Streaming services have been in the news, with Spotify having trouble with their blue-eyed peddler of misinformation Joe Rogan; pecunia non olet, as I believe one Roman emperor said in justification of a tax on sales of urine...
<caveat>... and Spotify, presented with the choice between a money-spinning shock-jock and a pair of rock stars past their prime (but with significant back catalogues) held their nose and took the money. Read more about it here. (Wednesday morning's The Death of Nuance referred to the increasing frequency of such confrontations.)
Check this before quoting me ;-)
</caveat>
Streaming services, it turns out, have been with us for longer than most of us (including me, until earlier today) think. What changed my mind was this Facebook post:
"The first streaming music service' is coming it a bit.
<autobiographical_note>
It reminds me of a claim by Robert E Horn (grand-daddy of Information Mapping), which I read back when my job required me to read stuff like Mapping Hypertext: The Analysis, Organization, and Display of Knowledge for the Next Generation of On-Line Text and Graphics.' I did A COURSE on it: such fun. He wrote that the first instance of hypertext was an edition of the bible with copious annotations and extended quotations from cross-referenced text in separate columns. Up to a point, Lord Copper, I thought. That annotated bible had the seeds of an idea that would ultimately be developed into hypertext; to argue that it was hypertext is facile and virtually meaningless.
</autobiographical_note>
Still, it's an interesting bit of technology, and it's further proof of nineteenth-century innovations in sound transmission, another instance of which I discussed some years ago in this post.
But returning to that Spotify brou-ha-ha, though still tangentially (you know me), I read a comment piece in the Guardian recently about anti-vaxxers. I couldn't follow it all, though you may have more luck. I did note (and concur with) this:
[I]f you find yourself in a culture war, figure out whether your opponent is persuadable or implacable. “Persuadable” is wondering what the civil liberties implications are of mandatory vaccination; “implacable” is thinking vaccines are really a plot by a cabal of billionaires to wipe out sheeple by making them infertile.“Implacable” is QAnon, it’s climate change or Holocaust denial, it’s white replacement theory, it’s any idea that relies on a secret, concerted, long-range conspiracy that, if you know anything about humans (their ability to keep a secret, for one), you know to be functionally impossible
There’s no point trying to persuade the implacable, but you do have one job, and it’s the very devil of a job: to stop them persuading anyone else. I think maybe “Keep them off Question Time” [the subject of the piece was Fiona Bruce's ill-conceived contribution to the BBC's race to the bottom] is [a] good start but I am – and I hope always to remain – persuadable.
I nearly gagged, in my last sentence, on the word 'anti-vaxxers'. This is yet another example of a tendency I decried not so long ago on the subject of 'shielding': in a pandemic, the first casualty is language:
<apropos enemy="covid19", first-casualty="language" >Which reminds me: I'm finding it hard to say 'I'm shielding' (which is the magic word for people especially at risk). The health chappies (Witty et al.) are obviously not conversant with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – which sprang partly from Benjamin Whorf's experience working with insurance claims. He recognized that the way people described situations often contributed to misfortunes; for example, the phrase "empty petrol cans" encouraged people to underestimate their flammability, as "empty" can mean null or void or having no effect – as in "empty threat" "empty promise" and so on.Similarly (at last, the point) the verb shield implies strength. A (hero) shields B (vulnerable person) from C (danger). So saying 'I'm shielding' invites the belief that I'm strong. So when I was recently ordering some pills online I asked for them to be delivered to my home address rather than asking MrsK to queue outside the pharmacy (which I gather we're saying now instead of chemist – I'm tempted to do the full Shakespeare and say apothecary). But I didn't want to say "I'm shielding" in case someone who spoke English misinterpreted it. (On the international stage I reckon this might be more of a problem. People exposed daily to Wittygrams know all about this (ab)usage; but not Johnny Foreigner.)
Just saying. People planning resistance campaigns of all kinds need to think about the language they're using.
</apropos>
<parenthesis comment="Slipped that one in">As I said: the first casualty. But I've been done.
What is boosted by the vaccine is resistance/immunity/<whatever>, but the Government are making a Big Thing of their 'Get boosted' campaign (as if the jabbee was getting a fillip of some kind; a boot up the backside, perhaps).
</parenthesis>
<autobiographical_note type="skippable; no, really">
Some of us (clinically extremely vulnerable are the magic words) qualify for an extra one. When MrsK and I were vaccinated for the third time last year, hers was a booster and mine (the same amount of the same vaccine) was a 'third primary dose'. I booked my booster on 31 January, foolishly scheduling it for immediately after a consultation.The consultation overran of course, and I was late for my vaccination, but only about ten minutes, so I hightailed it out of the building to another entrance. I was told there that it was elsewhere in the hospital, and they very helpfully offered me an escort. I followed her through the hospital, past the point where I had started (now 15 mins late), to another building, where she showed me to a lift and said. 'It's on the first floor, I think.' The receptionist on the first floor said 'Not here; try the third floor.' On the third floor they said 'Not here, follow me', and led me back down to the ground floor (where my original escort had left me). He took me out of the building (now 20 mins late) and down an unmarked passageway to a door that said: Covid 19 vaccinations. At last. This led down a narrow corridor to a vestibule where there was a notice saying
Out for lunch. Back at 13.30.Leaving a trail of bread-crumbs so that I could find my way back, I went and ate my sandwiches. Over lunch, I went to their online booking service and reserved the next available slot, in case they couldn't fit me in before.
But ttey could. There was a harassed woman at the desk, and a growing queue in the increasingly crowded corridor. There was an unexpected hold-up in the jabbing area, so the queue kept growing (and squashing together), not helped by the fact that one person who had been jabbed needed a wheelchair and a carer – both waiting for a hospital porter (arranged by the harassed woman). All-in-all, not very socially distanced. But in the end I emerged, barely two hours after my appointment.
</autobiographical_note>
 |
| Peregrinations of Bobby-4-Jabs Update: 2022.02.09.14:35 – Added PS I wrote earlier that I had more to say about what is known as "mandatory vaccination". That "What is known as" is a way of skirting round a problem with this discussion. In a paper published at the ed of January 2022, Daniel Sokol, PhD, a medical ethicist and clinical negligence barrister and the author of "Tough Choices: Stories from the Front Line of Medical Ethics" presented several arguments on this subject...
.... – a format that had me fooled for a while, because the arguments against "compulsory vaccination" were prined in bold, and I thought at first that this suggested the drift of the whole argument. So I was inclined just to dismiss it; but I suspected that there might be some good things in it (though I couldn't imagine what), so I made a note to read it when I was feeling stronger. He wrote:
(This explains my 'what is known as "mandatory vaccination"'; though the point is a very fine distinction, to the extent that Sokol himself undermines it in the rest of the paper by using the contentious phrase unqualified. But the distinction is a nice one, and rather than repeating "known as" every time I use the phrase I shall follow Sokol's [not altogether courageous] example.) Sokol's last sentence here also explains what I objected to in that Sajid Javid quote I originally ridiculed. I thought he was using "deployment" as NHS jargon for "employment"; but it's not that. The point is that someone who chooses not to be vaccinated will not lose their job (except if they choose to define "my job" as the job they've thitherto done; they won't, if you want to split hairs like that, lose their employed status; they'll be moved to a job with less certainty of infecting patients. Sokol's paper is worth a read (particularly in the light of the proposed suspension of this requirement (which strikes me as stupid beyond words). I'll leave you with his closing remarks:
RIP that policy; and let us hope that its detractors live to regret their short-sightedness. |
No comments:
Post a Comment