Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Elon Musk’s Starlink won't block Elon Musk’s X in Brazil, as required by court order

This does open up an interesting possibility that Brazil could, in theory, decide that the Starlink satellites themselves are forfeit, and that, when directly above Brazilian territory, technically they are in Brazilian airspace, and under Brazilian jurisdiction. It's just as well for Musk, that Brazil is not a major space power, and that they don't possess the ability to de-orbit a satellite that is over their territory. Other nations do possess this ability, for example, the US has the X-37B autonomous space plane which in theory could bring a small satellite down to Earth undamaged, and the Chinese government have proven their ability to hit satellites with missiles, much to the consternation of other spacefaring nations, because nobody wants a Kessler Syndrome.

Re: Musk isn't alone

I think you just figured out why Musk created Starlink - "SPACE internet = no country can stop me!"

Yeah, that logic kinda fails when you need ground-based receivers, and a country can just make the ownership or operation of those illegal. Since they emit RF at a known wavelength, which obeys the inverse-square law and can be triangulated, they can be tracked down with the simple use of a TV Detector Van*. This demonstrates not only the arrogance, but also the idiocy of such companies.

*Other RF-pinpointing equipment is probably available, but at the very least, we could send everyone who has previously bought one of these things increasingly severe-sounding letters, threatening to send the detector van round.

Re: Tantrum boy

To be fair, the best thing to do with one might be to drive it into a duck pond.

Re: Butthurt why?

In his case, "first principles" is letting someone else invent something, then buying it off them.

I'd rather not listen to him "chat", that would be part of my finite life-span wasted listening to a spoilt rich boy mansplaining to me things that I almost certainly have a better and more nuanced understanding of than something he dreamed up when he was stoned.

"Free Speech for Me, Not for You"

Musk – who claims to promote a maximal definition of free speech

Absolute horseshit. You only have to post the word "cisgender" to see exactly where that supposedly idealistic promotion of free speech ends; that is, if the fact that he sues people for exercising their free speech right to not advertise on his platform wasn't already copious enough evidence of his sincerity.

So, basically, the man is so thin-skinned, and so transphobic (about his own offspring) that the mere use of a term used to distinguish between transgender and non-transgender people triggers him to such an extent that he calls it hate speech. All the while unironically refusing to restrict or block actual hate speech, and in some instances, promoting it himself, by reposting far-right conspiracy-theories that aim to spread such hate.

Musk's X, Media Matters headed to trial

Re: Russian Dolls..

If you troll people with Kremlin talking-points, then QED this is Russian trolling. Your other drivel is exactly that. However, here's an important point, about the specificity of language: conspiracies are real (history is littered with them), you probably meant to put "conspiracy theories". You should probably go away and do a bit of a deep-dive into the origin of that term, because ironically, it is absolutely in keeping with your method of agitprop, except that it was originated by the CIA and not the Kremlin.

It doesn't actually matter, to me, anyone else here, or to Vladimir Putin, whether you actually work for the Kremlin; your posts are doing his work whether you are paid for it or not. The only question then, is whether you are doing it pro-bono, which puts you in the "useful idiot" category, or are being paid, which puts you into the hostile foreign-agent category.

Thankfully, it seems that most people here are bright enough not to swallow your demonstrably false nonsense. Of course, one of your goals is probably to trap people in a rabbit hole of being forced to constantly disprove your claims. I have a full-time job already that is far more rewarding than fighting with trolls, so I only dip in and out for my own amusement.

So, yes, the onus is not on me to prove you are a "Russian agitprop agent", but this doesn't change the fact that you constantly post Russian agitprop. Pages and pages and pages of it, in vast discourse, as if you have no other job to do.

As for defamation, that, my friend, only applies to natural people, unless your name really is Jellied Eel, or that handle easily identifies you as a real person (which it does not), that claim is a load of pseudo-legal horseshit. Also, you'd have to prove that what I have posted forms actual claims about your person, is actually defamatory, is untrue, and has caused actual harm upon which can be given a monetary value. Also, it's a civil matter, not a legal one. But thank you for demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of UK law. I think any judge would take one look at your forum posts and declare them to be word-salad in any case. You'd have better luck with trying a "freeman on the land" approach in an actual courtroom.

