Soot [none/use name]

I don’t care if management eats babies.

You definitely should care, what a weird thing to say.

I like Firefox and use LibreWolf all the time, but Mozilla should still absolutely get lampooned for their bullshittery.

How fast will your heart be beating when YOUR BLOOD BOILS INSIDE YOU, HUH?!

Boyboy have a very good video on Pine Gap where they talk about this exact issue at the start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHMa-Ba-2Mo

When Gough said they wouldn’t join in the fun overseas wars, the CIA bugged cabinet meetings and did all sorts. After Gough threatened to close Pine Gap, the Australian Governor General at the time (a supposedly entirely ceremonial position) worked for the CIA (which we only now know due to leaked documents). The Governor General just straight up sacked the prime minister despite having a parliament majority. Just that easy.

Even if you don’t believe the CIA involvement, at the absolute most innocent this was an incident where a very pro-Western unelected ceremonial guy, with completely private communications with US and UK governments, dismissed a democratically elected prime minister and installed a new one. It was a coup, by definition.

It’s probably worth mentioning that though his death was ruled a suicide, and it’s plausible, there are a lot of doubts around it.

Basically none of his family and friends believed suicide was likely. He had just written up a to-do list, so it wasn’t planned at least. It would’ve been quite easy for him to accidentally poison himself with cyanide. Nobody bothered to test for cyanide anywhere at the scene. And a biographer noted he was now a marginalised person with significant knowledge of state intel and would’ve been an extreme and obvious Cold War risk.

This sums up in two sentences why I never really fancied visiting the US

I do agree. But calling the UK Orwellian is kind of funny, given Orwell’s 1984 is largely, if not mostly, based on the UK:

• Like Winston, Orwell worked in the UK as a war propagandist, and lamented that he constantly had to lie and censor facts, but thought it worth it to defeat the Nazis.
• The ‘ministries’ were entirely based on the UK’s, especially e.g. the ‘Ministry of Defense’ actually being a ministry of war.
• Orwell complained that the UK secret police constantly opened all his letters because he was a commie.
• Room 101 and the Ministry of Truth is basically just satire of the BBC.

As well as cultural changes in the 80s-90s, I think people don’t quite realise how much the internet ‘escaped’ the grasp of governments for the past few decades. By constantly banging the drum of “what about the children D:”, governments are finally just catching up to where we used to be.

“you can look it up” provides no specific details.

It is true, the beetle is the Regimbartia attenuata. There’s a paper on the idea of active escape post-predator-contact https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982220308423

Static typing is bourgeois foppery. Real proles enjoy Python’s ultradynamic typing that lets you jam any object into anything

I mean sure, but it’ll still likely leave 'em scratching their heads for a while before they go “I guess I just… replace the semicolon…?”

Sadly, both countries in this war have long been using tons of illegal war munitions of many kinds, including chemical warfare. Utterly fucked. All war but class war is the worst shit ever.

This behaviour is precisely why I stopped using Gmail. My account got locked one day - phone number and recovery email weren’t “enough” to recover, all appeals rejected, that’s it. Lost all my emails, all the stuff in my gdrive, just gone forever. There is literally no way to escalate other than doing a lawsuit. I make sure now to never have my data with a company that can just arbitrarily lock you out and completely ignore you.

We have strong evidence to the contrary. Cats only meow to humans, not to other cats. So they know we’re fundamentally different.