“You are part of our gang” – running news social media accounts during an election campaign

Having run social media accounts for both the Mirror and the Guardian during election and referendum campaigns, here’s a long rambling brain dump about the whole thing… I suppose one of the things that has driven my career over nearly...

Police Search High School, Pat Down 900 Students (Audio)

George Newhouse, partner at Dentons, amd Laura Donohue, professor of law at Georgetown Law

discuss two recent cases dealing with the Fourth Amendment. One case involves the warrantless search of 900 high school students by police. The other case is about the legality of swabbing a car door handle for DNA in a public parking lot. They speak with June Grasso and Greg Stohr on Bloomberg Radio’s "Bloomberg Law."

President Trump's Executive Order on National Monuments (Audio)

Charles Warren, partner at Kramer, Levin, Naftalis and Frankel, and John Leshy, professor at University of California, Hastings College of the Law discuss President Trump's executive order that could rescind national monuments. They speak with June Grasso and Greg Stohr on Bloomberg Radio’s "Bloomberg Law."

Friday Reading S06E09

Friday Reading is a weekly series of recommended reads from the Guardian’s Social and New Formats Editor Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology. It is also available as an email newsletter – sign up here. This week I’ve mostly...

Clown down: The post-O’Leary Conservatives

Conservative leadership candidate Kevin O’Leary addresses a Conservative Party leadership debate Monday, February 13, 2017 in Montreal. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

Perhaps now (he said with no real hope), we will stop pretending success in other fields transfers effortlessly to politics. Ken Dryden was a great goalie. He got nowhere as a leadership candidate—and that was in 2006, when, as it turned out, the Liberals could have used a good leader. Marc Garneau was an astronaut. Peter Pocklington (ask your parents) owned the team that fielded the greatest hockey player since, I don’t know, maybe Orr, and are you seriously coming to me for hockey lore? Anyway, he crapped out as a Progressive Conservative leadership candidate.

The lesson, which a lot of people seem slow to learn, is that conspicuous success over here does not constitute any kind of guarantee over there. Politics is its own set of skills and challenges. If you can’t speak in a way that inspires at least part of your audience, if you can’t make others want to give their time and energy, if you can’t make hard choices, stand withering abuse, organize your way out of a paper bag—if you can’t do politics, then politics doesn’t care what you can do.

READ MORE:Inside Kevin O’Leary’s investing fund misadventure

And Kevin O’Leary, let us remember, was not even that good at the other thing. I don’t want to belabour this, but come on. Pop quiz: If you wanted to see O’Leary on TV last November, before he got into the Conservative leadership race he’s just left, where would you tune in? What time and station? If you’d called a dozen of your friends, could three of them have told you?

And then there was the extended uncertainty about which country he likes best.

Anyway. O’Leary’s departure clarifies some things about the choices ahead for Conservatives, but I want to pause and offer some gentle questions to those Conservatives who have already spent time working to make him the next Conservative leader and who now find themselves bereft: What were you thinking? Which of his policies did you think was the wisest for ensuring Canada’s prosperity? What was he saying that would have struck you as clever or insightful if it had not come from a semi-professional TV jerk?

And, most delicate: Was there any sense in which you were supporting this guy, not because you thought he would be good for Canada, but because some other rubes could be made to buy him? Because in nearly a quarter-century covering federal politics, I’m still amazed every time I see that instinct at work. This is the PT Barnum school of political strategy, and I’m here to tell you, even in the year of Donald Trump, that it fails far more often than it succeeds.

RELATED: How are gay rights and climate action not conservative values?

Anyway. Enough of the loudmouth quitter. Onward: Is Maxime Bernier now the heir-presumptive? Maybe. This would be a remarkable outcome: handing the party of Stephen Harper to a man who believes that, on the scale of what’s possible and needed to restrict the role of government in the nation’s life, Harper did nothing significant. If Harperism was about a partial rehabilitation of social conservatism on one hand, and a steely incrementalism on the other, Bernier rejects both hands. On social questions he’s a libertarian. On economic questions he has no interest in moving slowly. His selection would be an expression of deep frustration with the Harper legacy, by people who spent a decade helping to build that legacy. It’d be a fun experiment, to say the least.

If not Max, then who? Andrew Scheer (medium-right) and Erin O’Toole (rightish) have been fighting for the mantle of Harperite continuity. Each of their campaigns is sure they see a path to victory. The rest of the field is a mix of quirky gambles (maybe Conservatives want a carbon tax! Maybe Kellie Leitch isn’t a self-animated golem!), social conservative proof-of-concept candidacies, and tragically misfiring former ambassadors, whom I won’t name but, you know, Is-Chray Alexander-way.

O’Leary saved the party some real trouble by quitting, because if he hadn’t quit now, you can now be certain he’d have quit at some random point in the future. Different flavours of trouble lie ahead. Perhaps the huckster’s departure can be taken, by each Conservative in his or her own way, as a stern admonition: Get serious before it’s too late.

The post Clown down: The post-O’Leary Conservatives appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Flynn Faces Legal Action Over Russian Business Dealings (Audio)

(Bloomberg) -- William Banks, Director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism at Syracuse University Law School, discusses potential legal charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn for not fully disclosing his business dealings with Russia. He speaks with Michael Best and Greg Stohr on Bloomberg Radio's "Bloomberg Law."

What if taking my son to Leyton Orient is ruining football for him?

A couple of weeks ago my wife and children had just landed in Cyprus, and she texted me: “On the bus to the hotel – we’re the first stop – thank God! Flight was fine – no bumps. James wants...

Boost Your Brand: How to Create Content for Awareness

Historically, when digital marketing agencies venture into content creation, it’s with the hope of increasing the number, or strength, of backlinks.

Continue reading >>

Waymo vs. Uber: 8 Things I Learned From Anthony Levandowski Taking the Fifth

The questions he was asked spoke volumes about Uber’s suppliers, the secret Spider lidar, Google’s early suspicions, and more

What are the beginner mistakes when content marketing?

What are some common beginner mistakes in content marketing?

Not understanding the fundamentals and over complicating the process

1. Content marketing is only about two things, communication and persuasion.


2. Your CM should enable the reader to do two things, save time, make money. Everything else is fluff.
   
   You don’t need a third, the above is enough. Now I have saved you time, go make some money.

You don’t need a third, the above is enough. Now I have saved you time, go make some money.

But let’s look at this in more detail.

1.  Creating content for the wrong person

A specific mistake may be that a beginner looks at all the content that is being produced, notes that certain types of content are more common and think that is the type of content to create.

The flipside of that mistake is when a content type is perceived to be ineffective because it is so common. The listicle is a prime example.

Not creating content that works, because the creator has a personal prejudice against that type of content. An example is our friend, “the listicle”. If you work in creating content with a view to drive traffic, you will learn to loath the listicle. But the hard truth is

NO ONE CARES WHAT YOU THINK

The content is not created for the creator, it is created for the reader

It may be that in your experience you think this type of content is not effective, but that is a different process than thinking, “urgh, I hate listicles, they’re grody to the max.”

The best content creator, in my experience is the one who likes getting under the skin of others, the one who likes to get a rise out of people, the one who needs a reaction to validate their existence. Good content creators are troubled people.

2. Thinking it’s all about the tool

Having a tool means you don’t have to work as hard, it has the promise of saving you time. This is why the idea of the “tool” is very attractive. A blog post that details a list of tools will always work as a type pf content, the more comprehensive the list the better, even if most of the list is not read.

This is because each tool highlighted, each description is a little promise that it will save you time and any content that saves you time gets shared, bookmarked and linked to, more than one that doesn’t.

Which is probably why we see so much content detailing the many tools available to us, such as 12 Free SEO Tools. A blog post I did recently and which drove a nice bit of traffic to this blog.

But you don’t need any tools to do good SEO.

You don’t need tools to create great content.

Yes of course a tool is useful as a mechanical aid to perform a specific task, but excitement over tools is similar to when the DIY nut goes to the store and ends up spending hours going through the specs of the drills, when all she needed was a hole.