Re: How has this guy managed to become the worlds richest man is beyond me

He does have degrees in Physics and Economics and is quite bright, like many people with ASD which are quite affordable to people with very rich parents.

If you check it on Snopes, he has what appears to be an ungraded BA, which is presumed to be in physics, but has no actual department associated with it. Given the vast number of people with science degrees (I hold two degrees in Chemistry myself), this is hardly an impressive achievement. By this logic, having a higher degree in a hard science than Elon does would make me "even more" of a genius than he is, especially since my undergraduate degree is a bachelor's of science, not of arts. Of course, that word "genius" is a meaningless accolade. If any oif this shows us anything, then it's probably that Musk is of slightly above average intelligence.

As for being neurodivergent, A whole load of people working in the field of computing are "on the spectrum," and any of them would tell you that he displays very few neurodivergent traits. It's also not an excuse for megalomania. A common neurodivergent trait is actually having a strong sense of social justice, and if he had this, he certainly would not be the world's richest man, because he would have used that money to solve some of the actual problems the world has, such as vast levels of inequality, rather than playing with rocket ships, like something out of a pulp 1950s sci-fi novel. I'd suggest that you know very little about neurodivergent "symptoms" (medicalising the condition by referring to traits as symptoms is a bit of a giveaway for starters). Where are the actual common traits, such as avoiding eye contact, stimming, masking, hyperfocus, social guilt, literal interpretation, and so on? Claiming a condition that millions of people have to deal with on daily basis, as an excuse for being a weapons-grade arsehole is deeply insulting to all of those people who have to live in a world that is geared towards neurotypicals. The traits that Musk does display point much more closely to run-of-the mill sociopathy, or psychopathy. It is, of course, worth pointing out, that armchair psychiatry of this sort has absolutely no diagnostic value. He claims to have a diagnosis, good for him; lots of people do, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with his being a c*nt.

And of course, if Musk is a weapons-grade arsehole, I dare not type what that makes Peter "straight-up-Nazi" Thiel.

Re: Russian Dolls..

Yes, we are referring to someone else, but thanks for confirming that you are, indeed, a Russian agitprop agent.

Re: I suppose that's the problem with the usual foaming-at-the-mouth ..

I think that experience tells us that they live in the UK, and are adept British English speakers, but that they either work for the Russian government (either directly, via a three-letter-agency, or indirectly, via Russia pawns like Farage), or that they have somehow fallen so deeply into a right-wing echo chamber that they actually believe what they are saying. It's weird, because there is clearly an ability there to form coherent sentences, but the content is so often absolute bullshit (and trivially easy to refute bullshit too), that the only real conclusion that makes sense is that they know that everything they are saying is obvious far-right and pro-Kremlin agitprop, but they're going to go ahead and post it anyway, based on the idea that if you keep telling the same lies, people will eventually believe them. The scary thing is that the more gullible members of society, or those completely surrounded by such dangerous stuff, actually do believe this sort of things, and that leads to unpleasant things happening like a mentally-disturbed individual trying to force their way into a non-existent basement of a pizza restaurant and shooting up some servers in a storage cupboard.

This is exactly why this sort of disinformation is dangerous. It's not directly harmful, but en masse leads people to believe things that are dangerously false, and act on them. The end result is the loss of human life. Jeel is clearly happy enough to trade human lives for cash.

Re: Sidebar

One would hope that blocking would include not only both the DNS entry, and a network-level block on the IP address(es) this points at, but also the availability of the "X" app from app stores within the country. Otherwise, it would be trivial to ship a software update to the mobile apps for X to point directly at the underlying IP address, rather than performing a DNS lookup, and there would literally be no interruption of "service".

I've not closely read the reporting on the block on "X" in Brazil, but I'm sure those involved in implementing it will have at least a minimum level of technical nous.

Re: “Media Matters” manufactured misinformation by ..

Absolute bollocks. To claim asylum in the UK, you need to be in the UK. It is literally the only way to do so. Personally, I think it should be possible to make an asylum claim at an embassy in a foreign nation, but then we'd have to have a grown-up discussion about whether the UK government really wants to live up to its international obligations, and whether it is even possible to do such a thing with hostile media, and foreign actors ready to pounce on any such move in such a way that would probably cause the government to fall.

