TiG’s curious **** list.

After seeing that one commenter’s name, ‘Casinoboy’ is partially obscured because it contains the word ‘nob’, I’ve finally decided to start compiling a comprehensive list of words that fall foul, sometimes hilariously, of the word filter. If anyone has encountered ‘bad’ words that I’ve not, the more incongruous the better, they’re welcome to post them to me, and I’ll add them as well…

Nob
Arse
Scum (due to the ‘cum’)
Bint
Slag
Taffs (due to the ‘ffs’)
Whore is, I’m pretty sure, infra dig, despite ‘attention whore’ being part of the internet jargon.

And we must not forget ‘paedo’, although it’s practically Ian Mean’s favourite word.

So, anyone else want to get the **** rolling?

 

Save Your Sanity…

‘D-DAY is almost here – this is your chance to save this city.

At 12.30pm tomorrow, a massive gathering will come together at The Cross to say “no” to Boundary Commission proposals to “rip the heart” out of Gloucester.’

Three queries about this story in today’s paper. First, what does the ‘D’ in ‘D-Day’ stand for. Day? Debacle? No shortage of those in TiG. Maybe it should have been ‘B-Day’?

Secondly, ‘chance to save this city’? There’s been no shortage of readers, those that still visit the website anyway, who have pointed out that the ‘city’ is in no danger. Hypotenuse, much? There wasn’t all this fuss about Longlevens being transferred to the Tewkesbury constituency, and likewise, I’m pretty sure it continued to be served by Gloucester City Council. IIRC, Churchdown and Brockworth also belong to Tewkesbury. Or maybe Cheltenham? Something that appears to make little sense, but still didn’t inspire a march,anyway.

Thirdly, TiG is predicting a ‘massive gathering’? More than predicting, actually stating that it will happen, despite the failure of their purple prose on the subject to instill a fervour in the hearts of readers. I would have been half tempted to go into town to watch this spectacle tomorrow, but I’m afraid that I might be counted as part of the ‘massive gathering’, so I probably won’t now.

Perhaps the Citizen should ask their readers if they can think of a way to reduce the number of MPs from 650 to 600 without some constituents getting a different MP? I wonder if some of TiG’s sister papers are running ‘Save Our MP’ campaigns?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The proposal to move Wesgate ward to the Forest constituency may have been inspired by political mischief on the part of Lewis Baston, but alternative proposals haven’t demonstrated that there is a better alternative that involves Gloucester. If the Forest needs more voters, can’t they take a chunk out of Tewkesbury, instead of Gloucester, which seems to have just the right number at the moment?

Whatever proposal is accepted, it doesn’t seem like an urgent matter, since no seat will be abolished as a consequence. Is anyone getting such a great service from one Tory MP in Gloucester that they fear what they might receive from a Tory MP in the Forest?

 

‘Islamic Terrorism’ – A Distraction?

There is a ‘Big Issue’ piece in this week’s Citizen, relating to Barton & Tredworth, entitled There is no such thing as Islamic terrorism.

In the article, members of a local mosque offer to dispell ‘misconceptions’ about Islam in a single day session or over a few days, and the piece cites several ‘sterotypes’.

The main theme of the piece, as exemplified by the title, though, seems to me like a straw man. Saajid Badat notwithstanding, in the twenty plus years I have lived in Barton, violent Islamic extremism has not been the problem, but rather a creeping assimilation of property and resources, what some would call ‘Islamification’, of the ward, coupled with poor or non-existent interaction with the ‘indigenous’ community. Local people are a lot more bothered, for example, with the traffic disruption caused by the ‘Islamic school’ on Stratton Road, when they were assured a decade ago that the building would be a community centre for everyone, and not a place where parents would clog up the road with their cars, not just in the morning and afternoon, but evenings and weekends as well.

The Working Man’s club on Barton Street is now the Friendship Café, dedicated to the benefit of (Sunni) Muslims. At least three properties on Charles Street have been bought up so that an Islamic centre, with parking, can be built at the back. The Barton & Tredworth Community Trust runs a madressah. It’s trying to sell the premises, due to financial mismanagement, but there’s little danger that a new venue won’t be found for the madressah if the new owners don’t want to share the building.

If the volunteers really want to reassure the community, they might wish to give their assurances that the BBC report about abuse in Islamic schools has no bearing on Gloucester. Islamic terrorism really is as much of a ‘Big Issue’ here as ‘bonkers boundaries’.

