Protests

I read in Friday's Guardian of plans from the Extinction Rebellion to drive drones around the perimeter of Heathrow, with the intent of causing as much disruption as possible  while staying within the letter of the law. Now I am becoming a believer in extinction - or at least very serious change - in the not too distant future, and if the climate scientists are right about global warming and if we continue to dither, we are likely to be in for a bad time. Not least a complete break down in law, order and society at large in some heavily populated parts of the world. On the other hand, we have also already done serious damage to society at large, with one aspect of this being a break down in standards of public debate. And with further (minor) evidence today of same being the coarse publicity for a Paxo compèred debate about the failings of the House of Commons or some such. So I am uneasy about pushing at the boundaries of the law in the cause of that public debate.

In the same way, some years ago, I was very uneasy at an East Anglian jury's failure to convict some other protesters who had trashed some fields - worth thousands of pounds - on the grounds that they were being used, perfectly legally, to grow genetically modified crops. Perhaps there was some overlap with the hunt saboteurs, another bunch of protesters I do not much care for.

I guess that on all this I sit on the fence with Corbyn (this last over Brexit). I allow the protests about global warming, but also allow protesters who break the law to be taken to court. Or to be bundled into police vans if they push their luck.

Further down the same page, was a piece about YouTube Originals moving into serious programming. With Google having decided that going head to head with Netflix was not going to work, but that high end programming with advertisements might - with the option to pay of the order of $12 a month to have the advertisements removed. The piece claimed that the average Brit in the 18-34 bracket spends more than an hour a day on YouTube, presumably rather more than they spend with a newspaper, online, free or otherwise - although speaking for myself, as someone some years out of that bracket, I should think my average is closer to a minute a day, mostly finding out about classical music which I don't happen to have on vinyl, something which I do from time to time.

A quick search - with Google - failed to tell me anything about whether YouTube is any better than Facebook at censoring bad content - but I imagine there must be a lot of unpleasant stuff out there, just as there is on Facebook.

Definitely something else to worry about.

PS: regarding protests, I ought to say that I have done some protesting in my time, in the margins of the Vietnam War. Protests energised by the presence in London of post graduate students from the US, keen not to be conscripted to fight. In my defense, I can say that I was in good company with presidents Clinton, Bush Junior and Trump all being draft dodgers of one sort or another. Although Clinton was lucky in that, in the event, he drew a good draft number and did not have to go the whole hog.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/08/global-warming.html. Becoming a believer.

Reference 2: https://rebellion.earth/. The extinction people were rather smoother than I expected.