March | 2024 | Steve Woods

Dire outlook for Tories

07/03/2024 Steve WoodsPolitics, Social Media

Yesterday saw Jeremy Hunt, a man who does very poor Chancellor of the Exchequer impression (preceding which he had pretended to be Secretary of State for Health, managing to incur the ire of hospital doctors while in office. Ed.), present his budget to parliament.

Many folk have remarked on social media recently on the similarity between Mr Hunt and Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean sitcom character, so here’s a handy image to see if their affirmations are correct.

Sticking with the same two characters, your ‘umble scribe decided to have some fun yesterday on Mastodon with a poll asking who would make the better finance minister. The unsurprising results are shown below.

And that’s not the end of the bad news for the Blue Team. Another poll in which I participated asked who readers would like to be the next prime minister, giving the options of incumbent Rishi Sunak, Labour leader ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer, the late lamented Groucho Marx, and Larry the Downing Street mouser.

Yes, that’s right Larry the Cat, the Downing Street moggy, beat both professional politicians, as did the runner-up, a Marxist, albeit one from the Groucho wing of the movement.

We are cursed to live in the proverbial interesting times.

Even though Larry resigned from his post under the premiership of disgraced former party-time alleged prime minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (posts passim), as did lots of other staffers, he soon returned to his old stomping ground during the lettuce shelf life length premiership of the disastrous free marketeer Mary Elizabeth Truss, the free marketeer the markets rejected.
Michelle Donelan does a libel

06/03/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics, Social Media

News has come to light today that Michelle Donelan, the dishonourable member for Chippenham, currently doing a nice sideline in incompetence as the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, has retracted libellous allegations made in October 2023 against Professor Kate Sang of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh – an academic recently appointed to a UKRI advisory group – accusing Prof. Sang of expressing sympathy for proscribed terrorist organisation Hamas. Donelan also made similar defamatory allegations about another academic, Dr Kamna Patel of University College London.

Donelan has now withdrawn her allegations and apologised for the remarks she initially made via social media, as well as agreeing to pay Prof. Sang undisclosed damages and legal cost have been funded by the taxpayer, in the same manner disgraced former party-time Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson had his legal fees funded by the public purse when he was finally pulled up after constantly lying to the House of Commons.

The use of public funds to redress the damage done by a government minister’s private bigotry has not gone down well in some circles, to put it mildly. Those objecting include the Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader Daisy Cooper, who has has referred to the largesse of the public purse in relieving Donelan’s financial embarrassment as nothing short of a national scandal as her actions were clearly outside of her ministerial brief.

However, not all the media presented the audiences with the full facts. Here the BBC has Donelan forking out herself for the damages and legal costs. It was not alone in doing so, with The Guardian, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph all implying Donelan is paying the agreed sum out of her own pocket.

Wikipedia helpfully mentions in its article on the minister that before entering politics, Donelan’s career was in marketing, meaning that she has previous form in peddling stuff that is patently untrue or closely related thereto (along with advertising, public relations and broadcasting, marketing is one of the so-called bullshit industries. Ed.).

Calls are now being made for her resignation, but as per usual an anonymous Number 10 source has stated that Rishi Sunak had full confidence in Donelan, calling her “an excellent minister”. The last time I looked, excellent ministers do not commit libel.
90s boy band gains haloes & gilt picture frame

03/03/2024 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media
Today’s Bristol Live/Post has added another object of religious veneration, i.e. an icon, to the already burgeoning modern pantheon engendered by lazy modern ‘journalism‘ with news of a forthcoming gig in Almondsbury in South Gloucestershire, as shown in the following screenshot.

I expect to find icons in an Orthodox church, not a suburban boozer…

The boyband [sic] in question is Five, who spell it 5ive and it originated from the same stable that sired the Spice Girls, although I can’t imagine they’re doing that well if they’re gigging at a nondescript suburban West Country boozer.

However, the band is just the latest object to be saddled with the I-word, about which your ‘umble scribe has written critically before (posts passim).

