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piltdownman
Joined 895 karma
- Beautifully lampooned in "In The Loop" when the US Assistant Secretary of State fobs the UK Director of Communications off with one of his 'top guys'.
MALCOLM I’ve just had a briefing from a 9-year old child... His f*ing briefing notes were written in Alphabetti Spaghetti. When I left I nearly tripped over his umbilical cord.
LINTON I’m sorry if it troubles you that our people achieve excellence at a young age... By the way, your prime minister informs me that he’s tasked you with collating some fresh British intel for us.
MALCOLM Yeah, apparently your f*ing master race of gifted toddlers can’t quit get the job done in between breast feeds and playing with their power rangers.
- The Mandela Effect isn't used to describe coping mechanisms around the faulty recollection of an individual; rather it categorises a systemic and widespread incidence of false collective memories.
There's no satirical or arrogant component inherent in this phenomenon. For example, pick any five people at random in your life and ask them if they remember any of the following iconic lines:
* Snow White "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" * ST:TOS "Beam me up, Scotty" * Star Wars "Luke, I am your Father" * Wizard of Oz "Fly my pretties, fly" * Casablanca "Play it again, Sam."
I've done about 50-100 of these 5x5 samples in casual groups/workshops and have never had a single all-negative response. Problem is, none of the lines above were ever said.
- Yeah you can connect via USB MIDI using an OTG adapter by enabling "USB MIDI Peripheral mode" in Developer Options. There's plenty of videos on how to set it up from the Android MIDI Arranger App community - just N.B. you may need a powered USB hub depending on your use-case.
- "So did Achilles lose his friend in war, and Homer did no injustice to his grief by writing about it in dactylic hexameters" - Tobias Wolff, Old School
- Mutators are about the only thing keeping Starcraft 2 Co-Op players going in 2025 (and by extension, the community).
Earliest memory I have in the multiplayer FPS context was probably the 'cheat' menu unlocks for Goldeneye on the N64 in 1997.
- Nice try.
In December 2024 Amnesty International denounced it as a Genocide, leading to Israel’s foreign ministry defaming the London-based group as a “deplorable and fanatical organisation”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/05/amnesty-intern...
Two prominent Israeli Humanitarian Organisations - B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel - identified it as Genocide in July 2025. Dr Guy Shalev, executive director of PHRI, said: "Silence in the face of genocide is not an option. We want to stress: confronting genocide is not only the responsibility of legal and political institutions. Confronting it demands urgent action from the global health community."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c776xkvz6vno
In September 2025, the world's leading association of genocide scholars, which includes a number of Holocaust experts (IAGS), has declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and that Israel's conduct meets the legal definition as laid out in the UN convention on genocide.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cde3eyzdr63o
In September 2025, the independent international commission of inquiry set up by the UN also concluded that “genocide is occurring in Gaza”. Legal analysis accused Israel of committing genocide in four out of five categories as defined by 1948 convention and cited ‘Direct evidence of genocidal intent’, saying that its offensive there has been waged “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/16/un-commission-...
- When someone tells you who they are - _listen_ to them
- Graham Linehan is an example of nothing other than how to tank your marriage, friendships, and any semblance of a professional career over a misguided moral crusade.
He was a well-known and liked figure in Ireland off the back of Father Ted, Black Books and the IT Crowd. He was a huge blogger and early presence on Twitter, with both him and his wife being public feminists and supporters.
He was also - and this is the important bit - a public advocate and supporter for the pro-choice position in our abortion referendum, which gave him some sense of intellectual and moral security in his heartfelt positions, as well as a huge fanbase.
Unfortunately some of his previous advocacies evolved into TERFs, and he with them. This then became a mono-crusade under the guise of standing up for the women in his life and women in general. Slowly but surely his fanbase, his professional connections, and society at large fell out of step with him.
https://metro.co.uk/2021/02/23/graham-linehan-joins-queer-wo...
As his antics became more extreme and problematic in their optics, his friends, his family, and his Wife begged him year after year to stop sabotaging his own existence before eventually having to leave him.
He's dug down so far at this point that he's being courted by Joe Rogan, which is probably the saddest bit of this entire story.
- It's on the back of Jonathan Hall KC and Government Announcements in the recent past following the Palestine Action proscription - e.g. the UK Government recently saying it would amend sections 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act 1986 to further impose conditions on public protests and assemblies.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-police-powers-to-prot...
The changes to the law would allow police officers to consider the cumulative impact of protest when deciding whether or not they are lawful, meaning they could potentially re-route or totally shut down protest they believe could cause serious disruption to local communities.
The Netpol argument suggests that the upcoming annual review of national security legislation is likely to expand the protest-related clauses of the National Security Act in a similar fashion - providing the groundwork for a legal definition of ‘subversion’ that could prioritise ideology over conduct.
