Ian Kenway @iankenway@social.cleverlibre.org

#MontyPython - The #Philosophers’ #Football Match with Greek Subtitles - YouTube

This from an episode made for German TV.

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

Delete Chrome. Now.

Google is using its exceptionally powerful position to make *the browser itself* analyze your browsing behavior and serve that on a plate in the form of "cohorts" to anyone interested.

They are transforming Chrome into a "browsing-history-passport" - right now.

If you care about your intellectual freedom even a little bit, you must put Chrome out of your life as soon as possible. Support others doing the same.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/google-testing-its-controversial-new-ad-targeting-tech-millions-browsers-heres

#DeleteChrome

I find it hard to believe that after all these years, we still fail to understand the significance of Sickle Cell Disease. 😭
And, they didn't listen to their patient! Heartbreaking, utterly heartbreaking. 😭😭😭

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/nhs-999-patient-death-sickle-cell-b1825992.html

@freemo There is a deeper reason why the woke tend to believe absurdity and lie about people:The postmodern philosophy underlying their ideology is anti-realist
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For most of us, the concept of “truth” doesn’t seem terribly complicated until we try to define it. Truth is… what’s true—this is actually the first definition for “truth,” paraphrasing a bit, in some dictionaries. Truth is that which is in accordance with reality is another. Philosophers understand that “truth” is a more complicated topic, and people in different schools of thought have different understandings of what truth is. Some, for example, hold that truths must be in some way transcendent of all human contingencies—that which absolutely holds for all people in all times (sometimes in all possible universes). Scientists tend to use a more pragmatic understanding (sometimes called “provisional truths”) that could be rendered as statements about reality upon which we can bet and reliably win. Most people, including nearly all scientists and many philosophers, generally agree that for something to be a “truth” means its having something to do with accurately describing reality.
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The postmodern school of thought, which profoundly informs the Theory of Critical Social Justice, however, does not see truth this way. In fact, it is openly hostile and radically skeptical of these understandings of truth, which might generally be described as being “realist” in orientation because they see some correspondence between truth and reality. Postmodernism is generally anti-realist in orientation, meaning that it does not necessarily see a connection between “truths” and reality. Truths might happen to describe reality, say as the Earth and the Sun describing a dynamic system in which both travel along eliptical orbits around their common center of mass (which is inside the Sun), or not, say as the Sun going around the Earth. Under postmodern thought, both of these understandings are “true” in the cultures that consider them true. That is, postmodern thought sees truth as entirely a matter of human (social) contingencies. This is what the American postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty meant when he wrote, “We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there.”
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Truths, in postmodern Theory, are socially validated statements about reality, which means that they are, ultimately, products of not just the cultures that produce them but of power within those cultures. The French postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault described this as power-knowledge, insisting that knowledge claims (truths) are ultimately only expressions of power. This sound strange, but the logic is accessible. What is considered true is decided by people by some social process of validation, the thinking goes, so “truth” is a social and political status conferred to certain ideas, which is then reinforced by their acceptance as true. Simultaneously, “truths” confer (political) power, as “knowledge is power” implies, because if it is accepted that a proposition is true, then people who accept it as such will behave accordingly. Thus, Foucault Theorized that “truths” are socially constructed by the systems of power (and the powerful within them) in society and then used to dominate, particularly in the attempt to maintain their power and exclusive status (see also, hegemony, episteme, and biopower).
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Most of this anti-realist, political understanding of truth (and knowledge) has been imported more or less intact into Critical Social Justice.
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In Critical Social Justice, “truth” is still considered culturally contingent, but because of the strong influence of identity politics at the core of the Critical Social Justice project (which could be said to use critical and postmodern Theories to do identity politics – see also intersectionality and positionality), the relevant cultures are ones rooted in various identities Theorized to be “minoritized.” Thus, “knowledge” and “truth” as we generally conceive of them are considered shorthand for “cis, straight, white, Western, male knowledge” or “cis, straight, white, Western, male truth” (see also, white science, white mathematics, and white empiricism, and also feminist empiricism), which are just one way of knowing. In fact, they’re a particularly bad one because these dominant groups not at all aware of their self-serving biases or limitations of their own knowing system (see also, internalized dominance and meritocracy).
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Thus, on the other hand, Critical Social Justice generally believes in cultural knowledges (e.g., racial knowledge) that have been marginalized by “dominant discourses,” which are deemed to be straight, white, male, able-bodied, thin, Western, Eurocentric, etc. These are believed to arise because different identity-based cultures have different ways of knowing (epistemologies) thus recognize different knowledges, and dominant ways of knowing (e.g., science, reason, logic, dialectic – see also, master’s tools) are believed to have utilized their greater power to unjustly exclude them from the range of “acceptable” ways of knowing and knowledges (see also, epistemic injustice, epistemic oppression, and epistemic violence).
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-truth/

Strong dislike of articles that espouse phones (and often include computers) being these evil antisocial things that draw us away from "true socialising" and "important interactions" and "life experiences".

Fuck that noise. I have so many friends I provide emotional support to through my phone when they need me, and if they message me that they're in a rough place when I'm out somewhere, they're going to take priority.

My phone is also escapism for me. I have social anxiety-

> elderly Thai man is killed by a black teenager
> media and left wingers blame white nationalism

Just cut it out already. Seriously this is just stupid. Only in America, land of the dumbasses, would this happen. This man did nothing to deserve to die and "white people" did nothing to deserve any part of the blame. Neither did black people in general. This one violent man did. It's not necessarily a hate crime when a minority member is harmed and using his death as a political tool is wrong.

Just upgraded my server. New 2TB SSD. Ubuntu 20.04 server, replacing 16.04 (just in time).
Needed Gnuplot for on-the-fly graph generation on my web server. So dependencies demanded a whole installation of X (why?)
Restarted, all appeared fine. Went away for a bit, came back, and couldn't access the server. Did sshd fail? No. The whole server had suspended itself due to inactivity.
This is a server ffs!!!
Other than that though, it was a fairly painless upgrade.
@omgubuntu

#oops #facebook „533 million Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online“ https://www.businessinsider.com/stolen-data-of-533-million-facebook-users-leaked-online-2021-4

"533 million Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online"

rm -rf facebook/ 😒

https://www.businessinsider.com/stolen-data-of-533-million-facebook-users-leaked-online-2021-4

#BorisJohnson ‘a #clown’ with no diplomacy skills, says ex-deputy in diaries | Boris Johnson | The Guardian

View of ex Tory MP #AlanDuncan.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/apr/03/boris-johnson-a-clown-with-no-diplomacy-skills-says-ex-deputy-in-diaries

#UK #Politics #Tories

A solitary #egret not quite in its element (though not far away).

#MyWork #MyPhoto #CCBYSA #DSLR #Nikon #D7000 #Nature #Birds

The #Sun shimmering off the #ExeEstuary in a #spring morning.

#MyWork #MyPhoto #CCBYSA #DSLR #Nikon #D7000 #Nature

Bill Gates continuing to do evil under the guise of philanthropy.

"When Oxford University began work on its covid vaccine, it promised that the resulting work would be patent-free, with an active tech-transfer assistance program so that developing nations could manufacture their own supplies....

....That promise was broken. The Gates Foundation pushed the racist lie that poor people can't make safe vaccines - despite world-leading production facilities in the Global South - and convinced the university to sell exclusive rights to Astrazeneca...."

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1377290915987918849