Social Media | Steve Woods

Newspaper gives fascist geography lesson

22/07/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics, Social Media
An interesting mini-drama has played out on social media this morning in the wake of incumbent US president Joe Biden’s decision to step down from the impending campaign in that country’s presidential election.

The dramatis personae are as follows:
- Johannes Huber, a member of the far-right AfD party who serves as a member of the Federal Parliament (MdB); and
- The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), one of Germany’s major newspapers.
In common with the characteristics of the species homo politicus, i.e. approaching each and every subject with an open mouth, Huber took one look at the news of Joe Biden’s decision to step down from the forthcoming US presidential election (called a general election in the USA. Ed.), got straight on to X/Twitter to post the words ‘Biden is not my President!’.

Note the exclamation mark. 😀

This enabled the FAZ to reply sarcastically to the MdB in question ‘Dear Johannes Huber MP, correct, your president is Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Best wishes‘, giving him both a timely geography lesson reminding him not so subtly that he is in fact a German citizen.

Meanwhile in the actual presidential campaign itself, Biden has formally endorsed his vice-president Kamala Harris to be the Democrats’ candidate; and Harris looks like she’s relishing the prospect of putting victim-playing egomaniac and disgraced former president Donald John Trump in his place.

Ouch!

The next few months promise to be interesting times indeed.
Crowdstrike and Microsoft – culprit identified

19/07/2024 Steve WoodsOddities, Politics, Security, Social Media, Tech

The BBC reports that a massive IT outage is causing chaos around the world, affecting airports, railways, broadcasters and untold companies..

Cyber-security firm CrowdStrike Holdings has admitted that the problem was caused by a dodgy update to its software which is allegedly designed to protect Microsoft Windows devices from hacking.

At the same time, Microsoft has said it is taking “mitigation action” to deal with “the lingering impact” of the outage.

Although Crowdstrike has admitted liability, social media had long since decided who was to blame and where.

This is Alan Ferrier on Mastodon, who wins the prize for the best attribution of blame.

The disaster known as Mary Elizabeth Truss was ousted from her comfy job misrepresenting the long-suffering burghers of Norfolk at the 4th July election. She was recently seen at the extreme right-wing Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where the perpetual victim, one Donald John Trump, has been anointed its presidential candidate despite his being a convicted felon 34 times over, confirmed business fraudster, document thief, adjudicated sexual predator, congenital liar, oath breaker and golf cheat.
Auntie prefers football to politics

17/07/2024 Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities, Politics, Social Media

Yesterday’s The Jouker column in The National highlights a prime example of a colonial attitude in the media of the Untied Kingdom.

There were two two significant resignations on Tuesday, but as The Jouker points out, football – and English football at that – was prioritised on the BBC News website ahead of a major political development in Caerdydd, capital of England’s oldest colony.

That resignation was of the disgraced First Minister of Cymru, Vaughan Gething, who amongst other things, had refused to step down after, inter alia, losing a vote of confidence and accepting a £200,000 “donation” from a “businessman” convicted of environmental crimes. Gething’s hand was forced by a mass outbreak of ministerial resignations similar to that which ended the premiership of disgraced former alleged party-time prime minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

Although he’d only been First Minister since March, when the BBC did finally send its political editor down the M4/Great Western railway line to Caerdydd, Chris Mason did helpfully point pout that Gething’s term of office was 2.4 times longer than that of another British premier, one Mary Elizabeth Truss, the ultimate free marketeer whose polices were roundly rejected by the, er, market.

The resignation story which took precedence yesterday was that of England football manager Gareth Southgate who managed to get his team to two consecutive European Football Championship finals, yet still disappointed the jingoistic English media by failing (yet again) to win a chunk of international silverware like his predecessor in 1966, Alf Ramsey.

Why should football take priority over politics? Critics on social media were not slow to notice the choice of priorities made in London, i.e. that only England matters and Wales is a lesser concern, as has been the case ever since Henry VIII’s 16th century Acts of Union.

There is however precedence for this attitude and it comes from another footballer; and one that is one of Scotland’s greatest football exports, Bill Shankly, who was manager of Liverpool FC from 1959 to 1974, a length of tenure of office which modern football managers can only dream of.

Shankly is famously on record as rating the importance of football as follows:

Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.

The above quote from Shankly can be found here with plenty of others from the sage of Anfield.
The new enemy within

06/07/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media

Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher infamously branded the leaders of the 1984–85 miners’ strike “the enemy within”.

In the wake of last weeks’ general election, there is a new enemy within; and one far more dangerous to the country than Arthur Scargill and his NUM colleagues.

There’s now an enemy within the walls of the House of Commons.

Step forward Nigel Farage and his four fellow MPs elected for pretend political party Reform UK, which is actually constituted as a limited liability company with Farage as the person with significant control and financed by perma-tanned “businessman” Richard Tice.

