Lies, damn lies & Misleading Retweets

Saw this on Twitter today:

Is this the sort of thing a reasonable person would do? I think not.

UPDATE: It gets stranger...

Over on The Blog That Peter Wrote is a piece going into more detail about what happened.

Cole has appeared in the comments saying

Peter, I like a lot of what you write so was sad to see this one. The tweet was done at the heat of the moment and does fall more into your latter suggestion [that, as Peter puts it, Cole "'innocently' amended the tweet because there wasn't space to put his insult about Ireland's wife in the 140 characters"] of space. So furious at the ridiculous allegation of the original tweet that on reflection I should probably have stopped and retweeted the original in whole at first. However the allegation that I was somehow threatening to his wife and kids is and remains bs. As I went on to explain in further tweets, Ireland is deluded with his giant conspiratorial web, that I'm frankly bored of being slightly tangled in. I stand by my denial of his assertions and am more annoyed I broke the first and second rules of Tim Ireland club. Engaging.

I think that Cole has misinterpreted Peter's view - see how "innocently" is in quotation marks and how he notes that it carries on about Mrs. Tim. He also says

That I am in anyway protecting someone and thus a threat to your family is a crock Tim. That is the allegation you made and that is my denial. Again.

Even though - as is clear from the two images - Tim made no such claim.

At the best, it seems that reading comprehension isn't Cole's strong point.

At worst, we it appears that Cole wanted to alter Tim's original message in order to give misleading impression of him, and, in a later message, to suggest that Tim has a persecution complex towards Cole. Tweet

Person of the Year 2011

I came across this a few weeks ago, but it seems like I didn't write about it.

Every year Time Magazine hand out a "Person of the Year" award.

It is given to the person who "has most influenced the news" over the past year.

Given this year's events, there can only really be one winner: Mohammad Al Bouazizi AKA the Tunisian guy who set himself on fire last December.

This led to the Tunisians overthrowing their dictator, as well as causing revolutions in other Middle Eastern & North African countries.

This has obviously been the biggest news event of the year.

Everyone should vote for him and hopefully Time will do the right thing. Tweet

'Tis the Season

As we're getting close to Christmas it's time for the annual "They've Banned Christmas!!!!!1!!!!!1111!!!!!" myths to re-appear.

As previously said, the Daily Mail has admitted that its "Birmingham have replaced Christmas with Winterval" piece was a load of bollocks.

However, other myths exist.

Thanks to Jamie Sport, I've discovered that on Facebook people are ranting about the Red Cross Banning Christmas so as "not to offend Muslims" or to "peaceifi [sic] muslims", amongst other things.

Shockingly, this too, is a complete load of crap.

Last year the Red Cross did a blog post about how the claim is a load of rubbish, and Jamie has kindly agreed to let me reproduce it:

Yesterday, we started getting some comments on our Facebook page from people angry with us for ‘banning Christmas’, which we haven’t, and the story now seems to be spreading on some American websites.

It turns out that these people have stumbled across an article that appeared in the Daily Mail in 2002 and now forms part of the paper’s online archive. Unfortunately, the article isn’t dated on the Mail’s site, which had led some people to believe this was a current news story – although references in it to Sangatte, the Calais refugee camp that closed in 2002, do serve to date it. We denied the gist of the piece strongly at the time.

Christmas is a major UK holiday and time of celebration, which is shared by people of all faiths and those of no faith. Many of our shops and offices are decked out in festive decorations around this time of year – we also sell a range of Christmas cards and gifts in our shops, both high street and online.

It’s true that you won’t find explicitly religious items or displays, relating to any faith, in any of our shops, at Christmas or any other time. But this certainly doesn’t amount to a ban on us celebrating or mentioning Christmas, or any other holiday. And it’s absolutely nothing to do with “offending non-Christians” or to serve any other sort of politically correct agenda.

The point is that the Red Cross is not a political or religious organisation. This neutrality is one of our fundamental principles and governs everything we do in the whole Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. It means that we can reach and help people in need, whoever and wherever they are. Often we provide help in countries that other organisations cannot or will not work in. We cross front lines in times of war to help conflict victims and visit prisoners of war on both sides. We can only do this life-saving work because we are understood to be a completely neutral, independent organisation. Put simply, our neutrality saves lives.

We can’t let people in need down by compromising our neutrality. That is why we do not align ourselves with any particular political cause or religious creed anywhere in the world. And that’s why we don’t have any items of a religious nature in our shops.

A nativity scene in a shop in Kent might seem like it has nothing to do with our sensitive, precarious work in a war zone in Africa or the Middle East. But in a world where information travels quickly and pervasively – a world where an eight-year-old news story is still raising questions with our supporters – we have to make sure we act consistently across the board with regard to our neutrality.

We wish all our supporters a merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Hopefully more people will see this message and how it's wrong. Tweet

CFAs/"No Win No Fee" cases aren't being scrapped

A video appeared on the Guardian today, which, unfortunately, is based on a false belief - that No win, no fee agreements are going to be scrapped/severely limited.

They're not.

There's nothing in the government's "Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill" (Part 2 has the planned changes to legal costs) - or the Jackson Report (PDF) on which it's based - about scrapping these things.

At most, all they are going to do is make "success fees" - a bonus payable to the solicitor and/or barrister for winning a case on a CFA - unrecoverable from the losing side.

This has no bearing whatsoever on CFAs themselves, or access to justice generally.

Lawyers will always take a case on if they consider that it has a decent chance of winning.

For what the government does plan to do, I refer to my three previous posts. Tweet

In defence of Anjem Choudhury

You may have heard that the government has banned a group who call themselves "Muslims Against Crusades", efective as of 23:59:59 GMT.

The group is/was led by a guy called Anjem Choudhury. He was he founder of a Group called Islam4UK, before it too was banned.

All he does is acts which he knows will cause hysterical reactions in the public.

This is known as Trolling. It may annoy you, or piss you off, but that's not a reason to criminalise the twat! 

It's a case of "We have to do something" and "Ban this sick filth".

All that will happen is he'll create a new group, which will carry on as before. Tweet

Daily Mail: Winterval is a myth

The Daily Mail has finally - after 14 long, frustrating years - admitted that "Winterval" is a myth. I would do a long post, but suggest that people read Dave Cross's instead. Tweet