Blood-quordling

 

That, my friend, is some satisfying Quordling today. 

Take that, early on-set dementia. 

I'm 4 times as convinced. 

Litter pickle

 I sometimes see a road sign "picking up your litter risks roadworkers lives". And I wonder, if that's the case, and yes, it must be the case, how can the employer possibly justify the activity when they're doing their risk assessment paperwork. Obviously it needs doing, but.. 

I figure this is what the robot "dogs" in that Black Mirror episode, "Metalhead", were originally invented for.  They started off picking up the litter as replacements for human roadworkers, and then their AI twigged it would be more efficient to get rid of the cause of the litter. 

Stab stab stab, kill kill kill. 

At least we're biodegradable.

Finished (yesterday) : Head On - John Scalzi 

Makes you Rwanda whether the Tories can go any lower

It's so painfully obvious that the government's plan to send "illegal people" to Rwanda is a "dead-cat" to distract from the scandals of Partygate and non-dom status etc. It's inhumane. Rwanda has a poor human rights record the UK has itself criticised. It's massively expensive.

And it's so depressing that they believe, and may well be right, that appealing to racism, xenophobia and basically the lowest, nastiest side of the electorate will serve to distract us and save them. 

Vile.  

Sunak in parliament December 2021: "No, I did not attend any parties"  

Johnson in interview December 2021: "I certainly broke no rules". 

Resign!

 I'm pretty cross about fixed penalty fines for BoJo and Rishi. 

I'm pleased the Met have actually had the balls to follow through, as my confidence in them is incredibly low, given their recent history. 

- strip-searching of a child, 

- the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer nicknamed "the rapist",

- this other rapist, 

- behaviour towards protesters at a vigil for Sarah Everard, 

- and spreading round snapshots of murdered women.

I'll stop there, as there's more. Just a ghastly, disgusting list of failures and an apparent culture of misogyny and racism. 

But here we are, this they pursued, and I am glad about it. 

Sunak in parliament December 2021: "No, I did not attend any parties"  

Johnson in interview December 2021: "I certainly broke no rules". 

Online abuse study

CornwallLive story  

In a statement, Cindy Southworth, Meta’s head of women’s safety, said: “While we disagree with many of the CCDH’s conclusions, we do agree that the harassment of women is unacceptable.

“That’s why we don’t allow gender-based hate or any threat of sexual violence, and last year we announced stronger protections for female public figures.

“Messages from people you don’t follow go to a separate request inbox where you can either block or report the sender, or you can turn off message requests altogether.

“Calls from people you don’t know only go through if you accept their message request and we offer a way to filter abusive messages so you never have to see them.”

But this isn't doing anything to address the actual problem, which is the people sending abusive messages and rape threats to women in the public eye. The problem isn't these women seeing the abuse. (I mean, obviously they don't want to see it, but it's the wrong direction to be tackling it from, surely?)

Instead, could there be some sort of filtering before sending to a stranger? ie. anything containing obvious swear-words/misogynistic/racist words gets rejected immediately and you get a message to the effect of "This message content does not pass our standards for civil communications. If you intend to contact other customers of ours, please revise what you want to say and ensure it fits with our standards as set out here [link to suitable policy]. Repeated flagging of your account for inappropriate messages will lead to a suspension or ban."

When sending to a stranger, perhaps you get a caution as you press send:  "Are you sure you want to send this message? We want to build constructive dialogues and healthy online communities, if this is not in this spirit, then do not send. If the content of your message breaks our community standards [policy here], you risk losing your account with us and potentially legal action." or something? 

The Grimness of the Grammys

 So, the Grammys - what a shambles. What a disgusting shameful slap in the face. 

I'm hugely revolted by the "rehabilitation" of rich, statused, usually white men. 

A couple of days ago, we had fucking "Prince" Andrew in full media glare, walking Mumsy to her seat like he hasn't just publicly paid off the victim of a convicted sex-offender & convicted sex-trafficker after her allegations against him. 

One of the most disgusting things I've seen was convicted rapist, Mike Tyson, playing a victim in a role in Law & Order: SVU. I knew Dick Wolf's series was exploitative and prurient, but this was just like coming right out and saying to the victims of sexual crimes - "Fuck you, I'll make money off stories like yours, plus here's an actual rapist to show you just how little his conviction has done to harm him long-term and how little value his victim had."

And then, we have Louis CK winning a Grammy, like he hasn't admitted to exploiting his position and sexually harassing women. 

Someone in the comments somewhere said something like, "But, but how long should his punishment bee-eee-ee?" Well, actually I'm pretty comfortable with Louis CK never getting on tv again, never being awarded kiss-ass gongs again. I think if you're in the public eye, with the opportunities that brings for amassing wealth and status, you should be held to a standard of behaviour and if you fuck it up, you simply don't get another go. You go sit and write scripts for other people or something. I mean this is a man who wrote this: 

“The courage it takes for a woman to say yes [to a date with a man] is beyond anything I can imagine. A woman saying yes to a date with a man is literally insane, and ill-advised. How do women still go out with guys, when you consider the fact that there is no greater threat to women than men? We’re the number one threat! To women! Globally and historically, we’re the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women. We’re the worst thing that ever happens to them!”

“If you’re a guy, imagine you could only date a half-bear-half-lion. ‘Oh, I hope this one’s nice! I hope he doesn’t do what he’s going to do.’”

It's not like he wasn't aware.

I'm comfortable with "cancelling" sexual predators and violent offenders from the public eye, because of  their acts, for good. I'm comfortable with the idea of professional footballers or other sportspeople who rape or harass or commit violence, never getting to play professionally again. I'd have been comfortable with Polanski getting fucking jailed like he should have been and never having opportunity to make another film: that would have been good. I'm comfortable with the prospect of never seeing Kevin Spacey's face again.   

As for Andrew, for fucks sake. 

Viva la république.