The fans, the players and every single person involved with Man City FC were incredible today. Definitely the moral winners of this game.—
Vincent Kompany (@VincentKompany) January 08, 2012

and this

We lost today but in our heads we won! Out team spirit is inspirational! The fans kept us going for 90 mins! Thank u. Ctid—
Micah Richards (@OfficialMR2) January 08, 2012

The mocking responses were many and varied. “Good luck in the Fourth Round of the Moral Cup”, for example. And “enjoy your Moral Cup success”. And, “here’s to the Moral Cup Winners 2012″. And, well, mainly that same joke, really, over and over and over.

And fair enough, I guess. We lost, and claiming a moral victory is pushing it. But our performance was excellent, and the thing is, I know where Messrs Kompany and Richards are coming from; indeed it’s not a million miles away from what I was feeling after the match. To be precise, I remember saying “it’s not quite a moral victory, but it doesn’t feel far off.” And judging by the reactions of the fans in the stadium, subsequent conversations with other City supporters, and even Alex Ferguson’s downbeat assessment following his side’s 3-2 win, I’m far from alone here. (I also knew that, a couple of days later, being out of the cup, that fine feeling would count for nothing. And here we are.)

So damn those players for expressing themselves a little clumsily, if you like; yes, damn them all. And bring on your ridicule and your opprobrium. But we can take it. In fact we can do better than that. The fact that the players and the fans felt so positive in defeat to our bitterest rival, and so in tune with each other despite our cup exit, is something I take as a hugely encouraging sign.

Because, ultimately, I think it all comes down to whether or not you believe there is more to football than merely winning matches. I certainly do, and I don’t believe you’re a true football fan if you don’t. Real supporters know the thrill of a tightly drawn game, and the boredom of a functional victory; they recognise how a battling defeat can give hope for the future, while a fortuitous win may merely paper over the cracks. Not surprising, then, if for certain United fans – the kind, say, who equate a lack of trophies with a lack of history – this is a concept they they simply fail to grasp, and so find ripe for mockery. Gratifying too that, despite our recent influx of petrodollars, it is something that so many City fans do still understand.

For now, at least.

That said, one of the complaints I read, numerous times over, was the furious assertion that don’t you know it’s the private sector that pays for the public sector in the first place, providing the slackers with their pensions, and their wages?! Now this, it seems to me, is undeniable. It also doesn’t appear to be a problem. Where does this sense of grievance come from, I wonder?

Put another way, rather than clefting the nation in twain and labelling us as either public sector workers or private sector workers, why don’t we use the terms government workers and non-government workers instead? Lest we forget that it’s the non-government workers who are the ones who pay their taxes to finance those wages and pensions for government workers? It’s a disgrace I tell you, something must be done!

Oh really? How about, just for fun, we cut the pie a different way? Talking of pies (and pasties!) how about we divide the country into Greggs employees and non-Greggs employees? Did you know that it’s down to the non-Greggs employees to hand over their hard-earned cash to feather the beds of those pampered Greggs workers, with their wages, and their pensions, and their natty uniforms! It’s an outrage! Oh…er…hang on; that doesn’t actually sound unreasonable, does it? More like a mere a statement of fact, in fact. What’s the difference?

Basically, nothing*. Taxpayers pay for government, customers pay for Greggs. Otherwise, it’s as you are. The reason they are considered differently is down to ideological oafishness. No one would dream of getting angry at Greggs workers for having a decent pension paid for by the likes of you and me. And yet…and yet…

…we get the common sight of newspaper columnists, sneering down their noses at public sector workers who earn a fraction of their salary, and demanding they endure a shittier retirement. And incidentally that, if anything, is the problem with Jeremy Clarkson’s comments. Not that he’s said something controversial (yawn†); he made a joke, and as is his way, it wasn’t all that funny. It’s the suggestion that behind the joke lies the unsurprising lack of self-awareness of a pampered rich man looking down on others while pocketing a handsome cheque from the state broadcaster. He’s a tit.

