theinspectorst

So pathetic from India - seeking to punish Canada for the fact that the Indian government murdered a Canadian in Canada, and Canada had the temerity to call them out for it.

What an absurd victim complex Modi has.

I fully agree that’s it’s an authoritarian measure that needlessly targets a vulnerable minority.

But it’s also something we should laugh at the French state for. Orwell memorably mused that the reason the goose-step never made its way into British military marching drills - at a time when many other European armies were adopting it - was because if British civilians saw soldiers on parade goose-stepping down the road then they would laugh at them. He thought that instinct to laugh at pompous displays of authority was something that helped insulate the British from the fascist and communist totalitarianism that took root elsewhere in the first half of the 20th century. Fascists tend to have very thin skins.

The French state is making laws to regulate women’s fashion. They should know that doing this makes them look ridiculous to normal people.

The French state literally making laws governing fashion is the most French thing ever.

Right, I’m not suggesting otherwise. I’m just observing that, for someone who remembers that time, seeing a politician eating for the cameras to prove some food is safe brings to mind this very specific unfortunate example.

In 1990, as the BSE (‘mad cow disease’) crisis in the UK was unfolding and shortly after scientists had found proof that the disease could indeed cross species, the Agriculture Secretary John Gummer went on national TV to try to force his four-year-old daughter to eat a beef burger for the cameras, to convince the public to keep eating British beef.

Several hundred people ended up dying from CJD (the human variant caused by eating infected beef). It remains one of the most widely derided photo ops in British political history.

This is stupid. I don’t use Facebook and I’m certainly no fan of Meta, but they didn’t ban news links for the fun of it - they did it in response to the Canadian government making them pay news agencies for news links that gets shared on their services.

I think that’s a stupid law, but the Canadians are entitled to do that if they want to. But that means they’ve intentionally increased the cost to Meta of permitting news links, and Meta has made a commercial decision based on this, which it’s also entitled to do. Meta isn’t a charity or a public sector agency and to expect this company (of all!) to behave like one is ludicrous.

This is pure cakeism.

I’m looking forward to a proper app with more functionality, but for now the progressive web app does work fine and I have it on my home screen on my phone in the place where Baconreader used to sit (and open it multiple times each day).

So is invading Ukraine.

ChatCCP

A corporate problem and a societal problem are two sides of the same coin. Corporations don’t make money in isolation, they make money because they sell things that (directly or ultimately) are bought by consumers.

You could choose to imagine a scenario where the CEOs of Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, etc just voluntarily decide to stop extracting oil overnight, and think that would be more impactful than billions of individual consumers slashing their demand for carbon-intensive products and fuels. But if the consumers don’t change their behaviour and continue to demand this stuff, other companies would just step in to fill the gap, takeover the old oil fields, etc.

The sustainable way to change corporate behaviour is through changing their end-consumers’ behaviour - i.e. if end-consumers stop directly buying carbon-intensive products and stop buying from carbon-intensive companies.