Love tech in general but this new psy ops style of leadership that is becoming popular in the west makes me uneasy. Obviously politicians will spin things as always but the tech leveraged version of that is a little ominous
This is actually fascinating (even if it may not be the behavior we expect from our elected leaders). He did the same thing in June where he gave a completely baffling interview [1] about how his hobby was painting models of buses out of used fruit crates.
But people suspected [2] then that it might be a similar strategy, to monopolize the results for "boris johnson bus" searches.
I wonder why nobody else is willing to do this? It seems like it works, and it keeps you in the news...
Makes me wonder what Jean-Claude Junker, head of the EU, is hiding now when he came out with the bizarre statement "he did not have an erotic relationship with the Irish Backstop".
There is a much simpler explanation. It's actually these cheap news websites engineering articles targetting Boris Johnson popular terms (like Model or Bus), in order to generate clicks and advertising revenue.
But Johnson still seems to deliver suitable quotes on cue. As much as I prefer explanations that involve less assumed cooperarion between actors, I don't see how yours can hold up in this case.
These websites have money to gain for writing these articles targetting SEO keywords on things Boris Johnson says or does.
They will pick up on any term for which they can easily write an article and run with it to get ad clicks.
I don't think Boris Johnson even has to do anything to make this happen, even though he obviously has something to gain in terms that these articles turn the public attention from these issues.
I mean this can be applied to literally almost anything he does or says. At worst, he might be intentionally adding to his speech terms that are easier to apply this technique to.
Searching "boris johnson bus" still comes up with a dozen pictures of the Brexit bus, with the "model bus" rambling not 'til below the fold. So it doesn't work all that well.
Boris Johnson has been painting red busses since before I had is own Brexit bus. The Brexit bus wasn't a secret, it was his campaign vehicle. "red busses" only seem obscure to you because you don't live in the UK which is ... full of red busses.
It's insane that people are obsesses with calling "conspiracy!" on Johnson for making an easily verifiable true statement about himself.
> you don't live in the UK which is ... full of red busses.
Well, London certainly is, the rest of the country tends to be mixed between green (arriva) and white/purple (first) these days.
In the days before deregulation, red was indeed the most common colour country-wide, but even then there were abhorrations such as west yorkshire's green and cream - there's another conversation to be had about 1950s and 1960s liveries composed of 'and cream' combinations that probably started with BR (well, the BTC then, which would have been the parent 'company' for most local bus services) 'crimson and cream' carriage livery - known colloquially as 'Blood and Custard'.
The weird part isn't that the bus he describes himself painting is red, or that his campaign bus was red, it's that his hobby is apparently painting buses out of empty wine boxes and it sounds like he's making it up on the spot.
>I wonder why nobody else is willing to do this? It seems like it works, and it keeps you in the news...
The gaming of keywords, offline and online, to influence SERP's has been done before and continues to do so ─ the optics on the practice of Google-bombing is a matter of frequency illusion. As an example, 'Santorum' clearly demonstrated the value and the power it holds. The eponymous search engine has a role to play by favouring newer content e.g. news media involving politics, entertainment and culture.
They talked about this on John Olliver. They had a bizarre interview where he brought up a story about a bus and people think it is to salt the keywords of Google search to not show a campaign bus that highlighted something like free health care or something like that.
Edit: user "sincerely" has a better description and links
It isn't "spiritually" true. It is factually true to the extent that the High Court ruled 350m was approximately the correct gross figure. Indeed some say that figure is conservative because it was based on projections from an official figure dated from 2014 that put the gross at closer to 450m. I'm guessing 2014 was high because of financial bailouts still being paid into the EU coffers.
From the ruling statement:
“The alleged offence set out in the Application for Summons is that the Claimant “repeatedly made and endorsed false and misleading statements concerning the cost of the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union”. It appears that if the Claimant had said/endorsed a figure of £350m per week gross, or £250m per week net, there would have been no complaint.”
Isn't it strange that any and all seemingly pro-Brexit posts here are being downvoted.
What you posted is factually correct. From observation, HN has turned into just another Slashdot, unfortunately. I came here to escape from Slashdot's obvious liberal-biased bubble, but the infestation has happened here too. No doubt this post will be downvoted into oblivion as well, including the other replie(s) I've made on this topic. :(
No - it isn’t strange. This is Hacker News. We are here to talk about the technical aspects of the alleged search manipulation, not your political beliefs. It’s well known that political opinion isn’t on the table for discussion here. If you want that kind of discourse, check out the politics subreddit, where you will find oodles of children spouting their uninformed political opinions.
There have been plenty of non-flagged stories on both UK and US politics where they deviate from the regular, with discussions that haven't descended into flame war and a sea of greyed posts. Not specifically relating to tech, but are exceptional in some way. e.g. Brexit and the various constitutional shenanigans, some surprise USSC or agency ruling etc.
Reasonable discourse has resulted with good points on both sides - along with a minority of both sides playing it like reddit - black/white voting, and absurd easily disproved comments.
The "day-to-day" and regular politics can stay in the reddit cesspit.
As you go down the age scale, and up the education scale, you get higher support for Remain. Freedom of movement is probably much more important to entrepreneurs too -- if you support Brexit you're probably in a small minority on HN. Would make an interesting poll.
I could say that as a consumer I used my skill and cunning to buy something for 20% discount compared to everyone else, if I quote the price before VAT, but the fact is that I would have paid the same price as everyone else once VAT was applied. The whole idea of saying "we send £350m to the EU" was based on the same mental gymnastics.
EU Structural and Investment Fund allocated £8.4bn for UK
for 2014-2020, £1000pp in Cornwall & West Wales alone.
Similar funds for 2007-2013 are estimated to have created 70k jobs in the north of England, and 80k in Scotland & Wales. [1]
I wish I had your casual nonchalance about how these regions will be affected post-Brexit.
1) The claim was rubbish, that amount doesn't leave the treasury
2) The EU does fund NHS projects
However it was a powerful message that kept on being repeated by the incredulous remain side, doing the propaganda work for Leave, it's an interesting "hack" in many ways. 90% of people pay no attention to politics, when all they see is a single policy "vote X and get more money for NHS", that's all they'll remember.
It doesn't matter that it's a lie, repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth. When your enemy is repeating your lie for you, you win.
Because it makes you look like a fool. Doesn’t mean it won’t work though. Bojo apparently targetting the segment for whom this kind thing goes over their heads
Then I'd argue that we are the greater fools for letting this happen without any consequences. Personally I think this is a genius move by Bojo and something that should be applauded by hackers (this is Hacker News after all). It literally hacks the system, and I think it's beautiful.
It's genius in the same way as crawling over websites looking for a 90s relic to inject "DROP TABLE IF EXISTS x;". Personally I don't deem anything genius simply on the merit that "it works".
>Then I'd argue that we are the greater fools for letting this happen without any consequences.
