Why does my iPhone always think I’m trying to type “ducking” when I’m actually trying to type “ducking” and no matter how many times I type “ducking” it still auto-edits it to “ducking” every ducking time? Is there any way of stopping this?
I didn’t LOL, but I did smile.
I don’t suffer from this ducking problem here.
LATER: I’d never watched this before. Ducking good.
Apparently there have been complaints about this:
I agree with DebApre, replying to an American complainer:
This is not an issue in England. We share culture. We don’t consider this appropriation. You can’t sully something that’s meant to be fun and claim racism. This is not it. I used to wear Saris because one of my best friends was of Indian heritage. This is how people are in London.
Melting Pot London. Love it.
Also from DebApre, this:
Also, i lived in Dubai for 2 years and I dressed like Middle Easterners and Indians. The world is your oyster and experience if you want it to be. I still wear Indian outfits. I have never once been accused of appropriation.
So what’s happening? Well, I just put a comment on Samizdata which says a little of what I think about this stuff:
They aren’t “alarmed”. They are focussing attention on white racism, white racism being what they now want, and have done ever since the working class let them down by not wanting to join their revolution. They want a race war, because they reckon their side might win that.
The way to react is to frame this not as these races versus this race, but as civilisation versus barbarism, with all the socialists, national and international, on the same barbaric side. The recent Republican Convention would appear to have done this splendidly.
What the “alarmed” people were doing there was talking up white racism, in the guise of denouncing it (in connection with a demo about wearing masks). And with this Adele photo, they’re trying to stir it between white people and black people once again.
God forbid people should actually just get along with each other.
Found this here:
I don’t know if it’s real or merely computerised. My first guess was the latter, but if so it’s very well done. Either way, this passed the LOL test with me. I really did LOL when I saw it.
This one is definitely a computerised contrivance, but once again, I really did LOL:
This may be a bit out of date. Now that the Dems are starting to fear that the riots are hurting them and helping Trump, they are starting also to disapprove of the riots.
Am I the only Brit finding American politics massively more diverting than British politics just now?
I think it’s because we just saw off Corbyn and Corbynism, for the time being anyway, and as far as Corbynism being in official charge of things is concerned, whereas in America they haven’t yet had their vote on the same approximate subject, but very soon will. This means that the contrast between what is now at stake here and what is now at stake there is far greater even than it usually is.
I think that Trump will beat Biden by a thermonuclear landslide, but that could merely be because I hope that Trump will beat Biden by a thermonuclear landslide.
Trying to chill through the culture wars in 2020 pic.twitter.com/ikBHStDyqz
— Ben Winegard (@BenWinegard) August 27, 2020
Setting aside the culture wars, is that a really big … hamster? … in the middle there? Or is it that the ducks are unusually small, for ducks?
Yes, this is fucking amazing:
For about ten minutes I thought: this isn’t a “rant”. It’s a calmly but firmly made argument. But then, the argument having been made, it suddenly turns into the fucking rantiest fucking rant fucking ever.
I have long been hoping – really fucking hoping – that Trump doesn’t just defeat Biden, but absolutely fucking crushes him and everything he fucking stands for and is standing next to, by the proverbial fucking landslide.
It is my clear understanding that this Scott Adams rant makes this distinctly more fucking likely. I mean, everyone’s going to want to fucking see this. Fucking everyone.
The “Mainstream Media” of the USA have not been the actual mainstream media for nearly two decades now, ever since the Internet got into its stride. This piece of fucking video fucking is going to prove that more fucking completely than anything else I have ever fucking seen.
I mean, quite aside from anything else, the old ex- “Mainstream Media” would never have fucking allowed anyone to fucking say “fucking” so many fucking times, without pulling the fucking plug on him. But now fucking Scott Adams can fucking do it. And I can sit, on the other side of a fucking great ocean, and I can fucking do it in this little fucking blog posting. And nobody is going to fucking stop either of us from fucking doing it.
Roll on that fucking landslide.
Whatever that is.
Busy day ahead. That to-do list (see previous posting) is already demanding that I go off and do various things, which leaves little time for blogging now.
So, quota photo time, and it’s very strange:
I already like the building, but I tried internet searching about this Croydon Spaceport stuff, and am not much the wiser. Basically, I can’t tell how serious they’re being. Are they promoting Croydon, which is a place I’ve always loved? Or space exploration, which I also strongly favour? Either way I’m for it, but am still a bit baffled.
No time to do much linking now, but may add some links later.
LATER: I am none the wiser.
Don’t have anything funny or informative to say but have to post something because I’ve told my loved ones that if I don’t post for 24 hours it means I’m in danger or dead.
And as a result of having to tweet something, while not having anything funny or informative to say, he nevertheless said something funny and informative, about the relationship between himself and his loved ones.
There is a lot more to social media than just screaming abuse at political enemies.
I got to this ten minute video lecture by Ivor Cummins via a Facebook posting by David Ramsay Steele. Steele had earlier written a piece which I half noticed a few days ago, as a result of someone mentioning it on my Twitter feed and me happening to be paying attention to Twitter at that moment. I have just now got back to that piece by Steele.
Steele argues that respiratory epidemics like Covid-19 cannot be stopped, and probably not even slowed much in their spread. The point is to get herd immunity (which Cummins calls, rather poetically, “community immunity”), and meanwhile to protect the vulnerable as best we can. (I seem to recall this being argued right at the beginning of all this, in Britain.)
Steele also links to and agrees with this blog posting by J.B.Handley.
Me going into further details is pointless. Follow the above links if you are interested.
I believe that the way to find out the truth about anything is to have a huge argument about it. Roughly speaking, the truth consists of a “model” which most closely describes reality. Eventually, the most accurate model wins. Not all “models” are wrong. But most models are wrong.
If I had to place a bet on which Covid-19 model will win, that is to say: be acknowledged more widely than any other model as the truth of things, then I would now bet on this Cummins/Handley/Steele model.
There is just one detail of this argument I will pick out. Trump and Trumpists have been saying that if the Chinese government had told everyone faster then the worldwide spread of Covid-19 could, perhaps or even definitely, have been confined to China. This is, says Steele, “hogwash”. I mention this merely because I have been a Trumpist about this, but will now have to find some other way to denounce the Chinese government for its handling of matters Covidic. Shouldn’t be hard.
LATER: Following.
My go-to guy for creature postings, which I like to do on Friday, is Steve Stewart-Williams, and he has recently tweeted about plenty of impressive creaturely behaviour. There’s this shark, jumping out of the sea. There’s this butterfly pretending to be leaves. There are fishes doing social distancing. There are lions and hyenas having a dust up, although the interesting thing to me about this is how little actual damage they seem to be doing to each other. There are donkeys, one of them a bit cleverer. And much else besides of a creature-related sort.
But honestly, the recent SS-W tweet that I want to pick out is the one with this graphic, which identifies one of the most important moments in all of human history:
If that graph, or another like it, is not entirely familiar to you, then it damn well should be. It pinpoints the moment when our own species started seriously looking after its own creature comforts. This was, you might say, the moment when most of us stopped being treated little better than farm animals, and we began turning ourselves into each others’ pets.
Patrick Crozier and I will be speaking about this amazing moment in the history of the human animal in our next recorded conversation. That will, if the conversation happens as we hope and the recording works as we hope, find its way to here.