Chris Worfolk's Blog

Last Saturday the EDL held a protest in Dewsbury. Although, the first I knew about it, was when a bunch of their supporters came running past my window in the centre of Leeds. Luckily, as I explained last week, Twitter soon had be clued up what was going on.

I spent a bit of time watching the Twitter updates, with both sides tweeting live, and had to giggle a bit when a guy named Ged Robinson kept asking them what was the point in doing protest events when a much better way to engage would be to talk to the moderate Muslims.

This may be a good point, but there is a certain level if irony with someone spending a large amount of their time engaging in the futile activity of trying to put a rational argument to people who will never accept such points, telling them their efforts are futile.

The police were soon hot on the trail however and within a few minutes, there were half a dozen police vans parked outside my house.

After the HSoWY meeting last Thursday, we headed towards The George for a few drinks. Unfortunately (or should I saw fortunately) The George was closed. So we headed on to Millenium Square, to hit the Cuthbert Brodrick.

While I will admit that it was a little nosier than I was expecting, we soon found a nice quite place to sit down outside. And the advantage of going to Cuthbert was the drinks were both cheap and varied.

Not to mention that when I ordered my ham, egg and chips, it cost £2.10. £2.10! You probably couldn’t make it that cheap just based on buying the raw ingredients, let alone the labour costs which could come to 20 times that once I had gone to the shops, cooked it and cleaned up.

There really is no justification for disliking ‘Spoons.

At last Thursday’s Humanist Society of West Yorkshire meeting, Brian Layfield and Mark Edon presented a talk on Creationism.

Brian is a long time member of HSoWY but also father of Steven Layfield, a well known creationist who is now head of Science at Emmanuel College. Mark is secretary of the British Centre for Science Education (BCSE for short) and has previously spoken at both Skeptics and A-Soc.

On Wednesday, I received a letter from the company that runs my car park.

It stated that some permit holders where parking there on a Sunday even though their permit did not entitle them to and if this continued, they would get their parking enforcement company to start issuing tickets.

Now, I have no idea if they sent this to everyone or not, but I do know that I am pretty much the only person who parks there on a Sunday. So I can’t help but feeling a little bit victimised by this.

Apparently, even though I have been parking there for two years now without any problems even after explaining to them when I first signed up I would be there all the time, the standard permit I have only covers Monday to Saturday and if you want to park there on a Sunday, you have to pay extra.

This is despite the fact that all council car parks are free on a Sunday and nobody parks there anyway so it isn’t like they need the space.

You could of course argue that this is just a company trying to pull as much cash as it can from every available orifice but pragmatically, it’s just them being wankers. They make virtually no money out of having this separate pay extra policy because no permit holders park their on a Sunday anyway, so the only person they are getting extra money out of is me. Their price gouging brings them little reward, but plenty of angry blogging.

Last Sunday saw the June meeting of the Humanist Community of Leeds. This month’s meeting saw a very elaborate array of discussions with topics ranging from The moral landscape and global politics to exactly how you should cook extra thick steak. Big thanks to Gijsbert for his excellent news round up as usual.

At around 4pm this afternoon, dozens of people, some wearing St George’s Crosses came running past my window, followed by a few dozen police officers and half a dozen police vans. There are still seven police vans a police car parked outside my house.

What was going on?

Well, my first guess was that there was some kind of EDL protest happening.

Unfortunately, traditional news outlets can’t keep up. There is nothing on the BBC Leeds website, nor the Yorkshire Post website. There never is.

The one place you could find out what was going on however, was Twitter. A quick search for the words “EDL” showed my a long series of posts about the group having a demo in Dewsbury today, next to the train station, they had then moved to Leeds and were now running around the city centre.

I could even confirm most of these details on West Yorkshire Police‘s official Twitter account.

That’s the great thing about Twitter. You’re right – nobody does give a fuck when Lily Allen puts the kettle on and tweets about it, but when it comes to breaking news, Twitter really is bringing something special to the game.

Eli Pariser recently gave an interesting talk at TED about the way the internet is becoming more and more personalised – filtering so we see more of the stuff we want to see, and less of the stuff we don’t. He argues this can be a bad thing as it means we don’t see the other side of the argument.

One of the most interesting statistics given in the talk is that Google use 57 different factors to personalise your results, including many used even when you’re not logged in. That really must make your job a whole lot more complex if you work in SEO ;).

I recently took a quick glance at my stats to see, well I would say how many people read my blog, but what you really get is how many spam bots have hit your blog. In any case, it was interesting to see some of the search terms that people have used to reach my blog:

• dogging
• red light area in london
• hamster birthday
• chicken brain
• osama bin laden death photo
• sue my chin buff my pylon
• dont buff my pylon
• cottaging blog
• daily star they ve stolen all our jobs
• bejeweled illuminati
• talk to dead ancestors
• water way to have a good time

Dogging I can understand, though I imagine people will be quite disappointed in the content they find when they get here. Chicken brain comes from the time we went to Nando’s for my birthday and found a chicken brain in our food.