In summary, then, yes; it’s the private sector that pays for the public sector. But that isn’t a matter to feel aggrieved about; it’s a matter of bookkeeping.

PostScript: Another post! And a vaguely topical one! Good God! Can I keep it up?

*You get further points deducted for stating that we can choose to shop at Greggs but we’re forced to pay for government. True, but irrelevant.

†This, for what it’s worth is the correct response to whatever Clarkson says or does. For heaven’s sake don’t complain. It just makes you look silly.

I’d been finding it increasingly difficult to find the time, inclination and trousers with which to blog, and so at the turn of the year decided to go on a hiatus, and to make the most of the remaining time I had left with the kids until they were both in full-time education. So I set September as my intended return date and put my feet up. In May I had my latest and last dust up with some phishers trying set up home in the hidden nooks and crannies of my WordPress.org self-hosted blog, and so I also resolved to leave the cuckoos to it and move over to WordPress.com, which I’ve done, and which explains the exciting fresh new look to this site. Now, with the kids in school and the removal of the distraction of having to maintain and update my own website, I reckoned I would suddenly have plenty of free time in which to write stuff and put the world to rights. Yet here we are in November, and nothing; not a word.

Oh I’ve got excuses, but they’re not interesting. And during my absence I can’t say I’ve exactly been straining at the leash to break my self-imposed abstinence. There was a brief moment when I thought I’d write about the summer riots, but before long I was so fed up with the claptrap being spouted by all sides, with people, as ever, proclaiming an absolute knowledge of the unknowable which conveniently also fully vindicated their existing prejudices that I completely withdrew from all news and comments programmes and turned off twitter because it was pissing me off (in particular the views of people I habitually agree with pissed me off, which I find really depressing; the David Starkey’s of this world can just be dismissed as twats.)

But I do like to write, and so I intend to return. And if nothing else I have rafts of drafts; posts which I had abandoned because before I’d finished them they’d stopped being topical; the world had moved on and I felt I’d run out of time. And now I have the time, theoretically*. I’m also, to my mind, the master of l’esprit de l’escalier; or in my case more like l’esprit de l’escalier, l’entrance hall, la rue extérieur et alors dans mon maison avec un cup de thé et un croissant, et quatre jour après le fact. You see, an event will have been in the news, but rather than have something to say there and then it’ll be days later when I’m still mulling it over that I suddenly come up with a killer line, or what I feel passes for a killer line. But I’d think it too late, now, to come over all smart, a bit silly to revisit old news, and so I’d let it slip. So from now on, on this blog, it’s never too silly to revisit old news, as long as I think I’ve got a feeble comment to make. And a draft is never too long in the tooth that it can’t still be published. If I think I’ve got something interesting to say then you’re going to get it, right between the eyes, and topicality be damned. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

And that, more or less, is that, for now; a tentative new mission statement for the all new Obscurer. Same as the old Obscurer. Stick around if you fancy your chances. This could go either way.

*Just re-read that line. Doesn’t really make sense in this context. Oh well. Fuck it.

So, see you in a couple of weeks!

And a bit…

The unfairness of the government’s financial grant settlement for Manchester, one of the five worst in the country, has been widely reported.

We now have to find £110m in savings next year – £60m more than expected – because of front-loading and the redistribution of money from Manchester to more affluent areas.

The accelerated cuts mean we can no longer achieve the staffing reductions we have been forced into through natural turnover, which is why we are proposing a time-limited offer of voluntary severance and voluntary early retirement.

Quick as a wink, local government minister Grant Shapps shot back

Labour hypocrisy on this issue is breathtaking. They admit there need to be cuts but can’t say where they would fall. Ed Miliband needs to go back to his blank piece of paper and come back with a plan.

We have been quite clear that if councils cut chief exec pay, join back-office services, join forces to procure and cut out the crazy non-jobs, they can protect frontline services. Yet Manchester has a chief exec on a pay packet of nearly a hundred thousand pounds more than the prime minister who won’t lead from the front and take a pay cut and a Twitter tsar on nearly £40,000.