Disgraced former MEP Farage, who once famously had his MEP’s salary docked for misuse of EU funds, has finally become a member of the Westminster parliament at the eighth attempt. Your ‘umble scribe hopes that parliamentary watchdog IPSA keeps a beady eye on the new dishonourable member for Clacton given his past behaviour in Strasbourg and Brussels.

As is usual, social media has been awash the reactions to the general election result, including the following exchange.

No more needs to be said. Farage has been known to harbour extreme right wind views for decades, dating back to his schooldays at reassuringly expensive Dulwich College.
Election special: Tories pretend to be HMRC

27/06/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics, Security, Social Media

There’s only a week to go until the vote for the Untied Kingdom’s general election to end 14 years of Tory misrule will be taking place.

A wipeout of Conservative members of parliament has been/is being widely predicted, which will give the opposition Labour party what is now being erroneously called a supermajority. For the sake of clarity, a supermajority is a otherwise known as a qualified majority. Older readers may recognise that what is being actually being talked of is in fact a phenomenon known as an elective dictatorship, a thumping great parliamentary majority that makes political opposition little more than tokenistic, a subject tackled by Quintin Hogg in his 1976 Richard Dimbleby Lecture.

As is usual, this general election has seen its fair share of bad behaviour, which was first documented by the likes of William Hogarth in the mid-18th century.

Chairing the Member from William Hogarth’s 1755 Humours of an Election series. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The most egregious bad behaviour so far in the current campaign has been the Conservative election betting scandal, which has so far implicated 15 Tory candidates and officials who are being investigated by the Gambling Commission for using inside knowledge to place bets and gain unfair pecuniary advantage.

However, more bad behaviour by the Blue Team was uncovered earlier today by Alan Beattie who writes opinion pieces for the Financial Times, namely impersonation, trying to pass themselves off as a different organisation, in this case HMRC.

Mr Beattie has today posted the following on the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

Mr Beattie’s post contains 2 screenshots, the first of which is from the HMRC section of the government’s website, informing visitors what to look out for in genuine content and/or information from the tax authorities.

The other screenshot shows a letter to small businesses from the Conservative Party and purporting to come from an organisation calling itself Briefing for Business. Anyone who has been in communication with the tax authorities will immediately notice how the letter mimics the fonts, layout and colours used by HMRC. The giveaway is that all party political materials must bear an imprint indicating who is responsible for publishing the material and for whom they’re promoting it.

Your ‘umble scribe is aware that in the past political parties have passed themselves off as their opponents in election materials in an attempt to discredit them, but this is the first time he can remember a party trying to mimic a government department; if you know differently, please post details in the comments below.

And finally…

Don’t forget to vote and never forget that the emphasis on Conservatives is on the first syllable, i.e. con. 😀
X Man: thin skin meets humour

16/06/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Social Media, Tech

The excessively wealthy man-baby commonly known as Elon Musk is a well-known egotist.

However, Musk, who has recently been awarded a massive and unwarranted boost to his already considerable riches by Tesla shareholders, has another asset that is less well-known, namely an excessively thin skin.

Whilst Musk is a deeply unpleasant character who will not hesitate to insult others, once famously calling one of the rescuers of a boys football team trapped in a Thai cave “pedo guy” as he felt slighted by his the person he insulted, Musk can’t handle the mildest of mocking, as the following exchange on Twitter/X shows.

Think before you tweet…

It is often said that with the wealthy the most sensitive part of their anatomy is the bank balance. Be that as it may, the above exchange proves this is not necessarily a default position for all plutocrats. In the case of Musk the ego is clearly his most delicate organ.
Vos passeports, s.v.p. !

06/06/2024 Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities, Politics, Social Media

An irony of our times came to light at the 80th anniversary D-Day celebrations as yet another dubious Brexit bonus emerged, further illustrating the Untied Kingdom’s third country EU status, as well as depicting a bureaucratic obstacle not faced by those arriving in Normandy on 6th June 1944.

The screenshot below of a post on X/Twitter by the Brexitshambles account needs no further comment, apart from to add that the parachutists not only had to show their passports, but get them stamped too, so that officials can check in future whether they’ve overstayed their maximum term of 90 days in a European Union member state. 😀

Update: 07/06/2024: Today’s Guardian has reported on the above incident, noting that ‘while immigration checks for British troops on exercise abroad are routine, doing so at a public commemoration is deemed exceptional‘.
Conservatives’ National Service proposal – social media responds

27/05/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media

Yesterday’s duff election idea from the soon-to-be-annihilated Conservative Party was the reintroduction of mandatory national service, otherwise known in more plain-speaking parts of the world as military service or conscription.

Your ‘umble scribe remembers older people during his 1960s childhood advocating the return of conscription as a panacea to cure all the evils that emerged during the 1960s like social progress (e.g. the abolition of the death penalty, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, legalisation of abortion, etc.), youth culture, colourful clothes, the consumption of drugs other than alcohol and tobacco, contraception, sexual promiscuity and everything else they didn’t like about the time.

