Reflections From a Murky Pond

Yes, Twitter is good. It’s popularity is well-deserved. What’s very much not good, however, is #hashtaggery, which for the purposes of this post I define as using twitter hashtags as some means of political or societal protest medium. This recent and growing phenomenon is not good. In fact, it is worse than useless.

Domestically, where it might be though to have some value, it devolves to people seeing or hearing of something they don’t like, such as specific crimes, and tweeting about it using a hashtag as an identifier. Sometimes this causes a trend and rises in popularity and visibility. Yet, at the end of the day, it doesn’t go beyond Twitter. Nothing comes of it, in part because people feel that they’ve done something about the problem.

#Hashtaggery At Home

You really want to #StandWithHer or be #United4Her? You want to #DoSomething? Get off your ass and do something real. Don’t stand with her, stand before her in full readiness to do whatever it takes to stop what is about to happen.

The only way your #hashtags are going to have any effect upon the real world is if you carve them into carcasses of the offenders that you’ve exterminated or left it at the remains of one of their nests that’ve burned down or blown up.

And foreign policy and relations? Please! Does anyone really believe that twitter bombing a foreign government or group of terrorists is going to do anything at all? Apparently so. The ability of people to descend into self-serving self-delusion seems to know no bounds.

#Hashtaggery Abroad

Carve #FreeOurGirls into the carcasses of Nigerian Muslim boys that have been exterminated in reprisal for Boko Haram’s action and you might get results. Burn your hashtag in the mutilated corpses of Sudanese Muslims and you might #FreeMeriamIbrahim. Cut into the bodies of Mexicans and you might help #FreeOurMarine.

Alternately, wave your hashtag as a banner when you storm and take the foreign nations’ consulates or embassies and put their personnel to death.

Anything else is just useless #Hashtaggery and serves only to make yourself feel good without actually having to or risk anything, especially your precious comforts.

It’s an old axiom that a sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. A corollary to this would be that a sufficiently advanced scientist is indistinguishable from a magician or other magical entity.

There are, in the latter case, ways to distinguish the scientist from the magician or other magical entity…
 

Yep! The only magic scientists and researchers have is mendicant magic in that many of them do seem to be able to conjure funding out of the aether…as long as they are practicing orthodox, “white magic” at least. Those following a purer path don’t do so well at all.

So…Two Special Agents from the FBI showed up at my door earlier today. They wanted to talk with me about some of the things I’ve posted online.

Yep. I’m betting that you can see where this is going. Wrong! They and the FBI in general have no issues with anything that I’ve posted here or elsewhere. They just wanted the provenance of an image I tweeted to make sure that there was nothing they needed to investigate.

I suppose that, if you look at it a certain way – and many would – my ego should be bruised. Here I am, a political blogger and commentator in direct and very overt opposition to the current regime and the FBI didn’t care at all about me, just where an image came from so that they would know if there was something they needed to investigate.

In all actuality, the two FBI agents were very pleasant and extremely polite. The only painful part of our discussion was the fact that they kept reiterating time and time again that I was well and fully within my rights to publish everything that I’ve published and that I apparently had a very solid understanding of the legal limitations of such speech.

Microsoft fired up it’s Bing Pulse tool for the second year in order to record real-time audience sentiment during Obama’s fifth SOTU speech. The online voting tool allowed viewers to share their opinions about the speech using a smartphone, PC or tablet.

This year, Microsoft is added some new functions to the tool, including an annotated graph feature that allowed viewers to click on spikes and/or dips in the real-time graphs to see the issues being addressed during the speech that have prompted major reactions.

Last years SOTU Bing Pulse registered 12.9 million votes, according to Microsoft, and this year’s should have been at least as popular so these are the broadest political polls in existence at this time. The re results are also quite interesting.

Speechcrafting

Firstly, I have to give credit where credit is due. Whatever team of writers developed Obama’s 2014 SOTU speech did a very credible job.  The Overall Intensity Graph show a solid curve of interest that builds well, peaks, and drops off at the end, indicating a good denouement. The pacing of the peaks and valleys of engagement also shows a good pace to the speech.

A Telling Response

The listeners’ responses, broken out by political beliefs, is very telling indeed. There’s a huge and stark disparity between how Democrats viewed Obama’s speech and how both Republicans and Independents did so. It’s quite a dramatic difference.

Democrats held largely uniformly positive views of each of Obama’s talking points, only dipping below the 50% mark on the issues of the War on Terror and continuing to support Israel.  They’ve approval didn’t waver much throughout the speech either, showing far less mean difference in approval rating and engagement from one talking to point to the next than either Republicans or Independents. For the most part, however, while differing in amplitude, Democrats showed the same peaks and valleys of approval as both Republicans and Independents.

Republicans and Independents conversely were, by and large, quite disapproving  of Obama’s talking points during his speech, rising above 50% only when it came to the War on Terror and providing medical benefits to veterans. They were, in fact, both more disapproving of it than the Democrats were approving of it.

One point to make specific note of is that Republicans and Independents responded to the talking points in Obama’s 2014 SOTU speech almost identically. There was almost no statistical variation between them, whereas both differed greatly from the Democrats’ responses.

Women’s Needs

Interestingly, despite the constant contention that women have different needs and priorities than men, the responses and engagement of the respective genders was, talking point by talking point, almost identical. This largely held true even on those parts of Obama’s speech which would normally be considered “women’s issues.”

Hey! Firefox is a good and very popular browser but they still need to work to maintain and hopefully increase their market share. One of the best ways of doing that is to provide it with cool add-ons already installed…
 

And wasn’t it awesome of Marie-Claude Bourbonnais aka Marry Bardot to develop the most delightful add-ons?