It’s really about what happens in the brain of the reader at the time they consume the content

We are wired to compare things, to sort things. The SEO mindset puts this on hyperdrive and so when asked to create content will head to the tools. Therefore if you want to attract the SEO to your blog, create plenty of listicles.

The most simple tool and probably the most effective when it comes to creating content is pen and paper.

But that just sounds boring, doesn’t it?

3. Thinking you can’t come up with new ideas

I often come to a point where I have used up all the obvious ideas for content to create.

The solution to the creative process is the one that works for you. It’s about trying a few out before you find one that fits. This is such a common problem with writers and creative artists that there are many ideas out there about how to get to the point there you have a pile of workable ideas.

My personal solution to this problem is this

1. Change the state of mind. Creating content and coming up with the ideas for content are two different things and you should think about them differently, just as the state of mind for writing a first draft is different than editing.


2. Go for a walk, change your metabolism. There are studies that prove that walking aids thinking, plus less chance of distraction


3. Consume fantastic content. No this does not give you permission to buy the DVD Box set of the Walking Dead to watch from the start, just to experience that “Nagen” moment again. It means consuming content that takes you away from the problem and allows your sub conscious to work on it, whilst shovelling tasty food at the other end.


4. Discussing with other human beings. Even though the actual information that another person can tell you may not help you, the act of shifting your brain to one on one, personal communication mode is enough to help shake the box and allow the ideas to flow.

Whatever works is what works. If the ideas are not flowing, pick a solution you have never used before and see how it works. With a mind to developing your own personal box of solutions.

 

In conclusion.

There are are many mistakes that will be made when a beginner, and don’t let them slow you down when it comes to creating content. Mistakes are there as aids to learning, if no mistakes are being made you are probably not trying hard enough.

At least as a beginner you wont have a huge amount of people watching what you do and picking it apart.

 

The post What are the beginner mistakes when content marketing? appeared first on Digital marketing blog Cornwall seo.

Bloomberg Law Brief: Ocwen Sued By Regulators (Audio)

Robert Hockett, a professor at Cornell University Law School, discusses a lawsuit against mortgage giant Ocwen for improper handling of mortgages that they bought from banks in the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis. He speaks with June Grasso and Michael Best on Bloomberg Radio's "Bloomberg Law."

Virgin Media and the constantly drifting fix times

So, you know the deal by now. I’ve been checking the fix time for our On Demand service. In previous posts here you’ll see that it was originally April 21st, then it moved to April 24th. I thought I’d check it again today and… Oh dear… Yet another massive face palm… It’s now going to be fixed (apparently) on May… Read more →

Softwood lumber: Well, that escalated quickly

(Ben Nelms/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Shots fired:

“It has been a bad week for U.S.-Canada trade relations [US trade secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement this evening]. Last Monday, it became apparent that Canada intends to effectively cut off the last dairy products being exported from the United States. Today, in a different matter, the Department of Commerce determined a need to impose countervailing duties of roughly one billion dollars on Canadian softwood lumber exports to us. This is not our idea of a properly functioning Free Trade Agreement.”

Chrystia Freeland and Jim Carr were quick to reply:

“The Government of Canada disagrees strongly with the U.S. Department of Commerce’s decision to impose an unfair and punitive duty. The accusations are baseless and unfounded…The Government of Canada will vigorously defend the interests of the Canadian softwood lumber industry, including through litigation.“

It started with such promise, too. When Justin Trudeau visited the White House on Feb. 13, the longstanding softwood lumber dispute with the Americans came up — and in an interesting way. I was told some time ago by a source familiar with the discussions that at some point, Donald Trump became interested in knowing how his budding relationship with Trudeau compared to Barack Obama’s. Trudeau was circumspect. I did have a good working relationship with President Obama, the prime minister said, approximately. But you know one thing he was never in a position to deliver on? Softwood lumber.

Hint, dropped. And reinforced, in a followup call ten days later. The hint seems to have been taken: some Canadians who’ve worked with both the Obama and Trump administrations on the softwood lumber dispute believes that until this week, the discussions were more substantive with the current administration than with its predecessor.

READ MORE: For a troubled Trump, Canada is easy pickings

So what happened? Two things, perhaps. First, Trump has been having a lousy time on trade, which was one of the two or three top issues that got him elected. He can’t get his nominee for chief trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, confirmed. He hasn’t been able to formally start the 90-day process toward a NAFTA renegotiation. He’s backed down on a trade fight with China, which is the fight some Trump aides entered politics to wage (if you have some time, check out this astonishing documentary by Peter Navarro, now a trade advisor to Trump).

What’s left? I’m told that at 1:46 p.m. on Monday, Fox News carried an interview with a Wisconsin dairy farmer who has hit hard times and blames Canada. The President was watching, and was greatly displeased. Coming as it did on the heels of Trump’s visit last week to the Snap-On Tools plant in Kenosha, the Fox News story egged the President on in his growing suspicion that Canada, far from being cuddly and Ivanka-friendly, is actually a marauding border-squatting trade succubus.

The relationship has come so far, so fast. Only three days after Trump’s inauguration, his informal economic advisor Stephen Schwarzman was in Calgary briefing the Trudeau cabinet on bilateral affairs. In remarks to reporters, Schwarzman was full of sunshine. “One of the important things is the unusually positive view that’s held of Canada,” he said. “Canada’s been a great partner of the United States for as long as anybody can remember.” Trump’s arrival might portend “a changed climate, maybe some modifications,” Schwarzman said. But “basically things should go well for Canada.”

READ MORE: Donald Trump flops and flubs and goes after Canada

And now? The 20 per cent tariff that seems about to hit Canadian lumber exports to the U.S. is neither unexpected, I’m told, nor out of line with earlier U.S. tactics during this interminable dispute. And Canadian officials continue to talk regularly with their U.S. counterparts at senior levels. It’s not inconceivable there could be an agreement within weeks, the Canadians believe.

But Canadian officials cannot discern any consistency in the Trump administration’s tone from day to day. If prospects of an agreement fade, the Trudeau government, finding itself in a fight, may decide to push back. I can detect no sign of a rush to get to that point.

The prime minister won’t have to spend much time wondering what business leaders think he should do. He had already scheduled a lunch meeting on Tuesday in Kitchener with the Business Council (formerly Canadian Council of Chief Executives, formerly Business Council on National Issues), the blue-chip CEO group led by former Liberal cabinet minister John Manley. They may be able to help him gauge next steps. Surely, even at this late hour, Trudeau still hopes the storm will blow over.

The post Softwood lumber: Well, that escalated quickly appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Ocwen Sued Over Improper Mortgage Handling (Audio)

(Bloomberg) -- Robert Hockett, a professor at Cornell University Law School, discusses a lawsuit against mortgage giant Ocwen for improper handling of mortgages that they bought from banks in the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis. He speaks with June Grasso and Michael Best on Bloomberg Radio's "Bloomberg Law."

First Syngenta Lawsuit Reaches the Courtroom (Audio)

(Bloomberg) -- Margaret Cronin Fisk, a reporter for Bloomberg News, and Andrew Torrance, a professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, discusses the first of many lawsuits against grain giant Syngenta, over Syngenta's decision to import corn seeds to the U.S. before China allowed the seeds to be imported. They speak with June Grasso and Michael Best on Bloomberg Radio's "Bloomberg Law."

France isn’t burning—yet

Marine Le Pen, French National Front (FN) political party leader and candidate for French 2017 presidential election, delivers a speech after early results in the first round of 2017 French presidential election, in Henin-Beaumont, France, April 23, 2017. (Reuters/Charles Platiau )

It says here in my Big Book of Foreign Correspondents’ Clichés that we’re supposed to have conniptions every time a member of the Le Pen family makes it to the second round of a French presidential election. It made a lot of sense the first time: On April 21, 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the obtuse old paratrooper who’d called the Holocaust a “detail” of the Second World War, squeaked past the Socialist Party’s terrible candidate, Lionel Jospin, for second place. That was enough to get Le Pen a place in the second-round runoff against Jacques Chirac.