 

Praise where it’s due, though…

Despite the entry below, and despite the fact that my complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about, among other things, editor (in chief?) Ian Mean claiming the individuals who caused disturbances in Barton & Tredworth and the city centre in August were from my ward (the implication of claiming they ‘shamed’ B&T), has been rejected, for the spurious reason that a brief line four days later (almost) said otherwise, I do have to complement an organisation, or a part of it, when it’s merited.

Anyone who still visits the thisisgloucestershire website, particularly if they are interested in political stories, and especially ones involving Labour, will be aware of an individual going by the name of ‘James_Glos’, who for the most part, only posts comments against our Conservative MP, and in defence of the local Labour party and ex-MP Parmjit Dhanda. When I was able to post, I used to use his name in inverted commas because unlike myself, he is cagey about his identity, which is the hallmarket of a ‘Red Flag’ style sockpuppet. The only purpose of ‘James’ seems to be running online interference for the aforementioned local party.

Yesterday, ‘James’ posted this, below the ‘Date with your MP’ article:

Wednesday, October 26 2011, 2:35PM

“Tim, I’ve no idea who “my lot” are but I’m afraid whoever is MP there performance is going to be judged and commented on. I don’t think Mr Graham has done very well thus far, so I’ve said that.

I assume you were equally saddened when the previous MP was criticised on those pages. In fact I’d have thought you would have been more than saddened since the abuse was real quite crazy. So much so that a harassement order and a ban from this website were required for the main perpetrator. An honest critique of Mr Graham’s performance doesn’t really compare with that does it?”

The last part contains a reference to a rather despicable attempt by Parmjit Dhanda to gag me in the run-up to the last general election, which failed in its intent but was ultimately a success in that, although the local police completely mishandled their attempt to serve me with a harassment warning order, when I later referred to PC Steven Crown in a TiG article about (another?) city centre police officer abusing his authority, it was enough to get me banned from TiG, which ultimately has led to a whole world of hurt.

So, since the above comment is also pretty despicable when I have no way of responding, I complained about the post when I saw it yesterday, on the grounds of ‘libel’. That didn’t work, perhaps because TiG’s moderation company don’t view it as untrue. Just as I didn’t think what I said in passing about local Labour so many months back, and would say about any main party, being economical with the truth, was in the least bit controversial. This being the case, I reported the comment again, as ‘abuse’. This tends to always work, because nowadays, it’s enough to just say one feels offended by something for it to be labelled as offensive, without question. I rather suspect that it was ‘James’ or someone very like him, who made the same complaint about my innocuous comment. Innocuous, certainly, when compared to other comments on TiG that are left alone because nobody has an axe to grind with the commenter.

And work it has. Before 10:20 this morning, the comment was still there. After 10:20 it wasn’t. So my praise where it’s due is that everyone, even me, has an equal right, in the eyes of TiG’s moderation company, to get comments removed if they choose to take it.

Of course, as Marge Simpson once said, ‘That’s not necessarily a good thing…’

P.S. some people might question why I should get a comment removed, then re-post it here. Well, it isn’t the lousy comment, it’s the fact, mentioned above, that I don’t have the opportunity to respond. People can say any nasty thing about me they like as long as I have right of reply. Having that denied is quite frustrating. It’s funny, but with Richard Graham being such a disappointment (really, more so than I could ever have thought), and the Liberal Democrats being their typical selves, I flirted with the idea that, even with Dhanda still on board, there was little other choice but Labour. ‘James’ has reminded me why our local branch are still, for the most part, a shabby, untrustworthy bunch.

 

TiG – It can’t just be me, can it..?

I mean, other people must be able to read their articles and appreciate just how devoid of journalistic merit most of them – OK, let’s say ‘many of them’ – are?

Warning signs flash merrily when the headline ‘Boy racers rev up again in Cheltenham’ hoves into view. It’ll be about cruisers, of course, and people have complained before that ‘boy racers’ is a lazy journalist’s phrase which doesn’t describe the behaviour of the vast majority of cruisers, who annoy residents more by being parked up in one place than ‘racing’ anywhere.

Then the report goes on to inform us that the council want to designate the Kingsditch Retail Park as an ‘accident hotspot’, citing three motoring accidents which, shady as my knowledge of what vehicles cruisers like to invest their money in, don’t seem to involve cruisers at all. And the Cheltenham Cruiser Working Group, consisting of ‘police, Cheltenham Borough Council, Highways, residents and parish councillors’, doesn’t appear to include any… cruisers. Perhaps if it did, the problems this working group appear to face wouldn’t have persisted as long as they have. What is it, getting on for five years now? More?

