Richard Littlejohn doesn’t understand Twitter, so he doesn’t like it by shoutingatco.ws
You could make it up, and routinely do
The Chief Constable of Suffolk set the pace recently when he hoisted a rainbow flag above Bury St Edmunds nick to celebrate Gay and Lesbian History Month.
No, he’s got a fly in his bell-end about Twitter:
Using the latest social networking tools, officers will be contacting the rioters by Twitter, rather than loud-hailer, and asking them nicely to desist from throwing fire extinguishers off the top of the Millbank Tower and kicking in Topshop’s front windows.
Apparently, the new policy is in response to fears that the protesters’ yuman rites could be compromised by ‘kettling’ and being smashed over the head with a riot shield.
Obviously by saying “yuman rights”, you can surmise that Littlejohn is a gaping rectum who is over-extending himself intellectually. I mean, if the Met really didn’t want to kettle protesters, they, er, just wouldn’t. And I imagine that it’s more along the lines of the Police keeping an active eye on the Twitter accounts of the protest organisers, and searching for various keywords. Rather than the bullshit, over-simplistic example that Littlejohn gives:
So instead of ‘You’re nicked, chummy’, cops will plead with them to behave in fewer than 140 characters.
@MetPlod omg! pls dont pee on the cenotaph :)
Moving on from the Police, but in the same column, he’s back to banging on about Twitter:
Fred Kite soundalike Bob Crow wants to tax emails to tackle the deficit. The railwaymen’s union leader says the Government should slap a 1p levy on every message sent.
The problem is that emails are a vital part of any modern business and a new tax would hurt employers at a time when the recovery is still fragile.
Here’s a better idea. While email is useful, Twitter is nothing more than a self-indulgent toy for show-offs.
A social networking site, yesterday
Why not tax Tweets? The money raised from Sarah Brown and Stephen Fry alone would pay off the national debt in under a fortnight.
A great idea! Stephen Fry has 8,043 tweets, while Sarah Brown has 4,771. By my ropey maths, that’s £128, if they’re back-taxed. Is Littlejohn saying that the national debt is less than a round of Champers with Binkie West, or does he just have no idea what he’s talking about. We’ll leave it to you to decide, but it’s definitely the second one.
Littlejohn sounds more and more like a befuddled old man, unable to understand the world around him, pining for a better time, a time that only existed in his mind. Imagine him coming home and staring at the DVD player, unable to comprehend the LCD display, and cursing the day that VCRs became obsolete.
Is Twitter just a string of bad puns and self-promotion? No, of course not, in the same way that (most) newspapers aren’t. In any medium there’s going to be dickends, so why not notice some of the other things that people use Twitter for:
We could go on. But no, they’re all a “self indulgent toy for show-offs.” Unlike e-mail, which is luckily never used for junk.
The technological argument against charging per tweet, as though we were giving his rubbish idea any credence at all, is that it’s impossible to tell whether an account belongs to someone in the UK, and whether their messages are posted within the country. An American friend and a proxy is all you’d need to circumvent it completely. For all the Government know, you could be living in Miami and commentating on the UK as though it was some way relevant to you. In a handcart!
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© 2012
He hates it for a more self-serving reason: it’s full of people calling him a prat.