Since then, “un 21 avril” has been French shorthand for a huge political surprise, and pundits of the “Europe is always in crisis” school tend to underplay what happened next: People who’d never have considered voting for Chirac’s Gaullist (roughly, centre-right) RPR party voted for him anyway. “Le klepto,” as Chirac was fondly known, ended up beating “le facho” with more than 80 per cent of the second-round vote.

This time around, everything’s softer around the edges. Le Pen père won a little less than 17 per cent of the popular vote in 2002. His daughter, Marine Le Pen, seems to have won about 22 per cent on Sunday night, en route to her own runoff against the charming, maddeningly unspecific centrist Emmanuel Macron in two weeks. Fascism on the march? Maybe, but only to the extent that a little less fascism gets you a little further. The younger Le Pen has sharply reduced her National Front’s overt anti-Semitism, and her anti-immigrant, anti-Islamist, anti-European Union stances are not always easy to distinguish from, say, those of Nicolas Sarkozy, who was France’s nominally centre-right president from 2007 to 2012. That’s more to Sarkozy’s shame than Le Pen’s credit, but there it is.

In France, analysts often contrast the “Republican” vote with the “extreme” vote. This can be confusing to outsiders. “Republican” here means generally in agreement with the democratic values of modern France, especially as encoded in Charles de Gaulle’s 1958 constitution. Every French president since 1958 would qualify as a republican by this definition, from de Gaulle to François Mitterrand to Sarkozy to, assuming he wins, Macron.

READ MORE: Marine Le Pen’s Quebec misadventure

On either side of the republicans are “the extremes,” Communist on one side and vaguely fascist on the other. Traditionally the republican stance has been to urge voters not to support either extreme if it comes down to a clear choice, which is why most Socialists held their noses and voted for their bitter enemy Chirac in 2002: At least they could agree with him about what the rules were.

Usually the extremes have been really easy to spot. In 1965, Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, chief censor of the wartime collaborationist Vichy regime, ran for president and won 5 per cent of the vote against de Gaulle. In 1988 the far left, chronically divided but undaunted, fielded candidates representing the Parti communiste français, the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, and Lutte ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle.)

The extremes have had good election years in the past. In 1969, with de Gaulle out of the running and the riots of 1968 fresh in memory, assorted more or less Communist candidates won a total of 28 per cent of the first-round vote. In 2002, led by Le Pen, the left and right extremes won about 31 per cent.

And this year? If you add Marine Le Pen’s vote and that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the most prominent far-left candidate, you get 42 per cent for the “extremes.” And for the first time, no candidate from either of the country’s mainstream political currents will be in the second round. François Fillon, who was prime minister during the Sarkozy presidency and who is many ways a formidable personality on the centre-right, also seems to have enjoyed hiring family members for made-up jobs, and he never recovered from the scandal. Benôit Hamon, the Socialist candidate, only got to run because France’s current Socialist president, François Hollande, has made such a hash of things he finally decided not to run for re-election. Even a good candidate could not have rescued the party’s fortunes, and Hamon was not a good candidate.

But here’s the thing: what makes Hamon a proper “republican” and Mélenchon an “extreme?” The two used to be pals. They’d plot procedural tricks together at Socialist Party conventions. Hamon stayed in the party as it moderated its positions when in power, and Mélenchon struck out on his own. Mélenchon is to the left of Bernie Sanders, but unlike some of the Communist candidates of the 1960s and ’70s, he had no interest in bringing elections to an end even if he had managed to win this one.

READ MORE: The meaning of a meeting of Europe’s leading nationalist minds

I’m not fond of Marine Le Pen. But this year at least, she is probably a self-correcting problem: just about all the major figures in both the Gaullist and Socialist movements are calling on their supporters to vote for Macron, and he’ll probably win handily.

But then he will have to try to solve France’s problems, which have less to do with “left” and “right” than with opportunity versus entitlement: in the country’s sclerotic labour market, employers are reluctant to hire because it’s too hard to fire, a chronic situation that blocks the path forward for too many young French citizens. Sarkozy was supposed to fix that. He lost to Hollande because he failed. Hollande didn’t even run for re-election because he knew he’d failed too.

Macron’s support is broad but shallow, his political experience almost non-existent. Imagine a younger, more naive Justin Trudeau winning an election with no party to back him, trying to govern a country with more problems than Canada has, under direct and frequent attack from terrorist groups, while well-financed opponents keep repeating beguilingly simple answers: boost everyone’s benefits with imaginary money, or close the borders. Macron doesn’t get to fail for free. His failure would tend to validate the creeping suspicion that France, in some way, doesn’t work—at least not France in Europe, or France with immigration, or France with markets.

The extremes this year were a little less extreme and a little more successful. In five years, they or their heirs will try again. That’s the scale of the challenge the young and untested Macron will face if he wins in two weeks.

The post France isn’t burning—yet appeared first on Macleans.ca.

After the Catastrophe: resistance and the post-truth era

Abstract.
Mourning is movement; melancholia is stasis.

We live, supposedly, in an age of ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth politics’. This is a misunderstanding. ‘Pre-post-truth politics’ includes the era of the ‘war on terror’ and its deceptions, and the orthodoxies and falsehoods which led to the elite debacle of the credit crunch. It is technique, not truth, which has been found wanting. That is, the idea of a ‘fact’ as an objective measurement of reality, is losing ground in the post-credit crunch era.

‘Post-truth politics’ is what, until now, we have been living under: technocracy, in a word. The “monstrous worship of facts”, as Wilde called it, is nothing other than an avoidance of the question of truth. The category of ‘fake news’ describes a fusion of infotainment, propaganda, public relations and churnalism which has been long in the making, now accelerated by online advertising revenues. The moral panic which blames ‘fake news’ for the rise of fascism and right-wing populism misses the point that these degraded ecologies of information have triumphed in the vacuum of political possibilities produced by the post-Cold War consensus.

What the moral panic also obscures, by displacing it, is the fact that ‘fake news’ is just one symptom of the breakdown of the near ideological monopoly previously enjoyed by large commercial and state media outlets. The fragmentation of content, the rise of ‘narrowcasting’ on social media, the proliferation of producers — more people are published authors now than ever before, rewarded in ‘likes’ rather than cash payment — produces as many opportunities as pathologies. New types of information and new ways of sharing it, new literacies, new modes of writing, are becoming possible.

The problem is that we grope toward these opportunities in the shadow of catastrophe. The fall of the USSR didn’t signal the defeat of socialism so much as confirm it, at just the point at which it is clear that the persistence of capitalism means possible species death. Parties, publications, union membership, ideological affiliations, confidence and self-organisation dwindled and fragmented into the scale of atoms. And politics without the possibility of a liberated future, curdles and turns reactionary. New forms of antisystemic politics are emerging to take advantage of new forms of social media, but they can’t by themselves replace what has been lost. Without acknowledging what we have lost, we cannot creatively adapt to what we have left. We need, as Douglas Crimp wrote, “Militancy, of course, but mourning too: mourning and militancy.”



Talk.
- [ ] In the beginning was the lie. Freud points out that it is a condition of our autonomy that we can successfully lie: once we know mum and dad can’t read our minds, we can think freely and rather subversively. Milan Kundera argues that the injunction not to lie is one that can never be made to an equal, because we have no right to demand answers from equals. Adorno argued that, “the injunction to practice intellectual honesty usually amounts to a sabotage of thought.”

- [ ] And if I’m top-loading this talk with quotes and intellectual armoury, it is because I’m aware of how merely common-sensical is, what Wilde called “the monstrous worship of facts” — exactly what we have been living under. A politics exclusively consisting of facts is a tyranny of technique and an avoidance of truth. The relationship of lies to truth turns out to be rather more interesting than we would assume.

