The Angry Exile: Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha...

The Hangman

Into our town the Hangman came,
Smelling of gold and blood and flame.
And he paced our bricks with a diffident air,
And built his frame in the courthouse square.
The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
Only as wide as the door was wide;
A frame as tall, or little more,
Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.
And we wondered, whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal, what the crime
That the Hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.
And innocent though we were, with dread,
We passed those eyes of buckshot lead --
Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he
For whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
And he gave us a riddle instead of reply:
"He who serves me best," said he,
"Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief
And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn
By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.
The next day's sun looked mildly down
On roof and street in our quiet town,
And stark and black in the morning air
Was the gallows-tree in the courthouse square.
And the Hangman stood at his usual stand
With the yellow hemp in his busy hand;
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike
And his air so knowing and business-like.
And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done
Yesterday, with the foreign one?"
Then we fell silent, and stood amazed,
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."
He laughed a laugh as he looked at us:
"Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss
To hang one man? That's a thing I do
To stretch a rope when the rope is new."
Then one cried "Murder!" and one cried "Shame!"
And into our midst the Hangman came
To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he,
"with him that was meant for the gallows-tree?"
And he laid his hand on that one's arm.
And we shrank back in quick alarm!
And we gave him way, and no one spoke
Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.
That night we saw with dread surprise
The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
The gallows-tree had taken root;
Now as wide, or a little more,
Than the steps that led to the courthouse door,
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
The third he took -- we had all heard tell --
Was a usurer, and an infidel.
"What," said the Hangman "have you to do
With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"
And we cried out, "Is this one he
Who has served you well and faithfully?"
The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows-beam."
The fourth man's dark, accusing song
Had scratched our comfort hard and long;
"And what concern," he gave us back.
"Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again,
"Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick," he said. "that we hangmen know
For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."
And so we ceased, and asked no more,
As the Hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night,
The gallows grew to monstrous height.
The wings of the scaffold opened wide
Till they covered the square from side to side;
And the monster cross-beam, looking down,
Cast its shadow across the town.
Then through the town the Hangman came,
Through the empty streets, and called my name --
And I looked at the gallows soaring tall,
And thought, "There is no one left at all
For hanging, and so he calls to me
To help pull down the gallows-tree."
So I went out with right good hope
To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.
He smiled at me as I came down
To the courthouse square through the silent town.
And supple and stretched in his busy hand
Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap,
And it sprang down with a ready snap --
And then with a smile of awful command
He laid his hand upon my hand.
"You tricked me. Hangman!," I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men...
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman. Foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I.
For I answered straight and I told you true --
The scaffold was raised for none but you.
For who has served me more faithfully
Then you with your coward's hope?" said he,
"And where are the others who might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the foreigner, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."
Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
None had stood so alone as I.
The Hangman noosed me, and no voice there
Cried "Stop!" for me in the empty square.

Maurice Ogden

Wednesday 29 June 2011

Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha... - UPDATED

... ahahahahahahahaha!

Johann Hari, a multiple award winning political journalist who writes for newspapers around the world, was exposed after a reader noticed that a quote in one of his stories had been cut and pasted from a book.

Ahahahahahahahahahaha.

Such was the controversy that he was forced to respond in a personal blog, but his defence only further fuelled the intensity of the attacks against him.

Ahahahaha.

On Twitter, the micro-blogging website, users posted a series of jokes in which famous sayings in history were re-created as if Mr Hari had been told them in intimate interviews, while blogs from rival journalists accusing him of so-called "churnalism".
At one point his alleged plagiarism was the second most discussed topic on Twitter and even became the subject of a doctored clip from Downfall, a film about Adolf Hitler's final hours.

Ahahaha? Bwahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Hooooo.

The backlash began when a left wing website analysed an interview Mr Hari conducted with Antonio Negri, an Italian Marxist, in 2004. The blog found that Mr Hari used a quote in the interview which appeared to have been taken from Negri on Negri, a book published a year earlier.
[...]
The blog goes on reveal that a passage from pages 100 and 101 of the book is almost identical.
Brian Whelan, another blogger, subsequently found a further example in a 2010 interview by Mr Hari with the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. He found a passage that appeared to be composed of sentences that had appeared in a column written by Levy the previous March.

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahaohfuckithurtsnow.

[Hari] claimed that he had only used the quotes to make his interviewee appear more articulate, and said he had not received a complaint in a 10 years.
He wrote: "So occasionally, at the point in the interview where the subject has expressed an idea, I’ve quoted the idea as they expressed it in writing, rather than how they expressed it in speech." However the response failed to dampen the backlash against him.

Ahahahahahaha. Ahaha. Aha. Okay, I'll be okay. Heheheh.

Last night the Media Standards Trust, which funds the Orwell prize, demanded an investigation to see whether he should be stripped of the award.
It said that the issue had "the potential to damage its reputation".
The organisers of the award said they were following a "process" normally carried out in "situation such as this".

And so the lesson is quote by all means - and I do it extensively myself - but be honest and open and fucking source it.* This seems to be pretty much par for the course in the blogosphere and I thought it was for the MSM too. Perhaps not so much anymore.

UPDATE - can open, worms everywhere.

He also falsely claimed that none of his subjects had ever complained following the publication of one of his interviews. In fact, Noam Chomsky complained bitterly.

It now appears that Mr Hari has made quite a habit of pinching quotes given to other interviewers, and claiming that they were given to him.

Admittedly I've not read a lot of his stuff and this may be miles off, but I've got the impression that if Hari caught a journo from the Wail or the Teletubbygraph or somewhere else in the non-lefty bit of the media he'd call them on it in a heartbeat.

UPDATE 2 - And he's now been Mashed.

The criticism came after Hari used a revolutionary new interview technique that involved pretending people had said things to him and then imagining what his reaction would have been if they had have said those things to him, which they did not and in fact said to somebody else years ago.

Gold.

* Though I realise I may not be the first person to say that.