Comedy flash genii Doghorse and Eclectech have outdone themselves with this ludicrously catchy tune about the perils of your office PC. It’s promoting Not Safe For Work? - workSMART’s new interactive training thingy on Internet security. (more…)
Excellent riposte to my suggestion for union demotivators from Paul. Anyone else have an idea? Use Despair.inc’s Demotivator generator and LabourStart flickr group photos (or anything you have around) to show the side of trade unionism we all know and (sometimes) love.
UPDATE 10/10/08: May Day gets Demotivated by Donnacha
UPDATE 11/10/08: Organising again, this time by Carl
UPDATE 16/10/08: Organising again, by Carl again
UPDATE 21/10/08: Direct Action is tackled by Derek
UPDATE 23/10/08: Unity, another go by Derek
UPDATE 09/12/08: Union Leadership by Nick
I noticed something I liked a lot today. A bunch of CWU members, the dodgyclaimers, made a pop video parody to promote the union’s dispute with Royal Mail, and stuck it on YouTube. To say it’s not very polished would be a bit of an understatement, but it more than gets the point across – real people telling their story in immediately human terms. It’s set to the tune of the Proclaimers’ 500 miles:
“And we all walk 500 miles,
but Royal Mail want 500 more.
We’re going to be the men that walk 1,000 miles,
then fall down at your door.”
A couple of hours (and most likely a couple of beers) of an evening, with a cheap digital camera, free editing software (Yes Mac fiends, you get it on Windows too…), free hosting on YouTube, and 16,032 people have seen it. That’s 16,032! Loads of favourites and a string of comments that show it managed to motivate strikers all over the country.
So they did another, “The Posties” – sung to the Monkees, and another, a skit on “Brick in the wall” with the genius chorus “We don’t need no Alan Leighton”.
And the remixers are at it too. This isn’t new on social media – For every OK Go routine, there are a squillion kids who’ll make tributes (I even saw the treadmill dance acted out with Lego), and this phenomenon has already happened to dodgyclaimers’ Floyd cover. It is new for unions though 
I’ve seen a few activist video skits from the US, but these are the first examples I’ve seen from the UK. Some unions are doing well investing in swishy video reporting (Amicus) or quality campaign ads (PCS) but this kind of grassw00ts activism has every bit as much power to get the message out fast and wide – the scattergun approach means it only takes on to be funny. Unions might find it scary to deal with loose cannon communications during sensitive disputes, but there’s a lot to be gained from going with the flow of this creative individual activism. I’m hoping this is only the tip of a very big, and very funny, iceberg.
New evidence suggests that Dave’s rude kid photo-op curse started long before we’d first thought:
Our left blogohemisphere is getting quite excited about Sen Barack Obama’s race for the Democratic presidential nomination over the pond. It’s like Howard Dean never screamed, hurrah!
And there’s quite a lot to get excited about – as this video shows (thanks, parburypolitica!): Top orator, Impeccable community politics CV, all career moves covered by good altruistic reasons. He’s a kind of fantasy football candidate, and if he loses will have a great potential career playing inspirational presidents in disaster movies.
Naysaying seems to be focused around good old fashioned racism (including his rather unfortunate middle name of Hussein), his lack of cash and national campaign team, and possibly more tellingly that he’s new kid on the block, without the Washington experience of Howard Dean, let alone Hillary Clinton.
Anyway, watching the vid confused me a little. He does a great spiel on breaking down false divisions between red & blue, though I wondered a bit who he was trying to reach out to. The hardcore religious right deal in moral absolutes, so might be pretty immune to the shades of grey involved in trade-off politics and coalition building. For every one he won over with talk of worshipping “an awesome god” in the blue states, he probably alienated them again straight away by acknowledging the mere existence of “gay friends” in the red states.
As a tack for uniting those on the near right, with self-hating liberal tendencies though, I think it might work very well!
Maybe he is actually Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest character – trying to sucker the two sides into something which will make them both look silly.
Jak sie masz?
This post from Tom Watson scared me not inconsiderably! A creationist lobby group sending DVDs to MPs, purporting to offer evidence why creationism should make it into the GCSE biology syllabus. Made me wonder after reading Mr Tony’s recent New Scientist Interview:
NS: One subject that is of great concern to scientists is creationism. There has been a suggestion that creationism is being taught in some British schools. What are your views on this?
TB: This can be hugely exaggerated. I’ve visited one of the schools in question and as far as I’m aware they are teaching the curriculum in a normal way. If I notice creationism becoming the mainstream of the education system in this country then that’s the time to start worrying.
If they’ve got as far as the Palace of Westminster inboxes, does that mean that word from the top says it’s time for us good science-fearing folk to pack up and run for the hills?
I think the only rational response to this news is a knee-jerk cartoon:
Bigger version here…
