Jim Stewart's Blog

People use Facebook as a social media site – but it isn’t the only one. So Trump has been banned – people can discuss whether it is a good idea. There are questions about section 230.

In short, social media sites have been considered as libraries rather than newspapers. You can’t sue a library because of the books it holds – the authors of the books are responsible. But you can sue a newspaper because they perform an editorial function. A bit simplistic, but that is roughly it.

Trump has had his account blocked. That’s the background. Some will praise the block on Trump, some will hate it. Different people have different views.

Facebook have used fact checking to provide an answer back to some posts and have put temporary suspensions on others for potentially breaking rules. Some people have complained about posts in order to get them suspended. But in all of these cases they still claim to be a library, because their rules tend to be based around legal restrictions (like incitement of violence).

But now they have closed Donald Trumps personal account – they have gone beyond blocking items that are legally questionable, or answering back. They have chosen a permanent block – so he is not now allowed to say things that are acceptable. That probably will bring them in to the newspaper category. And the eventual outcome of this would be that Facebook would become liable for everything we post – so you could expect far greater restrictions on what you say.

But there is another side to what is going on. Parler is an alternative to Facebook – it tends to be populated by the far right. There are a few large groups on the internet – Google, Apple, Amazon. They are now all about to block Parler – the whole service. There are millions of people using the service (over 12 million).

Amazon have found just under 100 posts that incite violence – this is their excuse for dumping it.

Newspapers have carried numerous articles about porn on the site.

Just think about the posts you have seen on Facebook that incite violence, and the scams you have seen to direct you to sex sites. Parler is used by a lot of right wing folks that object to porn – so they actually have a configuration that says “block porn from appearing on my account” – paraphrased there. 99% of users choose the setting.

My take is that they do not want to be associated with the politics of most Parler users (neither do I, so I just don’t sign up to it). There really is no other valid excuse (well maybe they threaten to take away earnings).

What does that mean? Well, most apps depend on the big few to work. Despite my dislike for many of the views I think are on Parler (I have not signed up to it so I am just guessing) I do believe in freedom of speech.

This blog is hosted by one of the few big companies. Is it right that my views are blocked because they differ from that of the people that the company makes money from?

The internet is not perfect, but we desperately need a review of freedom of speech issues before our freedom to speak is removed.

I watched Auf Wiedersehen Pet as I worked this afternoon. There were several scenes shot in hotels. I suddenly thought “I remember hotels like that”.

When did cheap common hotels become as good as they are?

I can remember one hotel I stayed in during 1996 – it taught me to always zip my suitcase closed at night if I didn’t want to bring cockroaches home.

I remember one hotel I stayed in back in 2003 – within 2 days the infection was showing up in my blood.

I remember staying at the Adelphi in Liverpool. They have me a posh suite. It was struggling to stay alive, but had some amazing reminders of the glory days. I was desperate to find a toilet, so I rushed into my bedroom and dropped my bags on the four poster, turned round to go back along the suite corridor to the toilet – only to discover the wood panelled wall had a matching door that I had trouble finding.

I can remember the weeks spent in caravans when I was younger, and the bed and breakfasts in places like Fleetwood.

Almost everywhere I go in the world these days is much better than the places I stayed in just 30 years ago.

It was one of those moments when I realised how big a change there has been in my life.

It may be that I have moved up a rung on the ladder, but I don’t think so. I think the world has moved up a rung on the ladder.

I find myself getting less and less sympathetic toward the middle class suffering we hear about.

And then Dad’s Army first episode came on tonight. Rationing was in place until 65 years ago (except petrol rationing which ended a few years later). Last year we were panicking because shops were imposing toilet paper rationing of 20 times the amount we needed.

or – Greenland calling.

I went out for my post midnight walk tonight. The roads were quiet – there was nobody else out. Some places had a light frost – all I could hear was a light crunch as I stood on it.

I really enjoyed the walk, even though it was a bit chilly. At the moment the daytime temperatures here are about the same as the summer night time temperatures in Greenland.

It got me thinking of the quiet walks I used to have in Greenland. I remember one day I could hear a farmer’s radio about five miles away (that’s a Derbyshire driving fine away).

The one interesting thing about Greenland is the way it draws you back. Something about the silence is special – you end up having better conversations than you can have in company.

So the woman that suggested clap for heroes has had to withdraw because of threats.

