rule between Muslim communities and the rest of us. Meanwhile they've bombed every Muslim country that they can find an excuse to bomb. 

It's understandable that the Muslim community would feel a bit picked-on, a bit resentful; and while violence is deplorable it is nevertheless understandable that some turn to violence because of their anger at what they see. There has been a race war brewing for twelve years and now our chickens are coming home to roost. 

Idiots on both sides want blood. A soldier has been decapitated, a grandfather has been run through on his way home from the Mosque, a Mosque has been firebombed, and the EDL are out on the streets of London in ski masks. 

This is a time for human beings to start acting like human beings, not pouring more fuel on the fire. If you've got anti-religious views about any group, I don't wanna hear it right now. Keep that shit to yourself, because trotting it about like it were fact in this climate could well get some innocent person killed. Just stow it until this shit blows over.

Boston

The Boston Marathon was bombed yesterday.  It isn't known who did it or why.  I'm not going to jump on the Islamophobic bandwagon because it's just as likely the Marathon was bombed by domestic right-wing extremists.  It probably wasn't ecoterrorists, though I've heard of more bombings in the US by ecoterrorists than by Islamic extremists.  Whoever did it is scum, anybody who bombs civilians is irredeemable scum, but calling it an Islamist plot (I've already been hearing mutterings to this effect) is grossly premature.

Solidarity to the people of Boston.


Erik Rush, a regular contributor to Fox News, had this to say:

President Obama doesn't yet know who did it, but Erik Rush does.  He's named his enemy because he knows he can sell a lot of fearmongering articles to Fox on the back of this atrocity in order to profit from the post-9/11 Islamophobia which is borne by many Americans today.  He wants to make his money off of Boston's dead.  There's a term for creatures like him, and that term is carrion fowl.

A news source suggests the bomb is probably domestic.  This doesn't rule out a Muslim as there are plenty of Muslim Americans, but it does make it even more likely that the bomb is the work of some Neo-Nazi or disaffected sociopath.

On Steubenville

Trigger warning

The Steubenville gang-rape has brought an important fact to light: women should not get drunk, lest they be raped.

Okay, I'll bite.

Ladies, don't be drunk,
don't be sober,
don't walk alone at night,
don't go out in broad daylight.
Don't be a granny,
don't be a baby,
don't wear skirts,
and don't wear trousers.
Don't be straight,
don't be gay,
in fact don't even exist,
or else take some damn responsibility for what happens to the rapist.

As you can see, it's very hard for a woman - men too, but mostly women - to live her life without handing some manner of ammunition to a rapist, sometimes even after she's done living her life.  The internet is alight with discussion as to how this case is a lesson to young men about the perils of social media - a sentiment echoed by the judge himself - when it should be a lesson to young men about how it's wrong to go around raping.

CNN has lamented the fact that the boys will have to sign the sex offenders' register and have that looming over them, but they raped somebody!  At the time that they raped her, they admitted they weren't even sure if she was alive or dead, but they raped her all the same then urinated on her body when they were done.  They carry hatred and contempt for women to such a degree that it makes them a great danger to any woman within striking distance yet CNN finds it uncomfortable that others be allowed to know this fact in order to maintain public safety.

Others have said that the whole thing is just an attack on Ohio's football program, an attitude which makes them scarcely less dangerous than the two rapists at the centre of all this.  This attitude stems from the behaviour of the colleges themselves, who will gladly expel a rape victim to protect her rapist in order that he keeps on making them money from ticket sales.

In reacting to this case, society has once again put money and status and testosterone above women's bodily autonomy.  Excuse me while I rampage and break things.

The Burchill Fiasco.

Read this,

and this,

and then this.

To those involved on the ground it's a game of Oppression Olympics, but to those running the Observer it's clickbait.  The controversy brings in readers, and the spike in traffic bumps up the Observer's advertising revenues.  That's it.  All the pain and the upset, the division, activists making enemies of those who should be friends, the abuse, the hounding, the forced-outing, the public harassment; it's all so the Guardian group can make a few extra quid.

Shifty bastards.

In defence of schools

Schools are too quick to close these days.  When I was a kid we trudged through a foot of snow...

But what's changed?

When I was a kid, the buses and trains were run differently than they are today.  Buses worked in the snow. Trains had a limit, but when that limit was reached the Men In Orange would be out on the line with shovels. Transport did what it said on the tin back then.  Today the trains shut down with no prior notice whatsoever once the snow gets past an inch.

Insurance was different too.  Snow cover is hard to afford these days.  Slipping on ice is now a suing matter, while back then it was one of those things. 

Staff who work with students have less autonomy today.  This is partly understandable; endless paedophile scandals and the general underfunded crapness of social services has led to overtightening of rules.  Where it gets to the point where a teacher cannot help a child put on sun cream, or hug a child who is distressed, I for one think it has gone too far.

Yesterday, the buses would run, kids could be gotten home safely.  If the worst came to the worst and a freak blizzard of biblical proportions snowed the town in at the last minute, the kids could be bedded down in the school hall and the cafeteria set to the bulk output of hot chocolate.  It never happened, but if it did then the teachers would get on with the job and be praised for it.

