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Meanwhile I'm using the AI to shitpost with my RP group:

But I'm sure if anything can be said about the British press, it's how fairly they treat people who have undertaken (and won) legal action against them for libel in the past. 

The quote was taken out of context by the British press, as part of their ongoing crusade against Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

C'mon now, you don't really believe the Times, Sun, Mail and Telegraph give a single fuck about Muslim lives and wouldn't be cheering on this distorted account in any other circumstance, do you?

A true Scientologist would simply be able to redirect matter to avoid catching Covid.

Report them to the nearest OSA official.

It then took a month to get my energy levels back to approaching normal. I am fairly certain it was Covid, despite the test coming back negative.

There are definitely false negatives. I know several people who've recently had a horribly bad cold that totally wasn't covid because an LFT was negative.

My partner and I both got it back in March or April 2020, shortly after it officially came to the UK. There weren't any vaccines or self tests. Masks were in short supply, and it wasn't yet clear if it was a good idea to buy them or to leave them so there'd be enough left for the nurses. I got sent to a hospital and made to wait in a chalk square outside, then someone in head-to-toe PPE asked me some questions and watched my breathing, without any physical contact. It's weird to remember it being taken that seriously. They said I'd probably had it and we should both isolate for a week. I don't remember much from that week except being absolutely fucking knackered. I'm also pretty sure it made me less mentally sharp for months. No fun.

We're both up to three or four jabs now, I've lost count.

Yeah, I'm fairly convinced that I'm in the 8% (I think it was 92% accurate) that got a false answer back. I've had flu before and it didn't feel like that, with the recovery. Usually with that, once the fever breaks you start to feel much better, quite rapidly (you're still a wreck, but you're an improving wreck). And the long recovery fits Covid too well.

I had what felt like flu for 2 weeks - one of absolute hell, one that was manageable when medicated up to the eyeballs.

It then took a month to get my energy levels back to approaching normal. I am fairly certain it was Covid, despite the test coming back negative.

I mean, most of Tumblr sucks, absolutely. But it's still going to be an easier entry to the fediverse than Mastodon, since you know exactly what you're getting, exactly how to get it, and you aren't going to be effectively banned for breaking bizarre rules that nowhere else online has that are buried in a rules document that's functionally closer to a ToS in size and impenetrability than a list of rules.

True.

But imagine how fucking annoying the combination of fandom and Mastadon will be.

Mastodon is also very white, vaguely utopian, and extremely averse to anything remotely confrontational or controversial. Example: you have to content-warn photos of food. Selfies with eye contact. Anything to do with protests or activism.

It's unusable for most purposes, there's a barrier to entry, and Tumblr is going to be federating with it in the near future -- so, soon, there won't even be a point. Just make a Tumblr and avoid the limitations and bizarre social requirements.

I'm sure that joining up with the people who brought us this will not be a strange and highly toxic brew:

Mastadon is weird and very prone to groupthink IMO.

That's great if you want a small server to like, chat shit with people like on PD and FB. Something cosy and semi-private or based on specific niche interests works great. If you want to follow a wide variety of weird shitposters and activivists, academics and journalists it is less useful.

The Sunak thing is utterly insane and I can only imagine he's saying it with no intent to follow through because...I mean, imagine triggering a constitutional crisis to appease fucking TERFs.

In the short term, I believe the Central Russian Bank will recover and reorientate from the shock. The move came as a surprise - both the timing and that it happened at all - and so they're scrambling to recover, obviously hampered by the existing sanction regime narrowing their options. But the current run is mostly a consequence of that shock.

Longer term, the damage is done, it's just not equally distributed. EU price caps and bans on Russian oil sales, capital flight and sourcing for parts will hit harder once winter properly settles in and starts breaking things down. Being unable to source replacements, while revenue drains away and international companies refuse to work in the region will hit them hard. I don't think we'll see a dramatic tipping point like the bank run or anything, but the damage it'll do to the average Russian and the Russian military (which is already on its last legs) will almost certainly be more noticeable. Ukraine is already penetrating Russia's air space with drones, so I expect if we see mass defeats in the field, that may cause more panic than anything on the economic front - or pre-empt it.

(as an aside, still impressed with how Biden and NATO have thrashed their biggest regional rival with what is effectively a rounding error on the US military budget, and shown that NATO's combined arms docrine is still very relevant)

Our insane TERF movement actually influences the US one, in an odd case of far-right transatlantic meme trade.

A lot of this stuff was a lot more popular and respectable to say in the UK than it ever has been in the US - though the far-right over there certainly picked it up and figured they could use it as a wedge in which to smuggle in homophobia and the rest. The American and Australian versions of The Guardian actually called out the UK version of The Guardian over it's repeated mainstreaming of transphobia, to little effect.

It's also far more respectable among centrists and supporters of ostensibly left-wing parties here (see: Keir Starmer for example). UK Labour supporters and the like would not be welcome in US liberal-left or Australian left circles at all with their views. A lot of ours try to play off that they're left-leaning centrists, despite allying with the religious right and self-stated Nazis on numerous occasions (also see the LGB Alliance on that point).

Most notably, the UK public opinion remains broadly supportive of trans people and transgender rights being expanded, but the papers have run a culture war on these issues from around 2019 onwards, with some publications running 300+ articles a year on the topic (none of which are penned by trans people, naturally). Hmm, what else happened in 2019? It's almost like they're running a culture war to distract from the abysmal state of the UK economy, which is now the weakest in western Europe, or the complete lack of credibility that the current government has.

The new policy has been scrubbed from the Twitter support profile and Twitter policy webpage, btw

As someone on Facebook mentioned, this is the "don't link to any other forums" move every admin of every dying forum tries to pull.

It's a fucking death spiral now. He's banning critical journalists and doing other dumb shit, but it doesn't really matter now.

From what I've seen so far, he's not a complete shitshow.

Only because he hides from critical press and doesn't go out of a way to make a prat out of himself. He was one of Johnson's top cabinet members. This is just Johnsonianism without Johnson. So real problems are getting ignored in favour of asset-stripping and cronyism, and nothing will be done about any real issue ever.

Most MPs have already given up. They know the next general election is going to be a slaughter, so they're stealing office supplies and putting in sick days.