But quite how full is the government’s “piece of paper” when it comes to the cuts? In the main it seems to consist of a series of percentages, the size of which is dependant upon the individual minister’s proximity to the centre of influence and their negotiating skills with the treasury, and with the detail on what is actually to be cut generously devolved away, along with the blithe instruction to “do more with less” and that “you must protect frontline services you simply must”. So, lucky Messrs Gove and Lansley get smallish cuts to education and health (presumably because they have expensive departmental rejigs to waste money on) but weak negotiators or gleeful masochists like Theresa May and Eric Pickles are looking at 25% budget cuts in the home office and local government, but with the decision on “how” to be made elsewhere.

Now, I have no issue with the “how” being made as near to the coalface as possible, that is as it should be. The problem is that the “how much” figure seems to have been cooked-up in an ivory tower in Cloudcuckooland. And, as with Manchester council, when those cuckoos come home to roost and the departmental percentage for cuts is translated into actual losses of jobs and services, central government adopts a “not me, guv” attitude, and blandly asserts that savings of wasteful back-office paper-shuffling jobs can be made and the front line saved, but with no indication at all of how it can be done. So we should perhaps be grateful that on this occasion Grant Shapps has shown us the way, put some meat on the bones, and pointed out an efficiency that can be enacted; namely the sacking of that wasteful and indulgent Twitter Czar. (I prefer Czar to Tsar, because it’s nearer to the word Caesar; but you may say it as you choose.)

Except Manchester City Council don’t employ a Twitter Czar, or even a Twitter Tsar, do they? That much should be blindingly obvious to anyone in a state of consciousness, or so I thought when I heard the allegation on the afternoon news. Sure, they’ll have an internet communications manager or something, who will, among his or her other responsibilities, ensure a presence on twitter (an excellent idea, in my opinion), but you’d have to be pretty jaundiced, or moronic, or, apparently, a government minister, to believe that they employ someone on £40k whose sole responsibility is to tweet all day (which means, sadly, that there’ll be plenty of people readily lapping up that crap in blogs, and message boards, and, apparently, cabinet meetings).

Confirmation came during the PM programme, where it was announced

In the item earlier in the programme, you’ll remember, about 2,000 job cuts at Manchester City Council, we quoted Grant Shapps, the local government minister, saying the council employed a ‘Twitter tsar’. Well the council have been onto us to tell us they’ve have never employed such a person, though they do have a website manager which the Daily Mail referred to as a ‘Twitter tsar’ last October.

Okay, but that doesn’t mean the Daily Mail is wrong, does it? Perhaps Grant Shapps and the Mail were using the same, accurate source for this Twitter Czar claim? Eddie Mair continued

We’ve checked with Grant Shapps’s department and they said the newspaper report is what he based his comments on.

Brilliant. Tell me this isn’t representative of the wider picture. Tell me this doesn’t show, even in part, how the government has formed its theory about what cuts are or are not deliverable. When those actually responsible for effecting central government’s cuts complain, are their complaints really being dismissed based upon bullshit stories from the Daily Mail’s agenda-book? And is Grant Shapps so stupid that it didn’t occur to him that the Daily Mail story was a nonsense, here as elsewhere? Or does he simply not care, knowing that the reality won’t get as wide an airing as the convenient myth?

But perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh on Grant Shapps. He had to come up with some figure for local government cuts, and with the scrapping of the Audit Commission I guess thin air is as good a place as any. If he can’t himself specify where cuts can be made and has no idea what can genuinely be delivered, what is he to do but to work from Daily Mail headlines? Perhaps if we knew a bit more about Manchester council’s expenditure, if their processes were a more transparent, then he’d be able to make a statement that isn’t a bundle of idiotic gibberish piggy-backing upon a twisted tabloid half-truth? For as he also says

It’s equally disappointing that the council has so far failed to put all expenditure over £500 online so it can exposed to full public scrutiny.

Quite right too. Let’s get this stuff up on the website, so everyone can decide where the cuts can be made, so we’re not having to operate in the realms of guesswork and fantasy. Let’s do it, and yesterday.

Hmm. I wonder whose job it is to put all that information online?

