Aaronovitch Blusters to a Well of Silence 1213


Why Rupert Murdoch considers it worth his while to pay David Aaronovitch a large six figure sum for such puerile antics as tweeting that I am insane, is a conjecture I find difficult to resolve. Today this exchange occurred on twitter:

David Aaronovitch: This suggestion that if elected Corbyn could be quickly ousted is utter bollocks. Democracy allows Labour to commit Hara Kiri.

Mark Doran: @DAaronovitch I hope everyone is watching how these servants of the micro-elite try to paint “attracting popular support” as “committing suicide.”

Mark Doran: @DAaronovitch Craig finds the elite-serving contortions every bit as funny as I do

David Aaronovitch: @MarkJDoran I tend to find Craig Murray unpersuasive on the grounds of him being unhinged. I can see why you like him, though.

Mark Doran: Says the man who managed to find Bush and Blair credible. I can see why you liked them, though.

It is remarkably ironic that on being referred to an article which argues that views outside a very narrow neoliberal establishment narrative are marginalised and ridiculed by the media, the Murdoch hack’s response is that the author is unhinged. Aaronovitch could not have more neatly proved my point.

But something else struck me about the twitter record. Aaronovitch’ twitter account claims to have 78,000 followers. Yet of the 78,000 people who allegedly received his tweet about my insanity, only 1 retweeted and 2 favourited. That is an astonishingly low proportion – 1 in 26,000 reacted. To give context, Mark Doran has only 582 followers and yet had more retweets and favourites for his riposte. 1 in 146 to be precise, a 200 times greater response rate.

Please keep reading, I promise you this gets a great deal less boring.

Eighteen months ago I wrote an article about Aaronovitch’s confession that he solicits fake reviews of his books to boost their score on Amazon. In response a reader emailed me with an analysis of Aaronovitch’s twitter followers. He argued with the aid of graphs that the way they accrued indicated that they were not arising naturally, but being purchased in blocks. He claimed this was common practice in the Murdoch organisation to promote their hacks through false apparent popularity.

I studied his graphs at some length, and engaged in email correspondence on them. I concluded that the evidence was not absolutely conclusive, and in fairness to Aaronovitch I declined to publish, to the annoyance of my correspondent.

Naturally this came to mind again today when I noted that Aaronovitch’ tweets to his alleged legion of followers in fact tumble into a well of silence. I do not even tweet. The entire limit of my tweeting is that this blog automatically tweets the titles of articles I write. They are not aphorisms so not geared to retweet. Yet even the simple tweet “Going Mainstream” which marked the article Aaronovitch derided, obtained 20 times the reactions of Aaronovitch’s snappy denunciation of my mental health. This despite the fact he has apparently 10 times more followers than me. An initial survey seems to show this is not atypical.

In logic, I can only see two possible explanations. The first is that my correspondent was right and Aaronovitch fakes twitter followers like he does book reviews. The second is that he has a vast army of followers, nearly all of whom find him dull and uninspiring, and who heartily disapproved en masse of his slur on my sanity. I opt for the second explanation, that he is just extremely dull, on the grounds that Mr Aaronovitch’s honesty and probity were never questioned, m’Lud.


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1,213 thoughts on “Aaronovitch Blusters to a Well of Silence

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  • Ba'al Zevul

    I think mysticism might be characterised as the study of those propositions which are equivalent to their own negations. The Western point of view is that the class of all such propositions is empty. The Eastern point of view is that this class is empty if and only if it isn’t.

    Love it, thanks!

    However, just to pursue the original clockwork hare…awareness of an event can only occur if and only if there is a transfer of energy between the event and the sensor. As, ultimately, energy can only be transferred in quantum packages, that means that its wave function HAS to collapse at the sensor interface for the energy to be detected. We don’t know about the energy that misses the sensor. It’s not travelling as quantum packages but a distributed waveform. Unless it hits something – say an atomic bond – with which it interacts in such a way as to localise itself, it isn’t physically detectable. So in that sense only, the energy ‘knows’ we’re looking: it can only manifest itself if in some sense it is being observed…try taking away the screen in the two-slit experiment and see where that gets you.

  • Republicofscotland

    “Fred, oh, so you’re back to calling me delusional.”

    Exactly, it’s a kind way of saying what you said was not true.”
    ________________________

    How very odd if someone is in your opinion wrong, you say they’re wrong or mistaken, you don’t however refer to them as delusional.

    Delusional to me anyway seems condescending.

