A wilding

Patel should have been sacked multiple times, and should possibly be in jail for corruption. But I certainly would not be cheering any such suggestion as you mention, and would consider it in bad taste at the very least. Nor have I ever noticed such a suggestion being made. Of course I may well move in sheltered circles (and probably do). However I am well aware of the attacks on, for example, Megan Markle which, as per my previous post, may well be something do do with some of them having been of the front page of popular newspapers.

I wouldn't personally make a comment like BFC just did. But there is a subtle difference between a random person saying something on the internet and a public figure broadcasting it to their millions of viewers/readers/followers. Though you should definitely feel free to unplatform/cancel/ignore BFC if you wish.

Yes I read it and posted a brief comment on it: That said, I am going to give a copy as a Christmas present to a relative who likes their books dark. I will see what he thinks.

Not to mention entire fake burning towns to confuse Geman night bombing. Which even, at one point, had their own anti aircraft defences, until it was discovered that this discouraged the Germans from attacking them.

That does sum it up! I agree with your conclusions. And while as a British person I didn't want to make a point of it, of course the apparent implication in the book that all British opposition to slavery was purely on economic grounds is not true. I have now read The Poppy War. I thought it shallow in places and a bit rough round the edges, but again very powerfully written. However it is dark, and just gets darker. One of those books that make you wonder a bit about the author, though in this case they might be just getting catharsis after immersion in 20th century Chinese history. Though I understand that the sequels are even worse, I don't intend to read them.

I am now going to be starting on the Poppy War soon, so I can report my impressions of that. On the inarticulacy thing, I think it is probably just the American/English cultural divide. The old stereotype where the English think Americans incontinently express private emotions too much, and do so largely for effect rather than genuinely feeling them, while the Americans consider the English to be unemotional and repressed.

According to the NYT, he appears to be making the numbers up. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-speech.html

I was just checking and you are right. The bystander, one Mandu Reid, merely agreed that the transcript matched her recollection, and it had been racist and offensive. She was also quoted to this effect by the BBC. Edit and an interesting take from Mandu Reid here: basically she did not want Lady Hussey to resign, she would prefer some institutional change, rather than just sacrificing a scapegoat who was only a symptom of the problem. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/01/lady-hussey-resign-monarchy-race-remarks-institution

I think that the transcript comes via a (horrified) bystander, rather than directly from Fulani herself?

Been reading the latest book by R F Kuang (author of The Poppy War): Babel, or the Necessity of Violence. This is about the most autobiographic fantasy I have ever read. The author was obviously a driven first class linguistics student at Oxford with a serious love/hate attitude towards privileged Oxford academic life. They also appear to have faced racism, sexism and class snobbery (last time I noticed Oxford was indeed still infested with Boris Johnson's spiritual kin). And they apparently decided that most English are inarticulate, repressed, and unable to express their personal feelings. All this is in the book, transposed to an alternative 19th century and dialled up to the max. (Ritual public humiliation of students who fail their exams!) It is also an evisceration of British colonialism. The characterisation and evocation of a milieu are impressive and hooked me in, but the plot was a little weak. It is all powerfully written but felt like a polemic to me - I started skimming towards the end of the book. So mixed good and bad, but I would recommend it as worth a try.

My guess: by the time the EU gets around to it (or alternatively to hit Twitter with a heavy fine), there won't be a Twitter left to ban, or at least not a Twitter with any significant presence in the EU. But if it had happened last month, they would have lost a significant number of users and advertising revenue.

Or perhaps it is just about him staying an MP to maximise opportunities to stroke his ego and for grifting. But his majority is not that large, so with luck he will get the rude shock of being voted out.

UK police are going to text 70000 victims of fraud and ask them to take some action to protect themselves that will be specified in the text. Apparently people will know that the texts are genuine because they will all be sent tomorrow and they will contain links to the Action Fraud website. I understand that they are communicating in this way because in many cases all they have is the phone numbers of the victims, but they really have not thought it through have they? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-63736573

Use a pen, or the end of a key, or something similar to enter the PIN.

Oddly, today's round up of the newspaper front pages on the BBC website has silently omitted The Guardian. It is almost as if the BBC is scared of upsetting the government ... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-63738691

Corrupt Eurosceptic Brexiteer ex MP, on the record for demanding that the UK scrap its adherence to European Human Rights legislation, is suing the UK government in the European Court of Human Rights for "damaging his good reputation", by not scrapping the Standards Commission when they caught him out in his corruption and recommended his suspension as an MP. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63714944 Epic trolling!

Just read Ian McDonald's Luna trilogy, Luna: New Moon, Luna Wolf Moon, and Luna: Moon Rising. As many have said, the strapline for this is "an SF ASoIaF set on the moon". Though there is something of The Godfather in there too. But there are also some interesting sidelights giving depth, for example Luna sports (mostly co-operative), Luna sexual mores, the technologies (never described in detail, but obviously carefully thought through by the author), and a form of lycanthropy driven by the phases of the Earth. And the books do a good job of hammering home just how hostile the Luna environment is, with a frequent refrain of it having "a thousand ways to kill you". Ultimately though I was not able to really believe in the society depicted, nor in some aspects of the plot, and the last book felt somewhat weaker, with the story rather petering out. But nonetheless these were page turners, and I enjoyed reading them.

Though blaming her for them going too fast with their economic "policies" is a bit rich when his response at the time to widespread pushback was an in your face "there is more to come" - as even the BBC points out.

If I was a betting man then I would bet that the programmer was told by a corner cutting manager "of course we will have someone manually checking every promotion!" In fact there may well have been such a step in the process, only someone subsequently turned it off or removed it.

The first SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch since 2019 is due to happen in about 30 minutes time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY628jRd6gM

Though Braverman did lose her job immediately after the security breach came to light, which seems more than a coincidence! To me it feels more like she tried to spin being sacked for the security breach into a principled resignation over a policy disagreement. But I suppose if, since Johnson, breaching security is no longer a sacking offence, merely something that provides an way of sacking you if you are not wanted, that is still better then nothing. It provides at least some incentive for them to behave themselves. Though I personally think that the likes of Braverman genuinely seem to think that the rules do not apply to them and they can do whatever they want.

Me too. Cate Blanchett could have put it across perfectly well with some much subtler special effects. or possibly even none at all.

Yes, I agree with this. I was trying to make the point that she would genuinely be able to use the Ring, unlike, for example, Sam when he is tempted by it much later.

Personally I would not say that Galadriel is laughing at the very idea that the Ring would tempt her. And I think Frodo knows already it would be wrong for anyone to try to use it. I think that she is laughing because, while she had long thought that events would conspire to tempt her by bringing the ring within her grasp, she had not foreseen that last refinement - that Frodo would offer it to her freely. While at the same time she sees the fairness of his doing so, given she had herself earlier "tested Frodo's heart" as I think she puts it. But I do agree with @fionwe1987 that the test she faces is not so much to resist the corrupting power of the ring, in the way that various other characters need to. As with Gandalf, hers is a more rational test. She knows that she could master the Ring and then use it to save Lorien, which otherwise, as she explains to Frodo, is doomed, whatever the result of the War of the Ring.

That wouldn't be my take. Galadriel says that she had pondered for many years what she would do if the ring ever came within her grasp. I think that she had known for a long time that she was very likely to be exposed to the (enormous) temptation of taking and using it. So it was not really quick at all. The only thing that seemed to surprise her in any way was Frodo's offer to give it to her freely. Though she may have been taken aback at just how strong the temptation was when it came to the point. Certainly that seemed to be the take of the Peter Jackson films.