Which brings me to the latest Liberal Democrat leaflet, which dropped, through my door the other day. And what do you know? Now it seems that all of the world’s woes are Labour’s fault after all, while of the Conservatives we hear nothing much at all. It’s an understandable air-brushing of course; now that the Liberal Democrats are part of the national government in coalition with the Conservatives it’s no surprise that the tune has had to be changed. But seeing as this leaflet is billed as a “Local News Extra” (my emphasis) it would be nice if it perhaps featured some succour for locally born-and-raised rabid Tory haters such as myself.

But no, instead we learn about how the “Liberal Democrats in Government have been working hard to tackle the shocking legacy of debt left by Labour”. Which is fair enough. But I must have missed the bit where the Lib Dems continually complained about the gradual growth in public debt under Labour prior to the recession, then opposed the fiscal stimulus afterwards. I certainly remember them explicitly stating before the election that we should wait a while before tackling the budget deficit lest such a fiscal tightening should snuff out any nascent recovery. In all, it’s hard to see how the level of the debt today would have been all that different if the Lib Dems had themselves been in government for the last few years. So what has changed since the election and now? Oh, yes. Power.

Nowhere, I think, better shows the logical contortions that being a Liberal Democrat now necessitates than when the leaflet comes onto the subject of the Nimrod aircraft programme, which employs (or employed) hundreds of highly-skilled workers at the BAE Systems factory in Woodford within the Cheadle parliamentary constituency. Says local Lib Dem MP Mark Hunter

I am bitterly disappointed that Labour overspending has led to the MRA4 Nimrod Project being cancelled. It makes me so angry that people in this area are having to shoulder the burden because Labour spent and promised money they didn’t have.

But as it says elsewhere, “Mark has consistently supported the Nimrod project at BAE Systems in Woodford”. Doesn’t that mean that he himself has consistently supported at least that part of Labour’s monstrous overspending, which has led to that “shocking legacy of debt”? If Nimrod is an example of Labour spending money it didn’t have, why didn’t he oppose it all along? Unless, of course, he doesn’t consider Nimrod itself to be a waste of money, in which case why the hell is the coalition cutting it? Why not continue to support Nimrod since it is an example of good spending by the last government, oppose its cancellation by this current coalition government, and campaign instead for those many and varied wasteful projects to be cut instead?

Can you have it both ways, really? Is Nimrod a waste of money or not? If it is, why did you support it in the first place? If not, why are you cutting it now? Oh, who cares, let’s just blame Labour and be done with it.

As I said, locally the Conservatives are the Lib Dems electoral opposition; as you can see above, the leaflet even includes a handy graph to show you just what that means. So, while tediously predictable, it still seems daft that in a local leaflet the Conservatives get such a free ride; Labour, meanwhile, get both barrels, despite the fact that they don’t have a hope in hell of winning here at the next election. But then, if my current voting intentions are in any way indicative of wider opinion, neither do the Liberal Democrats.

But that’s not the end of it. There’s more to Stanley products than tools, as we discovered when my son received as a present a set of their toys. Yes, toys! But not the obvious sort of toys that I think you’re thinking of. No, this was no mere collection of branded plasticy knives and hammers for my son to play with and pretend to be his dad; grunting, wheezing, shaking his head and occasionally exclaiming “What the FUCK! This bastard just won’t SHIFT!” No, these were boxes of little Meccano-like models for you to construct out of metal strips, joints, nuts and bolts, each packed with their own little screwdriver and spanner. With minimal assistance, mainly for the fiddly bits, my son soon despatched the “racing car”, and then the “fork lift truck”. But the best was yet to come.

