Ben Michael Ward is a Web Developer living in San Francisco.

This is the blog. You should also take a look at my main site, ben-ward.co.uk, and follow on Twitter.

Nov 06 2009 ∞

And now it’s time for ‘That Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means’.

McCarthyism: The intense opposition, countering, fear and suspicion of Communism, particularly in the United States during the 1950s.

—(Wiktionary)

McCarthyite: A follower of McCarthyism

—(Wiktionary)

Emphasis mine.

So you’re saying that she’s un-American because she’s making “politically motivated accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence”? (McCarthism, Wikipedia).

No. No, that isn’t what you’re trying to say at all. You’re trying to tie her to communism again, aren’t you? Trouble is, of course, that you have no fucking clue who Joseph McCarthy was or what he did. It’s you and your angry mob, with your incessant cries of ‘socialism’, ‘communism’, ‘Nazis’ and posters of Obamahitler acting in the true spirit of McCarthy.

You’ve just heard your demigods on Fox say ‘McCarthy’ and ‘Communism’ enough times in the same sentences that you assume it must be an insult at the opposition. Plus, long words impress you, and you want to make your mob look intellectually equal to those Liberal elitist scum that you’ve been conditioned to hate. So, you painted it on your banner and you marched it around Washington without a fucking hint of an clue.

You are insultingly stupid.

You’re being used, of course. But having shit for brains is not a valid excuse. If it ever was, not any more. Not now. Not when you’re doing so much damage to discourse. It’s embarrassing.

There’s a sad punchline to this sort of thing. Will anyone (perhaps besides Jon Stewart) on the sane side of these protests stand up and call out the astroturfed morons for what they are? Does anyone have the balls to see through this fake mob and write them off? It’s depressingly doubtful that there will be a rebuke from anyone of weight. That’s what leaves me most angry. It’s not just the racism, lies, mob mentality and/or sheer wrongness of this scene, it’s that they are allowed to get away with it.

Via The Storming Of Capitol Hill, Part Two | TPM Photo Galleries

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New UK 1st class stamps

Design of currency and stamps are two things that the UK consistently does very, very well. A new set is being release January 7th featuring classic British album covers (and also one by Coldplay.)

Via. Notcot

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New Flickr Privacy Rule

The new people tagging feature has one other interesting privacy affect, in that you are able to see all photos you are tagged in, even private ones.

This is going to be a particular cause of alarm to obsessive-compulsive metadata-pedants, who also hide in bushes secretly photographing their crushes.

Nov 05 2009 ∞
The trouble with a ‘scientific’ argument, of course, is that it is not made in the real world, but in a laboratory by an unimaginative academic relying solely on empirical facts.

The choice quote from A. N. Wilson’s anti-science tour de farce on the Daily Mail site. It’s called “Yes, scientists do much good. But a country run by these arrogant gods of certainty would truly be hell on earth”. No, really.

1300 words, two of which are ‘Hitler’ (also, two mentions of ‘Nazi’ and one of ‘Soviet Russia’.)

Via. Simon Willison

Nov 04 2009 ∞
Only 36% of people view the GOP favorably, with an outright majority of 54% viewing them unfavorably.

Poll: GOP’s Favorability At Its Worst In A Decade | TPMDC

I can only assume that someone in the GOP Fortress of Evil, this conversation went down last November:

“Fucking hell, that was pretty rough. Oh well, it’s been a while since we weren’t in power, so how shall we approach this new period of opposition politics?” “Ooh, ooh I know! Let’s act like absolute fucking despicable cocks at every opportune moment. And, wherever possible, also in the inopportune moments. People will definitely identify with that that.” “Sounds brilliant. Get me Sarah Palin’s number.”

Oddly, given the above 100% real transcript, the GOP candidate for New York’s 23rd district actually dropped out because she wasn’t enough of a despicable cock. That left a hard-right Conservative party candidate Doug Hoffman who had—I shit you not—actually signed Glenn Beck’s 9-12 pledge. He proceeded to lose NY-23 to a Democrat for the first time since 1854.

Good work, GOP. You are examples to us all.

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The Visual Miscellaneum | Information Is Beautiful

Oh my, David McCandless is putting out an Information is Beautiful book!

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after Firefox 3.6 – new font control features for designers at hacks.mozilla.org

CSS-level access to OpenType functionality. Fancy fancy.

Oct 30 2009 ∞

There is a new sidebar pane when you inspect an element in the Elements Tree Hierarchy. If the current Node has registered event listeners there is a separate section for each type of event registered (click, mouseover, etc). Within each of these lists is a display of all of the event listeners in the entire event flow for that type. That means you see all the Capturing Event Listeners followed by the Bubbling Event Listeners in the exact order that they execute and on which nodes they are registered.

—BogoJoker » Improving the Web Inspector.

Holy shit, Webkit.

Oct 29 2009 ∞

Frequently Bought Together

This item: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade by Microsoft Software
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Upgrade by Microsoft Software
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade by Microsoft Software

Apparently choosing which edition of Windows is right for you is still as confusing as ever.

(Ultimate Edition remains the ‘oh fuck it I have no idea what any of this means, just take my Goddamn money and let this be over now’ choice. When my parents got Windows Vista a few years back, we originally plumped for Home Premium, only to find that some piece of the networking subsystem was disabled, preventing Dad from connecting to his work VPN. So we had to Ultimate Edition anyway. Incidentally, ‘Anytime Upgrade’, for those short of hard disc space at the time, means ‘reinstall from scratch’.)

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Support Details | Tech support anger management

A really neat interface to get useful system stats and browser set-up info from your users. Lots of useful applications for diagnosing support requests. (via David Emery.)

Oct 19 2009 ∞

Frequently Bought Together

Customers buy this item [HP Sauce] with Heinz Beans in Tomato Sauce, 13.7-Ounce Cans (Pack of 12) by Heinz

Or, as we call it back home, ‘breakfast’. Fuck yeah, Britain.

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All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true in itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Mein Kampf vol. 1, ch. X by Adolf Hitler

So, wait. ‘The Big Lie’, the technique of lying so colossally and spreading corrupted beliefs to an intellectually vulnerable populace through emotional misguidance—such as, say, the association of ‘Death Panels’, health care reform and Nazism—is a technique actually coined and documented by Hitler.

So help me Godwin, I think a feel a recursion error coming on.

(Big Lie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, via jormungand in the TPM comments)

Oct 14 2009 ∞

For the GOP Faces pool. See also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Comments.

Oct 13 2009 ∞

Flickr: The GOP Faces Pool

Meme of the week.

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Microformateers on Twitter

Designed for humans first, and superheroes second.

Lots of citizens ask questions about microformats on Twitter. So in an attempt to be coordinated and useful, I’ve assembled a small league of superheroes to stand up for truth, justice and structured data, sporadically answering your questions, fixing your code or helping you find the right reference.

So… it’s the microformats customer service desk, then.