@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.
@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?
@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.
@gerikson “Adraste wishes to send a private message to Beroe, but suspects that Erebus is intercepting their scrolls..”
@sc_griffith It's true. The bakery just down the road has both male and female staff and it's really pretty inconvenient that every time I go in I have to ask if they'd mind taking a quick break from the constant fucking in order to serve me. And don't mention the time I asked if they had "a couple of nice floury baps for me".
@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".
@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.
@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.
@dgerard @o7___o7 He was weird and creepy before that (see his attempts to make the Jargon File say that everyone in hackerdom was just like him), but yeah, hoo boy. Him and the LGF guy were prominent cheerleaders for Dick Cheney's wilder fever dreams back in the day. The LGF guy got better, ESR didn't.