Because the Stanley model “Spitfire” has to be the piece of the resistance. Oh yes; not content with simply offering you the chance to make a generic “aeroplane”, Stanley insist that this toy is a specific aircraft. And not just any old aircraft, but that legendary star of the Battle of Britain itself. Considering the simplistic materials provided, it must take great confidence to proclaim that your model is worthy of such an iconic description. But is this confidence justified? Well, just see for yourself…

Isn’t it impressive? Ignore, if you can, the fact that the model is resting on a chopping board*. Now look again. This could be a photograph taken at Biggin Hill in 1940, couldn’t it? You almost feel as if you are there, back in time. Shame Ginger bought it yesterday, the hun shot him to ribbons as he was watching your tail, and you nearly ended up in the drink yourself when you got one in the fuselage before making an emergency landing in that potato field; but you’re ready for the next sortie the minute those new-fangled RADAR boys spot Jerry heading back over the channel. For what other aircraft could this possibly be but the famed destroyer of so many Messerschmidt 109s and Junker bombers, the very RAF fighter that means we’re not forced to speak German to this day (unless it’s on your school’s curriculum)? Yes, the attention to detail is truly awe-smacking, the accuracy almost palpable.

Okay, it’s not quite perfect; I have spotted a couple of glitches. Those wings, for a start, look a teeny bit too rounded for my liking, more like those of the Tempest than the graceful elliptical wings you would find on the Spitfire (although I guess it’s possible they are trying to recreate the clipped-wing variant). And the nose doesn’t look quite right to me, more akin to the Hurricane perhaps? But these are minor complaints, and perhaps only noticeable if you’ve had my advanced-level training; those three years spent in the Air Training Corp weren’t wasted after all. Overall, though, the Stanley Spitfire is surely a major triumph, a worthy addition to the pantheon of really very good toys indeed.

* Ahh, that chopping board. We spotted it one day in Debenhams and bought it with some vouchers we’d received for our wedding. Only when we got it home did we notice a tiny label that stated “Warning, do not use sharp implements on this board”. A chopping board? Not for use with sharp implements? WTF? How else does one chop?

WEST Midlands Police has been accused of wasting officers’ time – and taxpayers’ cash – by bizarrely setting up a Twitter page for a crime-fighting sniffer dog.

Their two-year-old Labrador Smithy, who has been dubbed an internet scent-sation, now regularly posts tweets on the social netwoking site.

Writing the occasional 140-character tweet? Outrageous! This sounds like a job for the joyless fuckers at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, who opine…

It difficult to see how putting a dog on Twitter is supposed to benefit the people of the West Midlands.

The tweets aren’t even casually informative, they’re just nonsense dreamt up by a member of staff.

This silly PR stunt is a just a diversion from real police work, and with cuts being made Smithy should probably keep his nose to the ground and concentrate on the job.

Just how diverting is this Twitter account? What real police work does the TPA fear was left undone when this magnum opus was being composed:

Training went well ! but that is not the end of my handlers day; we, will still get a walk later, the great benefits of being a Police dog.

Well, that’s got to be a couple of murders West Midlands Police could have solved right there, if they hadn’t been so diverted! What about this one:

Duty time 8am till 5pm today…..I’m staying at home, as Drake is working at a football match, my fellow canine will update you later !

So now we have two dogs tweeting! What next? Three? Here’s another:

Off today and tomorrow, chilling, lapping up my growing internet following…gonna get either a new ball or bone out of this, claws crossed.

Days off? DAYS OFF? Why do police dogs need days off? Yet more public sector waste! And what’s this?

A request re a missing person please RT http://www.west-midlands.police.uk/np/coventry/news/newsitem.asp?id=1040

What’s that all about? Just as the TPA said: dreamt up nonsense that is not even casually informative. But it gets worse still when you look at this story.

Smithy’s trainer PC Terry Arnett said: “It was just something he wanted to do.

“He felt he and his team weren’t getting the praise they deserved and the next thing I knew he was tweeting.

“We’ve had to have the keyboard adapted so he can type, but apart from that it’s his way of letting people know the important work he and his pals do.”

And how much did this adapted keyboard cost? And guess who’s paying?

You know, the more I read about the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the more I’m beginning to think they are double-agents on a deep-cover assignment designed to ridicule and discredit small-government ideologues.

