Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitates it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social but created this profile on kbin.run during the first week-long outage.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2024

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  • Be prepared for the “ephebophile” argument, which, if Wikipedia is to be believed anyway, is actually for ages 15-19, but it won’t stop those who have twisted their minds into a knot to explain this away.

    Or the “if there’s grass on the field, play ball” argument (which is kind of ironic given the popularity of shaving it all off again.) which covers anyone who shows any sign of adolescent hair growth.

    Or “she was asking for it / totally wanted it / shouldn’t have been acting that way / shouldn’t have been dressed like that”.

    Because those are all the soundest of arguments.

    But the unspoken reason will be: “He’s rich and famous and therefore he can do what the hell he wants with no consequences. F–k you.”











  • YouTube have been doing that sort of thing for years though. Do you remember the push to have everyone switch to a Google+ account with a real name attached?

    They’d ask if you wanted to do the aforementioned, and if you said no, they responded “OK we’ll ask again later.”

    No “Never ask me this again.”, just the implicit “f–k you, we’re going to pester you with this over and over again until you sign up.”

    After they got enough sign-ups they quit asking. And then Google+ went down the Swanee, so they relented and decided that maybe it was OK for people to have pseudonymous accounts after all. It only took years for that to happen.

    Can’t see how short-form content is going to fail in the same way, so there’ll be nothing here to teach them the lesson again.



  • The House of Lords serves as a check and balance against a government running amok. Now, they’re not necessarily a good check or balance, but every government needs one. Very occasionally they have been - to be mildly disingenuous - useful idiots. (And occasionally, obstinate asses, but I digress.)

    Ideally though, we could do with a House of … whatever’s below Common, because if the ones in the Commons are commoners, what does that make the rest of us?

    And how would we stop corruption in this lower, lower house?

    But nonetheless, it would be useful for a government to have to take heed of people who are closer to the real world. (And I don’t just mean MPs’ surgeries or correspondence because the repercussions for falling behind on that are slim at best.)