Let that sink in.

She wasn’t telling people not to do other things, she wasn’t telling people to vote for Arthur (or whoever). She wanted to encourage a sense of community, she wanted to express thanks. And she was threatened because some people didn’t think it was a good idea.

I was particularly taken aback by a bunch of musicians who were commenting on Facebook about how it shouldn’t happen. Coming from a bunch of people that would be annoyed if they didn’t get two rounds of enthusiastic applause for 60 minutes work – well – what can you say?

To me they are the Trump supporters of the UK. They are the people that say “You must not be allowed to express your opinion because it isn’t mine”.

In the same way I see the “Not in my name” protestors as the grass roots of the Capitol invasion mob.

I listened to the Senate debate last night and heard this from a Republican Senator.

Democracy sometimes means accepting our group are sometimes walking a road we do not like.

We can disagree, we can decide we don’t want to clap. But to attack others for trying to do good is unacceptable. Stop the hatred.

And it is worth listening to the full speech from last night if you have 5 minutes to spare.

We are all hoping the vaccination will end this. But vaccination is only one way people are immunised – the other way is to get infected.

Today we are looking at 60,000 people being infected a day (about 400,000 a week). I started to wonder about the effect of both infection and the virus along with lockdown.

I did a simple calculation or two. First I assumed we start with 40,000 infections a day (lower than we currently have, but I am guessing the 60,000 is high because of a Christmas blip). The difference is not that important as far as this goes.

The orange keeps the same R value we have today, and the blue assumes the lockdown reduces R to 1.0.

The bars are the weekly infections and the lines are the total.

The thing is, the pool of people that can be infected reduces really quickly. Because of this even a fairly high R value eventually stops being effective – that happens when the number of vaccinations exceed the number of infections.

So without lockdown this suggests the number of infections per week will peak at 1.5 times the starting level, and that will be in February. With lockdown the level of infection will be about 0.5 the current value around the same time.

Okay, these are very rough guesses , but the idea is to let you see the effect of lockdown during the vaccine roll-out. It can make a massive difference.

You can look at the differences between lines – this suggests the lockdown could easily half the people that get infected. By the way – because the vaccination programme targets the most vulnerable the effect on death rate would be even more significant.

All very well, but the thing that really surprised me about this suggests that either way we will be looking at ending all of this by May.

Okay, there are lots of gaps in this. The big gap between injections will probably mean the vaccination rate will effectively drop around March (the first group will need to get their second dose about that time). And I am assuming a very high effectiveness very quickly.

But the news that I take away is that we may only have 3 months to endure. That gives me hope. And when I think about the target of the vaccine roll out reducing hospitalisation I have a lot of hope.

I caught a part of an animation over Christmas. In it there were two animated animals getting married.

It started my weird thinking about the way we give animals human characteristics in cartoons, or even in real life.

Of course the truth is that animals have no concept of our rules of civilisation.

I started to think about where our rules of civilisation come from. Some come from religion, some from our deep thinking philosophers. Some from historical tradition with origins lost in the mists of time.

Why do we have them, which ones are important? We have the human rights wordings of various flavours that try to capture them. We have that wording from the USA “inalienable right to life…” that doesn’t apply in the case of a death sentence.

One concept started through Thomas Aquinas and further expounded by Hugo Grotius (or so people say) is:

Now the Law of Nature is so unalterable, that it cannot be changed even by God himself. For although the power of God is infinite, yet there are some things, to which it does not extend. …Thus two and two must make four, nor is it possible otherwise; nor, again, can what is really evil not be evil.

De jure belli et paci, Hugo Grotius

This concept was all about behaviours. And this leads on to another concept of rights.

A true system of politics cannot therefore take a single step without first paying tribute to morality. …The rights of man must be held sacred, however great a sacrifice the ruling power must make.

Immanuel Kant

Watching the series about Obama as president tonight was interesting and got me thinking about the concept. He certainly wasn’t perfect, but you could see a morality in his behaviour. Just how much attention do we really pay to morality in decision making? We certainly point out immorality in politicians – we can see immorality in the tapes of Trump talking “locker room”, but how about our own decisions?

Are we prepared to make decisions that harm us on the basis of the morality of the decision?

