I’m talking about a vehement anti-interest that leads people to complain about the thing they lack interest in existing, and leads them to resent and despise people who are interested in it.

Hmm…

Largely, no. Much of the time people are accessing the mailbox in the same way a user can. When we get a new mobile phone account the voice mail is programmed to a default setting, including a default password with which you can “manage” your voicemail from a landline. A lot of the time voicemails were intercepted by journalists and investigators trying their luck with default and guessable passwords. It’s probably not the only way voicemails can be access, but it’s by far the easiest one.

The blame for the hacking, of course, lies firmly with the private investigators and journalists that accessed the phones, and the editors who either condoned the techniques or accepted stories with dubious sources without asking sensible questions. But there are ways that people can minimise the risk. Simple ways.

The message here is: set the pin on your mobile phone. Don’t rely on being to boring for anyone to take an interest in, you never know how things may turn out. Don’t rely on the media turning over a new leaf either, there will probably always be someone devious enough to try this trick on you.

So… what has this got to do with being a Doctor Who fan?

I think as who fans we can metaphorically sit too close to the screen. We can pay too close attention to the mechanics of the plots going on in front of us, rather than just sitting back and enjoying it as intended. Of course there is nothing wrong in examining the plots in such minute detail, people can and do get a lot of enjoyment about it. I do. But if we do this we must always be aware of what we are doing, and be prepared to take a step back and a deep breath. We must always bear in mind that we are subjecting an entertainment product to far deeper scrutiny that it can reasonably be expected to sustain. And we must be aware that in our close reading of the subject matter we will be prone to missing parts of the bigger picture, that will be plain to the viewer sitting back and enjoying the show.

It’s fine to examine the plots and discuss them at length providing we remain aware of what we are doing and don’t go on about plot holes and lazy writing which really aren’t there for the regular viewer. The worst conceit of many sections of Who fandom is to assume it is the core of the audience, rather than a statistically irrelevant subset of it. And most of all we shouldn’t get annoyed if someone enjoys the show in a different way to us.

I really don’t get celeb stories in the press. I mean I’m not interested in the tittle-tattle about people’s private lives, but I can see how others might be.

No the stories I mean are the “So What?” type, typically a picture of a famous person doing something banal like walking down the street, or going to the supermarket, or being on holiday, while doing nothing newsworthy like this example from the Daily Mail.The main thrust of the story is that Lewis Collins was spotted looking older now than he did when he was the star of The Professionals. THIRTY-ODD YEARS AGO.

I mean so what? Of course he looks older! What’s the point of this story, I really don’t get it.

The Daily Mail is one of the worst for these banal, privacy breaking stories. What’s worse is that on the website they all go out under the “Femail” section. Am I unusual in thinking that filling the women’s interest section of a paper with such spiteful and yet shallow and banal stories is sexist and misogynistic? The choice of stories of the editorial team of the Femail section seem to me to indicate that those compiling them think that women are typically shallow, gossipy, and stupid. I know this is not the case.

I mean WHY? I’m so confused it’s putting me off my morning coffee.

Hat tip to Minority Thought

I also feel that it does not need to be a separate, compulsory, subject post 14. I mean sure an IT GCSE should be available to those who want to do technically oriented jobs, and all other GCSE equivalent courses should have relevant IT skills. But IT needs to be part and parcel of what people are learning. It needs to be a tool rather than a thing in its own right for most.

It almost goes without saying that education is a good and necessary thing, we can always find ways to improve teaching. However I think education is only a small part of the problem with IT knowledge.

The biggest problem is attitudes to knowledge. We need to become a society that values knowledge, and expects people to know the stuff they were taught at school. Taking science as an example- that has been compulsory on the national curriculum since the early 90s, and it before that it was fairly standard for most people to be encouraged to do at least one science subject. Yet as a society we don’t seem to consider that teaching as basic background knowledge. Newspapers do not seem to pitch stories to a public that was taught basic science at school- they pitch them to people with almost complete scientific illiteracy.