This seems to be mainly based on Hall’s ‘Independent Review of State Threats and Terrorism‘, published in May 2025, and his his recent review of the Sentencing Bill, published in late October 2025.
https://terrorismlegislationreviewer.independent.gov.uk/wp-c...
https://terrorismlegislationreviewer.independent.gov.uk/wp-c...
He has been sabre-rattling in the UK media since May in an effort to drum up support - whilst simutaneously playing up to the far-right agitators by supporting 'anti-woke' figureheads like Graham Linehan and his anti-trans agitation.
""I am thinking about the measures that may one day be needed to save democracy from itself. What do I mean? I am referring to counter-subversion"
https://news.sky.com/story/britain-may-have-to-resort-to-ant...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/21/jonathan-hall-kc...
- I mean the opening statements of the KC for the accused perfectly refutes such nonsensical claims.
As Raza Husain KC told the court - “There are reasons of profound importance as to why, in the 32 executive orders that have been made adding organisations to proscribed lists, no direct action civil disobedience organisation appears...Such proscription is repugnant to the tradition of the common law and contrary to the European convention on human rights.”
“The Defendant has deployed this most repressive of regimes against PA, notwithstanding that, on her own evidence, only four out of hundreds of its actions are even capable of meeting the definition of serious property damage.”
“The decision to proscribe PA is an unprecedented and disproportionate interference with articles 9, 10 and 11 [freedom of thought, expression and protest].
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/26/ban-on-pales...
- The argument - and wholly plausible prediction being made - is that these changes lay the groundwork for a legal definition of ‘subversion’ that could prioritise ideology over conduct, providing the state with a broader arsenal to classify any political dissent as a security risk.
This is ALREADY in play with the proscribing of Palestine Action, and subsequent arrest of protestors on Terrorism charges. They are absolutely spot-on in their conclusion that, "These developments reveal a state increasingly concerned with defending its own legitimacy that is weaponising security itself to shield power from accountability."
The potted history of Shabana Mahmood is a grotesquely cynical exemplar of this relatively new phenomenon.
In 2014, a backbench Labour MP named Shabana Mahmood lay on the floor of her local Sainsbury’s in protest against the sale of products made in illegal Israeli settlements. A week later, she spoke to crowds at a Free Palestine protest in Hyde Park, of the “compassion and humanity expressed for the people of Gaza … from every race and every religion.”
Mahmood is now the UK Home Secretary, and gets to decide if the more than 2,000 people arrested for alleged support of Palestine Action – mostly for holding placards stating: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action” – will face criminal trial.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/26/ban-on-pales...
- In Ireland opposition to the ongoing Genocide in Palestine is a wholly secular and humanitarian concern, divorced entirely from any correlation with race, religion, ethos or creed - despite agitators attempts to label it to the contrary. We are, however, unique in Western Europe in this regard - but it is not a mono-culture and the reasons are very contextual.
While Germany is not an advocate of genocide in any sense, it is a major arms exporter to Israel and has also barely been re-admitted into the human race as a result of their egregious human rights violations and war crimes in the previous century. This over-erring on the side of caution for their previous victims can thus be explained, if not excused.
The UK, however, have distinguished themselves instead by trying to prosecute Irish Rappers for Terrorism, and proscribing Palestine Action a terrorist organisation - putting it alongside Al Qaeda and ISIS, and making support of the group a criminal offense punishable by up to 14 years in prison. It seems that to protect democracy under the current newspeak you have to arrest Placard wielding Pensioners.
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/united-kingdom/uk-arresting-pe...
British police have made over 1,300 arrests using terrorism legislation at Palestine Action protests this summer — five times more than the total number of arrests for terrorism-related activity in the U.K. in all of 2024. From a retired British colonel to a Catholic priest, half of the 532 people arrested in the Parliament Square protest alone were 60 or older.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/aug/16...
Those participating in anything akin to the Coal Miner's Strikes of the 80s under Thatcher would no doubt find themselves charged with 'domestic terrorism' and put on no-fly lists alongside other societally chilling measures. In short, this is to distract from the economic black-hole they find themselves in post-Brexit, with incitement to hatred spurred on by paid agitators like Tommy Robinson who is in turn backed by Elon Musk/Russia, or Nathan Gill the former MEP who was jailed for accepting around £40,000 in bribes from a Russian-linked individual to support pro-Russian politicians.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/world/europe/uk-far-right...
France has its own particularly xenophobic issues - but they are focused on Islamic migration from North Africa as a follow-on from France's appalling history of Colonial abuse in the region. Thus the French far-right, typified historically by their anti-semitism, end up as uneasy bedfellows and proxy Zionists by virtue of Marine Le Pen's stance since kicking her father out of their far-right party over his persistent refutation of the Holocaust.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/world/europe/france-jews-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/06/marine-le-pens...
