Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by pickwick

Michael McDonald @electproject.bsky.social · 4h

A reason why we got here is that the media stopped reporting facts and replaced reporting with making everything a reality tv show where contestants fight one another. It turned lying from a liability into an advantage since it would no longer be punished

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 37m

Continuing my occasional series of Panavision views with a black cat hiding just off to the side.

A line Pylons lining up with the sunset. A sky of orange, pink and purple. The nearest pylon stands in tall grass, and off to the side, paying no heed to either the electric giants or the vanishing sun, is the distinctive shape of a black cat. It is watching the night approaching.

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pickwick @pickwick.bsky.social · 19m

Also the amount of injury time is getting stupid

pickwick @pickwick.bsky.social · 19m

Football these days - super dull, and if anything exciting dares to happen, everything stops for five mins so they can double-check it wasn't a mistake

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pickwick @pickwick.bsky.social · 21m

Checking the football score occasionally and the whole thing just sounds like a terrible experience now. Combination of VAR and late stage capitalism I guess

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pickwick @pickwick.bsky.social · 59m

Sun pillar ☀️

pickwick @pickwick.bsky.social · 2h

Went on twitter and immediately saw someone complaining that @johnswinney.bsky.social "doesn't know what a woman is" despite all the pandering to transphobes - this is why everyone should be more like @zackpolanski.bsky.social

The correct answer to "Can a woman have a penis?" is "Yes"

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flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 4h

*John Swinney* is a dangerous radical spitting on the public’s grief, now. I think the lads just cannot stop clowning, ever, for the same reason why Peter and Wendy had to keep thinking happy thoughts about chocolate and Christmas: the moment they stop, they fall out of the sky.

Laura Kuenssberg • @bbclaurak • 1h @ ...
We asked the First Minister if he wanted to apologise over this, after upset from the organisers of a vigil to mark the Manchester synagogue attack bbc.co.uk/news/articles/...
JBG
NEWS
BBC Politics
@BBCPolitics 2h
"People would accuse me of being a hypocrite if I hadn't set out my view about how peace could be achieved"
Scottish FM John Swinney defends raising recognition of a Palestinian state at a vigil for those killed in the Manchester attack

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Farrukh @implausibleblog.bsky.social · 3h

BBC News explain that because of Brexit, Brits will be photographed and have their fingerprints taken when going into the EU, as the UK now is a third country

BBC News forget to explain that the UK helped create these rules when we were part of the EU because we wanted stronger border control

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the babahuck @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · 4h

In 2004, Parisian police were conducting a training exercise in the french catacombs and found, after moving past a desk and a tape playing audio of snarling dogs, a fully functional movie theater and bar. When they returned 3 days later, the equipment was gone, with a note: “Do not try to find us.”

Members of the force's sports squad, responsible
- among other tasks - for policing the 170 miles of tunnels, caves, galleries and catacombs that underlie large parts of Paris, stumbled on the complex while on a training exercise beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.
After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: Building site, No access.
Behind that, a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, "clearly designed to frighten people off," the spokesman said.
Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".

There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.
A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.
"The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."
Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."

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A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social · 2d

I've noticed the opposing team's fans only cheer when the opponents score on us. To win those fans over, I recommend we score on ourselves repeatedly; that will surely make them so happy they'll start supporting us. And I'm sure all our fans will keep cheering for us—who else is there to cheer for?

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pickwick @pickwick.bsky.social · 2h

No, no worries!

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So Mayer @suchmayer.bsky.social · 4h

This is another form of censorship and book banning to my mind: you force an ersatz simplification on young readers while making the original harder & harder to obtain, then tell them the ersatz is better than the real thing (bc it is programmed propaganda pablum).

Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 5h

No, resurrecting the corpse of Anne Frank so 12-year-olds can gossip with her is not how you “make history come alive.” It’s how you destroy history so that someone can come in, rewrite it, and then author a future to their liking.

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𝔐𝔞𝔤𝔫𝔢𝔱𝔰 🧲 @magnets.bsky.social · 3h

one thing i will never forget and forever be sickened by was that the leader of the SNP's, the First Minister's, in-laws were literally being bombed in an active genocide and the press and most of the political establishment just didn't care

The National @scotnational.bsky.social · 4h

Husam Zomlot thanked the people of Scotland in a rousing speech to SNP conference

🗣️ 'The Palestinian people will never forget the support of the people of Scotland when we needed it most'

Husam Zomlot thanks people of Scotland in rousing speech to SNP conference

www.thenational.scot

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pickwick @pickwick.bsky.social · 3h

Never convinced by "SNP should focus less on independence" arguments whenever they so much as mention the raison d'etre of their party, sprry

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Julia Serano @juliaserano.bsky.social · 1d

apparently the new Netflix show Monster: The Ed Gein Story invented an "autogynephilia" backstory for their serial killer (because of course they did!). so time to re-up my collection of writings on this pseudoscientific zombie theory...
juliaserano.medium.com/autogynephil...

Autogynephilia, Junk Science, and Pseudoscience

plus links to my academic articles, online essays, and explainers on the topic

juliaserano.medium.com

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Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 6h

thiel, man, what the fuck are you talking about

He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.

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pickwick @pickwick.bsky.social · 5h

He's handing weapons to them on a plate. Now unless the conditions are identical to 2011, the unionists will be like "sorry, can't give you a referendum, precedent ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ like you said"

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pickwick @pickwick.bsky.social · 5h

Swinney's insistence that only an SNP majority (rather than a pro-indy majority) gives Scotland the right to a referendum is extremely irritating and his latest stuff about "if we get an SNP majority we get a referendum because precedent" is extremely fucking stupid

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pickwick @pickwick.bsky.social · 5h

I saw Halloween tinsel today and it's broken my brain a bit

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pickwick @pickwick.bsky.social · 5h

Daily Mail readers watch Les Miserables to cheer on Javert

Hanniba-LINA Lecter 💀 @agirlcalledlina.bsky.social · 23h

He’s right

Shoplifting is justified for Brits living in poverty, says Green Party's new hard-left leader Zack Polanski - and he says he would do it himself if he was poor

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Fergus Murray @fergus.oolong.co.uk · 6h

'Antifa, which is to say anti-fascists: not an organisation, but a term for everybody who is opposed to fascism'

pickwick @pickwick.bsky.social · 6h

Journos need to always challenge the right-wing framing of "antifa" being a specific organisation that can be banned or restricted. Just straight up be like "but that's nonsense, it doesn't exist" every time

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pickwick @pickwick.bsky.social · 6h

Yes, gloss it every time just to show how stupid it is!

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pickwick @pickwick.bsky.social · 6h

(journos are not going to do this)

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pickwick @pickwick.bsky.social · 6h

Journos need to always challenge the right-wing framing of "antifa" being a specific organisation that can be banned or restricted. Just straight up be like "but that's nonsense, it doesn't exist" every time

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