Letting what exactly happen? Him using a phrase that might or might not have been intended to make a previous story fall in search results?
As if the original story about the model could not still be in the front pages of newspapers and websites, and so on?
That's not even half an accusation...
The public voted for something specific and 3 years down the road it has not happened or been scheduled properly. That should be the bigger democratic scandal (in the real sense of the people's will being followed) than "the PM used a SEO phrase..."....
"The public voted for something specific and 3 years down the road it has not happened or been scheduled properly. That should be the bigger democratic scandal"
The public did not vote for something specific - they voted for something very vague and ill defined, the little information they were provided was incorrect (e.g. "an extra £350m a week for the NHS"), nobody had anything even approaching a plan, the whole thing was a shambolic amateur affair, and that's one of the reasons it has taken so long and cost so much to get nowhere. The only vaguely professional part was the manipulation of the small majority via social media (Cambridge Analytica etc.) That is the bigger democratic scandal - the fact that we can no longer have nice things like democracy thanks to the abuse of technology by arrogant thugs from expensive schools, which is the original point of the parent.
> they voted for something very vague and ill defined
Utter tosh. The consequences of a Leave vote were hammered out by Remain-supporting politicians for weeks and weeks before the referendum. The government spent 9 million GBP to publish a leaflet in support of Remain which went to every household in the UK, before the referendum.
Claiming that no one knew what a Leave vote meant, is gaslighting in the extreme.
"The consequences of a Leave vote were hammered out by Remain-supporting politicians for weeks and weeks before the referendum. The government spent 9 million GBP to publish a leaflet in support of Remain which went to every household in the UK, before the referendum. Claiming that no one knew what a Leave vote meant, is gaslighting in the extreme."
You've talked about the Remain side, not the Leave side. The "no change" side doesn't need to provide a plan for how they would execute "no change" - it is the "everything changes" side that needs to define how they would change everything. My point was that the Leave side had nothing, just some vague largely unwritten appeals to emotion. Contrast with, e.g. the Scottish Referendum, when the "Yes" ("everything changes") side had a several hundred page document detailing all the steps that would be taken should they have won. You might agree or disagree with one side or the other, but having a plan gives people more opportunity to make an informed decision, and give people a reasonable degree of confidence that it could be executed relatively smoothly by people who knew roughly what they were doing, rather than have a process dragging on for years and years costing tens of billions with the people responsible still as clueless as they were at the start. If you fail to plan then plan to fail.
So what you are telling us is that the leave side knew what they were voting for because they saw through the lies from the leave side which said that everything the remain side was saying was "project fear". Do you honestly think you can claim that is democracy working as intended?
The common wisdom wrt democracy, for centuries, was that this was basically exactly how it would work, if actually implemented. These aren't unforeseen problems.
1) One side of a political decision is considered "lies".
2) The people vote, but don't get what they voted for.
3) Only one side's arguments count as "min-information".
4) The people who voted a certain way are sneered at.
5) The situation is presented as remaining is a There Is No Alternative situation.
Apparently the modern elites, and the 10%-20% richer substrates at the population are allergic to democracy and those "deplorable" 80% of their fellow citizens, and don't want anything to disrupt business as usual. And if things go well for the 10%-20%, obviously the rest have absolutely no basis to complain, they are just ignorant/vote against their interests (because the 10-20% know better than them)/etc...
When a "democracy" gets in that stage, and the higher ups loose all touch, you get people like Trump and Johnson. But that's only because you deserve them...
> Apparently the modern elites, and the 10%-20% richer substrates at the population are allergic to democracy and those "deplorable" 80% of their fellow citizens, and don't want anything to disrupt business as usual. And if things go well for the 10%-20%, obviously the rest have absolutely no basis to complain, they are just ignorant/vote against their interests (because the 10-20% know better than them)/etc..
Only 10-20% of voters wanted to Remain? A direct vote on a complicated open-ended question is a horrible way to sample the intentions of the populace.
No one makes decisions like this in their personal life. No one decides that they want to buy a car and then finding out that the only cars available are a millions of dollars decides that they have to pay that price. We make decisions that are bound by a bunch of implicit constraints and tradeoffs.
It would have been much better to vote to have a study for how to exit. And then a follow-up vote on which OPTION to take for an exit.
I'm sure the vote would have been different if it was for "Hard exit even if it means the break up of the UK" instead of a negotiated exit to protect our sovereignty. There are implications in the question.
Both replies have (assuming good faith) misinterpreted what you’ve said, so to flesh out: Vote Leave said that the remain campaign’s claims about the consequences of a vote to leave the EU (and, indeed, its implementation) were “Project Fear”: a campaign of at best exaggerations if not outright lies to scare people into voting for remain.
Having won, the leading members of the leave campaign (who now run the UK Government) now say that people knew what they were voting for because the remain campaign said what the consequences would be. That’s having your cake and eating it.
Whoever told Cameron to put the referendum in the manifesto (I've a pet theory that the "fucking a pig's head" revelation was a shot across the bows for this one) certainly had a plan, and 2 PMs down the line they're still pushing for it.
>The public did not vote for something specific - they voted for something very vague and ill defined, the little information they were provided was incorrect (e.g. "an extra £350m a week for the NHS")
Well, you never have full information, even if you're the PM and passing a new law.
As for the "an extra £350m a week for the NHS", I'm pretty sure all the sides had their misinformation at the ready, there was so much scaremongering and hyperbole from the remain side as if the world was going to end if exit was voted.
The "dire consequences" of an exit were repeated constantly by established media, politicians, celebrities, EU figureheads, and the public still voted in favor of exit, period...
Given the available information, the public voted what it did. It didn't see the outcome of that vote yet though, and everybody has been stalling it.
Possibly, but it's also a timeliness thing. This stuff has a window of opportunity: for like a week after the interview, it'll successfully game the results, but after that they may be crowded out by the reporting on the gaming itself.
If he's trying to spike negative results for just a certain period of time, it's quite an effective tactic. News cycles quickly, so even if each instance is eventually caught, it may successfully push down recent news / current events until they're no longer current, which may result in millions of people missing the reporting.
I've just realised that another example of this was his momentary diversion on building a bridge between Northern Ireland and Scotland. This reeks of an attempt to divert attention from his failed garden bridge project as London Major. Googling "boris johnson bridge" is filled with articles about he former for me at least.
The thing is, it doesn't have to be completely successful for it to be worth his while doing. It probably serves multiple purposes, like changing the current news cycle.
This is insane. He's been a politician for many years. What could he possibly say that doesn't have any nouns in common with some other issue? Busses, models, bridges, what else is Johnson now banned from life for mentioning?
I'm not a big believer in conspiracy theories and I'm the first to admit that this could be entirely coincidental.
However, my gut feeling is that that some of these statements were so unusually phrased or just plain strange that I'm leaning more towards this being a deliberate effort to obscure some unfavourable stories.
