Historical Heroes

[WaylanderToo]

Yes, the half wits who buy The Scum, The Murdoch Times, The (porn) Star, The Belly Laugh, The Nazi Express and The Nazi Mail are all worse than readers of The Guardian and The Independent.

 

[Caledfwlch]

Waylander old chap,

Yes, the "holier than thou" can be pains in the backsides, however at least no matter how annoying or daft they are, they are well meaning people, with empathy for others.
The Daily Mail and Freeman of the Land types are generally bigots, racists, homophobic, xenophobic, generally all round unpleasant people with no empathy, appear to be full of hate, and the Freemen of the Land section are absolute bastards, attempting to avoid paying Taxes and prosecutions when they are in criminal or other troubles, they have attempted to assault Magistrates, invaded and "seized" a Court Room in Birkenhead a couple of years ago, and because of their wrongful advice, they are causing people who are likely decent, but accidently ran into forums run by Freemen who charge for their advice, the poor person then goes to Court attempting to sue Bailiffs, and end up with massive legal costs to pay - one person acting on this advice ended up with £30,000!!!! as they were ordered to pay the Enforcement Firms legal costs.
During that case hearing, the Freeman the person paid around £1500 for advice and being accompanied to court, attempted to Assault the Enforcement Firms Barrister in a corridor!!

Not all Daily Mail readers are bad people, but the paper does attract a certain type of shall we say extreme "Alf Garnett" types.

 

[WaylanderToo]

Oh don't misunderstand me - I'm no fan of the Daily Nazi (indeed I feel about the same level of contempt for that rag as I do the Mirror, the Express, and slightly more than I feel for the Gruan and Indy though I'll be honest and say that at least some of the stuff in the latter 2 is, generally, better written).

The Bellylaugh has gone down-hill as has the Times. The sad thing is that papers reinforce positive/negative bias and play to their 'tribe' with little or no effort to actually report 'the news'. It appears, to me, to be opinion pieces so much so that when a paper actually does break a big story (The Mail WRT Stephen Lawrence, The Telegraph WRT the expenses scandal, The Guardian WRT Snowden) it's a massive surprise which is sad

As an aside - is this a correction of the most inaccurate piece ever published?

Newspaper correction goes viral as people ask, "Was anything in this Guardian article correct?"

 

[Cathbad]

As an aside - is this a correction of the most inaccurate piece ever published?

OMG... that is hilarious!

 

[Caledfwlch]

On the Guardian I mostly read the "Opinions" section, as to be fair to it, they have Opinion pieces from people of all sides of the political spectrum. They had a great one from a German guy, who is part of a new movement being formed to campaign and make the EU become democratic, so his article was part plea for Britain to stay in, and help fight the anti democratic elements of the EU because it if becomes democratic and answerable to the people, then it will become a great thing.

The bentness of the EU is incredible. Look how they fined Microsoft millions for packaging Internet Explorer with Windows, yet they totally ignore Apple, which has gone well beyond, they control every aspect, and if I understand it right, all software has to come via an app store, thus it is impossible to produce and sell Apple compatible software without paying Apple, totally ridiculous and totally ignored. People are screaming blue murder about Microsofts UMP plans for Windows 10, which would do the same as Apple, nobody could create and sell Windows compatible Software without paying microsoft to use the UMP store - Microsoft however will be forced down, it has happened before, and it will happen again, as if UMP goes ahead and becomes what some software engineers fear, Microsoft will be facing a massive battle from very powerful game companies and others.

Apple's fanbase dont appear to kick off about how locked down and anti competitive Apple are, and the authorities especially the EU don't seem to care, its mental. Yet, I bet if Microsoft attempts in any way to emulate Apples lockdown, the EU will go mad, and begin starting investigations and fining Microsoft millions again.