There’s a similar story with maths, I was once privy to a conversation with two adult education advisers who were teaching basic maths to nursing students. One bemoaned that some of the stuff they were expected to learn was GCSE level. Well, that *is* basic maths.

The other thing we need as a society is to be more relaxed about, and aware of our ignorance. We should be relaxed about our weaknesses and not be aggressive when they are pointed out. We all lack knowledge that it is reasonable to expect us to know. I know this because I am no different. Be too harsh about lack of knowledge and people hide and don’t seek help. However, if you normalize a low level of knowledge, many people who need to know more assume they are doing fine and don’t seek help either. In the second situation people feel better about themselves, but otherwise are no better off.

The problem with normalizing a low level of IT knowledge is that we end up with policy (in businesses as well as the public sector) being driven by people who know little, but feel that they are well informed. They know quite enough, thank you very much, and those who know more are difficult pointy-heads. These people do not seek the advice of specialists because they judge those specialists to be pedants, geeks and weirdos (I’m generalizing of course) who just make the mumbo jumbo up as they go along. Anything they don’t understand is irrelevant and nonsense. Well it must be.

So my point is, yes we do need to teach IT at school. We all need the basic aptitude to use computers so we can easily pick up the specifics as we go through our lives. But unless attitudes in society change, much of that teaching will be going down the drain.

Unfortunately I can’t see how these attitudes can be fixed.

It appears to engage your readers you need emotive hyperbole, partonisingly simplistic knee-jerk arguments, anger and aggression.  Either that or some popular bloggers are operating some elaborate in-joke on a level I just don’t get.

Unfortunately, I don’t do knee-jerk or aggressive. I just do nuanced and thoughtful. So I’m going to have to get used to the obvious fact- life’s not fair.

Several posts to this blog remain in drafts hell. Most have never left my head as the idea I had while walking to the playground evaporates or loses cogency when I’m faced with the tools to turn my thoughts into words other people can read.

One thought that keeps bubbling to the surface is how I took a stand against online bullying and normalised aggression and nastiness five years ago. I ultimately failed to make a difference, but I am still proud of myself- I feel I deserve a lot of respect for it. Sadly, even proud of my actions as I am, there are unresolved issues relating to this event that mean that this post may be less about my actions to make the world a better place, and more about my sense of unresolved bitterness at the way I was treated- as if I was the problem rather than the brave person standing up to it.

The second post is surrounding this post on a true story about Daily Mail lies. Mine is a more general piece about lies and the media, namely that I don’t think the fact “they all do it” makes it OK, and that there is a big gap between skewing a story toward a newspaper’s agenda, and simply making stuff up.

Part of what holds me back is the futility of blogging. Something that drives me on each day is a desire to work towards making the world a nicer and better place. Even standing up for people wronged as rude and nasty on the internet, by those far ruder and nastier, counts. Trouble is my capacity for actually achieving this is limited (as evidenced by the fact I chose a time where I tried and failed as a “proud moment”).  It sometimes seems that more intelligent and philosophical blogging is unlikely to change minds, only to get the converted nodding and those that disagree riled rather than challenged. Opinion pieces seem to reinforce opinions, rather than change them.

The couple were extreme Christians applying a personal interpretation of Christian values to their guest-house. Their views are far from normal, even among Christians. Actually even among the sub-set of Christians who have a problem with other people being gay. That’s not to say believing sex outside marriage to be wrong is rare, and believing homosexuality to be a sin of some degree is not, relatively, common. It’s just that most decent, caring, Christians do not seek to impose those values on others.

As someone who was brought up in a loving, caring Christian family, I worry about the fall out from this sort of case. It always seems to be the nasty, dogmatic kind of Christian, who’s just that little bit weird. It never seems to be your normal, church-going caring christian, who has come up against some silly aspect of dogmatic secularism. Even though some religious leaders claim religious people are under attack from dogmatic secularists, these sort of cases demonstrate nothing of the sort.

