Notices by The Sleight Doctor 🃏🍉 (apostateenglishman@mastodon.world)

@oli @alice Honestly Olifant, it's rained here like, once in two months, and even that was the least British-looking rain ever. It wasn't even trying to be proper rain. In the international rain tournament, England came last.

Half the fucking country is officially in drought. I'll take the boob wash. 🤷🏻♂️

@AnarchoNinaWrites I keep saying it, and I keep urging Americans to vote in those midterms too. Not because I think it'll make a difference, but because it's only when civil society is proven to be broken that they'll finally realise all this "vote harder! Impeach! Lawfare! Write to your Senator! Dress as a frog!" bullshit is obsolete in the USA.

The liberal, quasi-religious faith in a system that never worked in the first place needs to be shattered before revolutionary change is possible. 🤷🏻♂️

He's a ghoul.

"We don’t think Musk intends claims like these to be debated on an empirical level...Musk is communicating in subterranean tropes that his far-right global audience will instantly find intelligible: he’s advancing the generalized sentiment that due to DOGE cuts, nobody died for whom we need to feel any passing responsibility. Nobody died who’s worthy of our concern.

...Musk’s rhetoric has grown ominously more oriented around the idea of global race war."

https://newrepublic.com/article/213533/elon-musk-economist-interview-doge-cuts-killed-zero-children

We can't let this "party" of crooks take power.

"Police are investigating payments to Reform UK by a company controlled by the party's deputy leader, Richard Tice...

Britain Means Business gave the party two donations of £250,000 in the run-up to the 2024 general election, when Tice was party chairman.

Tice has said the money was given to his firm by Fiona Cottrell, a significant donor to Reform UK and mother of a convicted fraudster with close links to Nigel Farage."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yv4r5g55do

Not sure why I'm only just discovering this valuable resource (probably because we and affiliate orgs produce our own, similar leaflets and fact sheets!), but it's worth sharing here.

The North East Migration Partnership, in collaboration with Police and Crime Commissioners, produced a 'Migrant Myth Busters’ Leaflet last year.

With some context around it, it does a good job of showing how foreigners are being scapegoated for the consequences of neoliberal ideology.

https://northumbria-pcc.gov.uk/new-migrant-myth-busters-leaflet-launched-to-tackle-misinformation-and-rising-hate-crime/

Next time someone from a hot country mocks Europeans for struggling with the unusual heat, ask if the thousands of dead were imagining it.

"The heatwave that affected England and Wales in June killed about 440 people a day during its three-day peak, scientists have estimated...

The data starkly illustrates the danger of extreme heat...supercharged by the climate crisis. More than 40% of the people affected would not have died without...human-caused global heating..."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/13/june-heatwave-killed-440-people-a-day-england-wales-data-suggests-climate-crisis

@osma The Republicans are trying to control what's taught in classrooms and universities, what books are on library shelves, what it's permissible to say out loud without being subjected to vicious smear campaigns, even how folks can self-identify themselves. They're trying to micromanage every aspect of public life. The term for that is totalitarianism.

"Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state", as Mussolini put it.

This is fascism, not communism. 🤷🏻♂️

@aral @FSonder I thought you were just being today's Most Annoying Person on the Fedi, there, until I realised you were making a point about accessibility. 😆

@theeclecticdyslexic @thomasfuchs True, there's no equivalent of an evolutionary "pruning" process to weed out falsehood or mediocrity, the way natural selection does with maladaptive genes. Both will only accumulate and spread over time and poison future iterations. A chicken quickly dies if you feed it only its own eggs, with no external source of nourishment. Increasingly, LLMs are also consuming their own outputs as their slop proliferates across the internet.

Model collapse is inevitable.

@AimeeMaroux @thomasfuchs No, only that babies learn language so fast because they have a genetic head start. LLMs have to hoover up everything to build a statistical model of a language that a baby already has built-in - at least, to a large enough extent for linguists to discern grammatical commonalities and deep structure that's shared by all human languages.

@thomasfuchs Specific languages are never genetically inherited; that wasn't the point. It's the underlying 👉🏼biological machinery👈🏼 for processing and learning any humanly comprehensible language - yes, with equal ease and speed - that's encoded into our genes.

All human languages share common grammatical features and "deep structure" because our brains are hardwired for human language.

@thomasfuchs But a baby does inherit the genetic "memory" of humankind, giving their brains complex innate neural structures adapted for language. The baby learned so fast because much of that learning had already been done by countless generations of ancestors. 🤷🏻♂️

How the "most moral army" behaved in the first Nakba of 1948.

"In general, the rule was to shoot “every 10th man” [a Roman military punishment known as decimation]
in a captured village where outsiders were found.

...while there was an order to raze villages, in some cases, that was not enough..when it came to Arab a-Zabah, a Bedouin community in the Lower Galilee, not a soul or a trace was to remain. “Every Arab among the Zabahim is to be killed,” the order stated."

https://israelpalestinenews.org/what-israel-army-did-in-1948/

Every small victory counts!

"Leaders of the nationalist group Raise the Colours have agreed to stop hoisting England flags on lamp-posts in Oxfordshire after the local authority secured a high court injunction against the campaign.

Ryan Bridge, Ben Cullen and Trudy Wells told the high court on Tuesday they would not raise St George’s flags from Oxfordshire county council property, encourage others to do so or impede council workers from taking them down."

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/23/nationalist-group-stop-hoisting-st-george-flags-oxfordshire-court-injunction

@aral I heard that if you stop monitoring it, then it won't exist anymore.

@RickiTarr I wasn't raised in a religious family, but my best mate and I refused to sing hymns in school, a culturally diverse state comprehensive. This eventually led to us being hauled before the deputy head mistress and chided for our "disrespect".

I said I couldn't see the sense in forcing non-Christians to sing hymns - especially those of other faiths such as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, etc. My pal's mum later wrote an official letter of complaint.

We were allowed not to sing after that. 🤷🏻♂️

It's illegal in the UK to use threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior that stir up hatred or are intended to cause harassment, alarm or distress based on race, religion or other protected characteristics. Why then are such fascists as Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson and Danny Tommo allowed to openly stir up race riots? Not much would have happened this week were it not for these public figures weighing in and urging followers to action.

There are 👉🏼existing👈🏼 laws for this type of shit.

@Pikestreet @conchoid @Danpiker Nor me. I have a collection of optical illusions that do fool me though!

Lemme find them...

@Pikestreet @conchoid @Danpiker

This is a good one.

☝🏼This is also why Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is about as realistic as Musk building a permanent colony on Mars, which even he now admits isn't going to happen (he's switched to the moon, which also isn't going to happen as he can barely get a rocket out of Earth's atmosphere).

None of these things are ever going to become realities. Both of them are scams to extract from gullible investors with more money than sense.

These tech bros are just very successful confidence tricksters.