There are a lot of annual reviews taking place at this point in the year. I was reading the list of people in entertainment and arts we have lost in 2020 this week. I must admit I don’t know a lot of them. But there are names on the list that make me feel sad.

• Kirk Douglas (He might be Spartacus, but I will always remember him for Ace in the hole)
• Joseph Shabalala
• Roy Hudd
• Kenny Rogers
• Max Von Sydow
• Honor Blackman
• Tim Brooke-Taylor
• Lynn Faulds Woods
• John Prine
• Little Richard
• Ian Holm
• Vera Lynn
• Ricky Valance
• David Bryant (always there to beat Scotland)
• Ennio Morricone
• Diana Rigg
• Diego Maradona (the hand of God)
• Bobby Ball
• Frank Bough (I still remember the Grandstand theme)
• Gerard Houllier (another local gone)
• Sean Connery
• Eddie Van Halen
• Des O’Connor
• Barbara Windsor
• Peter Alliss (the voice of golf)
• Charley Pride
• Stirling Moss
• Willie Thorne
• JJ Williams

Not just a great voice, but also a great message.

I was thinking about the review of my year. Given that I managed to spend about 9 months of it locked in my house there has been quite a lot happened. I visited Nicaragua via Panama. I’ve managed to buy a new house in Spain. Quite busy really.

I started to wonder, though, in 100 years time, or maybe 200 years time when the historians are doing a review of the 2000s what will they mark this year as. Maybe it will be pandemic year. Maybe it will be BREXIT year (doubt it will be considered that important in 100 years). But there are two things that I think will mark this year more than any others.

On the down side there will be the dishonesty of USA politics. And the odd thing is that no matter which side you prefer you can agree with that statement. Will this be the start of the end of the USA as the greatest world power? I fear it might – a divided country can never survive, it spends so much effort looking in on itself.

On the plus side there have been some amazing efforts to work together for the benefit of the world this year, whether it is related to climate change, or just related to vaccine production. In relation to that I am proud of the contribution of the UK, not just as a country, but the organisations and the people.

On balance my year has been a bit negative, but my hope is that the future will look back on this last year as one where great things started.

It was disappointing seeing the protests in London recently. The attitude of the protestors and their behaviour was disappointing.

I watched news from the other side of the world recently and saw people being arrested for protesting. Protesting had been made illegal there because of coronavirus. Even there the infection levels were much lower than ours..

The regulations in the UK are different. There is actually a specific exemption that allows people to gather in order to protest – you just need to respect things like spacing.

There has been a lot of talk about balancing the economy with the restrictions, but a protest is nothing to do with the economy. Remember that most protests are against the government, but our government have decided they are so important that they need to be allowed.

Part of this, I am sure, is that they think people need a pressure relief. But the bottom line is that our country has decided that our freedom of speech is so important that they have refused to include it in the blanket restriction.

I’m proud of that. I just wish people wouldn’t abuse it.

I have a passion fruit growing in my garden. It has flowered a lot over the time I have had it. But it has never set – there has been no fruit. That is until today. But the temperature is far too low for the vine to have fruit, although it is supposed to be a winter fruit.

Mind you – we have only had two really cold days this winter that would have affected the plant.

I’ve seen a lot of meal photos appearing on Facebook recently – I guess because food is a passion for many people (see what I did there). Others are posting how many steps they walked or miles they have run.

It struck me that a lot of social media is about our passions. Do we ever initiate posts about other people’s passions? You know the party guest that just talks about me me me that we all want to ignore. Social media pushes us in to being that kind of guest. If you wanted to say “john, how are your passion fruit growing?” you would hide it in a personal message, you would not make a public post of it.

Having spent the last year on social media I wonder if we will all be boring pay guests when we get back together?

The film Wargames was on tonight. In the end they use a simple game of tic-tac-toe to prove to the computer that you cannot win – and when it applies this to nuclear war the computer realises there are no winners.

It struck me that it was a very simplistic definition of winning, a binary approach. But life tends to be a lot more complex.

I’ve seen it all around recently – the BREXIT/REMAIN is cast as win or lose. Somebody had to have their own way and others had to lose. At no point did anybody say “You know what – we are divided down the middle, how do we get an answer we can all live with”.

We see it in SCEXIT – devolution is not good enough – one side or another has to win.

And we see it with the pandemic response – we judge based on numbers of deaths.

Here is to a new year where we can try to be less binary.