@TheSimonEvans I assumed that had to be several years old at first. Incredible doubling down.
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Richard Fitzgerald
568 posts
Also the first time I can remember thinking “I ain’t reading all that” half way through an Onion piece. Tragic.
Josh Howie@joshxhowie
There’s actually something quite funny here, if read as a satire on how trans activists view JK Rowling. But the Onion has instead written it for trans activists, and as such it’s utterly deranged, nasty, and terribly unfunny. The Onion is a cautionary tale of the saddest fate in comedy; to be laughed at, when you used to be laughed with.
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@FondOfBeetles People sometimes discover late in life that they were adopted. Therefore none of us have a clue who our parents are.
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Meanwhile In The Real World:
Almost everyone observed as male or female at birth is XY or XX, respectively.
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It absolutely horrifies me that people are so incapable of this kind of incredibly basic creativity and decision making that they need to ask a machine to do it for them, like, my god, are you not ashamed to admit this in public???
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We had a spare room at the back of our place doing absolutely nothing for years I asked Gemini what to do with it and implemented the suggestions. I don’t love everything about the room (open to changes!) but now we use the room every day.
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@Days_Are_Gone Now there's a historic male relationship.
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@CptHastings1916 It’s incredible that this is still going on.
Their position is (for want of a better term) so *woo* for people who regard themselves as the Sensibles.
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Histrionic disdain for JKR is just so odd, she's a down the line left-liberal on every conceivable issue but trans, and in fact she holds what was the conventional liberal position until c2010. The idea she is promoting some kind of hate campaign is neurotic nonsense.
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Great example of this. The "normal mainstream opinion" here is agreement between a Hollywood actor and a writer for the New Yorker.
The actual mainstream opinion on JK Rowling can be imperfectly but reasonably gauged by how many kids wear HP costumes for World Book Day.
Sonny Bunch@SonnyBunch
No phenomenon has ever been more online-only than the idea that people, broadly, are boycotting/tired of Harry Potter/JK Rowling.
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@TheGhostSleepi1 Encourage audiences to engage, they said.
Continue a dialogue with the community, they blathered.
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It honestly looks better with the eyes on it. He looks sad without them. Now he looks like a blue clanger. When you produce a sculpture like this, you can't expect people to take it seriously & treat it with the same reverence as if a Michelangelo's David had been installed.
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Woman who swallowed 3 liters of vodka pleads guilty to sticking googly eyes on $95K blob-like sculpture trib.al/EGZ9qHN
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@MrEwanMorrison Something gloriously dated about "the entire corpus of knowledge… at home!"
It's door-to-door encyclopedia salesman patter, or an ad for Encarta on CD-ROM.
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America is becoming an episode of Black Mirror.
Brian Allen@allenanalysis
🚨 Melania Trump this morning: Proposes an AI system—“Plato”—as a replacement for teachers. “Literature, art, science, mathematics, history… the entire corpus of knowledge… at home.” Replace teachers? With a machine? AI over teachers. That’s the idea. Instead of calling for better pay for our nation's educators/heroes. Sad day!
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@TheSimonEvans I mustn't think about that or I'll forget how to do it.
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@MichaelAArouet @KuittinenPetri The surge of support for Reform (and Restore) provides a clue.
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@KuittinenPetri How do the Brexit supporters feel about that?
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Isn't it ironic that many Brits voted for Brexit because they wanted immigration to go down?
How did this happen?
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@sarahstuartxx There's a shout / heckle as she says that. I think I hear a 'phobic!'
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Killer line for me is: 'If you can't sign it because you're not cis.' Yes, a petition to benefit 'trans women' which only women can sign, to protest women who say 'trans women are men'.
Oh, I can't even-
𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙶. 𝙷𝚊𝚛𝚝 🇮🇱@charles_hart
“We are all stars” - Janet Ellis off Blue Peter with NION Women at Jolyon’s TransAid performance, Wembley Arena last Wednesday night.
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@BDSixsmith Several of those were removed from schools for woke-ish reasons and Fun Home contains images that would be banned on Bluesky.