Re: “Media Matters” manufactured misinformation by ..

If X was really about free speech, why on Earth would Musk want to try to punish someone for speaking freely, unless it's "free speech for me, but not for you"?

This is quite obviously nothing whatsoever to do with free speech, and 100% to do with controlling the narrative, which the far-right are very adept at trying to do.

Genuine free speech, on the other hand, means freedom to speak in a way that doesn't harm others. Karl Popper's work on the limits of free speech demonstrates why this doesn't include hate speech, and why tolerating intolerance is logically inconsistent. The "survival of the fittest" of hate speech is pretty much a text-book definition of fascism (the strongest punishing and subjugating the weakest), because if we tolerate hatred, then hatred spreads and destroys everything else.

Rather than being "far left" as you so ineloquently put it, this is literally the set of everything that is not far-right. If you characterise anyone who has a differing opinion to you as far-left, then rather than strengthening your argument, this literally signals that you are arguing for fascism. History is not on your side when it comes to that argument.

As it happens, both "left" and "right" are pretty crude and useless definitions, and only serve a purpose to polarise discussions such that they become argumentative slanging matches. The approach of "agree with me, or I'll call you names" is not helpful to anyone.

Musk likes to throw money around to get his way, and the fact that lackeys like to refer to him as a "genius" is laughable, when he doesn't seem to even appreciate the contradiction in his own position here. As a reference point, none of the people who history considers to have been extremely intelligent (think Newton, Einstein, Al-Khwārizmī, Plato, and so on) have been extremely wealthy individuals, and no extremely wealthy individuals that I can think of have been considered to be extremely intelligent. The traits that lead to extreme wealth are being born rich, being lucky, and being ruthless. All of these combine in Musk, which have given him the illusion that he has been very skilful. As the world's richest man, he is actually extremely dangerous, because most extremely arrogant individuals do not have the means to inflict themselves on large numbers of people. When this has happened in history, it has inevitably lead to mass bloodshed, often instigated by those individuals (think Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, etc.), but not always (the French Revolution should still be considered a warning to those who think that they have a divine right over others, the original conflict between "the left" and "the right", in teh original sense of those terms).

My advice would be to study some history, and to stop being an idiot, but I'm sure your handlers have done that for you, and fed you your talking points.

Re: Manufacturing fake research?

Are you suggesting that this poster might possibly be something that rhymes with "Trussian Roll"? Have we collected a new one?

On the other hand, of course there are plenty of other despotic regimes who like to agitate in the West. North Korean perhaps?

Ah yes, Elon Musk the Champion of Free Speech ™

(terms and conditions apply)

Body of IT tycoon Mike Lynch recovered after superyacht sinks

Thinking about it, do you know what makes me itch? When there aren't coincidences.

Mathematically, there are a vast number of random events that could happen, and that could coincide in a way that aligns to look meaningful, but is not.

If none of those things do in fact coincide, that deviation would be statistically meaningful, and would indicate some sort of guiding hand in the fate of man.

Oh shit, I just disproved God again, didn't I (well, at least an interventionist one)? I'd better change my name to Oolon Colluphid.

Re: Upvote for the humour, but...

I don't know, they do have a fantastic selection of chesses and cured meats at reasonable prices dans les supermarchés. That could prevent me from leaving, if my passport still allowed me to remain there.

Or, indeed, overconfidence. I don't think the deaths of others, such as his daughter, or crew members, were necessarily so karmic.

Since the wreck has been found and divers have recovered bodes, i think something like that might have been noticed and reported on, don't you? Or are all the divers, rescue and salvage teams, press, coastguard, etc. etc. in on it too?

Exactly this. Any death such as this is tragic, none more or less so than any other, a human life is a human life. I do feel that the press coverage of this has entirely been of the "rich man dies" variety, rather than "tragic deaths at sea". My sympathy towards him is only slightly lessened by the fact that he died in an ostentatious display of wealth (because, frankly, this is what a luxury yacht is), this in no way makes his death deserved.