- [ ] So when we talk of “post-truth politics”, with the implication that we have just departed from an era of unalloyed truth-telling, from Iraq to the credit crunch, we might be making a huge category error. In truth, it is not truth, but facts, which have been found wanting; facts, as somehow purely objective measurements of social realities which, because intrinsically relational, can never be purely objective. Expertise, as Michael Gove reminds us, has made us sick; its seeming commonsensical neutrality exposed as merely the prestige of the ruling ideology. Sir Humphrey Appleby can sound like a technocrat only for as long as the ends to which techniques are crafted are taken for granted.

- [ ] Those blaming the internet for this state of affairs run up against the difficulty that the internet doesn’t exist. It is by now a cultural commonplace that the Internet, as Internet jargon has it, it isn’t “a thing”: jokes about the internet in South Park and The IT Crowd make light of the tendency to reify the internet by representing it as a single broadband router. And we get the joke, because we know that what we call the internet is a series of processes and relations mediated by its technological bases and protocols. But we forget it, too, if we succumb to either cyber-idealism or cyber-cynicism, by reinforcing too strict a demarcation between the online and the offline.

- [ ] I think it would be useful, therefore, to start with the kind of activity that is involved in the internet, and particularly in social media: that is writing.

- [ ] We are all authors. Interrogate that we: the differential access to the internet is obviously raced, and classed, and in an interesting way, gendered -- it isn't just about affordability and bandwidth, it is about how much work you have to do. A consequence of the internet is that, we all write, and we are all published. Because of email, social media, and instant messaging services, we now spend more of our lives writing than we ever have. We are acquiring new literacies at a ferocious rate. We have yet to grasp the full significance of this vast expansion of literacy, this democratisation (and further commodification) of writing. One thing we do now is that we are all becoming amateur hermeneuticists, scanning quickly through acres of text, learning to discern, quick sharp, how to discern trolling and ‘fake news’, paid advertisements, charlatanry, and scams. We’re also learning the whereabouts of all kinds of invisible and rapidly shifting cultural thresholds; things that can and cannot be said and in what way.

- [ ] We are all, putting it slightly differently, artists of the self. When you write, you invent yourself, give yourself a specific embodiment. By putting some part of your being into the form of words, you're giving it a corporeal shape that it would not otherwise had. You are not just 'expressing' something that was already there, but creating something new. And you're doing this every day, all the time. The format in which you can do so matters. Rather than keeping diaries, many of us now metabolise our lives online, for a public. Our pets, our dating mishaps, our family lives, our jobs, our accidents, the quiddity of experience is inscribed in a public realm in the heavily stylised format of tweets and posts, with current moods, filters, hashtags, emojis, stickers and the rest affording us a convenient short-hand to make ourselves conformable to our peers.

- [ ] Of course, there is another form of writing that is achieving a degree of autonomy from human creators, and that is computer programming and script. It is completely non-phonetic writing which reminds us that writing began with the knot or quipu, read through touch, and it does as much to give us embodiment as what we may write in our phonetic alphabets.

- [ ] Social media is not new -- non-commercial leftwing popular newspapers in the past operated as a kind of social media -- but capitalist social media arguably is. The social media formats in which most of us do most of our writing is so structured as to make petty entrepreneurs out of us. Our writing becomes a form of corporate personality, a sales pitch seeking to attract eyeball attention and 'followers'. This both a democratic opening, and a property-based closure; both an unprecedented opportunity, and an acceleration of the ‘culture of narcissism’ that Christopher Lasch worried about. It supports to an extent Manuel Castells’ argument about ‘creative autonomy’, since it breaks the ideological monopoly of the broadcasters and print media; but it also supports the argument of Philip Mirowski and to some extent Evgeny Morozov that in its networked individualism (or entrepreneurialism), it is a playground for neoliberalism.

- [ ] Technologies are not socially and politically neutral. If nuclear power tends to support hierarchical, secretive structures, social media tends to support the opposite: a panopticon effect. Individually, this has both opportunities and costs.

- [ ] The internet is a rigged lottery. If our capitalist social media accounts are indeed set up like enterprises competing for eyeball attention, then going viral or 'trending' is like winning the lottery. And in principle, anyone can win. The potential audience for your writing literally is the entire internet. In practice, of course, the lottery is mostly won by well-placed media corporations and public relations firms dominating the terrain.

- [ ] Even if we do win, it can be the worst thing that happens. While most of us dream of going viral with that one insightful tweet or post, few of us are equipped to maximise any opportunities that arise from positive publicity, or to cope with the costs of negative publicity — which might include shaming or trolling campaigns, themselves a devolved form of tabloid expose and bottom-feeding culture. We may be treated as if we're small enterprises, but since we are not corporations with public relations budgets, we are vastly under-resourced to handle the attention we may potentially receive.

- [ ] Far from simply challenging the ideological power of the old media, moreover, at critical moments it arguably amplifies and exacerbates it. The rise of narrowcasting and the proliferation of content producers helps to disperse the concentrated spectacle of broadcast news into the diffuse spectacle of Twitter and Facebook. This can even be more effective in securing consent, as Guy De Bord pointed out, because it works through seduction and commodity competition, rather than simple top-down violence. This is to stipulate a different form of presence of violence within the organisation of consent, rather than a withdrawal of violence.

- [ ] This is in part because capitalist social media isn’t an organised opposition or alternative to the mainstream but a formal extension of it looped into new economies of attention. If one thinks of the England riots and the role of social media in allowing certain points of view to be ‘spontaneously’ organised — pro-police and counter-subversive attitudes and campaigns — one can also call to mind those attitudes which were more effectively identified and punished, by looking at the case Azhar Ahmed, the #twitterjoketrial or any number of instances wherein social media users have been prosecuted under public order legislation.

- [ ] Whence then the fear of post-truth politics? And the moral panic about ‘fake news’? The category of ‘fake news’ starts to collapse from the inside when you examine it up close. The Washington Post, in its war against Russian-inspired fake news stories, has repeatedly published untruthful claims about Russian subversion in the US. It would be stretching credulity to say that Post’s falsehoods are less fake because well-intended: as if the newspaper of the DC establishment doesn’t have its own propaganda goals, or its own record of disseminating intelligence falsehoods. In truth, what we call ‘fake news’ is often either infotainment, PR, rumour, celebrity gossip, military or state propaganda, churnalism, or a combination of all of these — tendencies that were already well underway in the old media. So in what sense are we ‘post-truth’?

- [ ] We could start with the lies we tell, and the truths they inadvertently tell. Why should it be that the shift in political imaginaries means that people are more likely to be taken in by the idea that Mexican immigrants are rapists, than by fuzzy satellite imagery of weapons laboratories? Both of these lies displace colonial desire in different ways, but the shift almost repeats the shift from global white-supremacy to defensive white nationalism: each different ways of preserving racial distinction organised around the signifier of whiteness, as a signifier of limitless being, omnipotence and plenitude.

- [ ] And we could go back to Freud here: because lying on the couch, one can’t help but tell the truth one way or another. Indeed, it is when the patient stops reeling off the banal facts, whatever status they may have, and starts to lie, that the truth of her desire begins to emerge. The lies we are prepared to speak, and believe, says a lot about our desires, often thwarted and displaced: and that is why correcting a lie, fact-checking and all the rest of it, is often useless by itself. Though necessary, it does nothing to get to the other place, the place of desire, which is the place of political truth. That is how a well-informed but politically inept Nick Clegg could be so comprehensively defeated by a facile liar attuned to the dreamwork of politics named Nigel Farage.

- [ ] This place of desire is the nocturnal side of reason, on the side of what Adorno referred to as “pleasure and paradise”. But if desire is excluded from politics, if it becomes simply a matter of management of the status quo, and of assembling coalitions to prevent major changes, then desires which might project into the future, curdle and turn nostalgically reactionary.

- [ ] That is the real relationship of post-truth politics to the new far right. Post-truth politics is the triumph of managerial politics, of a politics in which after 1989 the long-standing defeat of communism was finally registered, with an immediate drastic contraction of the horizon of possibility. As Enzo Traverso put it, “an entire representation of the twentieth-century”, in which the disasters of the age were also the ground for revolutionary hopes, fell apart.

