Month: November 2024

Lords have mercy

MPs back end of House of Lords hereditary peers

MPs have backed plans to get rid of all hereditary peers from the House of Lords.
A bill making its way through Parliament would abolish the 92 seats reserved for peers who inherit their titles through their families. […]
But during a debate in the Commons, some MPs also called for the government to go further.
Conservative Sir Gavin Williamson put forward proposals for Church of England bishops to be removed from the Lords but these were rejected by MPs.
He argued it was “fundamentally unfair” for a block of clerics to “have a right and a say over our legislation”.
“For me, as someone who is an Anglican, I cannot see why I have a greater right for greater representation than my children who are Catholics,” he said.
He added that the 26 bishops in the Lords only come from England and are “probably not reflective of today’s world”.

I’m not sure the Lords in general reflects the modern world in general, never mind just the bishops… I’m sympathetic to the SNP fellow who thinks the House of Lords should be abolished entirely as long as it’s unelected, but if the UK must have it then I’ll settle for the removal of the bishops at least; I’m here for the separation of church and state, and the UK’s insistence on keeping them together is retrograde at best.

Just stick to the biology, Dick

To be honest, I’ve been unimpressed by Richard Dawkins for quite a long time—I think his Islamophobia is rooted in something more than just his generalised hatred of religion—but this is a new low for him. I mean, it’s there in the fucking picture, Oolong’s so diametrically opposed to Mushroom Cock that he’s embracing him at one of his own rallies… And that’s only just been posted within the last day, and Oolong has long demonstrated himself to have none of the characteristics Dawkins attributes to him and to be far more like his description of 45. Back to the lab with you, Richard, and stick to things you actually know about…

Clive got his money’s worth

United Australia senator Ralph Babet posts racist, homophobic slurs

United Australia Party senator Ralph Babet has posted a series of slurs online after sharing a video of misogynistic internet provocateur Andrew Tate crowing about Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, prompting condemnation from the Greens.
The fringe senator, elected at a cost to mining billionaire Clive Palmer of $116 million, made the sexist, homophobic and ableist remarks on Elon Musk’s platform X, where right-wing influencers have celebrated the US election as normalising offensive speech.
Babet shared a clip on Monday of Tate giving a live-streamed “emergency meeting” speech about the political landscape changing as “gatekeepers are losing their power” over the economy, information and politics.
“In my house we say phaggot [sic], retard and n—-r,” Babet wrote in the caption. “We are sick of you woke ass clowns. Cry more. Write an article. Tweet about me. No one cares what you think.”

I can’t wait to see what happens when someone tries to call him one of those things, cos if he’s OK with using them against I presume he’s OK with them being used against them.

X-odus

Bluesky adds 700,000 new members as users flee X after the US election

Social media platform Bluesky has picked up more than 700,000 new users in the week since the US election, as users seek to escape misinformation and offensive posts on X.
The influx, largely from North America and the UK, has helped Bluesky reach 14.5 million users worldwide, up from 9 million in September, the company said. […]
The platform has previously benefited from dissatisfaction with X and its billionaire owner, Elon Musk, who is closely tied to US president-elect Donald Trump’s successful election campaign. Twitter shed millions of users after rebranding to X and usage in the US slumped by more than a fifth in the subsequent seven months.
Bluesky reported picking up 3 million new users in the week after X was suspended in Brazil in September and a further 1.2 million in the two days after X announced it would allow users to view posts from people who had blocked them.
“We’re excited to welcome all of these new people, ranging from Swifties to wrestlers to city planners,” Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu said.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and professor at New York University, had 250,000 followers on X but picked up 21,000 followers in her first day on Bluesky this week.
“I am still on X but after January, when X could be owned by a de facto member of the Trump administration, its functions as a Trump propaganda outlet and far-right radicalization machine could be accelerated,” she said.