There are plainly a large number of people who have prejudices and look for reasons to back them up. The Bulls’ are so clearly such a couple that I shudder when I read about their personal views, even extrapolated from Christianity as they are, being misrepresented as Christian values.

I worry about the popular view of Christianity when these are the examples of Christian values people see. Not Churches running homeless projects or reaching out to help asylum seekers. Not taking on and supporting individuals who’ve had a hard time. The image is of a people who have a set of rules which they use as a ruler to judge others and don’t hold back when they find they don’t measure up.

I think decent, caring, mainstream Christians should be doing more to present the positive side of Christianity. Sending out a message that the Bulls’ are not typical or representative of true Christians.

I heard, via various channels, that the British are failing once again to cope with the snow, and are a laughing stock all over Europe where the rest of us are coping and life carries on like normal.

Living in Germany I turn on the TV news, and look out of the window and think, “Really?” I mean sure we have Winter tyres here, but things are being affected by the weather. Some of the local buses are cancelled due to the snow, and some people are choosing to work from home. Elsewhere there are tail backs on the autobahn, and flights are being cancelled because of the bad weather. Students from the next town are missing lectures because of the snow. And the gritting is nowhere near as good as it was in West Yorkshire, with side-streets remaining untreated here as they were there.

There’s little stopping the average Brit from taking similar precautions. Any decent tyre dealer will get hold of winter tyres and a spare set of hubs for you, should you choose to use them, and have the space to store your spare wheels. Certainly I know that once back in the UK I can get replacements for the “All Weather” tyres that our car now uses. And while manufacturers may not go in for German levels of over-engineering you can get decent outdoor gear in the UK too.

I wonder if the difference is attitude. In Germany, most people expect there to be inconvenience, they expect to need decent footwear to get to the bottom of the street, they expect to take longer to get places, they choose not to go out and don’t see it as the collapse of civilisation. And maybe few drivers in Germany expect grit to be some sort of magic dust that means they can drive in the snow without slowing down or taking any more care. In Britian, we try and plough on regardless and when we suffer the slightest inconvenience and we’re calling for the heads of the council gritting department managers.

Pictures from BBC news show that Germany and Britain are not unusual, people are having problems all over Europe. So maybe the only thing that is making the UK a laughing stock is the ability of the tabloid press to make a drama out of very little.

The news that a convicted rapist won a case in the ECHR elicited a predictably furious story in the Daily Mail.  This prompted many people to post mis-placed anti-EU commentary, even though the EHCR is part of the Council of Europe and not the EU.

Anyway, silly me, I left two comments myself. One pointing out this little factual inaccuracy, and another one that’s more thoughtful and philosophical about how the difference between a regular law-abiding citizen, and the worst criminals ever is not a binary distinction but more of a sliding scale:

While I agree that people who have committed serious crimes should be disenfranchised, many of us break the law in small ways every day. Under your blanket rule anyone who drives at 33 mph in a 30 zone should be ineligible to vote.

Sure there are practical limitations as to who is prosecuted and who isn’t, to give both the general public and police equipment a reasonable margin for incompetence, but the fact remains that the dividing line between breaking the law and not breaking the law is not somewhere between doing something “a little bit wrong” and committing murder.

The message here is that while there are rapists and murderers, who can be legitimately described as “evil” they don’t make up even the majority of people who break the law by a long shot, and it’s a good idea to have a sense of perspective on these matters.

OK, it’s not Pulitzer prize-winning standard, but it’s a pretty good and intelligent piece, even if I do say so myself. It amused me to see how being sensible, level-headed, and thoughtful wins you no friends in Daily Mail land. My comment was one of the three on that article in negative appreciation figures, when I last checked it was minus 26.

I’m not sure about giving all prisoners voting rights; I think there is a case for withdrawing rights from serious offenders,.however the responses seem a little simplistic- it’s either all or none, and all prisoners are as bad as multiple rapists. This is plainly untrue.