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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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“Et tu, Beetrute?”

· How very odd! · Humour · UK affairs

I am not the only one who perceives a Caesarian theme to modern British politics. This portrait of political treachery chilled me to the marrow:

Entry into vegetable competition in summer fête in London

July 17th, 2016 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata snicker of the day

· Humour · UK affairs

Brave Sir Boris ran away
Bravely ran away away
When danger reared its ugly head
He bravely turned his tail and fled
Yes, brave Sir Boris turned about
And gallantly he chickened out

Bravely taking to his feet
He beat a very brave retreat
Bravest of the brave, Sir Boris!

(h/t commenter Pardone)

July 1st, 2016 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)

Replay!

· European Union · Humour · Sports · UK affairs

3.9 million sign petition to replay England vs Iceland

It makes just as much sense as this:

Petition for EU referendum re-run hits 3.7 million as David Lammy MP calls for parliament to block Brexit

June 28th, 2016 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)

Free space

· European Union · Humour

1GBfree

(I do not know who made this image. If you are the creator, let me know and I will be happy to give credit.)

June 24th, 2016 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)

Oh noez, Brexit be bad!

· European Union · Humour · UK affairs

Just spotted this splendid summary of the dire consequences of Brexit:

6. The NHS will collapse as Bulgarian X-ray technicians head home, leaving thousands of Brits with badly-set broken limbs
7. When we tell German intelligence about terrorist threats, they will put their fingers in their ears and go ‘nah nah nah’ (actually, they probably do this already)
8. The British advance Battlegroup stationed on the Oder (two tanks, a platoon of RLC dog-trainers and a QM Sergeant) will be asked to return home

Check out the rest on Raedwald.

May 15th, 2016 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)

This was… inevitable

· Humour

hat tip: Tim Evans 😉

May 1st, 2016 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)

Fooled ya!

· Asian affairs · Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Humour · Media & Journalism

The Daily Mail reports:

April Fools is no laughing matter, China’s official news service intoned Friday, saying the Western tradition of opening spring with a gag is un-Chinese. The official news agency Xinhua’s stiffly worded post on micro-blog Weibo declared: “Today is the West’s so-called ‘April Fools'”. The occasion “does not conform with our nation’s cultural traditions, nor does it conform with the core values of socialism“, it added.

“Don’t believe rumours, don’t create rumours and don’t spread rumours,” it said, capping off the note with a smiley emoticon. A cartoon accompanying the post showed two phones “spreading rumours.” A finger pointing at them is accompanied by a word bubble that says “breaking the law”. Spreading rumours online can be a violation of Chinese law.

But the country’s Internet users met the reminder with a collective guffaw, suggesting that in China, every day is April Fools. “You speak lies every day, use government policy, data, to trick the people in every way. What’s up, what’s down? What’s wrong? What’s right? We’re on to you,” one Weibo commenter said. Other users likened the post to the satirical American newspaper The Onion. “The most amusing ‘April Fools’ news is that Xinhua is seriously saying ‘don’t believe rumours’,” said one.

One has to admire Xinhua’s deadpan delivery, but didn’t including the smiley rather give the game away?

April 8th, 2016 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)

Donald Drumpf for Prez!

· Humour

Not sure why the management tagged this as “humour” (or even “humor”) 😛

March 15th, 2016 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)

“White privileged hegemony has not been disrupted here …”

· Education & Academia · Humour

I liked one of the comments on this piece, which reports on a piece of feminist glaciology.

Take it away, commenter “Schacar Mevsky”.

Employing whiteness theory, I hypothesize that the authors are attracted to the glacier because it is white, especially at the “peaks” of the mountains, while the brown run off is down “low.” White privileged hegemony has not been disrupted here but infects the study from start to finish. The authors try to mask this by cultural appropriation of terms like “postcolonial analysis” and “feminist glaciology,” but they manifestly privilege phallocentric Western techno thinking. They construct binary, deontological “evidence,” having failed to consider that the glacier they are raping with their instruments is sacred to the Peruvian indigenous peoples, who have sacrificed 16-year old girls to it for millennia because its water “contains its sacred powers” (p. 95). Where, finally, in this allegedly subversive study are the Discourses of the Diasporic Imaginary of the marginalized? The authors privilege the glacier as an “icon.” But what about the Discourses of the iceberg? Of the lowly snowball? Of the ever-maligned piss hole in the snow?