Oh don’t worry, I’m under no illusions. I’m fully aware that no one else shows a tenth of the interest in this blog that I do, and to an extent that is part of the appeal. Tinkering pointlessly with the design and set-up at times seems more important to me than actually writing a post; and writing a post often plays second fiddle to actually publishing it. Often a sort of pedantic perfectionism takes a hold and I’ll spend way too long faffing about over some trivial rejig, but I justify it with the fact that I’m doing this for my own satisfaction rather than for an imaginary reader who might actually give a damn. That way I don’t feel so bad about spending ages installing drop capitals, or sorting a mobile edition, or changing the font in my blockquotes; all stuff you almost certainly won’t have noticed. One day I spent hours trying to debug a problem with the template which meant that the meta-data (that “This was written by Quinn…” gubbins at the bottom of each post) would ride up the side of an image if the text in the post was only short and the image was aligned to one side or the other. It was a problem that affected literally two-or-three posts such as this one, and which I’m sure fussed not a soul; yet when I’d finally sorted it (a simple “clear: both;” command in the stylesheet) it gave me a great sense of achievement.

But my most wasteful waste of time has got to be my tumblr. I already had one tumblelog which I used for my family and friends, for displaying simple snapshots or videos or brief posts, emailing them from my mobile whilst on holiday, so that on my return people could tell me “oh aye, I forgot to check your website for updates when you were away.” But I suddenly became attached to the idea of creating another tumblog for The Obscurer, to collect together links to all my posts, tweets and delicious bookmarks. I didn’t care if nobody looked at it – and in that I haven’t been disappointed, and I have the stats to prove it – I just liked the idea of tying things up neatly for me to refer to again if I liked. And it was easy enough to set up too, not even that time consuming; simply a matter of creating the tumblog, playing with a template to imitate some of the look of this blog, and then arranging it so it would publish the result of my blog, twitter and delicious rss feeds. Perfect, if pointless.

But of course it wasn’t that simple, and soon I realised I had gone down the path, once again, of creating a time consuming project that no one else cared about but which would frustrate the hell out of me. It was those rss feeds that were the problem; everything was duplicated, everywhere. I’d use twitter tools to issue a tweet each time I published a post post here, so each post would show up in both my blog and twitter feeds, and so would show up twice on my tumblr; and I used twitterfeed to do the same for each delicious bookmark, with the same result. I also, at the time, was doing those weekly twitter digests, meaning that tumblr would needlessly update each week with a link to a post here which detailed the collection of the tweets my tumblr had already reproduced individually over the preceding seven days. Now, I could just manually delete those duplicates as and when then came in, but that would be stupid waste of time. Better just to scrap the idea of the tumblog, obviously. But sadly, for no good reason, something in me wouldn’t allow me to do that. There was a problem, and I just needed to find some solution, somehow.

And I found that solution my usual way; by trying everything I could think of and getting it wrong wrong wrong until suddenly, surprisingly, I stumbled upon the thing that worked. And that thing was Yahoo! Pipes. Now you may well know about these things already – I’m usually the last to know – but in essence pipes are where you create your own rss feeds; you can take a feed or a number of feeds in one end, amend and adjust them, and out the other end you get your own personal feed. So, rather than tumblr simply publishing this blog’s rss feed, I get it to publishes the blog pipe; the blog feed goes in one end, runs through an operation that strips out any posts in the “twitterings” category, and publishes a revised feed at the other end. I did the same for my twitter feed; tumblr instead publishes the twitter pipe, being the twitter feed minus my blog posts and bookmarks. Out go the duplicates, and what is left is an easily maintainable tumblog that I can ignore as easily as everyone else can. Sorted.

But it got me thinking; what other uses could there be for Yahoo! Pipes? Surely in this internet and digital age where everything is reduced to zeros and ones there must be a way to use Pipes – or some distant cousin of Pipes – beyond just amending rss feeds for websites no one reads into a combined rss feed for another website no one reads? Surely they must have a more practical use? And once I had set my mind on that train of thought, it was hard to stop.