- [ ] One reason why social media couldn’t ever the Shangri-la of a new radically horizontalist activism predicated on a democracy of writing, is because of what it does to our writing. Twitter, for example, aims to mimic in some ways the patterns of speech, especially with its multimodal, digressive tendencies -- ironically, it is the non-phonetic aspects of writing that come to aid here, above all the emoticon. But of course, it also reduces speech to its tiniest molecules, 140 characters, and generates such a rapid turnover of content that it produces a tremendous pressure to fire off concise, immediate tweets and replies. And since the only incentive to participate in a conversation like that is because of the likes and retweets, attention and approval, this tends to mean that to an extent, people are only paying attention to what you are saying insofar as it gives them something to say, for the likes. This results on an insidious barbarisation of discourse, fractured, ungenerous, unrigorous, grandstanding, bullying, trolling, performances of whiteness, masculinity, repetitions of trauma -- if we are artists of the self, think what selves, personal and collective, this kind of writing permits us to fashion. We somehow have to be both in and against (capitalist) social media, somehow swimming against its currents, it's timelines, its temporalities and tendencies.

- [ ] But even if its protocols and structures had anything horizontal about them, even if they didn't favour marketing and accumulation, it emerged in the shadow of catastrophe. The eclipse of socialism was confirmed, at just the point at which it is clear that the persistence of capitalism means possible species death. Parties, publications, union membership, ideological affiliations, confidence and self-organisation dwindled and fragmented into the scale of atoms. And politics without the possibility of a liberated future, turns reactionary. New forms of antisystemic politics are emerging to take advantage of new forms of social media, but they can’t by themselves replace what has been lost. Without acknowledging what we have lost, we cannot creatively adapt to what we have left. We need, as Douglas Crimp wrote, “Militancy, of course, but mourning too: mourning and militancy.”

The Liberals’ infrastructure bank takes shape

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau takes part in an event marking the completion of masonry work on West Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, February 1, 2017. (Chris Wattie/Reuters)

The bill to enable the Trudeau government’s proposed infrastructure bank has been introduced in the House of Commons. It must be one of the Liberals’ biggest and most poorly understood projects: $35 billion from Ottawa as seed money, to attract potentially hundreds of billions from large investors for major new infrastructure projects.

A federal source told Maclean’s the structure of the bank and its location—a political hot potato, since mayors including Montreal’s and Calgary’s have been quick to announce that their cities are natural locations for the bank’s head office—will be announced within “weeks.”

Which means that important decisions over the bank’s structure, mandate and operations need to be decided soon. Which helps explain why the head of one of Canada’s largest pension funds was quite talkative when I put these questions to him.

Hugh O’Reilly is President and CEO of OPTrust, which manages nearly $20 billion in assets for 84,000 members of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union’s pension plans.

O’Reilly was one of several institutional investors, some with portfolios much larger even than OPTrust’s, at a Toronto meeting last November when Trudeau and senior cabinet ministers explained the infrastructure bank to potential funders. OPSEU members were picketing outside—not particularly surprising, as the pension fund operates independently both from the union and from the Ontario government.

But suspicions over the bank’s mandate and operation mustn’t be ignored by the feds, O’Reilly said this week. “My concern is to make sure that a political consensus around the infrastructure bank is established,” he said. “I think the federal government has to spend time with public-sector unions to understand what their concerns are, so we don’t start this with a feud.”

The infrastructure bank is already off to a shaky start. The NDP and the Council of Canadians have wasted no time calling  it Trudeau’s “privatization bank,” a sure route to corporate profit at the expense of worker benefits.

O’Reilly is more optimistic. “It doesn’t have to result in privatizations. You can have long-term leases of public assets, so that someone else operates them.”

And O’Reilly argues that there’s a role for the federal government in ensuring that labour standards be upheld even as outside investors are brought in. “You know, if it’s a unionized area, I think it should be a unionized operation (after leasing to big investors),” he said. “It should have the same pay rates, the same benefits. Involving pension funds or other entities in infrastructure shouldn’t mean that you’re going to reduce union density. And it doesn’t have to mean that.”

But surely that would scare away potential investors? “I would say no,” O’Reilly said. “I think if you look at the experience in Europe—remember in Europe, it’s no big deal to have unionized operations. It’s just the way it works.”

To O’Reilly, the point of having a federal agency organizing these public-private arrangements is precisely to ensure the public interest is protected. Otherwise you get results like the infamous 2008 Chicago parking deal, in which private investors bought into the city’s parking racket and promptly quadrupled tolls.

“That whole issue could have been negotiated,” to avoid that outcome, he said. “But if you don’t have experienced people at the table for the public sector, then you’re not going to do as well in a negotiation. And I think the infrastructure bank has a really important role to play, in making sure the public interest is preserved.”

This whole project is a balancing act. If the feds, or their proxies staffing the infrastructure bank, are pushovers, then pension funds and private investors will be able to buy into lucrative projects—rail systems with a new hotel and a high-priced parking lot at every stop; sewer systems with exorbitant meter charges—at the expense of good union benefits and at huge cost to commuters or homeowners. But if the bank makes too many demands of potential investors, they’ll walk away and nothing gets built.

O’Reilly’s comments suggest he’s not particularly worried about the latter eventuality. “As far as I’m aware, infrastructure opportunities don’t go lacking for investors,” he said. In fact, even if the Trump administration manages to get its own infrastructure project in gear, a project that will seek almost 10 times as much money from institutional investors as Trudeau hopes to attract, O’Reilly is confident that there’ll be enough investor money around the world to fund both countries’ projects.

Recent remarks from the prime minister suggest he also thinks the global infrastructure bazaar is mostly a seller’s market. In an on-stage interview Thursday in Toronto with Bloomberg News, Trudeau was asked whether his goal is to privatize the big airports in Toronto and Vancouver.

“The fact is that’s always one of the easy, quick things people jump to,” Trudeau said. “I’m interested in other things than that.”

Such as? “I’m interested in actually drawing in fresh capital to build new things,” he said.

And indeed, a federal source said the current plan is for the infrastructure bank to be open only to investors willing to invest in “greenfield” projects—newly built roads, rails, power lines, water treatment plants and so on, as opposed to simply buying a stake in existing, already-built “brownfield” development. Here again, that would be setting a high bar. Investors are normally fond of brownfield opportunities, because they know the port or the plant or whatever is already built, it works as advertised, it has demonstrable revenue. A greenfield investment is a leap of faith.

O’Reilly thinks the debate over the infrastructure bank is healty. “I think it’s entirely appropriate for people to be skeptical, to hold the government’s feet to the fire on this,” he said. “To make sure it achieves what it’s seeking to achieve and does it in a way that’s in the public interest. From my point of view, we wouldn’t want to be involved in anything that didn’t have a political consensus around it and wasn’t in the public interest.”

The post The Liberals’ infrastructure bank takes shape appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Virgin Media – At last, the On Demand is due to be fixed today!

In my earlier post I showed a screenshot of the Virgin Media status screen. For our area it showed a fault with the On Demand facility. However, it was being fixed. Sure, it was going to take three days, but they would definitely have it fixed by today, April 21st… Yay! Oh …. Wait though… After experiencing yet more problems… Read more →

Good luck with Days 93-100, Mr. President

Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump models a hard hat in support of the miners during his rally at the Charleston Civic Center on May 5, 2016 in Charleston, West Virginia. Trump became the Republican presumptive nominee following his landslide win in indiana on Tuesday. (Mark Lyons/Getty Images)

Donald Trump is tweeting about “the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days,” so let’s apply it. Our standard, of course, should be Donald Trump’s. Before the election, he was super-interested in being held to account for his accomplishments in his first 100 days! He called his list of promises “my contract with the American voter.”

Perhaps the American voter would have done well to remember that Trump likes to brag about stiffing contractors (I found that article by googling the phrase “Trump stiffs contractors,” and the search came up with a broad selection of choices). But any honest accounting (Trump used to be in favour of those: he promised his first 100 days would be about “restoring honesty and accountability”), he has not accomplished a lot. From his own list:

• “Middle Class Tax Relief and Tax Simplification Act”: No such proposal has been sent to Congress.

