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Twitter has hit the headlines twice this week, and the collective power of Twitter uses has delivered decisive smackdowns to two very different forces of evil.

The first was delivered to sleazy oil company Trafigura, accused of the illegal fly-tipping of toxic waste in The Ivory Coast, suspected of causing more than a dozen deaths and making tens of thousands ill, then spending vast sums on expensive lawyers to try and cover the whole thing up. What bought matters to a head was when their bullying lawyers got an injunction preventing The Guardian from reporting on questions being asked in The House of Commons about the matter.  This alarming comment appeared on The Guardian’s website.

“The commons order paper contained a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found”.

Since the commons order paper was available online on the official Parliament website, it didn’t take long for a few bloggers work out what this question was.  Then it started spreading across Twitter.  By Tuesday morning, “Trafigura” was the top trending topic, and far more people knew about the true nature of this rather unpleasant company that would ever have do so had their lawyers not tried to gag the press. The term for this is “Epic Fail”

If the first Twitter storm was about freedom of the press, the next one was about responsibility of the press. On Friday, a toxic little squit of a Daily Mail journalist wrote an disgustingly bigotted article about the death of Boyzone singer Steven Gately, on the eve of his funeral.  Within hours, Twitter went nuclear again. “Jan Moir” and “Daily Mail” became top trending topics.  Major advertisers including Marks and Spencer started withdrawing advertising from The Daily Mail in response.

A few hours later the hack gave a mealy-mouthed non-apology which claimed she’d been subject to an orchestrated campaign, and that her vile article “was not intended to cause offence”.  This stupid woman was clearly so wrapped up in her little Daily Mail bigot-bubble that it didn’t occur to her than this was a spontaneous reaction by tens of thousands of ordinary people who were simply disgusted at what they read.

While we’ve seen two examples in the past week of the collective power of Twitter users for good, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before the same thing gets used for evil.

By the way, I’m Kalyr on Twitter.  You can probably find a few of my contributions to both of those smackdowns.

Where do we go from here?
Where do we go from here, where do we go from here?
Where do we go from here, where do we go from here?

They boarded up the synagogues, Uzis on a street corner
You can’t take a photograph of Uzis on a street corner
The DJ resigned today they wouldn’t let him have his say
Surface scratched where the needles play, Uzis on a street corner

Where do we go from here

Terror in Rue de St. Denis, murder on the periphery
Someone else in someone else’s pocket
Christ knows I don’t know how to stop it
Poppies at the cenotaph, the cynics can’t afford to laugh
I heard in on the telegraph there’s Uzis on a street corner

Where do we go from here, where do we go from here

The more I see, the more I hear, the more I find fewer answers
I close my mind, I shout it out but you know it’s getting harder
To calm down, to reason out, to come to terms with what it’s all about
I’m uptight, can’t sleep at night, I can’t pretend everything’s all right
My ideals, my sanity, they seem to be deserting me
But to stand up and fight I know we have six million reasons

They’re burning down the synagogues, Uzis on a street corner
The heralds of the holocaust, Uzis on a street corner
The silence never louder than now, how quickly we forgot our vows
This resurrection we can’t allow, Uzis on a street corner

Where do we go from here, where do we go from here

We buy fresh bagels from the corner store
Where swastikas are spat from aerosols
I sit in the bar sipping iced White Russian
Trying to score but nobody’s pushing
And everyone looks at everyone’s faces
Searching for signs and praying for traces of a conscience in residence
Are we sitting on a barbed wire fence
Racing the clouds home, racing the clouds home

We place our faith in human rights
In the paper wars that tie the red tape tight
I know that I would rather be out of this conspiracy
In the gulags and internment camps frozen faces in nameless ranks
I know that they would rather be standing here besides me
Racing the clouds home, racing the clouds home

You can shut your eyes, you can hide it away it’s gonna come back another day
Racing the clouds home, are we racing the clouds home
Racing the clouds home

- Marillion, White Russian © EMI Music Publishing, quoted in full with permission

65 years ago was the D-Day landings.

65 years later, 943598 British voters chose to insult the memories of those who gave their lives on that day by voting for a party who represent exactly the same values as the enemy they died fighting.

Some people claim it’s just a protest vote; a way to say ‘up yours’ to the political establishment in response to the scandals about MPs expenses. How many of these voters have actually stopped to think what they’re endorsing?

I count many of black, Jewish, gay and transgendered people amongst my friends and acquaintances. This vile party is fundamentally opposed to their very existence; they want to herd them all into concentration camps. They’ll deny it in public, of course, but they’ll be lying. You have to be pretty stupid not to see these neo-Nazis for what they are. It’s the non-white, non-straight, non-Anglo-Saxon British citizens that a BNP vote really says ‘up yours’ to.