It could be that those coincidences can be explained adequately by two individuals who have just been acquitted of falsely obtaining their extreme wealth had allowed it to go to their heads, and their feelings of invulnerability thus imbued, had led them to individually go running in a busy road, and take a yacht out in a storm.

I'd add further that if there has been some foul play at work, why would anyone act so suspiciously as to top both individuals on the same day? Even Putin doesn't do people in, in a wholly predictable manner, yet is able to send a message that he did it, whilst maintaining plausible deniability. What would even be the purpose of doing so with these individuals? Whoever might be behind it wouldn't be getting their hands on the cash, unless you're suggesting that Mike Lynch's wife has something to do with it? Murdering your whole family (and also some family friends) including your offspring to get your hands on cash that you no doubt already had access to seems like a bit of an unlikely scenario, compared to simple carelessness.

Also, wow, can I have one of those weather machines?

Whilst their death is undoubtedly tragic, being "important" and "successful" make those lives no more valuable than any others. Last month, four people drowned attempting to cross the English Channel, but the same outpouring of grief and media attention wasn't splashed on them. Indeed, there are probably plenty of deeply unpleasant people who would be glad of their deaths.

The difference here, is that dying whilst larking about on a pleasure yacht is an avoidable death, whereas finding yourself in the situation where you are desperate enough to attempt a dangerous crossing in a small vessel that is almost certainly unseaworthy and overloaded is probably less so.

There seems to be a certain human tendency to elevate the super-rich to god-like personas, and then for those who are fortunate enough to find themselves in that group, by either luck of birth, luck of being in the right place at the right time, ruthlessness, skill, or a combination of the above, to start believing that they possess preternatural prowess themselves. Sadly, believing in your own indestructibility doesn't make it manifest, and being incredibly wealthy doesn't make the sea any less deadly or capricious.

My sympathies go out to the friends and relatives of all those who have died at sea, and I am led to wonder, if it is indeed true that the wealth of some individuals is due entirely to hard graft, whether inheritance tax on estates that are worth well over the amount that any dependants might need to live a reasonably comfortable life for the rest of their time on Earth, should be taxed at 100%. After all, if that money has been earned by merit, then logically, those standing to inherit it have not earned it by merit themselves. Either that, or we need to look again at why billionaires exist in the first place, and why the tax system doesn't prevent people trying to emulate the dragon Smaug. Having enough wealth to live comfortably, and to never have to work again is one thing, having so much money that it is noticeably otherwise missing from economic circulation is quite another.

Russia tells citizens to switch off home surveillance because the Ukrainians are coming

Re: This attack was brilliant strategy

"Am I really that stupid? No, it's everyone else. everyone else is stupid."

You're writing your own Principal Skinner meme here, tovarisch.

Re: Ukraine is spying on your ring

JE: Shills for Putin

Everyone else: You're just a shill for Putin

JE: Calling me a shill is hate speech.

The cognitive dissonance is strong with this one. I sincerely hope the Kremlin is paying him well, it must be causing a great deal of mental anguish to have a full-time job twisting and squirming to keep up with the agitprop, especially when he is getting no traction whatsoever with it.

Re: This attack was brilliant strategy

Sorry, I meant "volunteers" of course.

Re: This attack was brilliant strategy

they sure didn't sign up for being invaded when they aided Putin's war against Ukraine

They didn't sign up to anything, they are Putin's vassal state, and do exactly what they are told to do. Putin's big mistake was thinking that success in capturing Belarus in this way could be extended to Ukraine way back at the time when they failed to put a puppet president in place and Zelenskiy got elected on an anti-corruption ticket instead. Putin has been trying to get rid of him and install a puppet ever since. This is why Kyiv was the target on day one of his invasion, and why there have reportedly been several assassination plots against Zelenskiy that have been foiled. Putin expected him to flee to an EU state, leaving a vacuum for him to fill, and didn't count on Ukraine rallying behind him and fighting back.

Re: This attack was brilliant strategy

Russia hasn't started conscription, yet. It has been relying on volunteers

Would you like to volunteer to die on the front lines, comrade, or spend the next 15 years in prison?