I'm shocked that this works on a technical level, simply because a lot of words we use are ambiguous, so Google's algorithms are impressively good at picking up what we're really searching for.
I'm constantly amazed to see the correct search results, and almost never have to add clarifying terms, even when I have to admit that I am being quite ambiguous.
So I never would have expected this to be possible, let alone exploitable.
The funnier thing to me is the people in the thread talking about how DuckDuckGo finds the "right" results.
DuckDuckGo is just Yahoo. I think the results are something like 99.9% the same, so whatever is the 0.1% they add, when I did the search, it results in maybe a slight difference in link ordering.
The reason it finds the "right" results is also the same reason its results are such garbage. And this is coming from someone whose default search is DuckDuckGo.
Whenever people complain about DDG's search results I am always a bit baffled. It works 95% of the time for me and that 5% is occurs when I am searching for the answer to some obscure bug. I know this is your word against mine but "garbage" is a bit of an exaggeration.
Not really (at least, not via DDG). Just like Google, it now frequently ignores or changes key words unless you quote them, and sometimes seems to ignore quoted words, as Google seems to. Both search engines have become quite frustrating (I primarily use DDG, and falling back on Google is hit and miss).
Boris has always been an expert at saying one thing to the people in the room but something else to people reading about his speech afterwards. Now he’s taking it to the next level. Kudos!
I think I've heard about this tactic before, where it was used to help victims of revenge porn. It was used to push unwanted search results for their names away from the top in Google.
Well there was a story on french president Macron who was apparently thinking of renaming the ENA (one if not the most prestigeous uni in France) to "Institut Superieur des Fonctionaires", ISF in short (http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/le-scan/l-ena-remplacee-par... sorry it's in French).
But ISF is also the short name of the tax on the richest, which he has gotten rid of amid a lot of controversy.
They didn't end up renaming ENA to ISF, but that would have been a great way to play the SEO game so that searching for "Macron ISF" may have in the future returned results on the school rather than the tax.
Describing the ENA as a university is misleading [0]: its does no research and does grant degrees [1]. All "students" are civil servant in training that have been hired through the civil service examinations and will go on to their jobs. They spend more than half of their "studies" working already to learn on the job. It's like saying Parris Island is a university.
[0] In my opinion, this characterization as university stenghtens (a bit) its critics. After all, how come one small university has an almost monopoly on high ranking civil servants and then on top politicians? It should not be the case. But if you see it as a civil servant training program it is obvious how it comes to be - it's like wondering why so many US Army officers come form West Point - well, that's because West Point is there to produce US Army officers.
[1] Well it does in partnership with universities, but not for its main civil servant training program
There is no rule that says you can only reply to the primary point of a comment. Personally I found the clarification interesting, and learned something from it. Why do you think that detracts from the point about the potential motivation behind the rebranding? It's possible to learn more than one thing...
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
In other words, if someone posts a story about the new iPhone, don't comment "Did you hear the rumor that Tim Cook likes killing puppies?"
While fascinating, if this is a deliberate strategy, I wonder what its intended effect is supposed to be. Are people curious enough to google for stories about Johnson's alleged affair with the American woman going to be satisfied with the "model of restraint" quote? Are they going to forget what they have just been searching for, get immediately distracted and go read what this model of restraint business is all about? Do we have any inkling as to whether this works at all?
No, but it makes the alleged affair look a lot less important. If a news story is not even on the first page of google results, is it even that big of a deal ?
Actually the alleged affair, is not the important bit. The important bit is him appearing to mis-use public funds for a friend ( whether that friend was with benefits or not ).
That's totally fair if the user doesn't know what they are searching for (e.g. if the only search criterion is Boris Johnson); but if they already know that there is a body; if they have already heard about the model (or the bus), how likely are they to be put off the scent by irrelevant search results?
If you are already convinced that something is going on, then this will not throw you off, no.
But if you are indifferent to the matter, then you will most likely quickly give up, thinking that it can't be that important if it's not in the top search results.
One one hand some might think that there's no "model case" if top 3 results don't mention anything on the subject. On the other hand, Android and Chrome mobile keeps suggesting articles based on my interest. If I follow brexit then this might pop up more so it could be used for subconscious manipulation even if I don't click just read the headline.
Indeed. The "lovable bumbling fool" image he puts across is a very conscious choice on his part. Despite what you think about his politics (and I'm personally not a fan) you can't deny that Johnson is much smarter than he wants us to think.
> you can't deny that Johnson is much smarter than he wants us to think.
In playing the political game at least, definitely so. Lots of reports from coworkers (especially from the Foreign Office) that he is genuinely as clueless as he comes across when it comes to other elements of his job.
The news story that really made me believe that the bumbling fool shtick is real and not just an act was when he went to a buddhist temple in Myanmar and started reciting a colonial-era Kipling poem about a British soldier reminiscing about a Burmese girl that he kissed - until the ambassador intervened and told him it wasn't appropriate.
If he understood the context of the poem (a lack of sensitivity to the three wars the British fought to suppress Burmese independence) then he would've never recited the poem. But he is a 'well-trained idiot' - he's had an English classical education, so he knows Kipling, but he doesn't understand what it actually _means_ ('oh yeah, I totally was going to shag a girl when we were fighting in Burma') or how it would come across to someone who wasn't also from a classically trained English background.
So I think he is a clueless bumbling idiot. He, and Jacobs Rees-Moggs, are the British equivalent of a Texan politician who wears a cowboy hat and talks about their guns all the time.
For centuries a posh accent and certainty was enough for the class that ruled the UK.
One thing Brexit has successfully done is illustrate to all sides just how mediocre our leadership actually is.
Mediocre leaders are fine when the ship is sailing in calm waters to a known destination.
At the moment it feels like half of them want to steer into the iceberg and the other half want to abandon ship, with a few lone voices pointing out we could have just turned to port and swerved it.
It'll take an existential threat (war?) to sort the wheat from the chaff. Typically the best and brightest of a country trickle to the top when duty finally calls.
Though, there are opportunists. Like Mao. Or Hitler.
> If he understood the context of the poem (a lack of sensitivity to the three wars the British fought to suppress Burmese independence) then he would've never recited the poem.
That's exactly why he did it. He's a nasty, vindictive, racist colonialist.
I'm not saying he's not racist/colonialist. You only have to read his article about 'flag-waving piccaninnies... tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief...' https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3571742/If.... Or his argument that Obama hated the UK because he was Kenyan and had an 'ancestral dislike of the British empire'. Or any of the other dozens examples.
I'm just saying that if he's as smart as people claim, if the whole bumbling idiot is a calculated act, then there's not much to benefit from idiotically reciting that poem, it's not like there's some vast constituency in the British public who love The Road to Mandalay. It's an obscure reference, most British people have never heard of the poem... He seemed genuinely surprised that he shouldn't recite the poem.
I think the bumbling idiot thing is genuine. That doesn't also exclude him from being a nasty vindictive racist colonialist.