The buff my pylon stuff is a reference to Brass Eye while the last term is a reference to Alan Partridge, though the blog post itself is nothing to do with that.

The Daily Star reference refers to a headline they ran in 2008 claiming immigrants had taken every single unskilled job in the past few years.

Beyond that, I’m a little lost though. I don’t have any pictures of Osama Bin Laden’s dead body, I’ve never tried cottaging and I’m fairly sure that Bejeweled is not a product of the Illuminati designed to control our minds. And even if I did, I certainly haven’t expressed that opinion on my blog!

EDIT: Actually, while I didn’t say that, I did suggest PopCap might be the new Illuminati.

Last week, Emma posted a link on her Facebook stream, linking to a blog post by The Honest Courtesan. While it’s interesting to see Emma’s reading choices ;), the point of the blog post was to rebut a post by someone calling themselves Eve’s Daughter who made a post entitled “A Man is a Rape-Supporter If.”

In this list, Eve’s Daughter sets out a list of things which, if apply to you, make you a rape supporter. However, it’s written in a way in which every adult man falls into the category, making every man alive a rape supporter.

Now, I’ll be honest with you, once or twice in the past I have been known to troll a little. A was particularly pleased with my pre-election night throw away comment “oh no! I’ve lost my polling card, now I can’t vote :(“, as dozens of people rushed to tell me I could still vote 😀 .

So when I read the post by Eve’s Daughter, the first thought that went through my mind wasn’t, “what a load of nonsense this is”, it was simple one word – troll.

Of course, I could be wrong. There are a lot of radical extremist feminists out there and some of them probably do believe this. But here is why I believe it could well be a troll:

1. It’s clearly designed to get people really angry. It makes the bold claim that every man ever is a rape supporter in a bold and uncompromising way, stereotyping an entire gender. And it’s works. Check out The Amazing Atheist going mental on YouTube.

Strip out the WordPress header and insert a logo for The Daily Mail and it suddenly seems a lot more in context. To me, it almost seems like a job application for The Mail Online.

2. It is designed to draw in as many people as possible. Everyone checks boxes on this list so everyone who reads the list can’t help but been drawn in to the debate.

Again, it works really well. Not only are people commenting on the subject matter across the internet, but even I am here blogging about whether it is a troll or not.

3. It’s obviously not true, but is written in a way to make it almost plausible. The author could have just written “all men are rape supporters” and everyone would have ignored it as obviously nonsense. Instead the piece leads you through a series of leading questions to slowly heat your blood, without setting it straight to boil. That way, you don’t switch off straight away, you begin reading and get hooked before the fire is really stoked.

4. The author shows some signs of intelligence and satirical humour. On May 25th of this year, they made a post entitled “Life, the Universe, and Everything”. While this could be a coincidence, it is almost certainly a reference to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a fantastically clever piece of fiction that people like myself and you, my well educated yet probably bitterly sarcastic audience, enjoy.

Of course, I could be reading far too much into this, but if you accept the premise that the author of this blog is a Douglas Adams fan, and then ask the question “if a Douglas Adams fan published such a piece, is it serious or satirical trolling” the last option is suddenly a very appealing one.

5. There is no author information on the blog. If you were seriously campaigning on these kind of issues, surely you would put your name to it? Meanwhile if you were just doing it to get a rise out of people, you might as well publish anonymously, especially if you were a troll and people knew the real you didn’t actually believe any of this.

There was some mention of death threats somewhere on the blog, which could be a reason to publish anonymously, but I don’t think this is the case because who would actually make them? Surely anyone smart enough to rebut such arguments isn’t the kind of person that makes death threats so who would be so angry about this kind of writing to do that? Not to mention that if you believe in a cause strongly enough, which we’re supposed to believe the author does, that kind of thing won’t stop you.

As I said however, I could well be wrong. One of my points was going to be that it is simply too OTT, that reading the comments showed that this was clearly a comically absurd character created by the author and that clearly it was impossible to create a worldview so shielded from reality that truth was so utterly unable to penetrate. But I’ve been working in atheism for five years now, and from my experience, I know that this just isn’t true.

Still, so many of the techniques used in the article just seem to ring a little bit too true of the tried and tested strategy for a good troll post.

Last Saturday saw the final of the 2011 Indian Premiere League. The two teams who were fighting out were the Chennai Super Kings and the Royal Challengers Bangalore.

The Super Kings made a fantastic start, reaching 205 runs by the end of their innings. This left the Royal Challengers with a huge hill to climb and when Chris Gale fell in the first few balls, you knew it was all over.

The cricket was followed by the UEFA Champion’s League final between Manchester United and Barcelona. Man Utd played reasonably well but were ultimately completed outclassed by a team with mirrored the superb play of the World Cup winning Spanish side.

The biggest surprise of the day however was that I actually spent some time watching sport. Could it be that two years working in the sports betting industry has finally got to me? Is this s a sign that the rapture is on its way after all? Only time will tell…