Yup, that "volunteering" sounds an awful lot like it's nothing like conscription, right?

This all leads the rest of us to wonder, why do you bother? Are you actually being paid by the Russian state to push this ridiculous propaganda, or are you actually this stupid? Just like the Russian "limited military engagement", you're clearly making no headway on these forums, the only up-votes you are garnering are clearly from the other pro-Putin trolls. Is this a case of the old fascist technique of "tell the same lie often enough and people start believing it". That only really works on uninformed, or stupid, people, who can't see that this so obviously what you are doing, like uneducated 40-something white middle-Americans and Russian conscripts.

Re: Good to see we collect Russian bots here too...

Will troll for roubles.

Elon Musk's X Corp faces $61M lawsuit over unpaid tech tabs

Re: i wonder if there's any relation to this recent little gem....

In Godwin's own words:

I urge people to develop enough perspective to do it thoughtfully. If you think the comparison is valid, and you've given it some thought, do it. All I ask you to do is think about the human beings capable of acting very badly. We have to keep the magnitude of those events in mind, and not be glib. Our society needs to be more humane, more civilized and to grow up.

Maybe if Trump and his ilk didn't act like fascists, then they wouldn't be compared to them. The only childish thing here is the level of the argument in your exhortation to ignore the comparison.

Re: One Rule for Thee, and Another for Me

Not to anyone he asks for credit, he isn't. He'll be what is known as a "credit risk", and receive unfavourable terms. Those people who are willing to lend him money will be those sorts of people you really don't want to be on the wrong side of, such as, oh I don't know, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.

Say, Elon, how is the repayment of the interest on those loans you took out to buy Twitter going?

Twitter must pay over half a million to unfairly dismissed Irish exec

Re: Check the maths...

It would screw over anyone who has invested in any of his companies, and I suspect the stock exchanges would shrug it off. Since Tesla stock is already tanking, I'd wager that most serious institutional investors are already steering well clear. In reality, if Elon tries to cash in his shares in Tesla, SpaceX, etc., then as soon as he placed the sell orders, the price would crash, because nobody in their right mind would fill those orders. The only thing this would f*ck, as you so eloquently put it, would be His Muskiness Himself.

Try this though experiment:

You hold the controlling share in "Company X", let's call this 1,100,000 shares out of 2,000,000 in total.

The market price of "Company X" is £100 per share.

You want to make some quick cash, so you liquidate some of those shares.

If you sell 100 shares, you'll probably make the $100 per share, and net $10,000.

If you sell 1,000 shares, again, you'd probably get the asking price, and net $100,000.

If you try to sell 10,000 shares, people might get a bit nervous, and you might only get $99 per share. Still, $990,000 is not a bad amount of money. You'd probably get a bit more than that, as there would be some buy orders at the full $100 which would fill.

If you tried to sell 100,000 shares, people will notice that you're giving up your controlling share. All the existing sensible buy orders would immediately fill, the price might crash and then bounce back to 50% of its previous value, and unless you set a limit on your selling price, a whole bunch of chancers wanting to buy at silly low prices would snap up a bunch of shares. You'd maybe get $5,000,000.

If you tried to sell 1,000,000 shares, all of the above would happen, the stock would probably get a stop put on it on its native exchange, at around the point where the price has plummeted to $1 (if you're lucky). You'd probably net less than the $5,000,000 in the scenario above, and your remaining, unsold stock would be essentially worthless, wiping a big chunk off your personal "on paper" value.

In these latter scenarios, the market value of any other companies in which you have a controlling interest (let's call some of them "Penis Substitute X", "Reinvent the Train X", and "The Big Hole Digging Corp X") would almost certainly also plummet, as investors lose confidence in you personally.

Re: Interesting.

but now the UK is sovereign

It always was, you melt. Still carrying on with the leave disinfo long after the crooked referendum...