  • Republicofscotland

    “RoS It’s already planned. The 90th Birthday Party aka ‘The Patrons’ Lunch’ next year is in the capable hands of thickie grandson Peter Phillips.”
    _____________________

    Oh no that day I’ll have to turn off the radio and avoid the tv, listening or watching those sycophantic proselytises fall over themselves to laud Old Lizzie, with her parasitic entourage in tow, would just be a step to far, nauseating to say the least.

    Thank Mary for the link.

  • lysias

    Heath was appointed an Assistant Whip by Prime Minister Winston Churchill already in 1951, just months after he had first entered the House of Commons, and rose rapidly to Joint Deputy Chief Whip and Deputy Chief Whip , before he became Chief Whip in 1955, allegedly shortly after he had been warned to stop “cottaging” in a men’s room near his home.

  • fred

    “How very odd if someone is in your opinion wrong, you say they’re wrong or mistaken, you don’t however refer to them as delusional.

    Delusional to me anyway seems condescending.”

    No.

    Look at it this way, if someone tells you they are a vegetarian it’s because in the model of reality they created in their head they see themselves as being a vegetarian. If they are eating a meat pie then that is the actual reality which other people see. You can’t tell them they lied when they said they were a vegetarian or that they were mistaken. You would say they had deluded themselves.

  • Mary

    Lysias. Of course, the whips have all the dirt on the Hon and Rt Hon members which puts them in a powerful position. Some are known to be thugs. The whole system needs sweeping away.

  • Clark

    Ba’al, and the “delayed choice” variant of the two slits experiment?

    It’s a bit like Fred’s argument. First I’d imagined the incident entirely, then he says he was smiling at the child he mentioned (whom I confirm was present) rather than what I’d asked him, then he says I’d imagined it all again, but only because he’s being kind (and rather like Macky).

    But we all do this. We choose the description to best fit that which we wish to be so, just like the changing justifications for the 2003 attack upon Iraq. And dependent upon our self awareness (without which honesty is not achievable), we notice to varying degrees.

  • Republicofscotland

    “Look at it this way, if someone tells you they are a vegetarian it’s because in the model of reality they created in their head they see themselves as being a vegetarian. If they are eating a meat pie then that is the actual reality which other people see. You can’t tell them they lied when they said they were a vegetarian or that they were mistaken. You would say they had deluded themselves.”
    __________________________

    Meat pies vegetarians, the fact is Fred you called Clark delusional and I am under the impression Clark is your friend.

    Some friend.

  • Clark

    Republicofscotland, Fred’s all right; he’s a good bloke. He’s kind, generous, hard-working and conscientious with a good sense of humour. My opinion is that he has some blind-spots, but I assume that applies to all of us. Fred’s grip on reality is far better than Spivey’s.

    Fred, my opinion is that you need to work out your personal reasons for rejecting certain SNP policies*. If you do that you’ll have more trust in your slightly lowered opinion of yourself, and you won’t need to see so many “Nazis” around you to justify your opinion of the SNP.

    *(Given what I know of your circumstances I can take guesses at these, but my knowledge is obviously less than yours and it wouldn’t be right to describe them publicly anyway).

  • lysias

    Daily Mail today reminds us that an Assistant Whip under Heath’s prime ministership revealed that part of his job was to cover up pedophilia scandals of MP’s and use them to keep the MP’s in line. Moment whip in Sir Edward Heath’s Government revealed that his job was to cover up scandals ‘involving small boys’ and the PM kept details in a ‘dirt book’.

    Tim Fortescue was a whip from 1970 to 1973. More and more reminders of House of Cards (although that show, to the best of my recollection, didn’t go into the pedophilia).

  • lysias

    Although Hitler proclaimed himself to be a vegetarian, a favorite dish of his from his Austrian childhood was liver dumplings (Leberknödel), which he used to indulge in whenever he visited the Vier Jahreszeiten restaurant in Munich.

  • glenn

    Republicofscotland, Fred’s all right; he’s a good bloke.

    No he’s not, he’s a foul-mouthed bully. I’m reminded of mates who’ve had perfectly hideous other-halfs, who are excused on the grounds that “They’re lovely really“. But the fact is they are not – as demonstrated by their disgusting behaviour.

  • fred

    “No he’s not, he’s a foul-mouthed bully.”

    But it’s you who has been making attacks on me all day.

    How does that make me the bully?

  • Clark

    We’re all made from the same stuff. There’s a bit of a bully in each of us. If there wasn’t, our ancestors wouldn’t have survived to spawn us. We’re just stuck with it; no use pointing the finger and blaming each other.

