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

Dear Americans. A legit British English word which entered English from French in the 15th century, is "trumpery".

Meaning something that looks flashy or attractive but is actually cheap, fake or without value. Applied to speech it's almost synonymous with the USian "trash talk".

Also, long before Donnie came along, in British slang to trump meant to fart.

I would love for y'all to co-opt these words because there is plausible deniability: they're already in the dictionaries!

You're welcome.

@sundogplanets I'm a particular fan of Hajime Narukawa's AuthaGraph projection, which divides the globe into 96 equal triangles, maps them onto a tetrahedron then unfolds them into a rectangle!

As you might imagine, it looks bizarre when you're used to the Mercator, but it does preserve the true size ratios between land and water far better than most other projections.

I'm unconvinced that Google "capitulated" or is "bootlicking" the Trump regime. I think they just love American fascism and enthusiastically went along with its disruptive project. I can imagine Sundar Pichai thinking it would be hilarious to arbitrarily rename a gulf and lake. The entire Silicon Valley broligarchy are actively trying to dismantle democracy everywhere and violate any and all legal and social norms.

They'll already be itching for an excuse to rename historic landmarks elsewhere.

@ramsey @Natasha_Jay @blogdiva It's often made me chuckle imagining how many of the perplexing archeological finds that remain so mysterious, were actually just exercises in ancient whimsy of one form or another.

I mean, how many artifacts produced today are pretty much random cultural in-jokes that are never going to make sense to anyone 2,000 years from now...if humanity even survives that long?

The assumption that no-one in ancient times had a sense of humour seems shaky, to me. 🤔

I've just read that Dolly Parton, in addition to the 3000-odd songs she wrote that we know about, also has a whole unreleased back catalogue of material she intended to be released posthumously to keep her estate funded, so her philanthropic work could continue after her death.

It's often said that James Brown was the hardest working man in the music industry. Well, I think Dolly must have been the hardest working woman.

Everyone reading this will be dead when Dolly stops releasing new music!

If you have progressive views and are involved in protest, or indeed any other form of political organising, this means you. 🫵🏼

"The UK quietly sent one of its most senior security officials to a Trump administration summit which...proposed a new global counter-terrorism doctrine targeting expansively defined left-wing “political terrorism,” urging allied governments to coordinate intelligence, law enforcement and financial powers against the emergent left-wing threat."

https://bylinetimes.com/2026/08/28/uk-sent-top-security-chief-to-trumps-left-wing-crackdown-summit/

@skinnylatte Do you think this may explain your love of food? I mean, has taste become your primary sensory modality?

Apropos of nothing that involves electric shock-inducing gloves worn by lawless fascists - and contrary to popular myth - water on its own isn't particularly conductive unless you add substances that will create ions, such as soluble salts. Ordinary table salt added to hot water to create an aqueous solution will probably do it.

Stay safe out there, fedi friends. 🥰

@gwynnion MLK Jnr. was right about the "white moderate" in the context of structural racism, but his words have wider applicability: pick your progressive cause, and they always regard the reformers as a greater threat than the reactionaries. Every time. If the function of a system is what it does, then the USA's two-party system only exists to prop up the power of capital - and most "liberals" willingly perform the task of enabling the most right-wing forces rather than opposing them.

@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.