Unsurprising. There’s been a ton of new posters on Threads in the last week, too, no idea how many but it certainly felt like thousands… That said, I’ve also seen suggestions that a lot of Twitter’s losses in the last few days have actually been bot accounts that have served their purpose, they don’t need to keep spreading election misinformation any more now that Apartheid Clyde got his desired results…

Can’t buy me a DVD release

Here’s a fascinating story. I enjoy the Parlogram channel every once in a while, probably should watch it more often, but he has a particularly intriguing offering posted earlier today… I only very dimly recall ever seeing this when I would’ve been very little, quite possibly when I was still only aged in single digits. I can’t remember anything about them beyond that, and I could even be misremembering having seen them at all (though I am fairly sure I would’ve done; I at least remember them being a thing from that time). And I really knew nothing about them, they’re not a piece of Beatles media I’ve ever given any thought to. Because they just vanished for decades, they’ve never had a legit re-release unlike (most of) the films the band did, and there’s no sign of them ever getting one… So this look at their making was quite educational; I obviously never knew Norman McLaren had a small part in its history cos he recommended the production team use his old NFB associate George Dunning’s TVC Animations company, which was how the latter then came to helm Yellow Submarine a few years later. At least he succeeded in getting the involvement of the actual band, however briefly, in that film, which is more than the series did…

Of course you were

What do you do when your former boss basically tells you to go fuck yourself on social media?

If you’re Nikki Haley and your former boss is Mushroom Cock, the answer, apparently, is to quote-tweet the old cunt telling you to go fuck yourself and say “LOL uwu it was lovely working with you” with no apparent sarcasm or irony. Oh Nimarata, you would’ve been better saying nothing at all; I mean, you only STOOD AGAINST HIM FOR THE PRESIDENCY and called him unfit, that’s how proud you were to serve under him… but she turned toady so quickly after she stood down from that that I shouldn’t be surprised she’s still doing it. Keep embarrassing yourself, love, you’re even better at it than him…

Talking of Threads…

Threads has been quite interesting so far as a social media experiment, cos I do find myself having a somewhat different relationship with it to what I have with the others, especially when it comes to blocking other users. On Twitter, I tended to mostly block ads and right-wing shitheads when one occasionally got thrown up at me, but more often what I’d do was go into trending hashtags, and in many such instances you just knew they’d be overrun with the aforementioned shitheads and I’d block as many of them as I could there, so I wound up blocking quite a lot. (Of course, given Oolong’s determination to kill the block function, I wouldn’t have been able to do that much longer, another thing which drove me to kill my account.)

Conversely, I almost never do this on Mastodon or Bluesky. Part of that is that I just don’t use Mastodon that much now, and also I think the nature of it keeps the idiots away. Obviously there are idiots, but the defederating thing stops them spreading. Similarly on Bluesky, there’s stupidity but it’s easy to keep out of one’s feed; handily, it’s also easy to make lists of accounts and share them with everyone else, so when someone makes a list of MAGAts or other right-wingers, I can subscribe to that and automatically block the mongrels en masse. That sort of list for pre-emptive blocking is one of my favourite features of Bluesky. I don’t use it often, but it’s handy to have.

On Threads, however, there seems to almost be a culture of “block early, block often”, and blocking at the slightest provocation is kind of encouraged, cos the “For You” page is the default setting rather than the accounts you actually follow. So you open the site and you basically get whatever the algorithm thinks you’ll like rather than what you necessarily want… and though the Threads algorithm is actually pretty good in that regard, I will sometimes encounter someone having a conversation with a dickhead or cluster thereof and that gives me something to block. Indeed, sometimes I’ll just block people for being mildly annoying, even people whose accounts I’ll look over and they might be OK but they post one or two stupid things that irritate me and BOOM. Away they go. And, like I say, the general culture of the place seems to encourage this sort of thing and I’m fine with it.

Continue reading “Talking of Threads…”

Forever blowing bubbles

One other thing I’ve seen people say on Threads in particular about this election is that it’s opened their eyes about how much of a “bubble” they’ve been when it comes to politics. A few examples:

Unfortunately, I have noticed this bubble in the past, and it’s a problem I’ve seen for a long time on the liberal left; people on that side of the political spectrum are really good at assuming that their particular positions are so self-evidently correct that they can’t understand why everyone doesn’t share them, and sometimes they don’t seem to understand that everyone doesn’t share them… and then you get things like, well, yesterday when reality rocks up and laughs in your face while spitting in it at the same time. And I’m not blaming people for being in that sort of bubble when it comes to politics and media consumption; pretty much all of mine leans left/progressive to some extent or other. But I have no illusions about the other side not believing in the same things as me, cos they don’t, and the only surprise I’ve had in the last 26 years of being regularly online has been to discover just how bad the right can be… I learned this back in the early days of blogging post-September 11, and I have continued to observe it, and I have only seen them get worse over the last couple of decades. If they were monstrous twenty years ago, they’re outright evil now. It’s pleasant to be in that bubble, I know, sometimes it might be the best or even the only thing you can do to stay sane, but deluding yourself into thinking everyone’s on your side does nothing good.