This notion might attract non-comedic attention from academia. Maybe it already has.

The above mockery makes a bit too much sense to be five star academic bullshit, but the guy should stick at it. What he gets so right is the way that these idiots quite quickly reach the stage of trying to out-idiot each other. And by the way, in case you are wondering, “Diasporic Imaginary” is not a misspelling of “Diasporic Imagery”, or some such slightly less confusing thing. This is a reference to actual academic discourse.

Those piss holes in the snow take me back a few decades. I do love a bit of Michael Caine discourse.

Just how bad and how widespread is the kind of nonsense that is lampooned in the above comment? Are all academies in the Anglo-Saxon world as intellectually deranged as some parts of some of them clearly are? Or is it merely that Anglo-Saxony is huge and contains lots of academies, and so if you look for any particular sort of academic insanity you will find it?

March 6th, 2016 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)

Reasons to watch Top Gear

· Humour · Transport

The Guardian is not where I would expect to find a rave review of Top Gear.

Top Gear fetishises the totally unnecessary consumption of fossil fuels in the name of sport, entertainment and feeling better about your premature ejaculation disorder; it normalises dangerously fast driving; it contributes to the hunger for more and more cars that we neither need nor can sustain; it treats the sheer act of moving a machine as if it’s a display of heroic bravery and skill; and it paid Jeremy Clarkson’s salary for over 25 years.

Sounds great! Of course, with Clarkson and co. off to Amazon Prime, everyone is a bit worried whether the new line-up will be any good.

…the problem with Top Gear isn’t simply the lack of diversity of its presenting line-up, or its wrinkle-kneed wardrobe. It’s not its heritage brand of lazy bigotry and short-term greed, its predilection for petrol-powered laziness dressed up as machismo, its weaker-than-Liptons long-running in-jokes, its “I Am the Stig” USB memory sticks or its endless, jaw-slackening rota of reruns. It’s all of it. It’s the cars, motor industry and mentality on which it’s built. It’s the whole petrol-guzzling, self-interested, short-term, pleasure-seeking, morally indifferent, climate-changing, nature-breaking package. And it’ll take more than a new line-up to change that.

Well that’s a relief, then.

February 12th, 2016 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)

Police advice on how to react to a terrorist attack -run, hide and tell…

· Administrative · Humour · Security · Self defence & Security · Self-Defence · UK affairs

In the UK, there is now some police advice in a video on what to do in the unlikely event of getting caught up in a terrorist attack. The first tip is to run, the next is to hide, phone the police if you can and say where you are, and wait for the armed police to turn up, and when they do, try not to get shot by them by waving your hands around too quickly.

For those unfamiliar with hiding from armed killers, the video suggests.

“The best hiding place with protection from gunfire will have a substantial physical barrier between you and the attacker.”

Another handy tip is:

“Insist others come with you, but don’t let their indecision slow you down,” the video says.

A fuller version of the video is here.

Well that’s made it all fairly clear then. The video is pretty much what you might have expected. As Bob Geldof put it in ‘I don’t like Mondays‘ ‘…And the lesson for today is how to die…’.

Truth be told, the advice is realistic given the legal situation in the UK. Do our friends in Texas have a different take on what to do?

December 18th, 2015 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)

Data retention

· Humour · Privacy & Panopticon

Police have arrested a UK teen following the leak of ISP-U-Like’s browsing history database. The news follows revelations of a hack of the internal systems of the nation’s most popular ISP that left 60% of the country’s browsing history accessible from a public web site based in Sweden. British ISPs are required to retain records of the last 12 months of users’ browsing history under the so-called “snooper’s charter” introduced in 2016. Previously only police could access the information. Now visitors to ismyneighbourapervert.com can simply type in an email address and view anyone’s browsing history. Since then, there have been calls for a senior officer at Gloucestershire Police to resign after it emerged that he once visited a pro-GamerGate website. And the Daily Mail has defended criticisms of its “20 Celebrity Health Searches That Will Shock You” article, stating that the boil on the home secretary’s groin is “in the public interest”.

Meanwhile, the CEO of ISP-U-Like issued the following statement: “In the unlikely event that your mother-in-law finds out about your membership of gaymidgetsgonewild.com, then as a gesture of goodwill, on a case by case basis, we will waive termination fees.”

The investigation is ongoing.

October 30th, 2015 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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