Re: Reg trolling

I hate to break it to you, but jointly deciding not to purchase something because doing so might be damaging to yourself (and having your adverts next to hate speech certainly could be considered harmful to a brand), whilst it could be described as "collusion" is hardly illegal. That's called free choice, you know, something that people have in an "ideal market". It's actually supposedly core to free market capitalist economics, where every "actor" is supposedly perfectly well-informed. In this case, "collusion" would have been that free exchange of information between advertisers, allowing them to make that free and informed choice. Not that there's actually any evidence that there was "collusion" in this, other than people making an obvious choice not to harm themselves, based on both freely available information, and also Elon actually telling them to go fuck themselves. I don't believe that any of those advertisers were in any way contractually obliged either to not talk to each other, or to continue to do business with Twitler.

Re: Yankee employment conditions go home!

Most of the EU doesn't because it doesn't want armed militias challenging their power murdering people.

There, FTFY. Note as well, that there are plenty of civilised countries outside of the EU. Have you ever been to Iceland? It might blow your mind to find out, that, despite having no armed forces of any kind, and very strict gun laws, they still manage to function and not be an authoritarian nightmare. Their murder rate, incidentally, peaked in 202 at five. That's five people, in a year. In the same year, the US suffered almost 50,000 deaths from gunshot wounds. Accounting for population difference, per capita, that's more than ten times as many people being murdered in the US, with guns, than in Iceland, from any cause. So, tell me again, about how guns are so great.

My advice to any nation that is listening, is to be more like Iceland, and less like the US.

Re: Yankee employment conditions go home!

And this is very useful to the judge in helping to determine their sentencing.

Coldwar Steve has been very busy recently, what with all the material that Musk/Trump/Farage/Tommeh/Andrew Taint have been providing to him.

Re: Yankee employment conditions go home!

...I'll also add, that at no point did I equate prison slavery with chattel slavery. That's a false argument you have put forward. Once again, the being bought and sold part is irrelevant to the person who is enslaved; they are enslaved either way.

I'm not quite sure why you are so in favour of attempting to legitimise the enforced labour of imprisoned people, but it doesn't really shine a very good light upon you, and, from a criminological point of view, it is also counterproductive to the aims of rehabilitation and societal benefit. The only people it does benefit, are those operating the prisons, in much the same way that the forced labour of enslaved people on plantations benefitted only the plantation owners and not the "workers" there. Of course those situations are not identical, but the imprisonment and forced labour aspects are clearly analogous to all but the most wilfully blind.

Re: Yankee employment conditions go home!

At the same time, the prison population of the US is disproportionately composed of black people, and the colour of your skin has a statistically significant impact on whether you will get a custodial sentence for many crimes, so tell me again how the US has definitely abolished the slavery of black people.

Re: Yankee employment conditions go home!

Imprisonment is not slavery; forced labour whilst in detention is. There doesn't have to be "ownership" of an enslaved person for them to be enslaved. Such exploitation is illegal in most civilised countries, I'm saddened to see that the UK is not included in that list of civilised countries, either.

Re: Yankee employment conditions go home!

It's always worth remembering that when the US made slavery illegal, it only did so outside of the penal system. Unpaid forced labour is still perfectly legal there if someone is in detention. Incidentally, it also makes prisons very profitable, and the US also, again, purely by coincidence, has both the highest per-capita and highest absolute prison population in the world*.

*officially. I'd question whether China has caught up in recent years with its "re-education centres". I don't think anyone should aspire to be more authoritarian than China though.

Re: Yankee employment conditions go home!

Armed militias are definitely a thing of the past in civilised nations.

Musk realised that Zuckerberg was actually both very fit and skilled at martial arts, and basically chickened out of getting his podgy arse handed to him.

I'm seeing a lot of people dump Xitter for Threads, which, to be fair, is also run by a Machiavellian billionaire, just not one who has so openly having a public meltdown for the last couple of years.

Twitter was the de facto platform for this sort of social media, simply because it was the first around (at the time, Facebook already existed, but didn't quite work in the same "broadcast" sense). Lots of alternatives have come and go, and these days, I see a lot of people cross-posting to multiple platforms, so cutting one loose isn't really such a big thing as it once was. Nobody is really tied to Xitter by dint of having no alternative any more, and the more of a toxic hate filled echo chamber full of right-wing culture war talking points it becomes, the more people with any common sense are leaving it for platforms that will actually do something about hate speech.

SpaceX tries to wash away Texas pollution allegations

Re: 70 years ago...

