Notices by The Dread Slender Gnome (gnomeshatecheese@spinster.xyz), page 5

@taylan They certainly do. Hence I was hoping you might've come across something novel to me.

This sounds like a very messy case, and as someone in a comment section pointed out, multiple things can be true at once.
I rather suspect we may never get a proper clear answer to this, unless the perpetrator makes a clear, public statement (where "clear" might also include "clear nutcase").

multiple prominent ex-Muslim activists have pointed out that the attacker was likely to be faking his anti-Islam stance. He was privately harassing and threatening them.

Is there new definitive info on this conclusion?

I have heard he was being abrasive and even aggressive towards ex-muslims, but is there something to show he was faking being anti-islam, rather than actually being anti-islam, but also a nutcase lashing out at anyone he came in contact with?

@taylan @gleick Ah, shame.

It would be really useful knowledge, or at least very interesting.

My personal gut feeling is that the Finnish Wikipedia isn't as politicised as the English one, but I'm not sure. I don't really read Wikipedia much, and where I do, it's almost universally non-political topics.
Maybe I should do a review, just not sure where to start. And don't really want to, to be honest.

As soon as politics touches upon a topic, forget about impartial information on Wikipedia, because there is a serious risk that you will be presented with high-quality, convincing propaganda. That means: Anything related to history, biographies of people who ever had any kind of political controversy about them (i.e. not only politicians), descriptions of political ideologies and viewpoints, world conflicts, anything related to sociology and psychology... Even parts of IT, like when it comes to the GNU/Linux naming controversy and the like.

I assume you read Wikipedia in multiple languages. If so, in your experience, is the above equally true for all the different language Wikipedias you read, or more for some than others?

@taylan My impression is that the skin on the shins tends to dry out easily in general for some reason, and dry skin is very often itchy skin. I might have no dry skin issues anywhere else, but my shins might still be slightly flaking.

You could try applying some moisturiser before bed and see if it helps after a while. Loads of options out there, from heavy thick ones, to thin watery ones that absorb quickly.

When I lived in Finland, something in that particular town's water dried my skin like mad, and I spent a lot of (unscented) lotion just to keep the itching down.

Extra dose of holiday spirit!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhlWSOQ4cC4

(especially for @taylan )

@KeepTakingTheSoma More in some places than in others.

But the extent to which all academia shares these two structural issues, all of it is vulnerable. Both to just bad ideas, and to genuinely bad actors.

One protective factor I can see, would be to keep the academia solidly grounded in observable reality and connected to actual rationality, as well as upholding academic and intellectual rigour. But that requires will and commitment on the part of the people within academia.

@KeepTakingTheSoma I think that's a different matter.

Idea laundering, as I understand it, is taking advantage of the structural issues I outlined, rather than being the structural issues themselves.

I think a big problem in academia, and a significant reason why it has gone downhill so much ideas wise, is structural.

Or rather, there are two significant structural problems.

One is "success by citation". That is an academic's success is to significant extent measured by their citation index (or similar measures), i.e. by how many people refer to their work. The citation index however doesn't differentiate based on the content of the citation, so even if lots of people are citing someone's work only to say it's rubbish, that person still gets a high citation index.

The second issue is that the best and fastest way to make name for oneself in academia (or sciences) is by coming up with a novel, paradigm-shifting idea, or by disproving an old paradigm. This "success through novelty" means that academics are highly incentivised to come up with something, anything new, that goes against established learning, even if it appears nutty. And other academics are incentivised to hitch their wagons to such a novel idea, as they then stand a chance of being part of the early adopter crowd reaping the secondary rewards of being part of the trailblazing crowd.

Note though, that such a novel idea can not be something that can be easily debunked. This is easier in fields which are more analysis than measurement, but it's not impossible in hard sciences either. One just has to be more clever about it.

In short: a significant method to achieve academic success is to say something a lot of people will talk about, which goes against previous wisdom, and can't be easily debunked. This means the aspiring academic either has to massage the studies, or just abandon any pretence that they're attempting to find things out about an external reality.

When one puts together success by citation and success through novelty, and removes any ties the system may have had to common sense and observable reality, the results are a system which rewards and feeds novel, outlandish ideas, such as queer theory.

And once a particular academic's career has been made through a particular novel theory, no matter how batshit divorced from reality it is, you can be sure that academic will keep pushing that idea as long as they want to keep their career going. Thus giving surprising longevity to these outlandish ideas, which initially were little more than an attempt to find an attention-grabbing niche.

@HebrideanHecate Well, I definitely didn't have "labour government takes money away from charities" on my bingo card.

Actually, I'm just sitting here thinking the Labour are now fully a real-time political satire.

@Flick @FeartnTired @HebrideanHecate That sounds very similar to what the social democrats have been doing in Finland when in power.

Cut here, increase taxes there. Essentially continue the same policies as the rightist governments, just different amounts at different places.

I still find it funny that Labout increases taxes on charities.
Just the way it sounds is like out of a political satire.

The word (=rumour) now is that the attacker is a radical anti-islamist atheist, who decided to ram his car into a Christmas market because he opposed the spread of islamism in Germany.
The official sources appear very tight-lipped, as per usual.

I'm not saying this isn't possible.
I'm saying that if this is true, it's the most unhinged terrorist act I've heard of in a long time.

Not because of the act itself is more or less hinged, but the motive + target combination is just... nonsensical.

What can I say. "Atheist ex-muslim attacks a christmas market" certainly wasn't on my bingo card.

RT: https://hell.twtr.plus/objects/aae7aa12-b766-4944-9cc9-6569ca94db24

@KeepTakingTheSoma @RadicalCartoons I was just thinking about something like that.
I think it wasn't long ago that someone there said being into sport and fitness means you're more likely to be "right-wing".

So what are we to make of this?
If you want to be proper proggo, don't do sport, and don't shower too much. Certainly don't use deodorant, that one's just a capitalist scheme to steal your hard-earned money.

A thought.

"Culture is not a costume."

Ehm... no. It specifically IS a costume. It's a thing one puts on in order to signal allegiance or belonging to a group. Cultural artefacts and practices are, by definition, essentially costumes, because nobody is born with them.

"Culture is not a costume" is merely another thought-terminating cliche.

I wanted to watch this video on what happened in Iceland with the gender nonsense, but Google has in its infinite wisdom decided the content "may not be appropriate for all ages" and I have to thus sign in and confirm my age.

I am not giving Google my age. They already have more than enough data on me. I guess I'll just have to wait and see if the age restriction gets removed, because I have no idea how to get around this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGKBmtZUIJk

@ninapaley Oh you're just bitter because you've turned your back on the true satisfaction in life and now live an empty existence void of any legacy or impact.

/s in case that wasn't obvious.

@ninapaley Ah, so sadly no space for out-ruthlessnessing him.

There is the "in the end, they will all die alone and will be nothing but dust scattered in the wind", but that packs less of a punch when the discussion goes that way around.

Although... now that I think of it.
There's always the "oh, how very sad you feel that way about yourself". You know, channeling the passive-aggressive, covertly superior, middle-aged woman.
I mean, it probably won't make him stop, but it might be a fun card to pull.

@ninapaley Well, depending on how ruthless you're feeling, you could always respond with "in the end, we all die alone".

Suggestions needed.

If you opened a bottle of sherry, only to find it not to taste that nice, and resolved to use it for cooking instaead, what would you do with it?

Generic suggestion accepted as well, no need for specific recipes.

@GrumpyOldNurse @KeepTakingTheSoma @sim @polarisera Very true.
Of course, that doesn't mean we stop all medical interactions.

I'm also reminded of the crack-down on opiates in a lot of places, to where people are actively denied pain medication, or at the very least aren't given any without a prolonged wrangling.
I get that opiate addiction is a problem, but then in my opinion, so is forcing people to endure avoidable pain. A line has to be drawn somewhere, of course, but the big question is where.