I suspect the people in the EU who deal with all this are Hipsters brainwashed into Apple ways of thinking, slaves to their Iphones, Ipads and Ipods.. a Journalist went under cover and got a job at an Apple Store in London, and said the Staff genuinely behaved like they had been brainwashed - during the opening of another Store in London, Journalists were trying to interview Staff arriving for work, and scary looking men in Suits would appear, and drag the employees off into the store. Apple's internal Security Group has been compared to the Gestapo for years, and the way they operate is very chilling - and if they are doing the same stunts at offices in the UK, they are likely breaking employment law.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Not all Daily Mail readers are bad people

The online edition is one of my regular daily reads, not least because it has news volume. I keep away from opinion pieces.

Guardian, Independent, and Telegraph have become unreadable by their over-use of video inserts, which try to crash my browser if I open more than a couple of stories in tabs at the same time.

 

[Caledfwlch]

The online edition is one of my regular daily reads, not least because it has news volume. I keep away from opinion pieces.

Guardian, Independent, and Telegraph have become unreadable by their over-use of video inserts, which try to crash my browser if I open more than a couple of stories in tabs at the same time.

What Browser do you use? I use Chrome and have the Adblock Extension which stops me suffering those woes - the other day I turned it off on Guardian just to see what I was blocking and it was awful!

The Minister for Culture is sticking his fat, brainless unwanted nose in, wanting to outlaw/criminalise adblock software claiming they operate like "protection rackets" so he clearly has no idea of what a protection racket really is, and if anyone could be said to be guilty, its Apple for what I mentioned in my last post.

The solution to losing revenue because of Ad Blockers, is not to try and ban them which would be totally unenforcable, but to speak to people, discover what is peeing them off about ads, ie video adverts you cannot stop, which lock up browsers if you have an older machine - until end of last year I was forced to use an ancient PC running XP, and even with adblocker, which didnt seem to work quite as well, though I guess XP support on chrome and extensions is going to be very limited, and the Walesonline website, run iirc by the Welsh paper, the Western Mail was totally unusable.

Google itself has the best advertising system, its unobtrusive, and does not get in the way, you just get some results marked "Ad" though as I have adblock I don't know what I am missing.

For fun, here is a Daily Mail Headline Generator - my fave is "Could Teenage Sex give the Middle Classes Cancer?"
Daily Mail-o-matic

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Any headline starting with "Could", the answer is no.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Guardian, Independent, and Telegraph have become unreadable by their over-use of video inserts

Firefox setting now allows block Flash by default and then you can click to disable individual video
Noscript is needed (whitelist only the bits of a site needed) to speed up pages, block malware, trackers, and as a side effect blocks some ads.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Even if I blocked Flash, etc, there's still not much by way of news content on the Guardian or Independent online front pages (or Al Jezeera, for that matter, which I also tried recently to read regularly). And the Telegraph, despite the joys of the Matt cartoons, simply covers some of the same stories that the Daily Mail goes into more depth into. Though the DM does have all those irrelevant celebrity stories...

I used to read the Telegraph regularly, but eventually got sick of the way it tried to demonise politics beyond the Eton-Oxbridge-Westminister career millionaire norm.

 

[WaylanderToo]

What Browser do you use? I use Chrome and have the Adblock Extension which stops me suffering those woes - the other day I turned it off on Guardian just to see what I was blocking and it was awful!

The Minister for Culture is sticking his fat, brainless unwanted nose in, wanting to outlaw/criminalise adblock software claiming they operate like "protection rackets" so he clearly has no idea of what a protection racket really is, and if anyone could be said to be guilty, its Apple for what I mentioned in my last post.

The solution to losing revenue because of Ad Blockers, is not to try and ban them which would be totally unenforcable, but to speak to people, discover what is peeing them off about ads, ie video adverts you cannot stop, which lock up browsers if you have an older machine - until end of last year I was forced to use an ancient PC running XP, and even with adblocker, which didnt seem to work quite as well, though I guess XP support on chrome and extensions is going to be very limited, and the Walesonline website, run iirc by the Welsh paper, the Western Mail was totally unusable.

just how do you manage to make an ad-blocker illegal?

 

[Narkalui]

Just going back to the papers briefly and their reportage of actual news, The Mirror' s coverage of the junior doctors strike and Jeremy Cockney-Rhyming-Slang Hunt's attitude to them has been brilliant.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

just how do you manage to make an ad-blocker illegal?