And their use of British WW2 imagery, when their leaders idolise Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, really sticks in my throat.

I’ve left it a couple of days before posting anything on the US election.

As an non-American, my overwhelming sensation is one of relief.  Not that I want to downplay the significance of American’s first black president, or the sense of hope so many feel.  But I agree with Scottish SF writer Charlie Stross on this.   The world dodged a bullet on Tuesday.

Barack Obama may turn out to be a very good president; in the coming years he’s going to have is work cut out to clear up the mess his predecessor has left behind, and is almost certainly going to have to make some unpopular decisions.

But the alternative really didn’t bear thinking about.  McCain was 70, there are rumours that he’s got cancer, and his choice of Vice President was deeply frightening.  I’m not sure how many of the 46% that voted Republican realise just how extreme this woman’s religious views are.  I’ve already blogged about The New Apostolic Movement and their profoundly unChristian world-view. I don’t want anyone that believes she’s God’s choice to usher in the End Times to be allowed anywhere near the nuclear button.

At least according to one of John McCain’s attack ads, he is.

As Fred Clark of slacktivist notes:

There’s not a second wasted here — every image, gesture, note, word and allusion points in a single direction, everything in the film says a single thing: Barack Obama is the Antichrist. Yes, it’s propaganda, but like the films of Eisenstein or Riefenstahl, it’s also art — unsubtly didactic, yet beautiful in its unity of purpose.

The McCain campaign denies this, of course. Despite being what Orcinus describes as “blasting the dog-whistle at air-raid volume at the religious right“, it’s all allegedly just a joke. As Fred Clark continues.

Tragically for Davis, however, it turns out that accusing your political rival of being the Antichrist is considered a bit over the line. Apparently according to conventional American political mores, the claim that your opponent is the ultimate personification of evil, the 10-horned beast of the Apocalypse, is regarded as sleazy gutter politics of the worst sort.

As Street Prophets points out, that doesn’t wash. It’s a pretty blatant attempt to associate with Barack Obama with Nicolae Carpathia, the Antichrist figure from the appalling “Left Behind” books.

It’s clear the McCain campaign recognises that the rapture cultists (I refuse to use the word “Christian” to describe their heretical belief system), although dangerously bat-crazy, are a powerful voting block.

Anyway, I’ve always thought Sun Myung Moon would make a good candidate for the Antichrist. One world religion and all that?  But somehow the rapture cultists always ignore him. Presumably it’s because he’s a conservative, and they’ve all be conditioned into assuming that the horned beast of the apocalypse would be a liberal.

Bruce Schneier in The Guardian comes up with one explaination as to why photographers seem to be hassled more and more when trying to take pictures in public places out of misplaced fear of ‘terrorists’

Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?

Because it’s a movie-plot threat.

A movie-plot threat is a specific threat, vivid in our minds like the plot of a movie. You remember them from the months after the 9/11 attacks: anthrax spread from crop dusters, a contaminated milk supply, terrorist scuba divers armed with almanacs. Our imaginations run wild with detailed and specific threats, from the news, and from actual movies and television shows. These movie plots resonate in our minds and in the minds of others we talk to. And many of us get scared.

At to this that many of the sorts of people employed as security guards are not exactly the sharpest tools of the box, are poorly-paid, poorly-trained, and recruited through a process that fails to weed out small-minded bullies, it’s not surprising that some photographers get hassled.

And I’m not willing to listen to the sheeple who bleat “it’s better to be safe than sorry” when authority figures overreact to largely imaginary terrorist threats.  If we do nothing, our freedoms will be slowly salami-sliced away.  If when they came for the railway enthusiasts with cameras and you did nothing, what will happen when they come for you?

J Michael Neal has a great post about the importance of trust in economics, using the current mortgage crisis as an example of how American capitalism has gone off the rails.

The switch from the concern of corporations with various stakeholders to the approach where profit maximization was the overriding, and in many cases, only, goal, did drastically increase the efficiency of the economy. It did so at a cost, however, and that cost was trust.

At its most bleeding heart, this has been a critical change in the employer/employee relationship. There are all sorts of euphemisms for it, but the idea that your boss was only going to employ you so long as he didn’t have some other way to get the job done for more profit is corrosive. It eliminates the trust on the part of the employee that his employer has his interests in mind.

Read the whole thing.

Y’know, Dick, I know time is running out, but if you run those industrial-sized shredders too long, they can overload the circuits and start a fire. A word to the wise.

***Dave on that fire in Dick Cheney’s office.