    It matters more in politics because the states, corporations and other structures amplify power. The system has to be designed so as to protect against it.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    Clark:

    http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/150296/why-is-wheelers-delayed-choice-experiment-incorrect

    He’s extremely reluctant to say (and says so) that a wave. and not the particle, passes through the slit. Ultimately it’s a bunch of maths… But that’s the best way of visualising it, for my money. It’s a wave when it’s in motion, and when it stops it has to be a particle. And it has to have somewhere to stop, to stop. All the geewhiz value of Young’s experiment is contained in the light source, the slits and the pattern. The screen? Oh, that’s just a bit of A4 I ripped from my notebook…it’s the most important component.

  • nevermind

    @ Hampshire connection who wrote

    “There were restrictive covenants on Winchester College’s (unregistered) titles to some of the land. This meant that the price the DTP paid included a large sum for paying off the owners of those covenants.”

    Sorry had to run off this morn, had stuff to do.
    Hmm, that is news to me, so Winchester college actually benefited twice from the bypass, and we thought that the developers had screwed the DTP.

  • Republicofscotland

    British SAS soldiers dress up as ISIS in order to attack targets in Syria, the questions have to be who are the targets? and how often and for what other purposes do they appear as ISIS fighters.

    “The unorthodox tactic, which is seeing SAS units dressed in black and flying ISIS flags, has been likened to the methods used by the Long Range Desert Group against Rommel’s forces during the Second World War.

    More than 120 members belonging to the elite regiment are currently in the war-torn country on operation Shader, tasked with destroying IS equipment and munitions which insurgents constantly move to avoid Coalition air strikes.

    This confession strengthens the possibility that Special Forces are capable and willing I might add to imitate terrorists when the occasion calls for it.

  • RobG

    Bloody hell, Ba’al, this blog goes from politics to particle-wave duality. No doubt next you’ll get on to quantum superposition, where matter can occupy different places in space and time simultaneously; a bit like Andy Burnham.

    Talking of which, Ted Heath is still hitting the headlines, and thus everyone has forgotten the recent Ben Fellows trial, which has revealed that Kenneth Clarke, who’s a sitting MP and a tory grandee, is still under police investigation for further allegations of child sex abuse.

  • John Goss

    There is a lot in this MH17 article which helps explain why Russia vetoed a protracted tribunal to be set up by those who do not want to get at the truth. I draw attention to the pilot’s seat which has what can only be described as a bullet-hole in it. Eric Zeusse further explains that the cockpit roof, which Russia Today filmed and was left by the Dutch Investigation team when they originally collected debris from the murder scene, has no visible shrapnel scars as it would have had it been hit by a BUK missile. Ukraine, a country involved in the investigation has a veto which it is using to prevent the other countries involved from presenting the findings or from the pilot’s family examining the corpse of their loved one.

    http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-mh17-pilots-corpse-more-on-the-cover-up/5467351

  • Republicofscotland

    Mr Goss, radio station just confirmed that debris washed up onto the Reunion Isles is that of flight MH370.

  • John Goss

    There is a mistake in the above article. It was not his wife who the Malaysian authorities prevented from seeing the body, but his sister. You need to watch the Russia Today report which establishes that the pilot’s wife is so ill, in such a traumatic state since the crash, that she could not be interviewed. I thought I would make that clear before the trolls tried to discredit the report on that basis.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=388&v=D_7dlG7qPio

  • Republicofscotland

    “Thanks RoS. Why am I not surprised?”
    _________________

    Mr Goss, I know what you mean, it’s a bit like the miraculous discovery of the under carriage, on a roof of one of the jets that hit the twin towers, or the almost divine survival of one of the hijackers passports,as it tumbled through the fire and debris to land gently on the ground.

    Or even the Charlie Hebo gunmen, leaving their ID’s in the getaway car…geez that was a stroke of good luck….eh.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    No doubt next you’ll get on to quantum superposition, where matter can occupy different places in space and time simultaneously; a bit like Andy Burnham.

    I was….though it is the quantum states that are superposed, not the matter itself. Thank Dirac for that! Otherwise Burnham would be a heavyweight…

  • Ba'al Zevul

    (I think we need to invent quantum politics to explain some of the phenomena we vote for)

  • N_

    @Lysias

    Note what Ms Forde’s former solicitor (if he’s former, why’s he delivering statements for her?) is saying about why the case was dropped. He’s saying the prosecution had “witness problems”, namely that a witness was in the court cells and therefore not in a mood to help the prosecution. Uh?

    If the witness was brought in from prison, then it’s obvious they would be held in the cells. If they were sent to the cells that day by a judge for some reason…well what was the reason? Being in the cells can’t be the whole of the reason the case was pulled. Or was the whole case built on the testimony of a witness who was unstable? That wouldn’t be good work by the CPS.

    He also says this should all be on the record. Well is it?

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