Let’s take it a step at a time. When I first started reading blogs I liked to read widely, to actively court opposing views; some, like Biased BBC, I read just because I couldn’t help getting wound up by them (before finally kicking the habit), but others I found genuinely interesting even if they did come from a different point of view. But time is tight, and those reasoned blogs I’d disagree with could always be relied upon to write one too many stupid posts until my considered opinion was “get to fuck”; and so over time the stuff in my Bloglines Google Reader has come to reflect rather than challenge my prejudices. However, stray onto the comment pages of those blogs written by authors I agree with and before long you will still encounter those tiresome opinions that I’d much rather be insulated from. I’m talking about the likes of Newmania on Hopi Sen, Bob B on Stumbling & Mumbling, David Duff on Banditry*, Sally on Lib Con, Quinn on The Filter; all people who I rapidly scroll past when I guess that the tedious drivel I’m reading is one of their efforts. But how better to avoid this crap altogether?! I could use shutup.css or readability to get rid of the lot, but many comments are fine. Most blogs , though, now publish a comments feed; couldn’t you just whack one through a Yahoo! pipe, strip out any comments that are by or refer to the aforementioned bores and hey presto! A more enlightened comment thread at a stroke! There has to be a plugin going begging right there.

What about beyond blogs and out in the dreaded MSM? Perhaps you could do the same on the Daily Mail so you only read red arrowed comments? Then again, it’s probably better to simply avoid the Daily Mail altogether (and bless Rupert Murdoch for saving us the job and putting The Times behind a paywall, so it doesn’t even trouble Google News). But what if I want to know about a particular subject, say our good friend “public sector pensions”, but I want to read informed analysis of their viability rather than an ideological rant? Could I just set up a Google news alert for “public sector pensions”, run it through a pipe that strips out any article that mentions “gold plated” or “pensions apartheid” and consider it done? I don’t see why not. Sure it’s not foolproof, I may still get articles I disagree with, but that’s fine; they should at least be a little bit more intelligent, or at least more imaginative in their bias.

But of course the internet isn’t just web pages. I love my Pure Evoke Flow internet radio for the way it can slip almost seamlessly between listening to live Test Match Special on 5Live Sports Extra to yesterday’s Archers on Listen Again to a Collings & Herrin podcast. How about the viability of someone far cleverer than me hacking it and running its output through a pipe? Then, when listening to football commentary on 5Live it can automatically go quiet when Alan Green comes on? Sure, Jimmy Armfield or Graham Taylor will sound as if they’re talking to themselves for a while, but that’s still better that hearing Green whining on and on about some minor, trivial point as if it is a serious affront to human decency. Perhaps you could take another feed from another radio station – even TalkSport – when the egotist approaches the mic, until John Murray or Mike Ingam get their turn? Okay, it’s a rough idea, a work in progress, but one worth considering, and extending to television in turn.

When I was younger I always thought that technology had advanced as far as it could; that the arrival of Betamax and Channel 4 were the apex of our achievements and that the fantasy you’d see on Space 1999, of people talking into little mobile video phones was just that. Now my kids look baffled when we’re on holiday and I have to explain that we can’t pause and rewind the TV like we can on our PVR at home, an invention I never even countenanced. But as times change so do our expectations; we have come a long way since those days when we had no choice but to be passive recipients of whatever the neutral reporting of the BBC and ITN allowed, our prejudices only partially sated by the bias of the Telegraph or the Observer. The internet and new media on the otherhand has allowed such a wonderful profusion of different voices, a boom in choice and variety, that it has enabled us to selectively listen to a far narrower range of views than ever before. With filters such as Pipes going that inevitable step further and, if successfully arranged, preventing any dissenting voices from ever invading our brain space, technology allows us another fantasy: an echo chamber where we can confirm what we always half-believed. That all our opinions are wholly right.

Update 5/9/10: That’s the way to do it! Via Jim, a Ryan Avent-only pipe drawn from the RSS feed for The Economist’s “Free Exchange” blog.

* I’ve given up on John B, actually, after reading one daft comment too many. Although a pipe to remove any post where he deems it necessary to refer to someone as an idiot just because they hold a differing opinion† may be tolerable.
† Oh dear. Sadly, that’s all of them.