• “End the Offshoring Act”: Nope.

• “American Energy and Infrastructure Act”: This one would be really interesting to see! It’s Trump’s equivalent of the Trudeau government’s semi-legendary “infrastructure bank,” and it’s supposed to operate on a different model. The feds would use tax credits to attract big institutional investors to pay for a revolutionary boost in roads, airports, dams, sewers and what have you. More than a boon for American citizens, it would be an opportunity for Canadian investors, but it hasn’t happened so I’m mostly making all of this up.

• “School Choice and Education Opportunity Act”: Trump called for such a thing during his speech to a joint session of Congress in February, which was getting great reviews until Trump woke up on a weekend and tweeted unfounded allegations that his predecessor had wiretapped his residence. Anyway, calling for a bill isn’t the same as writing one, and there is no school voucher proposal before Congress.

• “Repeal and Replace Obamacare Act”: Whoopsie.

RELATED: Donald Trump lowers expectations before his big report card

I could go on. “This is my pledge to you,” Trump wrote. He’s actually done much better on the parts of his plan that didn’t require getting anyone else to cooperate—the parts that require only executive orders. He’s unwound Obama-era restrictions on coal plants; imposed a hiring freeze on federal employees (which was full of holes and didn’t last); approved the Keystone XL pipeline; set lobbying bans for White House officials; and has restricted travel from several foreign countries after a humiliating battle with assorted courts, setting himself up for further battles with employers.

In his Friday-morning tweet complaining that evaluations like this one were on the way, Trump helpfully reminded everyone that he’s notched a major victory, getting Neil Gorsuch onto the Supreme Court. That’s true, and it’s important that everyone realize that for a broad cross-section of the Republican base, including among many voters who are not otherwise impressed with Trump, the prospect of forestalling Democratic Court nominations is entirely sufficient reason to support any GOP presidential candidate, every time.

WATCH: Trump targets Canadian dairy: Crosstalk live

So Trump has had some success getting things done when they reside entirely within his executive powers. That’s not a lot compared to what he needs to get past Congress, where Republicans control majorities in both houses. Apparently this low bar is too high for him. That might change if he changes his work habits and personality entirely, while attracting anyone at all to his inner circle who has any experience or interest in the legislative branch of the United States government, but the odds of all that happening before next weekend seem long.

In foreign affairs, Trump has proven listless and not particularly worth worrying about. He dropped a great big bomb on Afghanistan and several smaller ones on Syria. The latter strike attracted applause from analysts who wish Barack Obama had taken military steps against the Assad regime after earlier chemical-weapon attacks. It’s still not clear whether, or how, the cruise-missile strike fit into a broader strategy of containing or replacing Bashar al-Assad.

In Iran and North Korea, Trump has not yet started new wars.

In relations with Canada, Trump is sometimes fond of Justin Trudeau (is it a bromance? Or isn’t it?). Sometimes he is angry about Canadian agriculture subsidies. He’s got a point about Canadian agriculture subsidies! They cost Canadian consumers and restrict American farmers’ access to our market, although plenty of farmers still manage to sell their product here. What’s less clear is whether Trump’s lousy mood will last any longer than his earlier sugar high did, or whether he’ll be able to spearhead any effective challenge to Canadian policies or practices, given his own mixed-at-best record in changing most American policies and practices.

It’s fashionable in some circles to view Trump as a disciplined, highly effective threat to Canadian interests. There’s simply no evidence to back this view. Until he learns how to be an effective president, he’s mostly just a novelty-shop curiosity with nuclear weapons. And he probably won’t use those on us.

The post Good luck with Days 93-100, Mr. President appeared first on Macleans.ca.

SEO Audit of UK Conservative and Labour Party websites

Websites are tools of communication and persuasion. And as such should be used correctly by political parties to achieve their aims. Following best practice web design and SEO it is relatively simple to create a website that Google will love, which increases your chances of ranking higher in the search engine results pages.

Performing an SEO audit on a website is required to establish whether or not a website is following best practice and is optimised in the most effective and efficient way.

It does take a lot of time and effort to do a full audit, but I thought I would show a few examples of what an audit can pick up. As the UK general election is in full swing I thought it would be interesting to look at the two main political parties.

Due to the amount of time a full audit would have taken, we have only been able to do a partial audit and focus on a few important things

Disclaimer: I have no allegiance to any political party, am a swing voter and have approached the analysis of both websites with a completely open mind.

conservatives.com

H1 Tag

No H1 tag exists.

Not good, Google values a H1 tag, I would suggest an H1 tag which echoed the title tag. As it would seem that is the most important keyword for the site

Although there are H2 and H3 tags

Share The Facts

Why we need a general election

Missing a H1 tag is not best practice, and is an opportunity missed to highlight a specific keyword to Google that the page finds important.



Functional and showing what is important, but missing an opportunity to add a slogan which will be seen by many. Missing an opportunity for further communication as the title tag is listed in the search engine results pages and does get scanned. A slogan is perfect for that context.

Meta Description

name=”Description” content=”The Conservative Party – Building a country that works for everyone” />

Again, very functional, very conservative. A phrase that is all about getting on with the job with little fuss. I think this works for the Conservative brand.

Canocilization

Although tricky to say, canocilization is a technical issue with the URL structure, it should follow a logical and hierachical structure, allowing Google to easily decide which of your pages you have deemed the most important.

It is crucial you are able to tell Google which is the front page to your website, as that is the one it will want to rank.

You must only have one of the following that will show in your browser, if not Google may index the duplicate URL and it will weaken your ranking potential.

• http://yourdomain.com


• http://www.yourdomain.com


• https://yourdomain.com


• https://www.yourdomain.com

The Conservative website has correct canocilization,  is correct, as only https://www.conservatives.com is available.

Duplicate content errors

Pages within the folder, “http://press.conservatives.com/archive/” are throwing up duplicate content errors. Possibly these pages should be non-indexed if not needed to rank or the con. This allows Google to know the exact pages needed to rank. Whilst not a major issue, optimising this will make the site more easier for Google to index the correct pages.

Oh, and something interesting popped up. The meta keywords tag is now redundant and yet the Conservative website has, name=”Keywords” content=”conservatives, conservative, conservative party, tories, tory, david cameron, centre-right” />

Did you spot the error?

 

labour.org.uk

H1 tag

Very bad situation with regards to the Labour parties H1 tags.

Labour

style=”margin-bottom: 0.6em;“>We will build a better, fairer Britain.

JEREMY CORBYN’S 10 PLEDGES TO TRANSFORM BRITAIN

Labour

You only ever have one H1 tag, whilst you can have many H2 and h3 tags.

It is how Google knows to structure what is important on the page.

A website is a communication and persuasion tool, it should be constructed along best practice guidelines. It’s actually very simple and logical to do this and getting the H1 tag this wrong is inexcusable.

To a web designer or SEO this is quite shocking as the error is not a simple mistake as it is repeated a number of times. Leading me to question the methodology of those who put this website together.

My questions to the Labour party if they were a client would be:

• Who is responsible for the oversight of the website?


• Did the web designer who put this page together raise the bad practice issues?


• What processes are in place to catch such simple mistakes?

I wouldn’t lay the blame at the person who was tasked to do the actual coding, but would investigate the management and systems that allowed this to happen. As whomever is in charge is doing a very bad job.

Title tag

Not quite sure of the purpose of the duplication. “The Labour party – insert slogan here“, would be better. Seems redundant and a waste of a call to action opportunity.

Meta Description

name=”description” content=”We are a people-powered movement. Be part of it.“>

This tells me that the “movement”, is a movement and not a party, is powered by people. Not sure what else a “movement” would be powered by. “Be part of it”, not sure if this is telling me what to do or asking me. It certainly does not inspire a click through if seen in the search engine results page, which is the purpose of the meta description.

Canocilization

This is a complete mess.

https://www.labour.org.uk/index.php/home/

http://www.labour.org.uk/index.php/home/

Are both available to the browser.