I’d like a closer look at the (parish) council’s data, before buying into any notions that cruisers are a bigger problem on our roads than a lot of other silly buggers who somehow managed to bluff their way through a driving test.

However, a year back, maybe two, there would have been dozens of responses to this story, from both sides of the equation, and varying in degrees of knowledge. Now it seems most people have just given up challenging the drivel the Cheltenham newsroom produces. If anyone out there uses Facebook, and wants an outlet for their criticisms that TIG can’t censor, or just wants to comment on a story that TiG has inexplicably denied responses to, this is worth a shot: Bring Back The REAL Citizen.

 

More ‘bonkers’ headlines…

Sometimes, I wonder if TiG aren’t just taking the piss because they know they’re going out of business…

School children are first in county to have hives

Update: You. Couldn’t. Make. It. Up.

gggg fdf sdf sdfsdf

 

Dear BBC Visitor…

This is an email I received from the BBC (donotreply.moderation@bbc.co.uk) just over a month ago. It’s the culmination of a discussion,ranging over several blog entries, about how the BBC’s online staff (or should that be the staff of BBC Online?) treat their customers, ie., licence payers. On the Beeb’s side, sticking out like a particularly livid thumb, was Nick Reynolds, ‘social media executive’, and a man who can’t seem to post a comment which doesn’t patronise and provoke at the same time. In spite of this rather less than ‘social’ behaviour I, and others, managed to remain civil in our responses, but that’s the thing when someone has decided that you are an undesirable. However polite you are, they see ulterior motives. In fact, the less abusive your posts are, the more convinced they become that you ‘appear to be aware’ of what you are posting, and that it ‘is not true’. It’s no good asking them how they can be so sure, though, as they have already judged you, as they judge anyone with the temerity to suggest that the BBC’s complaints procedure doesn’t encompass its online moderation, which is dealt with by a private company, Tempero, which is thus unaccountable to licence payers or anyone else…

(And the problem, in a nutshell, is that Reynolds’ bullyboy behaviour can’t be adequately addressed by appealing against a single modding decision, as required by the procedure. The big picture is required to truly appreciate his crassness, but the moderation company literally won’t see the forest for the trees)

Dear BBC Visitor,

Thank you for contributing to the BBC web site.
Unfortunately we’ve had to remove the content below because it contravened one of our House Rules.

We are removing this comment and closing your account due to persistent and harassing comments regarding Nick Reynolds, and the disruption to conversation on the Internet blog by your repeated off-topic comments about the moderation appeals process. Given that you appear to be aware that what you are posting, both about the appeals process and Nick Reynolds involvement in it, is not true the only conclusion can be that you are engaging in deliberate disruption of the BBC website. This is in breach of the terms and conditions of the site, and you leave us with no option but to close your account.

Please note that anyone who seriously or repeatedly breaks the House Rules may have action taken against their account without further warning.

Regards,
BBC Moderation Team.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs

http://www.bbc.co.uk/messageboards

URL of content (now removed):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/blog101/F21628708?thread=8251277&post=109728436#p109728436 [Comment 22]

Subject:

The Five Most Interesting Stories from Our Week

Posting:

Nick Reynolds wrote:
If people wish to have dialogue they need to obey the house rules and also accept that some conversations are not going to run on and on forever.

[I wrote] Has anyone expressed a desire for discussions to ‘run on and on forever’? If not, isn’t that an inaccurate and unfair view?

The House Rules are a different story. If rules are interpreted in the strictest, ‘more than my job’s worth’ way possible, with regard to being off topic, for example, how far away can a revision of those rules be? Oppressive regimes are toppling throughout the Middle East because they would not acknowledge the winds of change. Borrowed time for some of the more boorish staff members?

At the root of all this is the gradual eradication of the BBC’s message boards, accompanied by a range of specious and often contradictory excuses. An often made charge is that the BBC are clamping down on the public’s right to express their opinion’s following the Iraq war, and the Hutton report. Maybe this is so. Whatever the cause, we must hope that at some point, actual BBC employees start being accountable to us again, and mercenary outfits like Tempero get the boot. And that the BBC Trust pulls its head out of the sand.

 

Here I stand. I can do no other.

OK, because I said I would try to keep up with the blog, here’s that other thing about Asda and their automatic tills…

I was picking up some bits and pieces, just after tea, around 8pm, and the auto-till rejected my card. An assistant came over, and it was the usual thing, ‘could I pay any other way?’, which in this case meant cash, of which I didn’t carry much around on me.