We DO have a theoretical design for something like Star Trek's warp drive...

Sadly, I think the "theory" there boils down to, "first, we use magic to warp space...". It's in the same vein as "if we had material with negative mass, we could make a wormhole," in that it relies on "exotic" physics with no experimental basis to make it work. See also "if we could travel faster than light, we could go backwards in time," and "to an observer sitting outside the universe..."

It's all consistent with theoretical physics, it's just that nasty reality that keeps getting in the way.

Re: Dihydrogen Monoxide

Not to mention that inhaling it causes your lungs to instantly fill with water.

Disney claims agreeing to Disney+ terms waives man's right to sue over wife's death

Re: A lot of the media in the US is very anti Disney

Previously people were mostly very pro Disney

Yeah, nobody has ever referred to Disney as "The Evil Empire," have they? No, wait, I'm pretty sure I've heard them called that at least as far back as the 1990s, when discussions like these were being had on Usenet, and the most up-to-date web browser was X-Mosaic.

The negligent Manslaughter aspect aside...

...let's talk about dehumanising your restaurant staff by labelling them as "cast members". Eugh.

Elon Musk claims live Trump interview on X derailed by DDoS

Re: Greatest cutter

Well, since I'm not in the US, and don't have a library of US political speeches to hand (nor the slightest inclination to go and look up whatever you are on about), I'll have to take your word for it. Well, actually, I don't. It seems you know nothing about Keir Starmer, if you think he is some sort of firebrand. Since he has been in the job for little over a month, it's probably too soon to draw a decent judgement, but the overall sense is that he's a bit of a wet blanket.

As for Biden, well, the general opinion of him overseas is pretty neutral. He seems to have been generally OK for your country, with the obvious caveat that he appears to be old and frail. Trump, on the other hand, appears to have been a huge embarrassment, especially on the international stage; both loud and obnoxious, and seemingly completely unaware of basic manners and protocol. Watching him barge in front of the late Queen on a state visit was simply excruciating, and very much the sort of thing that a comic-book authoritarian dictator would do. I guess it's hard to remove the rose-tinted glasses when you have sunk all that emotional cost into your "leader" of choice, though.

There are parts of his personality that were very useful at wartime. There were plenty of things that were not, such as his abhorrent sexism, or his unfortunate attitudes towards the Kurdish people who, as far as I recall, he referred to as "rats" and advocated murdering en masse with poison gas (you know, basically the same thing the West supposedly toppled Saddam Hussein for).

This is part of the problem with people who cry "woke" when faced with people trying to teach all of history, and not just the revisionist version written by the winners. The history of the UK that we are taught at school, for instance, leaves out an awful lot (like anything to do with Ireland). I suspect the stuff that is taught now, after the last decade and a half of culture-war politics, is even more edited down to show England in only a good light. The fact remains that the greatest thing that we have done for a lot of nations around the world is purportedly to put their own Independence Days onto their calendars.

As it happens, a lot of the life of Churchill (who, let's not forget, was born in a fucking PALACE), was lived in the heart of the British Empire, and all that this entails. There are still plenty of people about who think that imperialism was great, but those people are either vastly ignorant, or psychopaths.

Re: Shelf life

I neither know that, nor follow you on social media (probably - being pseudonymised means you might actually be someone I know).

However, your user handle isn't something along the lines of "CandyM23423oj" and you aren't (yet) claiming to be a "Sweet American Girl" (I don't know why this seems to be the descriptor of choice on Instagram).

Re: Shelf life

No it isn't. For example, a well-known broadcaster such as Professor Alice Roberts is unlikely to describe herself as an influencer, but I follow her, because she often has interesting things to say, and has connections to organisations I am a member of.

Someone who spends all their time spouting on social media, and who has no real public persona beyond that, such as Andrew Tate, might be considered an "influencer" and might refer to themselves as such. That piece of human excrement can get in the bin.

Some people who seem to only exist on social media and who spend their time earning not inappreciable amounts of money there, touting various things such as makeup or fast fashion, very much do refer to themselves in this way, and I have as much interest in seeing them as I do in seeing any advertising, which is nil.