Isn't it much the same thing as Trump saying something racist that he can kind of get away with?
Johnson can say it, incite some anger in people who won't vote for him anyway, get his name on the news again and appeal to his base. Many of his supporters are the kinds of people that want to "Make Britain Great Again".
There isn't a vast constituency in Britain who love the poem, but there is a vast constituency who are mildly racist and look back to the "good old days".
Yes, Churchill said plenty of stuff that was racist/misogamist even back in those days. Bojo models himself after him. Btw I'm a big Churchill fan in spite of all that. The flawed hero.
I have a weird sort of in on this, in that my grandparents are exactly the kind of people who love The Road to Mandalay. I think the clever thing about reciting a poem like that is it appeals to a broad spectrum of conservative voters: the low-end, who will enjoy the thumb in the eye of 'political correctness', the mid-level, who feel like the british empire was good, then the 'intellectuals' (like my grandparents), who are very fond of poetry and Kipling, and like to think of themselves as more intelligent and refined than their proletariat opposition.
The nice thing about it, is it's a spectrum. If you're in the conservative-intellectual bracket, you still probably enjoy the provocation of the politically correct, and the imperial nostalgia stuff. If you're in the conservative-middle-brow bracket, you still feel good about the fact that your racism is being associated with Great British poetry.
I don't think he's a genius, or that he's playing fifth-dimensional chess, or something. I think it's just an advantage of this whole bumbling persona - that he can go to events like this and basically do what he wants. So when he thinks up some kind of stunt - like reciting a colonialist poem, or getting stuck on a rope, or whatever - he can go ahead with it, because it fits with his image. That gives him a whole range of communicative strategies most politicians don't have. What he actually communicates (the blend of dogwhistle racism and attention-seeking) is actually pretty normal.
But offending the locals doesn't matter to him. He's playing to the British right-wing audience, who then get to complain about "political correctness".
> British equivalent of a Texan politician who wears a cowboy hat and talks about their guns all the time.
Precisely. The Boris Johnson who is acting off the cuff - reciting the myanmar poem or acting like a moron in portugal - is the real Boris Johnson. The Boris Johnson who uses "SEO tactics" has been programmed by advisors.
"You can't rule out the possibility that beneath the elaborately-constructed veneer of a blithering idiot there lurks a blithering idiot" - Boris Johnson
He got a scholarship to Eton and then one to Oxford. They don’t give those out with the papers, even to rich kids. We can say he is very bright without any qualification.
We can say he leveraged his privilege well, and I think that's different than offering someone blanket praise of being "bright".
And again, I'm not necessarily making judgement on his academic credentials - I made the point about his jobs. Of which a classical education is evidently rather worthless. With the exception of being a player of politics and narratives.
Being a gifted student as a kid doesn't necessarily translate into being an intelligent or wise adult. If you don't cultivate it properly then it either goes to waste or gets spent on stupid or petty nonsense, like the attention whoring Boris Johnson seems addicted to.
I'm not even getting into Brexit, if you look at the comments made by senior diplomats when he worked at the Foreign Office (along with the very obvious gaffs including getting a British woman an extended sentence in Iran...) which has a reasonably clear remit.
His front-bench roles even before becoming PM, and his previous roles, where he was fired from being a journalist for lying, for example, show he's just bad at anything other than playing the political game. And even then, you look at the advisers he has around him in order to be adept at even that.
Yes, he does terribly when he doesn't get to define his own job responsibilities. At those, he frequently needed to fall back on his blueblood heritage.
Where he is now, his job (as he or his backers define it) appears to be to distract the voting public from unpleasant facts. He has proven very, very good at changing the public subject.
He has the complicity of the UK news media, much as W had in the US. The long-term takeover of the media by a tiny handful of right-wing extremists is proceeding smoothly worldwide, with concomittent benefits for their chosen spokesmouths.
When a coworker chooses to negatively gossip to the media about somebody, and the media finds it click-worthy, do you think this is going to be a characteristic and unsampled bias of that person or other's perception of them?
True, if that were a one-off occurrence done under the guise of an anonymous or worthless tip-off from someone with an axe to grind.
When it's dozens of former colleagues, all calling someone out on their BS over the course of years, regarding unrelated incidents, and where a number of those incidents actually occurred in the public eye?
This means he's also meta-smart. He focuses his limited mental energy on the things that lead to success in the areas he wants (he's been elected PM, that's the peak of success by any measure). The fact that he has gotten away with being "dumb" on some details is a fault of the system.
Same goes for the USA POTUS. At some point you have to say "don't hate the player, hate the game."
Hopefully anyone that completed a degree in that focused on Ancient Greece/Classics could muster a reasonable performance in a debate like this, even if they couldn't manage a first ;)
If anything his public speaking is above average, and the inflated ego and confidence that goes with attending Eton certainly helps with that.
Nothing here shows any great intelligence, maybe marginally more than he likes to let on though.
Maybe, but he's always been lazy and unwilling to do much actual work, apparently [1] his headmaster wrote
to his father in 1982:
Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies...
Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of
responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the School
for next half): I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard
him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.
No one gets to be a Telegraph columnist without doing a ton of work, never mind Prime Minster of the UK. Being unwilling to do work purely on other people’s say so is a separate trait from being lazy. He also has a much better command of Ancient Greek than anyone unwilling to apply themselves could acquire however wonderful the teachers the were exposed to.
This is quite apart from the question of whether he’s a buffoon. If anyone but Corbyn was in charge of Labour the Conservatives would be cruising to a large electoral defeat soon but we don’t live in that world.
> No one gets to be a Telegraph columnist without doing a ton of work
I can't speak for the 90s but watching the Daily Telegraph in the last years my impression is that the chief qualifications of their journalists and especially their columnists seems to be how much they mirror the weird political stances of the Barclay brothers, the owners of the DT.
No, but some people get to be Telegraph columnists and into positions of power without having to do as much work and face as much scrutiny as others because of their skin colour, their familial wealth and connections, and because they went an elite school.
They help less than you'd think. In reality the parents of the boys and girls on the inside of the existing networks steer them into in group friendships.
(They help more than nothing but less than you'd hope as a parent - even money can't buy your children entry to the upper classes.)
A Telegraph deputy editor was on the BBC news channel a few days ago reviewing the newspaper headlines, she could barely string sentences together but her accent suggested that she had been to a very good school.
I think that depends on how you define work/graft.
He has great energy and clearly finds writing and speaking easy, especially if he not constrained by effort required to check the facts ( opinion based columns ).
I suspect he is also very competitive under the bonhomie.
> ancient greek
He didn't get a first at Oxford, while Cameron did - he recently called Cameron a 'girly swot'. Suggests he didn't work as hard as he could have and still hasn't quite got over it.
I suspect for the stuff he doesn't want to do, or doesn't find comes naturally, the real hard graft, he isn't so great.