Yes that is correct, the Labour party website does not yet have a https certificate, which enables data to be encrypted between the browser and the website. It is best practice to have one and Google is saying you should have one and Google uses it as a ranking signal. This is again a basic error which any beginner web designer or SEO would know.

Also, the front page now redirects to http://www.labour.org.uk/index.php/home/splash, which means there are now 3 front pages. It is important you only have one front page to present to Google as it has to chose which one it is going to rank.

The request for contact details would have been better as being above the fold on the original front page and still have the same URL structure. Still filling the screen, but without messing with the structure of the website and its optimisation.

A quick fix would be to redirect the https page to the http page, as well as to redirect http://www.labour.org.uk/index.php/home/ to http://www.labour.org.uk and get rid of the splash page.

But the best solution is to get a https certificate and then redirect all front pages to https://www.labour.org.uk

Other UK political parties are:

libdems.org.uk

snp.org

ukip.org

greenparty.org.uk

plaid.cymru

mebyonkernow.org

More information on what is important best practice:

Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide from Google, this is a great starting guide from the people who you really should be listening to.

The post SEO Audit of UK Conservative and Labour Party websites appeared first on Digital marketing blog Cornwall seo.

Iowa Gun Rights Law Makes Iowa More Gun-Friendly (Audio)

(Bloomberg) -- George Moscary, a professor at Southern Illinois University School of Law, discusses Iowa's new gun rights law, which is being called one of the friendliest gun rights laws in the nation. He speaks with June Grasso and Greg Stohr on Bloomberg Radio's "Bloomberg Law."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Site Migration

"Towel day" by Alan O'Rourke

Continue reading >>

Church Brings First Amendment Claims Against Missouri (Audio)

(Bloomberg) -- Greg Stohr, Bloomberg News Supreme Court reporter and co-host of Bloomberg Radio's "Bloomberg Law," discusses the day's news from the Supreme Court. He speaks with Bloomberg's June Grasso and Michael Best.

Project and serve: 5 customer-centric marketing tips to help build relationships

Gone are the days where you could shake hands and turn your back on customers after the sale is done. Today, you’ve got to be willing to build relationships – and you can do it with these 5 customer-centric marketing techniques.

Situation report – Virgin Media, a month in

Bloody hell. The speed is great, the TV service is OK.. but… oh dear, everything else has just been terrible. The On Demand wasn’t working for days on end, so I complained. They eventually fixed it. Then parts of it broke again and, days later, it’s still not fixed. This is how things are tonight. Access to Facebook has broken… Read more →

Odebrecht Ordered to Pay $2.6 Billion Fine for Bribes (Audio)

(Bloomberg) -- Andrew Spalding, a professor at University of Richmond School of Law, and William Byrnes, a professor at Texas A&M University’s School of Law, discuss why a U.S. judge ordered Odebrecht, Latin America's biggest construction company, to pay a $2.6 billion fine for bribing officials across the world. They speak with June Grasso on Bloomberg Radio's "Bloomberg Law."

Tanzania turns to solar power to increase electricity connectivity

As many as 60 percent of the Kenyan population now has access to electricity according to official data. But in neighbouring Tanzania, the penetration rate is less than half of that and sparsely populated rural communities are especially neglected.  

Arkansas Executions Incite Legal Battle over Process (Audio)

(Bloomberg) -- Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty information center and Austin Sarat, a professor or Jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, discuss a judge's decision to block Arkansas' attempts to carry out a series of executions in a matter of days. They speak with June Grasso and Michael Best on Bloomberg Radio's "Bloomberg Law."

Isaiah Thomas Mourns Death Of Little Sister; Celebrities Show Their Support

The Boston Celtics point guard held his head high!

Early Saturday morning, Isaiah Thomas' 22-year-old sister Chyna died in a one-car collision in their home state of Washington. Her car reportedly veered off of Interstate 5 into a jersey barrier and pole.

instagram.com

The Boston Celtics point guard held is head high as he made the difficult, yet courageous, decision to play in Game 1 of the NBA playoffs on Easter Sunday.

Maddie Meyer / Getty Images

Overwhelmed with emotion, Isaiah tried his best to cope with loss of his little sister while preparing for the big game.

youtube.com

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Toronto Sports Media April Open Thread

By TSM We are taking care of some housekeeping at the corporate HQ, so this bud’s for you! Enjoy an amazing Toronto Sports day Jays Raptors Leafs TFC   Jonah

Letting go

“Why add more words? To whisper for that which has been lost. Not out of nostalgia, but because it is on the site of loss that hopes are born.”
— John Berger, and our faces, my heart, brief as photos, p 55

“This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –”
— Emily Dickinson, After a great pain, a formal feeling comes.



Robert MacFarlane’s Landmarks is a “counter-desecration phrasebook”: a vocabulary for valuing what we have just as we are about to lose it, just as we are losing it, just as we have already lost it.

It is as if the living world, of shivelight and suthering tides, of desire lines and whale’s ways, of glaise and drindle, sumping sea-lochs and high headlands, could be saved through re-description. As if it wasn’t already too late.

The last fourteen months have, one after another, broken global temperature records. Floods and droughts begin to assume Biblical proportions. Thousands of species disappear, forever, each year. Even on the mildest prognostications, they will disappear faster and faster.

With a 1.5 degree temperature increase above pre-industrial levels, 20-30 per cent of species risk extinction. With a 3.5 degree increase, the range is 40-70 per cent. We are already at 1.3 degrees, and 4 degrees is the current projected temperature by 2050, even if the Paris Agreement survives.

As the rate of acceleration increases, so does the probability of chaos. Scientists use the metaphor of ‘uncharted territory’ to describe this, since all we know for sure is what we are losing. What will never, ever be seen again.

Walking, in this way, becomes an urgent voyage, a pilgrimage, a visit to a dying patient. A stolen glimpse of what might have been won, had the earth ever been a common treasury.

But as Christopher Bollas points out, what we find in the environment is our own unconscious life — not in its narrative, nor in its scenery, but in keywords, objects. The more abstract, nonsensical and formless the terrain, the more we can project into it, and the more evocative it seems. Nothing is more evocative than what theologians, following Psalm 22, call ‘the night season’.

What you find in the burnt edge of a cool morning, the summer shimmer of riparian wetlands, clouds the size of cities soaking in a blue pool, or even in the literary outdoors, the cold mountains of Han-Shan, the freezing Yukon of Call of the Wild — is unconscious meaning.

Worlds of independence, adventure, possibility, decivilization, worlds teeming with potential, closer to birth than death. Oceanic immersion, the feeling of being held, protection. Phobias and anxieties. Screen memories. These private meanings always open out into public meaning. What Renee Lertzman calls “environmental melancholia” begins with lost worlds. Melancholia is a kind of freeze. Mourning is movement, and if you can’t mourn, you gather frost.

One of the biggest obstacles to mourning is that we can’t face our ambivalence: the extent to which we hated the lost object of our love. The ambivalence is complicated. On the one hand, it seems, no matter how much they meant to us, we’re always in some part of us glad to be shot of them. On the other hand, we also hate them for no longer being there. And there are the unconscionable pleasures and benefits that accrue from their absence.

We can hardly help being ambivalent about what we call ‘nature’ and its nemesis, fossil capital. The former means desperate, hard, labouring lives and early deaths. The latter, to the extent that it is coextensive with industrialisation, means comfort, central heating, celerity.

So what is the greenhouse defrosting of arctic sea ice, the bleached death of a coral reef, and the disappearance of thousands of species every year compared to air travel, moon voyages, genetic science laboratories, and the internet. What is the silence of the remote croft, or the murmur of the forest, compared to rising life expectations and falling infant mortality?

The other side of this ambivalence, the nocturnal side, is the knowledge — because this is no mystery, and anyone who wants to know already knows — that we are preparing a mass wake for the human species. It is a planned obsolescence. There are some hubristic billionaires who, by investing in survivalist Xanadus, fancy they will survive the collapse of the food chain and the destruction of habitable territory. Few have the luxury of that conviction. So, put another way, the questions above become: what is species death compared to another fifty years of life for capitalism?

