@gerikson It’s all about experiencing the beauty of nature and appreciating the fragility of our planet by driving thousands of miles in air-conditioned gas guzzlers before burning even more fossil fuels and a small rainforest of wood you get there. But it’s okay because you have to take your trash home with you.

@YourNetworkIsHaunted @swlabr As a parent myself I understand that my kids are not in fact my personal property but human beings in their own right who are capable of independent thought. That’s never struck me as being a particularly controversial point of view, but then I look at these creepy fuckers with their identically dressed kids smiling for the camera because they’ll get a beating later if they don’t and that just makes me shudder.

@Starseeder As someone with ADHD the only thing I find harder to cope with than the crazy, in-crowd bureaucracy of Wikipedia is attempting to read that mile-long polemic. Where do they find the time to write this shit?

@swlabr @mii One of the most notorious is the USA PATRIOT Act - Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act. Really.

Its counterpart in UK legislation is the Terrorism Act 2000, which manages to be both more informative and much, much shorter.

@dgerard Carry On Just The Racism

@dgerard He's such an amazing engineering genius he can't even build a racist chatbot?

@dgerard looks like Dr Miller here is completely rationally and altruistically examining the issues despite being one of the go-to “sciencey words” providers of various fundamentalist organisations in the UK.

@Soyweiser He's also oddly reluctant to disclose in his polemic that his ongoing association with Oxford is as a research fellow at the tiny Blackfriars Hall, which is a combination Dominican friary and heavily Catholic college. Not wholly out of the question that the post is funded by, you know, "a group of concerned individuals".

@gerikson “Adraste wishes to send a private message to Beroe, but suspects that Erebus is intercepting their scrolls..”

@gerikson @skillissuer They also completely misunderstand a whole aspect of this (surprise) -- nobody who's won an Olympic gold is going to come out and say "Woohoo, it's the doping games for me!" because top athletes actually care about their reputation and their legacy in a way the likes of Thiel would never be able to parse.

Doping is something to be _ashamed_ of doing, which is why people who get caught doing it fight so hard to get let off. Appear at these games and your career as a legit athlete is over. No Olympics, your sponsors will abandon you, no sporting dreams any more. Your record will be tarnished and anything you won in the past will have a "possibly doping" asterisk next to ot in the records. Nobody will sponsor this, there'll be no lucrative TV rights. It'll just be like a grim track meet at your county stadium.

They might manage some grotesque spectacle where over-the-hill mediocrities will dope themselves up in order to compete because they didn't win anything significant during their actual careers, but it will not be any kind of sporting spectacle.

@andrew_bidlaw For most people who suffer from paedophilia in the ICD-11 sense (which is a mental health disorder) and undergo years of treatment and therapy while living in terror that they might one day give in to their own instincts and do something unspeakable… it’s not surprising they prefer to not give interviews.

@gnomicutterance @dgerard Has the Republican writing style guide been updated to mandate that Weird Capitalisation thing that Cheeto Benito does or something?

@dgerard Thiel and Andreessen. I love the way that as soon as the Hondurans started saying mean things these proud libertarians went crying straight to the US State Department.

@raoul Strong "that kid at primary school who took a few weeks of karate lessons then told you he could easily kill you so he had to be careful not to lose his temper now" vibes.

@Tar_alcaran @V0ldek That's why you need the good guy with a hammer!

@Soyweiser @gerikson Plus the sets of "people who can DJ competently" and "people who are convinced that they should be allowed to DJ in public" do not, unfortunately, overlap completely.

@mawhrin To misuse an old engineering joke, is an LLM a Turbo Confabulator?

@fasterandworse @dgerard sorry, too busy dealing with my brain short-circuiting at the idea that anyone would think any of this was intended to benefit the poors.

@gerikson As someone with curly greying hair this is a great reminder not to go too long between haircuts in case someone mistakes me for this numpty and punches my lights out.

@dgerard Sometimes I feel like a hospital doctor who's worked in the clap clinic for decades and has had a series of name badges starting with "Venereal Disease" and passing through "Special Clinic" on the way to "Sexual Health Clinic". Same thankless job, just different labels.