He has often had multiple jobs, as well as multiple private lives - so great energy, but that's not the same as being able to really graft.
So I'd agree he is not lazy, by any means.
However, would you trust him with a really important task, a task that needed someones undivided attention to succeed?
Like Brexit or being Primer Minister? - I'm not sure he will do the job to his best ability - never quite the focus to be first class.
If his aim is to come across as a lovable bumbling fool then he's failing, he comes across as a malicious pompous ass who will happily wreck his country for minimal personal gain.
Boris Johnson is a man of average intelligence pretending that he is an idiot, so in case when something goes wrong and he really looks like an idiot, people wouldn't be able to blame him, since obviously, from the start, he was an idiot!
Perhaps not, but I don’t think that’s going to help people who, say, live along the Irish border or who will be impacted by drug shortages. This isn’t just some kind of game.
If the problems of the working class are “hypothetical” (as they are to the elite ruling class basically everywhere) then it literally is a game. They see things like this as edge cases to be sort of muddled through later, because they’ve never known anyone who uses the public health system.
If Google's first iteration of their search engine had the algorithm it currently has, it wouldn't have become the behemoth that it is today. Today's Google freaking sucks... Dropping keywords to make your search super general, irrelevant results. Early Google wowed, today's Google makes me facepalm...
The key to choosing smart people for positions of power is that they are predictable, much like car traffic needs to be predictable to be safe. Smart people are consistent and act in a controlled manner when given information to process. However, when someone who should be predictable begins to hide information they become unaccountable and unfit for positions of power.
Wow, that's damn impressive. It makes me consider to start following politics, I wonder what other fantastic moves this guy (or somebody else) routinely uses that I never heard of.
Even after countless updates to their algorithms, breakthrough AI and ML, breaking hundred of thousands of legit website each time, Google is still dumb enough to be tricked by such a simplistic tactics :-(
Or is Google biased toward "official" speech (even from a really-not-trustable source) like Twitter is when it will allow BS from a President (because it's an official account so not subject to moderation) or like FB is when deciding to NOT fact-check President obvious fake-news for the same reason ?
Maybe it's time to clearly distinguish 2 activities: search on one side, that has to be exhaustive, fact-checked, ranked by differences/complementarity (no use to show 10 times the same result, better to show 10 really different result with indication of common consensus) - and news of the day, where truth is much more "volatile" ?
I mean the query "Boris Johnson model" is genuinely ambiguous, it's a property of language rather than Google. There are a lot of queries out there that are truly ambiguous.
Can't reproduce the "wrong" result locally, but I bet the results for the "woman model" interpretation are just below the results for the "model of restraint" interpretation.
The question is whether Google is supposed to be a neutral media or a biased one.
But besides that - most of the time I myself would prefer if Google served more diverse than more popular results.
E.g. seeing several most popular results for a term from every month this year will have way more information than 20 different content copies for the same event popular right now
> breaking hundred of thousands of legit website each time, Google is still dumb enough to be tricked by such a simplistic tactics
Google wasn't tricked, it's intentional. Their business model is generating money from clicks. It's not showing you best results for what you search for. It's showing latest news, tragedy, and what people talk about. 10h old news? OLD, BORING. New shiny 2h young news? YEA, more clicks, clicks and more click, more ads, more clicks, more revenue. The sponsored content online must be constantly changing and adapting to new information to generate more profits and more clicks and keep people clicking and visiting and searching. Don't forget that it's not only sponsored content, but also targeted content with user tracking, because clicks count, on one day they will show you news to annoy you to generate more searches and clicks, on another day they will show you majority of stuff to calm you down. Keep clicking.
Good point that there can be misaligned incentives between searcher and search engine.
Is it really the case here though?
Most people would be running this search because they heard about the story elsewhere, so they will consider the search engine less useful when they see a completely different (non-)story.
If it was a bizarre tale about a prime minister making bus models, maybe, but "Politician praises himself, more news at 11" in place of a story hours earlier doesn't appear to help Google.
I'm not necessary criticizing, but it's a bit sad that most popular search engine turned to be manipulation and persuasion machine. I no longer thing about it as search engine, more like "what's trendy network", BUT I recognize that Google Search belongs to google and google is a business, and business does what's most profitable! That's good for them, not necessary for us, I personally almost never use google search, but I use android with google account, just because duck duck go is better search engine and google android is really comfortable.
This comes from Google News, which has been a very poor product for a long time. It groups together unrelated articles but still has repetitions, chooses articles with completely uninformative titles, choose articles about a video without the video or a link to it, often shows derivative articles missing important context.
Google cannot figure out which news items are more subjectively relevant for every individual. Any system with rules and emerging behaviour will be game-able by simple analysing what goes in and what comes out. There is no solution to this problem.
Was it "tricked" or does it just prioritize recent news articles? If media stop reporting about "model scandal" and start reporting about "model of restraint", and Google assumes you're interested in most recent news stories (seems reasonable to me), then it's doing the correct thing. (Feel free to blame the media instead for dropping an important story, but then I feel the same thing about Epstein scandal...)
Isn't Google supposed to comply with the "right to be forgotten" in the EU? In that case Boris Johnson could have asked to remove the offending articles and, since they are gone, new ones take their place. Just a guess thought, but indeed it's strange that they can be so easily tricked.
This is just silly. The last thing anyone would know about Arcuri is that she was very briefly a model. It would be like searching for info about (UK supreme court president) Lady Hale by Googling “barmaid”.
Try instead searching for “Boris Johnson technology lessons”, or indeed “Boris Johnson thigh”. Has his team SEO’d that yet?
Fair point. Looks like I read the wrong newspapers!
Anyway... BREAKING: this particular ex-model's just had her laptop stolen while she was in the UK... containing 6 years of emails, documents, photos and personal who-knows-what from the time when she was reportedly giving technology lessons to our now Prime Minister.
Arguably it should be the last thing anyone would know about Arcuri - treating everything else a woman in tech has done as irrelevant because she once modelled would normally be a fringe and controversial opinion, to put it lightly - but that's not how the press is framing this story.
As a non-Brit, I'm quite impressed by his ploy. I feel the comparison between him and the POTUS are unfair to him. He's way smarter and more tech savvy than his counterpart across the pond.
Nobody can be sure about this except google itself, because google gives different results for each user or location. I get all the affairs as well, but I don't matter to BJ as I'm not a UK citizen and won't vote.
Just for fun, I connected through a VPN (private internet access) and googled via a fresh firefox private window and the majority of the results are about his relationship with Jennifer Arcuri. A couple of results at the bottom of the page are about his "model of restraint" quote, that's it!
There should be a word for this, perhaps content or SEO masking, its definitely a thing. I first experienced the practice in regard to an unscrupulous company - whose sales techniques involve misrepresentation (I know as I was briefly trained in them, years ago) - called Marcus Evans. They also run business events, so if you were to look their name up in reference to 'scam' or 'fraud', then details of their 'fraud prevention' event would show up first. Luckily, it looks like someone more skilled in SEO has kicked them down the first page of google, deservedly, or perhaps Google's algorithms have improved since.
289 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadBut people suspected [2] then that it might be a similar strategy, to monopolize the results for "boris johnson bus" searches.
I wonder why nobody else is willing to do this? It seems like it works, and it keeps you in the news...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLcCZjDoWTQ
[2] https://gizmodo.com/did-boris-johnson-ramble-about-model-bus...
It’s to boost the signal of nonsense?
So nation states are pretty much at Orwell level?
“Gobbledygook & toot pickles, primrose!” The idiocracy ejaculated! as they launched the nukes.
Anyone know?
They will pick up on any term for which they can easily write an article and run with it to get ad clicks.
I don't think Boris Johnson even has to do anything to make this happen, even though he obviously has something to gain in terms that these articles turn the public attention from these issues.
I mean this can be applied to literally almost anything he does or says. At worst, he might be intentionally adding to his speech terms that are easier to apply this technique to.
It's insane that people are obsesses with calling "conspiracy!" on Johnson for making an easily verifiable true statement about himself.
Well, London certainly is, the rest of the country tends to be mixed between green (arriva) and white/purple (first) these days.
In the days before deregulation, red was indeed the most common colour country-wide, but even then there were abhorrations such as west yorkshire's green and cream - there's another conversation to be had about 1950s and 1960s liveries composed of 'and cream' combinations that probably started with BR (well, the BTC then, which would have been the parent 'company' for most local bus services) 'crimson and cream' carriage livery - known colloquially as 'Blood and Custard'.
The weird part isn't that the bus he describes himself painting is red, or that his campaign bus was red, it's that his hobby is apparently painting buses out of empty wine boxes and it sounds like he's making it up on the spot.
The gaming of keywords, offline and online, to influence SERP's has been done before and continues to do so ─ the optics on the practice of Google-bombing is a matter of frequency illusion. As an example, 'Santorum' clearly demonstrated the value and the power it holds. The eponymous search engine has a role to play by favouring newer content e.g. news media involving politics, entertainment and culture.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_the_neologism_%22...
Edit: user "sincerely" has a better description and links
The UK does send a fortune to the EU, and the EU will not spend it on the NHS.
At best they may use it to resurface a road in the UK in some town no one has ever heard of along with a "eu project" propoganda badge.
But the spirit of the message held water, even if it wasnt technically true during tuesday of the second easter of a red moon.
Put that way, you focus on the price but not the benefits.
From the ruling statement:
“The alleged offence set out in the Application for Summons is that the Claimant “repeatedly made and endorsed false and misleading statements concerning the cost of the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union”. It appears that if the Claimant had said/endorsed a figure of £350m per week gross, or £250m per week net, there would have been no complaint.”
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019ewhc... (search in doc for "350" to find the juicy bits)
What you posted is factually correct. From observation, HN has turned into just another Slashdot, unfortunately. I came here to escape from Slashdot's obvious liberal-biased bubble, but the infestation has happened here too. No doubt this post will be downvoted into oblivion as well, including the other replie(s) I've made on this topic. :(
There have been plenty of non-flagged stories on both UK and US politics where they deviate from the regular, with discussions that haven't descended into flame war and a sea of greyed posts. Not specifically relating to tech, but are exceptional in some way. e.g. Brexit and the various constitutional shenanigans, some surprise USSC or agency ruling etc.
Reasonable discourse has resulted with good points on both sides - along with a minority of both sides playing it like reddit - black/white voting, and absurd easily disproved comments.
The "day-to-day" and regular politics can stay in the reddit cesspit.
I wish I had your casual nonchalance about how these regions will be affected post-Brexit.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/01/mapped-where-in-...
1) The claim was rubbish, that amount doesn't leave the treasury
2) The EU does fund NHS projects
However it was a powerful message that kept on being repeated by the incredulous remain side, doing the propaganda work for Leave, it's an interesting "hack" in many ways. 90% of people pay no attention to politics, when all they see is a single policy "vote X and get more money for NHS", that's all they'll remember.
It doesn't matter that it's a lie, repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth. When your enemy is repeating your lie for you, you win.
Because it makes you look like a fool. Doesn’t mean it won’t work though. Bojo apparently targetting the segment for whom this kind thing goes over their heads
Letting what exactly happen? Him using a phrase that might or might not have been intended to make a previous story fall in search results?
As if the original story about the model could not still be in the front pages of newspapers and websites, and so on?
That's not even half an accusation...
The public voted for something specific and 3 years down the road it has not happened or been scheduled properly. That should be the bigger democratic scandal (in the real sense of the people's will being followed) than "the PM used a SEO phrase..."....
The public did not vote for something specific - they voted for something very vague and ill defined, the little information they were provided was incorrect (e.g. "an extra £350m a week for the NHS"), nobody had anything even approaching a plan, the whole thing was a shambolic amateur affair, and that's one of the reasons it has taken so long and cost so much to get nowhere. The only vaguely professional part was the manipulation of the small majority via social media (Cambridge Analytica etc.) That is the bigger democratic scandal - the fact that we can no longer have nice things like democracy thanks to the abuse of technology by arrogant thugs from expensive schools, which is the original point of the parent.
Utter tosh. The consequences of a Leave vote were hammered out by Remain-supporting politicians for weeks and weeks before the referendum. The government spent 9 million GBP to publish a leaflet in support of Remain which went to every household in the UK, before the referendum.
Claiming that no one knew what a Leave vote meant, is gaslighting in the extreme.
You've talked about the Remain side, not the Leave side. The "no change" side doesn't need to provide a plan for how they would execute "no change" - it is the "everything changes" side that needs to define how they would change everything. My point was that the Leave side had nothing, just some vague largely unwritten appeals to emotion. Contrast with, e.g. the Scottish Referendum, when the "Yes" ("everything changes") side had a several hundred page document detailing all the steps that would be taken should they have won. You might agree or disagree with one side or the other, but having a plan gives people more opportunity to make an informed decision, and give people a reasonable degree of confidence that it could be executed relatively smoothly by people who knew roughly what they were doing, rather than have a process dragging on for years and years costing tens of billions with the people responsible still as clueless as they were at the start. If you fail to plan then plan to fail.
1) One side of a political decision is considered "lies".
2) The people vote, but don't get what they voted for.
3) Only one side's arguments count as "min-information".
4) The people who voted a certain way are sneered at.
5) The situation is presented as remaining is a There Is No Alternative situation.
Apparently the modern elites, and the 10%-20% richer substrates at the population are allergic to democracy and those "deplorable" 80% of their fellow citizens, and don't want anything to disrupt business as usual. And if things go well for the 10%-20%, obviously the rest have absolutely no basis to complain, they are just ignorant/vote against their interests (because the 10-20% know better than them)/etc...
