Category: mastur/metablogging

So you think you’re a blogger

When I started hearing about a blogger called Brown Moses, who collated Syrian rebel videos and identified unexploded ordnance, and regularly posted remarkably sharp depth pieces on the Leveson inquiry, I assumed this person was some retired six-letter agency type with their SAS badge on the mantelpiece, in the formaldehyde jar, stuck through Jimmy Savile’s real nose.

But no. He is your original, washed in the blood of the lamb, A-Number-One front room indie blogger!

“If EastEnders isn’t on I get straight on the laptop. On a good night when nothing much has been posted, it will take me an hour and a half, but I’ve been looking more closely recently.”

Oh, but you will…

Update

Speaking of the Simple Plan, I am assured that the Liberal Conspiracy piece is coming Real Soon Now. Meanwhile, I’m seriously considering offering it to Conservative Home.

Netroots UK catchup

Other stuff from Netroots UK.

Having chugged through my official Brown Bag Lunch (which actually included Ribena, in a disturbingly infantilising touch), I went to the open space group on the Leveson inquiry. This ended up merging with the one on the LIBOR scandal. I was able to contribute by knowing how the LIBOR panel was meant to work, although we couldn’t get away from the point that separating investment and retail/commercial banking wouldn’t have helped because BarCap was big enough in its own right to be on the panel.

One point which everyone thought would resonate was that the scandal represented an attack on an institution that had relied on its members’ fair dealing. Exactly what to do with it, though, was harder. Could this support the Co-operative’s claim to buy the branches demerged out of Lloyds? Or a Leveson inquiry, but with banks? Of course there have already been inquiries, but then, the original ideal type of this kind of inquiry, the Pecora Committee, wasn’t the first inquiry or even the second into Wall Street in the 1920s.

What else? I went to one of the more tech-centric workshops, run by Blue State Digital. This was pretty good; I liked the point that Facebook advertising was usually a “hopeless waste of £2.50″, but it did have its uses. Those weren’t anything Facebook would want, though. Specifically, the ad-targeting tool lets you get a quick estimate of the size of a potential audience – input the demographics, locations, and search strings you’re interested in, and it spits out an estimate of your audience.

The other one was using it to bait your enemies. If you had a reasonable amount of information, you could place an ad that your target would have to read every time they logged in. This amused me more than a little.

Everyone, but everyone, loves ScraperWiki.

What else? WhoFundsYou scored thinktanks by the degree to which they are forthcoming about their funding. Astonishingly enough, Respublica, the “Not the Other” TaxPayers’ Alliance, and the Adam Smith Institute (no less) got an E. The very, very serious Centre for Policy Studies and Institute for Economic Affairs, and the somewhat less serious but certainly influential Policy Exchange and Centre for Social Justice got a D. You could have mistaken the score-card for a left-right political spectrum, as IPPR, Progress, Resolution Foundation, NEF, SMF, and Compass all got As, while Demos, Reform, the Fabians, and Policy Network got Bs. CentreForum was, superbly, right in the centre with Civitas and the Smith Institute.

It is telling that the distinction between wanktanks like Respublica and TPA and the Very, Very Serious ASI disappears on this scale.

Owen Jones has a lot of good laugh lines. The BSD people are good but self-satisfied. Clifford Singer is funny. I really regret missing the workshop on shooting better video on smartphones as I have zero video skills (even if their live demo was the traditional fiasco). You can’t hear anyone speaking anywhere in Congress House without using a loud hailer.

Request for blog

Here’s a role for a blogger that I don’t think anyone covers. The Whitehall blog. It’s a truism about British journalism, going back to Anthony Sampson if memory serves, that the newspapers cover Westminster politics obsessively but they hardly cover Whitehall at all. When they do, their service is even more conventionalised and less penetrating than usual. Partly, this is because the civil service is better at discretion than the politicians. But it’s not exactly unknown for officials to brief the papers, now is it?