Now, ten years back, this would have been pretty embarrassing for me, and I would have just counted my change and made a quick decision about what I should leave behind, just to put the situation behind me. What I did now was to not rush but instead take out my mobile and phone my wife to check the state of our account, and yes, she was adamant that we had more than enough to cover the purchase.

So I asked the assistant if my card might work with another till and she said no, it wouldn’t. All this time I’m putting the groceries back into the basket, so I can reswipe some of them and pay the cash. But I see an empty till, and the assistant has gone to assist someone else, so I think to myself, they’re not going to arrest me for this, so what the heck…

I use the other till, swipe everything, use the card, and it works just fine. I resist the urge to rub this fact in the assistant’s face as I leave…

This is worth mentioning because it’s the last five or six years of being forced to stand up to people in the community that I would not have said ‘boo’ to previously that has given me the confidence to stand up to commercial bureaucracy. Police officers, councillors, MPs, chairmen/women, people who park in front of schools… generally, the people who go through life thinking they are above criticism. People who know me should be aware that if they have problems getting answers from any of these people, they won’t get fobbed off if they ask for my support, and I won’t take the authority line at face value, because even technology fibs sometimes.

The Martin Luther line might sound a bit cheesy, but it accurately represents my position.

Next up (possibly); why the BBC’s attitude to social media has become a disgrace…

 

Dodgy dealings in Asda

Something I’ve meant to bring up, for about three weeks now, and I can’t allow the tardiness to continue, especially after advising someone else on the importance of regular updates, however little time there seems to be, is an incident in Asda, at the automatic check-outs. Actually, there are two incidents, very different in nature, that I want to talk about, but this is more of a public information announcement…

It was early evening, and these checkouts were busy enough for there to be small queues, one of which, the closest to the main doors, I was in. There are six auto-tills, three on either side, with less spacious ‘bagging areas’ than the two other sets that people queue for. The nearest till on the right had become available, and either the middle one had also become available, or it had just become apparent that no-one was using it. Hence, as the couple, a man and a woman, in front of me went to the first one, I went to the second.

Just befor I reached it, though, the man put a [pack?] of small bottles, around 8 or 10, possibly lager, beer or cider, on the flat area where my basket should have gone. I said ‘Excuse me’, and then ‘Excuse me’ again, after which I took the bottles off the flat area and placed it on their bagging area, without a word. This caused some difficulties for them, as I guess the bottles had not been scanned, and a assistant had to help them. I resisted the urge to offer some friendly advice to him about what the problem had been…

Now, am I just being overly suspicious, or was this a (not particularly clever, given it relied upon someone in my position not having a problem with being held up) way of trying to steal from the store? I would almost be inclined to say ‘watch out for this kind of thing’, but in all honesty you couldn’t really ignore it. It only has a real chance of working if the tills are being used much, and then the security cameras are probably being heavily scrutinised for funny business. Maybe when the tills are crowded is the only time one can get away with it, as slim as the possibility is even then.

So not exactly a major problem. Asda’s checkout software is probably a bigger issue, but I’ll come to that…

 

Barton & Tredworth Community Trust Emergency Meeting, July 7th, 7pm

As anyone reading this will probably not know, the ‘Trust Centre’ will be holding an EGM, following failure to hold a quorate AGM some… let’s see… four months back. The normal procedure, that is to say, what the trust’s rules say, is that when an AGM is inquorate, another meeting is arranged for seven days later, and however many residents turn up, the meeting is judged to be quorate. Despite attempts to point this out, the chairwoman was of the view that such a meeting ‘might not be quorate’ and the secretary, Bren McInerney, refused to acknowledge the facts, so the emergency meeting is finally taking place tomorrow. As you would expect, this meeting would have to be heavily promoted, to ensure that there would be minimal risk that it ‘might not be quorate’. Not a bit of it. No posters, no mention on the charity’s web site news page (well, there hasn’t actually been any news on it since over a year ago, even when the partnership asked it to promote our own AGM), no notice on the trust’s entrance display, nothing.

The general concensus is that this means the managment committee have no interest in residents turning up, and therefore no interest in the trust surviving its present financial difficulties, and that they intend to dissolve the trust and sell the building. This would have serious consequences for, among others, the radio station founded by the chairwoman’s husband, so I’m quite sure a lot of thought has gone into this. What exactly the committee has in mind, though, we won’t know until tomorrow evening…