When a "democracy" gets in that stage, and the higher ups loose all touch, you get people like Trump and Johnson. But that's only because you deserve them...
Only 10-20% of voters wanted to Remain? A direct vote on a complicated open-ended question is a horrible way to sample the intentions of the populace.
No one makes decisions like this in their personal life. No one decides that they want to buy a car and then finding out that the only cars available are a millions of dollars decides that they have to pay that price. We make decisions that are bound by a bunch of implicit constraints and tradeoffs.
It would have been much better to vote to have a study for how to exit. And then a follow-up vote on which OPTION to take for an exit.
I'm sure the vote would have been different if it was for "Hard exit even if it means the break up of the UK" instead of a negotiated exit to protect our sovereignty. There are implications in the question.
Having won, the leading members of the leave campaign (who now run the UK Government) now say that people knew what they were voting for because the remain campaign said what the consequences would be. That’s having your cake and eating it.
Whoever told Cameron to put the referendum in the manifesto (I've a pet theory that the "fucking a pig's head" revelation was a shot across the bows for this one) certainly had a plan, and 2 PMs down the line they're still pushing for it.
Well, you never have full information, even if you're the PM and passing a new law.
As for the "an extra £350m a week for the NHS", I'm pretty sure all the sides had their misinformation at the ready, there was so much scaremongering and hyperbole from the remain side as if the world was going to end if exit was voted.
The "dire consequences" of an exit were repeated constantly by established media, politicians, celebrities, EU figureheads, and the public still voted in favor of exit, period...
Given the available information, the public voted what it did. It didn't see the outcome of that vote yet though, and everybody has been stalling it.
The referendum was very explicitly non-binding. 'The outcome of that vote' was achieved simply by publishing the results.
- The failure of a busmaker
- The brexit bus advert
- The suspicion that his 'model bus' answer was this ploy.
If he's trying to spike negative results for just a certain period of time, it's quite an effective tactic. News cycles quickly, so even if each instance is eventually caught, it may successfully push down recent news / current events until they're no longer current, which may result in millions of people missing the reporting.
The thing is, it doesn't have to be completely successful for it to be worth his while doing. It probably serves multiple purposes, like changing the current news cycle.
However, my gut feeling is that that some of these statements were so unusually phrased or just plain strange that I'm leaning more towards this being a deliberate effort to obscure some unfavourable stories.
I'm constantly amazed to see the correct search results, and almost never have to add clarifying terms, even when I have to admit that I am being quite ambiguous.
So I never would have expected this to be possible, let alone exploitable.
DuckDuckGo is just Yahoo. I think the results are something like 99.9% the same, so whatever is the 0.1% they add, when I did the search, it results in maybe a slight difference in link ordering.
The reason it finds the "right" results is also the same reason its results are such garbage. And this is coming from someone whose default search is DuckDuckGo.
Whenever people complain about DDG's search results I am always a bit baffled. It works 95% of the time for me and that 5% is occurs when I am searching for the answer to some obscure bug. I know this is your word against mine but "garbage" is a bit of an exaggeration.
I think these are a majority of my searches, hence I had to switch back to google as DDG was almost never finding me any relevant result.
One really annoying thing is that python searches keep surfacing the python2 official docs instead of the python3 ones.
Ddg is my main search engine, but I find I fall back to g! queries more and more often.
I still prefer my Bing results without personalization, so I use DDG.
(Not to mention the right side "Answer box" that throws me off a bit since that result is not on the list of links)
Well there was a story on french president Macron who was apparently thinking of renaming the ENA (one if not the most prestigeous uni in France) to "Institut Superieur des Fonctionaires", ISF in short (http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/le-scan/l-ena-remplacee-par... sorry it's in French).
But ISF is also the short name of the tax on the richest, which he has gotten rid of amid a lot of controversy.
They didn't end up renaming ENA to ISF, but that would have been a great way to play the SEO game so that searching for "Macron ISF" may have in the future returned results on the school rather than the tax.
[0] In my opinion, this characterization as university stenghtens (a bit) its critics. After all, how come one small university has an almost monopoly on high ranking civil servants and then on top politicians? It should not be the case. But if you see it as a civil servant training program it is obvious how it comes to be - it's like wondering why so many US Army officers come form West Point - well, that's because West Point is there to produce US Army officers.
[1] Well it does in partnership with universities, but not for its main civil servant training program
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
In other words, if someone posts a story about the new iPhone, don't comment "Did you hear the rumor that Tim Cook likes killing puppies?"
I always thought that the ENA was similar to the Ecole de Petrole (a prestigious engineering school) but for economics or something like that.
But the official name is: Ecole National Superieure du Petrole et des Moteurs.
US service academies and War Colleges are actually degree-granting institutions, though.
If you remove the vague extra word "model", the alleged affair is still on the first page pof results for "Boris johnson".
Also, if you want news, perhaps you could...read a news site, not just stop at whatever Google suggests as 10 headlines related to a three word query
After all, if the first x results are not what you were looking for, how likely is it that the next x results will provide a match?
But if you are indifferent to the matter, then you will most likely quickly give up, thinking that it can't be that important if it's not in the top search results.
My page 2 might be your page 1, and vice versa, based on how we've been profiled by the search engine, our location, browser, etc etc
In playing the political game at least, definitely so. Lots of reports from coworkers (especially from the Foreign Office) that he is genuinely as clueless as he comes across when it comes to other elements of his job.
If he understood the context of the poem (a lack of sensitivity to the three wars the British fought to suppress Burmese independence) then he would've never recited the poem. But he is a 'well-trained idiot' - he's had an English classical education, so he knows Kipling, but he doesn't understand what it actually _means_ ('oh yeah, I totally was going to shag a girl when we were fighting in Burma') or how it would come across to someone who wasn't also from a classically trained English background.
So I think he is a clueless bumbling idiot. He, and Jacobs Rees-Moggs, are the British equivalent of a Texan politician who wears a cowboy hat and talks about their guns all the time.
The story is available here - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/30/boris-johns...
One thing Brexit has successfully done is illustrate to all sides just how mediocre our leadership actually is.
Mediocre leaders are fine when the ship is sailing in calm waters to a known destination.
At the moment it feels like half of them want to steer into the iceberg and the other half want to abandon ship, with a few lone voices pointing out we could have just turned to port and swerved it.
Though, there are opportunists. Like Mao. Or Hitler.
That's exactly why he did it. He's a nasty, vindictive, racist colonialist.
I'm just saying that if he's as smart as people claim, if the whole bumbling idiot is a calculated act, then there's not much to benefit from idiotically reciting that poem, it's not like there's some vast constituency in the British public who love The Road to Mandalay. It's an obscure reference, most British people have never heard of the poem... He seemed genuinely surprised that he shouldn't recite the poem.
I think the bumbling idiot thing is genuine. That doesn't also exclude him from being a nasty vindictive racist colonialist.