Needless to say, the Conservatives’ idea to revive conscription has been widely ridiculed on social media.

First out of the blocks, a lovely post parodying not just the idea itself, but Britain’s misplaced and chauvinistic idea of its own greatness, when in reality thanks to Brexit, it’s a small island off the west coast of Europe that has shut itself off from closer ties with its neighbours.

Also featuring on social media posts was ridicule of the Conservative Party itself, particularly its more unpleasant members such as the dishonourable member for Stoke-on-Trent North, one Jonathan Edward Gullis (majority 6,286). In a previous life Gullis was a schoolteacher.

Whether the poor spelling and punctuation are deliberate is unknown.

A different line of attack was taken by those who are critical of the Tories seeing everything as an opportunity to make money such as the grasping ‘Baroness’ Michelle Georgina Mone, who during the Covid-19 pandemic succeeded in selling the British government £200m of useless PPE via her husband’s newly-established PPE Medpro company.

Meanwhile in the offline world, Former chief of the naval staff, Admiral Alan West, has described the plan as “bonkers” and added it would deplete the defence budget.
General election – the trolling begins

23/05/2024 Steve WoodsMedia, Politics, Social Media

Yesterday the unelected prime minister of the Untied Kingdom, one Rishi Sunak, standing at a lectern in the pouring rain in Downing Street, announced to the assembled media sheltering under umbrellas and tarpaulins that a general election would be held on 4th July, an historic date given that in 1776, England’s north American colonies unanimously declared their desire to secede.

To many Mr. Sunak’s announcement was utterly bizarre. It was poorly managed, badly staged and had the unmistakable feel of an impetuous last minute decision, never mind the fact that the alleged prime minister was almost drowned out by Steve ‘Mr Stop Brexit’ Bray playing D:Ream’s Things Can Only Gert Better on a portable sound system in Whitehall.

The Guardian’s political sketch writer John Crace had lots of fun with Sunak’s soggy discomfiture, with his latest piece, entitled ‘ Cringing in the rain: soggy Rish! kickstarts his farewell tour‘.

However, it was not just professional journalists like Mr Crace who were having fun at Fishy Rishi’s expense yesterday. There was plenty of response to the unexpected news on social media too.

One stand-out contribution to this came from the Trades Union Congress (TUC), which posted a very barbed comment at Mr Sunak and his Conservative Party which has been notoriously anti-trade union since the inception of the organised labour movement, mischievously recommending that Mr Sunak should join a union if he was being mistreated at work.

In addition, the X/Twitter account allegedly run by Larry, the Downing Street cat (also known as the Chief Mouser to the Treasury. Ed.), also joined in the fun, giving full rein to the belief that cats are allergic to rain.

It has noted by some that the timing of Sunak’s announcement is rather curious. Was it really timed to knock the Post Office Horizon public inquiry and the contaminated blood scandal off newspaper front pages?

Have your say in the comments below.

No doubt lots more banter and trolling will be forthcoming over the next weeks…
Blakey’s discourteous successors

17/05/2024 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Social Media

From 1969 to 1973, ITV aired a comedy entitled On The Buses. One of the main characters in this mixture of sexism and misogyny that passed for humour at the time was Cyril ‘Blakey’ Blake (right) played by actor Stephen Lewis. One of the duties of inspectors in those days was to check passengers were travelling with valid tickets.

Skip forward half a century and inspectors have been replaced by so-called Revenue Protection Officers, by ~~First~~WorstBus, which along with its fellow WorstGroup subsidiary GWR, has a virtual public transport monopoly in the Greater Bristol area. GWR also employs Revenue Protection Officers.

Your ‘umble scribe had the misfortune to encounter two of these successors to Blakey yesterday afternoon, when they board a no. 24 service on the Stapleton Road. Dressed like pound shop police officers but with the words Revenue Protection Officers embroidered on the back of their uniform, the larger of the two proceeded to address the bottom deck of the bus: “Hi guys. Please have your tickets and passes ready for inspection”.

Guys? Neither we the travelling public nor you are American! Besides that, guys in this country normally end up on bonfires every 5th November or thereabouts.

That was informality bordering on the discourteous, which got your correspondent thinking of a more courteous and appropriate form of address, after a long discussion with others on social media yesterday and more especially bearing in mind the fact that some degree of formality is required when dealing with the public in a formal/official capacity.

First of all the Hi! needs ditching. Far too informal. As an interjectory greeting, it dates to the 1860s and originates in the American Midwest. It should be replaced by a Good (morning/afternoon/evening) (delete as appropriate. Ed.).

That’s the easy bit done. In these enlightened times ladies and gentlemen might not cover how everyone chooses to identify, e.g. the non-binary. Everyone would therefore seem to be the most apposite way to address a diverse inner-city busload of passengers. So, for the benefit of any passing WorstBus successors to Blakey, my suggested form of greeting when doing your job would be: Good (morning/afternoon/evening), everyone. Please have your tickets and passes ready for inspection, please!

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