It is useless to berate the insufficiently woke. We are all sleep-walking, and all half-dreaming, even if we dream of being awake. We are all hastening toward the last syllable of recorded time. And the point of melancholic subjectivity is that we are already berating ourselves. Our experience of powerlessness in the face of loss, and isolation before gigantic, tectonic forces, has already become our mantra of self-hate. Adding reproach in the name of the future would only accentuate our resentment of future generations, and our desire to punish them.

But if mourning is movement, it is also work. The work of mourning is not the same thing as the sharp, icicle stab of grief one might feel, while walking, when you suddenly realise that some day and soon, nothing that looks like this world will exist. It is the painful, laborious task of revisiting each memory, each thought, each impression, of what has been lost and, like Poe’s raven, meeting it with the judgement, “nevermore”. Mourning is not an uplifting process. It is a kind of despair, because it means giving up. First chill. Then stupor. Then the letting go.

Only when we can separate the object that has been lost, from what has been lost in it, do we recover. In other words, we give up without giving up. We fully and relentlessly recognise the loss, but we hold onto the qualities we saw in the lost object, because we think we can find a way to revive them in a new passion, a new attachment. We despair, but we do not submit.

“Despair without fear, without resignation, without a sense of defeat,” Berger called it, speaking of the Palestinians and their Nakba. “Undefeated despair.”

Against nature

We are being asked to believe. That is the first thing to take note of. We are exhorted to put aside doubt in the existence of human nature, and believe. The very fact that the argument is put in these terms is surely no accident. If 'human nature' were a self-evident reality that we could all agree on, there would be no need to believe. I don't "believe" in water, or air, or the colour blue; I can only believe in things that I can't know. Belief, in a sense, belongs to the register of certainty, but not knowledge.

Now the article goes on to claim that 'human nature' is something that we can know, but the conception that it offers is comparable to that other chestnut of contemporary discourse, 'British values'. Humans need to eat. Well, what's so special about that? Lots of animals need to eat. Humans need warmth. So do cockroaches. Humans are vulnerable to disease and organic decay. So is vegetation. Humans need to drink. So does Nigel Farage. That isn't 'human nature', that's just 'nature'.

The argument only really becomes interesting, and germane to the human, when it claims the existence of a human need, rooted in nature, for 'dignity' and 'autonomy'. But these are surely not needs in the sense that food and air are needs. They are the names for preferences, or desires, which are proper to linguistic creatures.

But once we are talking about language and desire, we are no longer strictly speaking talking about nature, because language and desire are historically and socially produced. Language marks the point at which the human animal makes a half-leap from nature to culture. In other words, as soon as you get to the characteristic that makes us properly human -- the fact that we are linguistic creatures -- you're already no longer in the domain of nature (indeed, you were never really in it).

And it is just as well to recognise this, because otherwise the argument becomes terribly tricky for socialists. Since the terms 'autonomy' and 'dignity' are glittering generalities which everyone is supposed to believe in (if only for themselves), having no intrinsic, uncontested, unhistorical, natural, given content, you have to engage in some logical gymnastics.

You can try to give these terms some content, at which point you risk bumping into all manner of phenomena which contradict them. For example, you might find that some people (maybe some Trump voters) will give up what you have defined as 'autonomy', in order to deprive others of it. Having done that, you can then try to question-beggingly define all apparently unavailing phenomena as a thwarted, deflected attempt at achieving these ends. It becomes even more complicated if you do try to relate the more unsavoury aspects of human behaviour to 'human nature'.

Suppose we abandon the distinction between need and desire, and concede that we do indeed have a need for 'autonomy' and 'dignity', howsoever defined, because of 'human nature'. Shouldn't we also make space for such needs as aggression, violence, domination, sadism, and omnipotence? On what ground do we insist that these are not needs while autonomy and dignity are? Eventually, if we were to proceed like this, we could end up with a concept of 'human nature' that covered every possible type of desire by redescribing it as a 'need', and every possibly type of action by redescribing it as an attempt to realise a 'need'. But then it would just be tautologous rather than informative. We would 'believe' in human nature, but to no avail.

A lot of the persuasive power of these types of argument derive from the idea that to doubt the existence of 'human nature' is to subscribe to a "blank slate" thesis. This is an idea shared by Steven Pinker and the author of this piece. Of course, even a "blank slate" is never really blank. It must have certain active qualities which enable/constrain inscription. But the real problem with a "blank slate" thesis, is that a slate is fairly limited in what it can be. It is there to be written on, or not.

As the biologist Steve Rose puts it, humans are 'radically indeterminate'. In part, this is because it is in the 'nature' of living systems to be like that, but language opens up a new kind of indeterminacy. To say that we are radically indeterminate does not entail that we have no organic constitution, but that this does not determine whether we are 'good' or 'bad', kind or selfish, nurturing or violent, sexist or egalitarian, or whether we prefer protection to autonomy, or domination to dignity, and so on. These things, the desires and behaviours which are characteristically human, are the contested product of history.

This brings us back to the major problem with speaking about 'human nature', which is that humans are distinctly unnatural creatures. Indeed, the very separation of nature and culture becomes problematic once humans enter the frame (meaning, it has always been problematic, since this conceptual cleavage is a human invention). As soon as human beings learned to make fire, they became co-constituted by technology (the body being nourished and reproduced by digesting cooked food). There is not a single human organic capacity that is not intricated with technology, culture and political power. Haraway's term "natureculture" is a more apt way to describe the material realities of human bodies and their relevance to politics.

'Human nature' is a contradiction in terms.

`Charging Bull' Lawyer Defends `Fearless Girl' Suit (Audio)

(Bloomberg) -- Steve Hyman, a partner at McClaughlin and Stern, discusses the lawsuit he is bringing against the "fearless girl" statue on behalf of the artist who sculpted "charging bull," which stands directly next to the girl. He speaks with June Grasso on Bloomberg Radio's "Bloomberg Law."

Getting Started with Measuring Brand Awareness

Few people dispute that brand awareness is an important consideration for companies of all sizes - there’s a half-trillion dollar global advertising industry built largely on that premise, after all.

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Friday Reading S06E08

Friday Reading is a weekly series of recommended reads from the Guardian’s Social and New Formats Editor Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology. It sometimes comes out on Thursday. And sometimes not at all. It is also available as...

“Graphic content, graphic novels” – Marc Ellison discusses his work at #ijf17

I’ve been at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, and one of the highlights for me was a session called “Graphic content. Graphic novels“, where journalist Marc Ellison talked through the projects where he has rendered stories in the form...

An alternative beauty in parenthood

Vela has an amazing essay by a mother of a child with a rare chromosomal deletion. Put aside all your expectations about what this article will be like: it is about the hopes and reality of having a child, but it’s also about so much more.

It’s an insightful commentary on the social expectations foisted upon pregnant women.

It’s about the clash of folk understanding of wellness and the reality of genetic disorders.

It’s about being with your child as they develop in ways that are surprising and sometimes troubling and finding an alternative beauty in parenthood.

 

Link to Vela article SuperBabies Don’t Cry.

Second Judge Rules Texas Voter ID Law Discriminatory (Audio)

(Bloomberg) -- Josh Douglas, a professor at the University of Kentucky School of Law, discusses a decision by a federal judge in Texas, who ruled that the state's voter identification laws were intentionally discriminatory towards black and Hispanic voters. He speaks with June Grasso and Greg Stohr on Bloomberg Radio's "Bloomberg Law."

Bloomberg Law Brief: Walters Convicted Guilty (Audio)

Peter Henning, a professor at Wayne State University Law School, and Robert Hockett, a professor at Cornell University Law School, discuss the conviction of Las Vegas gambler Billy Walters for insider trading. They speak with June Grasso and Michael Best on Bloomberg Radio's "Bloomberg Law."

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Wed. has Silent Hill & Castlevania releases. Castlevania is a reprinting

 

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