The nice thing about it, is it's a spectrum. If you're in the conservative-intellectual bracket, you still probably enjoy the provocation of the politically correct, and the imperial nostalgia stuff. If you're in the conservative-middle-brow bracket, you still feel good about the fact that your racism is being associated with Great British poetry.
I don't think he's a genius, or that he's playing fifth-dimensional chess, or something. I think it's just an advantage of this whole bumbling persona - that he can go to events like this and basically do what he wants. So when he thinks up some kind of stunt - like reciting a colonialist poem, or getting stuck on a rope, or whatever - he can go ahead with it, because it fits with his image. That gives him a whole range of communicative strategies most politicians don't have. What he actually communicates (the blend of dogwhistle racism and attention-seeking) is actually pretty normal.
> British equivalent of a Texan politician who wears a cowboy hat and talks about their guns all the time.
Exactly. Pander to the prejudices of your voters.
Portugal: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoifaIEvC0Q
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/06/my-boris-story/
And again, I'm not necessarily making judgement on his academic credentials - I made the point about his jobs. Of which a classical education is evidently rather worthless. With the exception of being a player of politics and narratives.
The guy who was editor of the Spectator, and a wildly successful columnist and speaker?
He seems to be doing well at his version. He is just not doing what you (and many others, but not enough) wish he were doing.
His front-bench roles even before becoming PM, and his previous roles, where he was fired from being a journalist for lying, for example, show he's just bad at anything other than playing the political game. And even then, you look at the advisers he has around him in order to be adept at even that.
Where he is now, his job (as he or his backers define it) appears to be to distract the voting public from unpleasant facts. He has proven very, very good at changing the public subject.
He has the complicity of the UK news media, much as W had in the US. The long-term takeover of the media by a tiny handful of right-wing extremists is proceeding smoothly worldwide, with concomittent benefits for their chosen spokesmouths.
When it's dozens of former colleagues, all calling someone out on their BS over the course of years, regarding unrelated incidents, and where a number of those incidents actually occurred in the public eye?
There's data points and a trend line...
Same goes for the USA POTUS. At some point you have to say "don't hate the player, hate the game."
yes, he is much smarter than he looks.
If anything his public speaking is above average, and the inflated ego and confidence that goes with attending Eton certainly helps with that.
Nothing here shows any great intelligence, maybe marginally more than he likes to let on though.
This is quite apart from the question of whether he’s a buffoon. If anyone but Corbyn was in charge of Labour the Conservatives would be cruising to a large electoral defeat soon but we don’t live in that world.
I can't speak for the 90s but watching the Daily Telegraph in the last years my impression is that the chief qualifications of their journalists and especially their columnists seems to be how much they mirror the weird political stances of the Barclay brothers, the owners of the DT.
In reality the elite school doesn't even help.
It all comes down to wealth and connections.
(They help more than nothing but less than you'd hope as a parent - even money can't buy your children entry to the upper classes.)
He has great energy and clearly finds writing and speaking easy, especially if he not constrained by effort required to check the facts ( opinion based columns ).
I suspect he is also very competitive under the bonhomie.
> ancient greek
He didn't get a first at Oxford, while Cameron did - he recently called Cameron a 'girly swot'. Suggests he didn't work as hard as he could have and still hasn't quite got over it.
I suspect for the stuff he doesn't want to do, or doesn't find comes naturally, the real hard graft, he isn't so great.
He has often had multiple jobs, as well as multiple private lives - so great energy, but that's not the same as being able to really graft.
So I'd agree he is not lazy, by any means.
However, would you trust him with a really important task, a task that needed someones undivided attention to succeed?
Like Brexit or being Primer Minister? - I'm not sure he will do the job to his best ability - never quite the focus to be first class.
Observing my social groups, Is answer that it does. People often question something like "how does this buffoon get to be PM".
Boris Johnson, people always ask me the same question, they say, 'Is Boris a very very clever man pretending to be an idiot?' And I always say, 'No.'
Boris has all the power and he can drop dc on a whim and blame him for anything he has done wrong.
Anyway, I hope that Google fixes this kind of SEO.
Now get that image out of your mind. ;)
Even after countless updates to their algorithms, breakthrough AI and ML, breaking hundred of thousands of legit website each time, Google is still dumb enough to be tricked by such a simplistic tactics :-(
Or is Google biased toward "official" speech (even from a really-not-trustable source) like Twitter is when it will allow BS from a President (because it's an official account so not subject to moderation) or like FB is when deciding to NOT fact-check President obvious fake-news for the same reason ?
Maybe it's time to clearly distinguish 2 activities: search on one side, that has to be exhaustive, fact-checked, ranked by differences/complementarity (no use to show 10 times the same result, better to show 10 really different result with indication of common consensus) - and news of the day, where truth is much more "volatile" ?
Can't reproduce the "wrong" result locally, but I bet the results for the "woman model" interpretation are just below the results for the "model of restraint" interpretation.
But besides that - most of the time I myself would prefer if Google served more diverse than more popular results.
E.g. seeing several most popular results for a term from every month this year will have way more information than 20 different content copies for the same event popular right now
Google wasn't tricked, it's intentional. Their business model is generating money from clicks. It's not showing you best results for what you search for. It's showing latest news, tragedy, and what people talk about. 10h old news? OLD, BORING. New shiny 2h young news? YEA, more clicks, clicks and more click, more ads, more clicks, more revenue. The sponsored content online must be constantly changing and adapting to new information to generate more profits and more clicks and keep people clicking and visiting and searching. Don't forget that it's not only sponsored content, but also targeted content with user tracking, because clicks count, on one day they will show you news to annoy you to generate more searches and clicks, on another day they will show you majority of stuff to calm you down. Keep clicking.
Is it really the case here though?
Most people would be running this search because they heard about the story elsewhere, so they will consider the search engine less useful when they see a completely different (non-)story.
If it was a bizarre tale about a prime minister making bus models, maybe, but "Politician praises himself, more news at 11" in place of a story hours earlier doesn't appear to help Google.
Try instead searching for “Boris Johnson technology lessons”, or indeed “Boris Johnson thigh”. Has his team SEO’d that yet?
Sky News: "Boris Johnson: 'No interest to declare' over links with former model Jennifer Arcuri"
The Mirror: "Boris Johnson 'had affair with ex-model Jennifer Arcuri while London mayor'"
The Sun: "Who is Jennifer Arcuri? Model connected to Boris Johnson"
The Independent: "Jennifer Arcuri: Boris Johnson repeatedly refuses to deny affair with ex-model awarded public funds and access"
Anyway... BREAKING: this particular ex-model's just had her laptop stolen while she was in the UK... containing 6 years of emails, documents, photos and personal who-knows-what from the time when she was reportedly giving technology lessons to our now Prime Minister.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7522877/Jennifer-Ar...
If he's clever it's that, like any good manager, he delegates to others.
I admit, it was clever the first time. Now it's just an horrible person getting away with it.