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Imagine the sheer courage that it takes to locate and read obscure samizdat like 1984 and The Kite Runner.
x.com/marlene4719/st…
Marlene Robertson🇨🇦@marlene4719
I survived reading all these banned books and all I got were critical thinking skills, which made me a lot smarter.
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@Jen3nfer Just knowing it exists is bad enough, let alone interacting with it
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It’s absolutely bad.
Tom Goodwin@tomfgoodwin
It seems a lot like AI is extremely bad for almost everyone’s mental health.
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@boxedsets Like a detail from the Denver airport murals, appropriately
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@moveincircles If it feels ruthlessly optimised to hold my attention I glaze over.
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Every time I look at a post then realise it’s one of those airport novel ones with very short sentences and lots of white space, I now immediately assume it’s written by AI and click straight away again
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@MrMatthewTodd @francesbarber13 It's useless information. Diluting the signal with noise doesn't help anyone. The Shawcross report:
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No it wasn’t. The research wasn’t intended to be made public. It wasn’t saying these books are a sign of extremism, it was noting what comes up a lot in their discussions. You’re framing it like the entire focus was these books when this was just a note within a huge report about extremist behaviour. The security services need to understand as much as they can about these people and not pander to political correctness that puts us in danger.
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I thought this was a hoax. Apparently it’s not. I actually can’t believe what is happening in front of our faces.
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The UK government flagged these books (among others) as potential signs of far-right extremism. List includes Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Hobbes' Leviathan, Milton's Paradise Lost. You may be an extremist if you've read these. What else would you add to the list?
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@MrMatthewTodd @francesbarber13 Those extremist online spaces probably mention BBC News and the Guardian too. To list these books as suspect is selective and a way of smearing them.
It’s not useful data because they would appear far more frequently in apolitical contexts anyway.
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It’s not true, Frances. This is being taken out of context. The report didn’t say these books are extremist or that reading them is a sign of extremism.
They appeared in an internal analysis looking at cultural references sometimes used or discussed in extremist online spaces — often because quotes or themes get taken out of context.
Many completely mainstream works showed up for that reason (e.g., Lord of the Rings, 1984, Brave New World). The point wasn’t that the books themselves are extremist — just that they occasionally appear in discussions within those spaces.
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@TwinkTheory We've been around this wheel before, when women realised the 60s "free love" thing wasn't really working for them.
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I’m like half reading the arc for this book and reading some of the press. She’s a talented writer in a structural sense and clearly intelligent (although very distant from her true emotions and motivations) Mostly what I’m struck by is that in the name of sort of “out libbing them all” these people have recreated some of the most regressive structures that they once railed against- just kinda rebranded them. I fail to see how what happened to her is any different than the “women were supposed to just turn a blind eye to their husbands cheating” days. He treats being “polyamorous” as if it’s a completely immutable part of himself that she must accept. The lib framework is simply weaponized to meet the desires of whoever’s at the helm.
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@_SatanWatch The destruction of art and architecture hurts to think about. He initiated a kind of English Taliban.
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If there's one historical figure I'd like to see time travelers assassinate it's this guy. Narcissistic landwhale created 1000 dispensationalist cults that read the Bible wrong and we're paying the price for it to this day. The long shadow of Anglicanism.
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U.S. commanders across more than 30 military bases told troops the Iran war is part of “God’s plan” and linked it to “Armageddon.” A commander said Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon.” The Military Religious Freedom Foundation
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@Paul_Heron_ Not quite as direct, but you could include Rik in the Young Ones, and the somewhat forgotten Girls On Top:
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Was Citizen Smith the only British sitcom to directly poke fun at leftists?
It was sort of the anti-left version of Till Death Us Do Part. The latter was intended by its creator to be an anti-right satire, but there were plenty of viewers who shared Alf Garnett’s reactionary views and identified with him.
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@CapelLofft Greens getting the benefit right now, but the same thing will happen to them, in time.
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I don't know why anyone is surprised, Labour exploited sectarianism and turned a blind eye to - or actively connived in - all sorts of dodginess for years. It's just that a different party is now getting the benefit. None of this is new.
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