For example, I have an impression that there is a shift of power and influence going on. David Cameron and Francis Maude’s biggest personnel decision so far has been not replacing Gus O’Donnell with another civil servant in the same role. O’Donnell combined the roles of Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service, as most of the postwar top officials did. He was the heir to the apostolic succession of the popes of bureaucracy.

Cameron and Maude decided to split up the job, separating the top job in the Cabinet Office, which controls the central government’s policy-making secretariat and also the Joint Intelligence Committee machinery, the role of Head of the Home Civil Service, which acts as the senior pro for civil servants, and the role of the official responsible for the prime minister’s personal staff. Taking forward a trend that was already going on in the Blair/Brown years, this job was cut out of whole cloth, creating a Prime Minister’s Office with the new domain name pmo.gov.uk and a Permanent Secretary for the PMO to lead it. This job was entrusted to O’Donnell’s heir apparent, Jeremy Heywood.

You guess that one of the reasons for this was to dilute the power and influence of the top civil service. All politicians are suspicious of it, and Tories especially. Why did the civil servants go along with it? Well, a big New Labour obsession was the idea that the traditional divide between policy-making and operational civil servants was pathological. Rather than a strict, and class-associated, divide, they wanted the top civil service to be closely concerned with “delivery”. The institution didn’t like it, and having a long memory is its business.

That leaves a couple of questions. The first is “Did it work?” The second is “Who of the three won?” The answers seem to be “No” and “Heywood”, as far as I can make out. I get the impression that the civil service has regained some influence in killing off the sillier ideas, and I think Steve Hilton’s sudden exit from Downing Street is pretty much entirely down to them. Hilton’s title had been upgraded from director of strategy to director of implementation, pretty clearly suggesting that he would be pissing in Sir Humphrey’s pool. That was before his brilliant idea to sack everyone they couldn’t fit in Somerset House (he may or may not know that half of it is King’s College law school and quite a bit more is an art gallery these days). And Heywood was personally insistent on getting rid of Hilton, something I think we can all “shudder a grateful amen” to. Generally, he seems to be on the rise, suggesting that not only has the system seen off the minister, but also that closeness to No.10 beats institutional bulk and headcount.

Now, what I want is this kind of stuff but with more links and goats and stuff, every week. All right? The traditional answer to this is that someone tried, back in the 1970s, but the pushback was dreadful. Well, that’s another way of saying that it’s the sort of thing that only dirty hippies would do, and that’s precisely what blogging is for.

Elsewhere

At Fistful of Euros: so what did Nicolas Sarkozy know about DSK, why did he only leak the bits he leaked, and what are the voters going to do about it?, how I was wrong about the euro, NATO for dictators, floating without a strategy, although if we had one it would probably be wrong.

At Stable & Principled: my entire post on Dr. Tim Morgan, how we were right as far back as July about the coalition economic strategy, the Kübler-Ross model of grieving, and the coming Sad Donkey Economics movement has vanished into thin air. This is a disturbingly common event with S&P, although nowhere near enough to account for its general lack of content. You know you want it, though. Update: Up!

Dr A.Q. Khan: Has a Blog

Via yet another really excellent Arms Control Wonk piece on Indian and Pakistani nukes, it turns out that A.Q. Khan, formerly of Khan Research Laboratories, the man who sold the world the unofficial open-source community version of the Urenco enrichment cascade, and now of luxurious house arrest right up until the Navy SEALs climb over his back garden wall, has a blog.

It’s in Urdu, but I know a man who can deal with that and who has blogging time on his hands.

Back to 2006

Bérube sez:

So these days, when I talk to my scientist friends, I offer them a deal. I say: I’ll admit that you were right about the potential for science studies to go horribly wrong and give fuel to deeply ignorant and/or reactionary people. And in return, you’ll admit that I was right about the culture wars, and right that the natural sciences would not be held harmless from the right-wing noise machine.

Ah..I said back in February 2007:

the modern global Right has operationalised postmodernism as a system of power

The Googles tells me I actually said it as far back as April, 2006 in a thread at Chris Lightfoot’s.