Today, the buses won't run, parents will need to leave work early and drive their kids home (if they can).  If the kids are kept in and our hypothetical blizzard happens, the teachers will be slammed for failing to foresee the unforeseeable, parents will become hysterical, the Sun will screech "but what if there'd been a paedo in there?!?!?!", and somebody will get sued into next Tuesday.

Headteachers today must - with no warning whatsoever - pre-empt the point at which the trains will shut down, the buses will stop running, and get the kids out with time enough to get them home.  Heads must judge if it will snow enough to shut the transport the night before, and decide if the two hours teaching they'd get done are as good as a wasted day.

You'd need a masters in geology and the wisdom of Solomon to balance all this and, inevitably, the balance will be gotten wrong.  It is natural therefore to err on the side of caution.  I don't envy them the task.

In Pictures: MugGate!

This is what happens when the same bunch of activists are cooped up together in the same place for too long. If they don't get new blood, new ideas, the occasional voice of reason, they start to get a bit... sidetracked. Next thing you know it's "OMG there are TOO MANY MUGS!"

  This is a real conversation that I was involved in.  I'm "Bill Door" below:

  It's funnier with rum.  

Update:  I've since been banned from Occupy London for "flaming".  Apparently it's now offensive to point out that we've got bigger things to worry about than mugs.  

Woodcare pt. 2 (plus a rant)

  I'm going to share this article, as with all the talk over the shooting of those schoolkids it is worth remembering that most people with mental ill-health do not go on to become killers.  I live with depression, I'm also autistic, I even have the so-called "warrior gene", yet I struggle to think of any situation in which I could murder.  Such a thing is either in a person or it is not, but most forms of mental ill-health do not contribute to it.  The panic which follows such events will inevitably lead to some poor sod with hyperactivity or autism or mutism - or even just someone who is unusually shy - who has never harmed a person in their life getting lynched by a bunch of eejits (egged on by the Sun) who confuse different with dangerous.  The problem has chiefly to do with culture.

  I found this quote.  It's attributed to Morgan Freeman, but then a lot of quotes on the internet are attributed to Morgan Freeman just because it gives them a measure of authority:-

"You want to know why. This may sound cynical, but here's why.

It's because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single *victim* of Columbine? Disturbed people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he'll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.

CNN's article says that if the body count "holds up", this will rank as the second deadliest shooting behind Virginia Tech, as if statistics somehow make one shooting worse than another. Then they post a video interview of third-graders for all the details of what they saw and heard while the shootings were happening. Fox News has plastered the killer's face on all their reports for hours. Any articles or news stories yet that focus on the victims and ignore the killer's identity? None that I've seen yet. Because they don't sell. So congratulations, sensationalist media, you've just lit the fire for someone to top this and knock off a day care center or a maternity ward next.

You can help by forgetting you ever read this man's name, and remembering the name of at least one victim. You can help by donating to mental health research instead of pointing to gun control as the problem. You can help by turning off the news."

Whoever actually wrote this has gotten it bang on.

Okay, pictures of finished things now.

And I've succeeded in fucking about with the heliotropic behaviour of a bramble.  Hooray!

A Short Shower

Tonight is the night of the Leonid Meteor Shower.  Tonight, Strawberry Hill has chosen to be both completely overcast and somewhat foggy.  FML

Youse takin' the Mickey?

An article in today's Metro has annoyed me.  In it the Potato Council, an industry lobby, blames gardeners and allotment keepers for this year's high incidence of late blight.  There are many things wrong with this position.

1. Late blight is a fungus.  Fungi like warm (but not too hot), moist, and preferably dark conditions.  The Met Office reckon 2012 saw a mild Winter followed by a Summer that was hot yet cooler than average, cloudier than average, and with unprecedented rainfall keeping it very moist.  In that weather it's amazing that stones didn't catch infections, never mind the tatties.  
2. Agribusiness don't grow the healthiest crops to begin with.  They grow monocultures which drain the soil of nutrition whilst providing the perfect environment for disease to flourish.  Combine that with the Summer we've had and it's no wonder the spuds are going nasty.  
3. Farms are out in the countryside, surrounded by other farms.  Allotments are in the cities, surrounded by houses.  There are a lot of miles to cover between a city allotment and a country farm.  How on Earth is a disease of potatoes - a famously sedentary species - communicated between urban tubers and their rural counterparts?

Still, the comments aren't a surprise.  Industry supports industry, after all, and the prime culprit - the weather - is the fault of climate change; a byproduct of the manufacturing, petrochemical and automotive industries.  For agribusiness to call these industries out for knackering the 'tater harvest would readily lead to a case of legal Mutually Assured Destruction, from which only lawyers and journos would profit.  

Furthermore, every home gardener growing potatoes is one fewer person buying potatoes.  Us arable gardeners are literally eating the profits of agribusiness, we are their enemy, so it is little wonder they would use the failings of big business as a means of attacking us as "irresponsible".  The statement "it would be preferable if people bought healthy potatoes from their retailer rather than grow their own" is most telling.

Take good care of your potatoes, burn any that show signs of blight, but don't stop growing just because the weather's bad for business!  When agribusiness feels the need to distort the truth and ignore the science just to attack the home gardener and the allotment keeper then it becomes apparent that the edaphic revolution has gained more ground than industry is comfortable with.