Our colonial legacy in Ireland, as the oppressed, however, grants us a special insight and advocacy for those in analogous circumstances - be it historically re: refusing to handle goods from Apartheid South Africa, or contemporarily with our Occupied Territories Bill (or whatever watered down version passes American MNC muster).
https://mandate.ie/2024/07/the-day-10-workers-changed-the-wo...
- The preponderance of dark UI/UX patterns in advertising and cookie consent pop-ups, as well as the grey-hat browser fingerprinting and DRM based tracking, unfortunately stand testament to exactly that.
Given that ~98% of Internet users couldn't even articulate what javascript does as part of their browsing experience, the exfiltration and reassembling of their PII via meta-data into sellable profiles for targeted auctions is completely beyond their capacity to comprehend or engage with. Thus consent is de facto ungrantable.
- // Plus when only the man worked looking after a home was a full time job
If we completely ignore the commonplace role of the maid, nanny or domestic helper — women in 1965 spent the same amount of time on child care and only about 10 more hours on housework a week than women in 2011. According to the 1870 census, “52 percent of employed women worked in ‘domestic and personal service.’” From 1870 through the mid-1900s, that percentage only increased.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/decline...
//much less in the way of microwaves and washing machines and whatnot
The CPI accounts for these as 'hedonic quality adjustment'.
It's always convenient to benchmark this against 1970s onwards as it was the first year that data on race and ethnicity was included in the income statistics. However 1970 is also a recession year which bottomed out the market and eventually led to an oil crisis for most of the decade.
Adjust for inflation to 2023 and its inarguable.
New house: $23,450 -> $174,468 Average Income: $9,400 -> $69,936 New car: $3,450 -> $25,668 Minimum Wage: $2.10 -> $15.62
- I'm not sure you understand how large parts of the draft violate European Conventions, the Charter of Fundamental Rights or settled Court of Justice case-law - not to mention that almost all Member States that gave feedback say they want no change. Germany did not provide evidence for the need of said reforms - it is unclear where these demands originate from, making this use of fast-track reform procedures even more sinister.
More to the point, there is two decades of case law supporting a broad and nuanced understanding of what constitutes "personal data". This proposal runs rough-shod over this established precedent in its entirety and is in clear violation of both CJEU case law and Article 8(2) of the Charter as regards the right to informational self-determination.
- The EU Commission is attempting to nullify significant privacy protections regarding GDPR and AI under the guise of the "Digital Omnibus" provision, intended only for minor adjustments. These proposed revisions cut to the very core of the ethos and intent of the GDPR legislation - affording BigTech an arsenal of avoidance in terms of future compliance.
Narrowing "Personal Data" Definition: Companies could argue data isn’t "personal" if they can’t identify individuals, exempting them from GDPR compliance.
Weakening Data Subject Rights: Rights like access, deletion, and correction could be limited to "data protection purposes," blocking their use in labor disputes, journalism, or research.
AI Training Free Pass: Tech giants (Google, Meta, OpenAI) could use Europeans’ personal and sensitive data for AI training with minimal safeguards.
Reduced Protection for Sensitive Data: Health, political, and sexual orientation data would only be protected if "directly revealed," not if deduced.
Remote Device Access: Companies could pull data from users’ devices for vague purposes like "security" or "statistics," risking invasive data collection.
tl;dr Germany is again pushing for macro-level EU reforms that bypass legislative safeguards, violate existing precedent, and disenfranchises EU Citizens in favour of BigTech. The legitimacy of GDPR as a democratic safeguard against Corporate Malfeasance will be effectively nullified in one fell swoop.
- How on earth did we never see some early 90s hacker-culture movie do some Blue-box phreaking using this watch, similar to the (fictional) Atari Portfolio ATM hack in Terminator 2.
- A great dissection of supposed middle brow journalism in contemporary American discourse, particularly the NYT, if only for the scathing summation that "What you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling “appraisal” surgically excised."
Rather, the current state of SaaS in the context of the historic stock market is a severe economic aberration divorced from any sort of valuation fundamentals like securities weighting. Instead we observe predatory VC and PE entities supported by a complimentary taxation and economic regime, all ultimately facilitated by the passing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
In short, this notion of self-sufficiency is unachievable in the European context as it is predicated entirely upon wealth inequality and thumbing the scale of the free-market via lobbying, and is the doctrine denounced to the point of anathema in any Socialist Democracy.
The end result here is not some sort of organically earned digital services dominance - instead you end up with scenarios like forcing the FDIC to bail out the VC bank of Choice - SVB - where uninsured deposits were estimated to represent 89 percent of total deposits at the bank, totalling $18 billion of the ultimate $20 billion cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund.