Also in the news

[RoboFox]

Musk gets his next big purchase idea

 

"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning society, thus, the Politics thread won't be locked when it gets a little bit tasty in there

 

...I think the Safehouse Thread is a bit cringe though so I'm going to bin that off" 

 

 

 

Edited 26 April 2022 by RoboFox

[Zear0]

10 minutes ago, RoboFox said:

Musk gets his next big purchase idea

 

"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning society, thus, the Politics thread won't be locked when it gets a little bit tasty in there

 

...I think the Safehouse Thread is a bit cringe though so I'm going to bin that off" 

 

 

 

Nerd like him would be all over the dark theme.

[Wymsey]

SmugTV for Piers Morgan more like..

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-61221177

[Finnegan]

15 minutes ago, Wymsey said:

SmugTV for Piers Morgan more like..

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-61221177

 

 

[Milo]

23 hours ago, Finnegan said:

 

He's an absolute loon and his cult of personality is ridiculous. He's a silver spoon rich kid who buys up other people's IP to pass himself off as a genius. He's about as "real" as Trump but he's got a similar following that absolutely lap it all up and probably just as fragile an ego. 

 

I see a LOT of parallels in the two of them to be honest. 

His Asperger’s may account for a bit of this, perhaps?

 

And he has a degree in economics and engineering, so I assume he has a little about him, brains-wise. 
 

My understanding is that he will make some of the Twitter algorithms more transparent, the idea being to show who is driving what conversations, and to weed out the bots. 
 

But, yeah, such a powerful platform being in the hands of a bit of an odd-bod could be interesting. 
 

I do like his sci-fi passion, though; Colonise Mars, stop using fossil fuels, explore space, etc. And the fact that he had ‘Don’t Panic’ on the Tesla he sent up into space! 

[ClaphamFox]

I'm not a big fan of Elon Musk, but the sheer extent of the meltdown among pearl-clutching celebrities and activists at his takeover of Twitter is one of the funniest things I've witnessed in a while. Who knows what he'll do with Twitter, but let's face it - he can hardly make it any worse, can he?

Edited 26 April 2022 by ClaphamFox

[Wymsey]

3 hours ago, RoboFox said:

Musk gets his next big purchase idea

 

"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning society, thus, the Politics thread won't be locked when it gets a little bit tasty in there

 

...I think the Safehouse Thread is a bit cringe though so I'm going to bin that off" 

 

 

 

Dare someone to post this on Twitter, to convince the world that this is a real image of Musk using this website - this forum would, potentially, get thousands of new members..

[LCFCCHRIS]

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/technology/article/elon-musk-twitter-changes-authenticate-humans

 

He could be putting a id check on accounts for a verification "blue tick" though. If implemented correctly you may well cut out some of the tw@ts that use it just to threaten violence, which can't be a bad thing.

 

Let's face it Twitter can bearly get any worse. I think many dislike musk for political and or jealousy reasons but it can't be denied he's successful.

Edited 26 April 2022 by LCFCCHRIS

[frakenfox]

Maybe one for 'unpopular opinions you hold' and I admittedly know little about Musk, but I kinda like him! I think he's the kind of person society needs; a bit of an 'out there' thinker, somewhat eccentric maybe and liable to say daft (and no doubt offensive sometimes too) stuff, but they manage to push the boundaries, and alert us to where the boundaries are even. They encourage debate, intentionally or otherwise. And, in Musk's case, push technological development.

[leicsmac]

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-61166339

 

I honestly don't know whether people are just doing this for the clicks and the money and they don't actually believe what they spout...or whether they actually do believe the entire scientific method is corrupt.

 

I'm not sure which is worse. The end product of such viewpoints becoming state policy would be the same, anyway.

[Facecloth]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10766089/amp/Judgement-Day-Boris-Becker-Tennis-ace-faces-jailed-seven-years-TODAY.html

 

Not the Boris I'd like to see behind bars.

[Sampson]

 I know we've already discussed how much whether people feel sorry for him or think he's a ****, but Le Tissier just gets worse and worse every week at the moment it seems.
 

 

Quote

Matt Le Tissier: Government and scientists were interfering in my life
The former Southampton forward on Covid, conspiracy theories and why ‘nice bloke’ Gary Lineker is illiberal

 

As Matt Le Tissier hosts a live chat on social media, questions veer from his predictions for the Europa League to whether the World Health Organisation is infringing on civil liberties. One minute he is talking about his favourite goal; the next about what to believe from the front line in Ukraine.

Quite how this former England footballer came to be a highly contentious oracle on world events, strangers asking his views about lockdowns and health policy, seems a question worth asking — especially given those wider opinions have caused Le Tissier to resign as an ambassador from Southampton, the club where he has long been adored.

Far from making him take a step back, that controversy after retweeting a post which cast doubt over the validity of a massacre in Bucha — he subsequently deleted it — has left him unbowed. He is more determined than ever to carry on sharing his thoughts, including an hour over Zoom when we disagree about almost everything.

 

Le Tissier, 53, says that he does not care what I think, or if he has two followers on Twitter or almost 600,000 as he speaks with evangelical scepticism against masks, lockdowns, mainstream media, the government, Sage scientists, pharmaceutical companies and much more besides. He has talked of a need to “tear down the system”, and he is not about to stop.

“If that means I come in for a bit of criticism and I get labelled by you guys in the media who try to paint me out as some sort of nutter then that’s a price I am willing to pay,” he says.

 

Did we misread him for those years when he seemed more than happy to let his talents do the talking? Was this maverick footballer also a secret campaigner? Did he ever discuss social issues in the dressing room?

“No, never,” he says. “All I did was play my football, have a laugh, spend time with my family.” He cannot remember ever voting in a general election.

There was, though, an independent streak in Le Tissier to be turning down lucrative offers, including one from Glenn Hoddle’s Chelsea. If he was more of a conformist, he might have won a trophy and more than eight caps between 1994 and 1997.

Le Tissier says that he has never minded being a man alone. In one moment of lightness, he talks of being the only Southampton player who did not drink beer. He could not stand the stuff.

 

“I drink Malibu, something that came in for a lot of criticism in a dressing room full of butch, macho footballers,” he says. “‘Fourteen pints of lager and a Malibu and coke please’. You have to be quite a strong character.”

Le Tissier speaks with pride of “not following the crowd” and he has certainly lived true to that code in the time of Covid. In August 2020, he lost his job as a presenter on Sky Sports’ Soccer Saturday though he believes that was more to do with it being “a show with five middle-aged white blokes on it” than his increasingly trenchant views around the pandemic.

“A couple of years ago I felt like something wasn’t right. People were interfering in my life who shouldn’t have been — mainly the government and scientists. I felt a real sense of injustice and when I feel a sense of injustice I can’t keep my mouth shut. I have to speak up.”

Some will agree with him that the scale of lockdowns was unnecessary; and some followed him in declining any Covid-19 jabs.

 

But Le Tissier goes much further. For example, when I put to him that we were all responding at the start of the pandemic to images from Bergamo of hospitals overwhelmed by gasping, dying patients, he replies: “Some of those were actors, by the way.” Really?

According to him, ventilators caused harm to patients; PCR tests were entirely responsible for elevating a flu bug into a pandemic; masks a sign not of precaution but of weak compliance. “If you think otherwise, you haven’t really done your research without wishing to sound rude,” he says. He claims to have read many scientific papers, including those which were “suppressed”.

 

“PCR tests were the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind,” Le Tissier adds. And he is only just getting started.

We end up having a squabble about whether promoting Covid vaccinations should trouble my conscience, and I ask if he is aligned with Novak Djokovic, which is not a comparison he welcomes at all. He says that he wants to “put to bed once and for all” the idea that he is anti-vax. He has been vaccinated all his life but resisted Covid jabs because of a lack of long-term data.

“One thing I object to is that it is always painted as a black and white thing — pro-vax or anti-vax,” he says, believing that too many of the rest of us have succumbed to fear and brainwashing in a world in which contrary voices have been censored.

Perhaps he is right about the need for more plurality of voices but, then, what about his own ability to see all sides rather than to grasp at anything to reinforce a particular narrative?

Even that retweet about Ukraine, which I suggest could seem highly offensive given the evidence mounting against Russian forces, he regrets only in not explaining a wider context. “The point of the tweet was to say ‘don’t believe everything you read in times of war because both sides use propaganda.’ ”

 

But surely he is not disputing that Russians have killed many innocent Ukraine civilians in a brutal invasion? He responds by saying that it is strange, given modern technology, that there is not more footage of fighting.

I suggest that we have seen enough images of destroyed villages, towns, even cities like Mariupol? “Some of those images have been falsified, you know that don’t you?”

 

When I say this is the stuff of far-flung conspiracy theorists, there is a flash of frustration. “If you want to discredit somebody, you just have to say ‘ah, it’s a conspiracy theory’ then you don’t have to actually argue anything. It’s absolute *******.”

Le Tissier says that most people he engages with shake him by the hand and thank him for speaking up for the voiceless. Within football, he insists that there are many who show him support privately but do not want the criticism.

“When things blow up like a couple of weeks ago, I get a lot of support,” he says. “It would be nice if they were public but I understand that. Not everyone has the same mentality as me that can cope with the flak.

“I had it most of my career from you sports journalists who would constantly take pot shots at me for not working hard enough, so it’s water off a duck’s back. If you have had 50,000 people at Old Trafford call you a fat bastard and questioning the size of your nose it really doesn’t affect you too much.”

That said, he does have a bite back at Gary Lineker, whom he accuses of illiberalism. “I find it funny that he goes out of his way to criticise me for having an opinion that’s different to his. I have followed Gary on social media for many years and a lot of the stuff I completely disagree with but I have never attacked him for it. But the other way round . . .

 

“He is meant to be the nice bloke, the woke Gary Lineker, nice and inclusive but he is the one going out of his way trying to dig me out.”

Le Tissier insists that he will not back down. He was on a march in January outside the offices of the BBC against mandatory vaccinations for NHS workers and may attend other rallies.

I tell him it must be exhausting to be scouring the internet so convinced he is being lied to all the time. And what about losing that job at Southampton, for whom he scored 209 goals in 540 appearances? That must have pained him?

“To be honest, it’s no great hardship,” he says. “It wasn’t a great financial thing for me, something that was more of a title, a way of being linked to the club. I am still welcome to go down there.

“So nothing really changes except Southampton don’t get the cancel-culture people ringing in saying ‘you need to sack Matt Le Tissier, his views are harmful to the people’.”

 

[Corky]

As ever, I can't decide whether he believes this shit or he's playing up to an act. Whichever it is, he's ruining his reputation and only has himself to blame.

 

Embarrassment of a man.

[Parafox]

Just now, Corky said:

As ever, I can't decide whether he believes this shit or he's playing up to an act. Whichever it is, he's ruining his reputation and only has himself to blame.

 

Embarrassment of a man.

Reminds me of David Icke.

[Dunge]

18 minutes ago, Sampson said:

 I know we've already discussed how much whether people feel sorry for him or think he's a ****, but Le Tissier just gets worse and worse every week at the moment it seems.
 

 

 

Sad, isn’t it.

He’s clearly only listening to the people who aren’t calling him a fool, which is basically all the conspiracy nuts feeding him more and more nonsense.

[Dahnsouff]

8 minutes ago, Parafox said:

Reminds me of David Icke.

As with Icke, I always wondered if this started out as a coping mechanism for some perceived risk, and was just self perpetuating through not be effectively challenged

[Sampson]

Yeah, you can see how he's convincing himself he's in the right. It's Ukraine stuff that's the most sad. You can kind of see by the way he's avoiding the question that he's trying to convince himself he's right and everyone else is wrong.

 

The bit where he says he was making a general point about people following the media with the post he shared rather than the Ukraine war. So the journalist gives him an out by asking "so you're not disputing that Russians have killed many innocent Ukrainian civilians then?" He doesn't take the gift and instead says "Well, don't you think it's weird that there hasn't been many images of the fighting?" 

 

Obviously the journo says "wtf? There's been thousands of pictures and videos caught on camera and phones of the devastation" to which he replies "Some of those are fakes, you know that right?" 

It's like a politician trying to subvert the question and talk down at the journalist for asking what should be basic questions. I mean it should be the easiest thing in the world to say "yeah, quite obviously the Russians have killed innocent Ukrainian people" and not answer the question by saying "there isn't enough images, it doesn't addup" and when told there obviously has been plenty he starts saying "yeah but those are fakes".

[Parafox]

1 minute ago, Dahnsouff said:

As with Icke, I always wondered if this started out as a coping mechanism for some perceived risk, and was just self perpetuating through not be effectively challenged

Thing is, the "high profile" exponent of such ridiculousness will attract a whole band of brothers willing to accept and believe. Most of us that are reasoned, balanced and objective in our thinking will see these people are a bit eccentric. That's t'internet for you.

[Dahnsouff]

2 minutes ago, Parafox said:

Thing is, the "high profile" exponent of such ridiculousness will attract a whole band of brothers willing to accept and believe. Most of us that are reasoned, balanced and objective in our thinking will see these people are a bit eccentric. That's t'internet for you.

O’ internet sage of our youth…..  

 

[Parafox]

1 minute ago, Dahnsouff said:

O’ internet sage of our youth…..  

 

But when you see surgeons/robots in operating theatres performing complex surgical procedures over the internet, guided by an expert/robot from wherever who is watching from their own theatre/surgery and can guide and direct.

 

The surgeon who operates from 400km away - BBC Future

 

T'internet is many things and has untold capabilities. I just wish it was only used solely for the good of humankind . Pandora's box has been well and truly opened.

 

[Sampson]

I remember Dan Carlin doing a podcast on the "Pandora's Box" of the internet, in terms of the sheer amount of unfiltered data out there means that every opinion under the sun is out there and can easily pull you into a rabbit hole. He was on Talk Radio in the US back in the 90s when the internet was getting going and said there was such an excitement back then that the internet would allow what he referred to as "democratisation of news,"

 

i.e. That it would allow everyone to tell and show their own story and it would allow everyone to basically become a journalist and investigate wrong doings. He said something like he held the (what he now admits was incredibly naive) view at the time that it would help stop government and corporate corruption and allow far more anonymous whistle blowing and that he and many others had this idealistic view that the internet was going to lead to a much fairer and well informed society and one in which governments and corporations could be brought to heel by everyday people.

I'm curious as to how much people actually predicted the division that would be spread by the internet and social media and the lies and slander spreading like wildfire too back in the 90s as generally it seemed like most people were incredibly optimistic the internet would lead to a better world where more people were better informed and would cause "the democratisation of news". I don't really remember any particular dissenting voices or predictions of its mass problems.

 

I've seen an interview where Terry Pratchett is interviewing Bill Gates in around 1996-ish and asking a few questions which really touch on this and the potential issues of the internet, but Gates bats them off with his usual "technological improvements will solve these issues" optimism. I don't know if Pratchett or Gates or anyone else really understood enough to press him further though I thought some of Pratchett's questioning were extremely interesting.

 

The computer game Metal Gear Solid 2 back in 2001 was actually one of the first things I remember discussing the issues which were going to be caused with mass information overload in the internet and the lack of filtering on there or "junk data" as it called it. Although I don't think a lot of us really understood what it was talking about at the time, it actually makes a lot more sense now than it did back then.

Edited 29 April 2022 by Sampson

[Dahnsouff]

It’s more the loss or reframing of truth that despoils the internet

[leicsmac]

8 hours ago, Sampson said:

I remember Dan Carlin doing a podcast on the "Pandora's Box" of the internet, in terms of the sheer amount of unfiltered data out there means that every opinion under the sun is out there and can easily pull you into a rabbit hole. He was on Talk Radio in the US back in the 90s when the internet was getting going and said there was such an excitement back then that the internet would allow what he referred to as "democratisation of news,"

 

i.e. That it would allow everyone to tell and show their own story and it would allow everyone to basically become a journalist and investigate wrong doings. He said something like he held the (what he now admits was incredibly naive) view at the time that it would help stop government and corporate corruption and allow far more anonymous whistle blowing and that he and many others had this idealistic view that the internet was going to lead to a much fairer and well informed society and one in which governments and corporations could be brought to heel by everyday people.

I'm curious as to how much people actually predicted the division that would be spread by the internet and social media and the lies and slander spreading like wildfire too back in the 90s as generally it seemed like most people were incredibly optimistic the internet would lead to a better world where more people were better informed and would cause "the democratisation of news". I don't really remember any particular dissenting voices or predictions of its mass problems.

 

I've seen an interview where Terry Pratchett is interviewing Bill Gates in around 1996-ish and asking a few questions which really touch on this and the potential issues of the internet, but Gates bats them off with his usual "technological improvements will solve these issues" optimism. I don't know if Pratchett or Gates or anyone else really understood enough to press him further though I thought some of Pratchett's questioning were extremely interesting.

 

The computer game Metal Gear Solid 2 back in 2001 was actually one of the first things I remember discussing the issues which were going to be caused with mass information overload in the internet and the lack of filtering on there or "junk data" as it called it. Although I don't think a lot of us really understood what it was talking about at the time, it actually makes a lot more sense now than it did back then.

 

Kojima had it pretty much spot on.

 

You do wonder how much of a world can go on with such "truths" neither clashing nor meshing.

 

8 hours ago, Dahnsouff said:

It’s more the loss or reframing of truth that despoils the internet

Not only the internet, but all aspects of human society, if that loss of truth becomes a matter of policy. Which it has, in many circumstances.

[leicsmac]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-61281559

 

Bolsanaro - small vision, small mind, probably a small dick that he's overcompensating for.

[The Horse's Mouth]

17 hours ago, Sampson said:

 I know we've already discussed how much whether people feel sorry for him or think he's a ****, but Le Tissier just gets worse and worse every week at the moment it seems.
 

 

 

, while hilarious I definitely still feel sorry for him. I get the pandemic skepticism, even if a bit further than I'd go with it but the Ukraine stuff just kinda shows he's completely gone.