You can't.
But SOME accept payment from companies to NOT block their adverts*. I'd not use those. That behaviour could be made illegal, I think they should be allowed, but forced to tell users what they are doing.

I only use plug-ins that I have the settings for and that can be disabled from "phoning home."

[*Which is obviously related to a protection racket]

 

[Caledfwlch]

You can't.
But SOME accept payment from companies to NOT block their adverts*. I'd not use those. That behaviour could be made illegal, I think they should be allowed, but forced to tell users what they are doing.

I only use plug-ins that I have the settings for and that can be disabled from "phoning home."

[*Which is obviously related to a protection racket]

I just checked Adblock for Chrome's Settings, and I was right in what I thought - these companies pay to be put on a "whitelist" however you don't have to have the whitelist switched on, you can turn it off, there's also an option called "acceptable ads" which im guessing shows ads like googles which are not intruisive.

 

[Caledfwlch]

just how do you manage to make an ad-blocker illegal?

Well quite! that's why the idiot is being mocked.

It is also why anyone who was fooled enough to install Windows 10 should look up the internet guides and turn off all the Spyware that Win10 has switched on as default, not to mention downloading adverts to show when your system is "asleep"

They could try and block all access to sites hosting Downloaders, which would cause millions of angry android phone, tablet, & PC Chrome users to be flooding the government because it would mean blocking access to Google Play.
Also, blocking access doesn't actually work. After Demonoid, Pirate Bay etc were blocked by all UK ISP's it took me about 5 seconds to get round the block.

 

[galanx]

A very flawed man, but if he had not been Prime Minster 1940 to 45 I think the world be much different far more unpleasant place then it is now. Those 5 years saved the world from the Nazis.

Inspirational, yes. But by the time he came into power Labour was soldly pro-war, as were a number of Liberals and Conservatives ( even though most Tories continued to support Chamberlain at first) so Britain would have kept fighting anyway. I recall one anecdote about a Churchill supporter early in the war arguing with a Labour MP that they had to agree with everything Churchill did, in order to keep Britain fighting; the exasperated MP replied "So what happens if he falls under a bus? We send a telegram to Hiltler saying 'We give in' ? "

 

[galanx]

I asked my ESL students here in Taiwan to write an essay on a person they admire for their persistence; aside from the usual Edisons and Lincolns, one of my students picked as his hero Mitsuo Fuchida, the Japanese pilot who led the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Darwin, the British naval base in Ceylon, and who was later injured at Midway.

 

[galanx]

As for Cromwell, he certainly committed massacres in Ireland; on the hand, in spite of his personal tyranny, the rights of Parliament were upheld and the Stuart attempts to impose the Divine Right of Kings discredited.

 

[Caledfwlch]

As for Cromwell, he certainly committed massacres in Ireland; on the hand, in spite of his personal tyranny, the rights of Parliament were upheld and the Stuart attempts to impose the Divine Right of Kings discredited.

Aye, everything he did was to suit the Political Classes. The Rights and Sovereignty of the People should be first, not Parliament, and he didn't even afaik abolish the House of Lords, thus his behaviour was hardly in the interest of Democracy.

But then, I think the existence of Party "Whips" to be a complete abomination and something that actively harms democracy - an MP should vote according to what is dictated by his personal conscience, and what is right for his Electorate, instead they are forced to vote the way the Party wants, because the Parties exist only to benefit itself and its members needs, not the government, and certainly not the electorate. Parliament may well be Sovereign, but the Mighty Party is even more so.

Mind there are many reasons why the UK is not remotely a Democracy, and claims to be one of the oldest Parliamentary Democracies are a joke - given that until only 100 years or so ago 99% of the population were not allowed to vote. This Weeks ESA Benefit Cut scandal shows that the House of Lords is a massive waste of space and money, since despite being a second house, a determined government can override them.

 

[WaylanderToo]

@Caledfwlch WRT the UK not being a parlimentary democracy... which countries are? AFAIK the only one that comes close is Switzerland?