However, your correspondent is not alone. Over in the USA, professional writer Garry Berman is equally not enamoured with the adjective, writing a post in April 2022 entitled Can we please stop describing everything as “iconic”?.

In it Mr Berman expresses his frustration with this extensively and lazily used adjective.

The word seems to have become the favorite go-to adjective of newscasters/reporters, commercials, documentaries, magazines, newspapers, and wherever the English language is found in our culture.

US dictionary publisher Merriam Webster has even added the note below to its definition of the I-word.

The original meaning of iconic was essentially “resembling an icon,” but today it often describes what is so admired that it could be the subject of an icon. And with that use, iconic has become part of the language of advertising and publicity: companies and magazines and TV hosts encourage us to think of some consumer item or pop star or show as first-rate or immortal or flawless—absolutely “iconic”—when that person or thing is actually simply widely known and—they assert—distinctively excellent.

Many decades ago, your ‘umble scribe recalls being taught at school that one of the secrets of good writing was to have a good vocabulary. This naturally entailed having a good stock of synonyms – words having an identical or similar meaning, so that specific words do not get overused.

Over at the Word Hippo website, there’s a wealth of synonyms for the I-word, of which a small selection is given below for the benefit of passing, journalists, reporters, broadcasters, etc.
- archetypal
- epochal
- exemplary
- quintessential
- emblematic
- seminal
It is not known whether Five/5ive will be performing wearing haloes, or if the stage will be surrounded by a large gilt border reminiscent of a picture frame, now the band itself has gained the status object of religious veneration thanks to the local press. Perhaps the Reach plc ‘journalist‘ who wrote the piece or the venue itself could clarify matters in the comments below if they happen to be passing. 😀
German literary translators want strict AI regulation

01/03/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Tech

German news site heise reports that German-speaking literary translators associations are demanding stricter regulation of Artificial Intelligence (usually abbreviated to AI) due to its threats to art and literature.

“Art and democracy too are being threatened.” This is being said by German-speaking literary translators associations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in respect of the increasing “automation of intellectual work and human speech“. They have therefore collaborated on an open letter (PDF) in which they are demanding strict regulation of AI.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Regulation must ensure that the functionality of generative AI and its training data must be disclosed. Furthermore, AI providers must clearly state which copyrighted works they have used for training. No works should be used for this purpose against the wishes of copyright holders. In addition to this, the open letter states that copyright holders should be paid if AI is trained using their works and a labelling requirement should be introduced for 100% AI content.

“Human language is being simulated now”

“A translation is the result of an individual interaction with an original work”, the translators write. This interaction must take place responsibly. How a sentence is constructed and what attention is focused on guides the inner experience of readers. The language skills needed for this are developed and honed in the active writing process. “The creation of a new literary text in another language makes the translator a copyright holder of a new work.”

However, text-generating AI can only simulate human speech, according to the translators. “They have neither thoughts, emotions nor aesthetic sense, know no truth, have no knowledge of the world and no reasons for translation decisions.” Due to their design, language simulations are often illogical and full of gaps; they contain substitute terms and statements that are not always immediately recognised as incorrect.

“AI multiplies prejudices”

The translators continue by saying that When AI products are advertised, it is suggested that the AI can work independently, “understand” and “learn”. “This means the huge amounts of human work on which the supposedly ‘intelligent’ products are based are kept secret.” Millions of copyrighted works are ‘scraped‘ from illegally established internet libraries to create language bots.

These and other arguments are combined in a “Manifesto for Human Language”. In it the translators write as follows: “Bot language only ever reproduces the status quo. It multiplies prejudices, inhibits creativity, the dynamic development of languages and the acquisition of language skills.” Text-generating AI is attempting to make human and machine language indistinguishable. It is not designed as a tool, but a replacement for human skill.

However, AI is not intelligence at all, since this also includes emotional, moral, social and aesthetic intelligence, practical sense and experience which arise from physicality and action. “In this respect, the technical development of language bots cannot be termed ‘progress'”, the open letter states.