Fragments

An attempt to preserve some things that would otherwise be lost.

The deal

:: tube

Here’s the deal: if I like the thing you make I will pay you for it, because people deserve to get paid for their work. If you then turn around and infest the thing I have paid you for with advertising which I cannot avoid, then fuck you.

There is no cabal

:: politics, doomed

Everyone wants to believe in conspiracies. Some people believe that the alarmingly far-right government of the UK is conspiring with shadowy plutocrats to enrich themselves. That government itself apparently believes in the ludicrous ‘15-minute city’ conspiracy theory, and that something variously known ‘the blob’ and ‘lefty lawyers’ is working furiously against them. Trump supporters in the US believe in more conspiracy theories than it’s easy to count. Their opponents believe that Trump is a sock puppet for Putin, or in various conspiracies called ‘disaster capitalism’. People on all sides think the Jews or, perhaps, the Muslims, are behind everything. Or is it the climate scientists?

Government by conspiracy theory

:: politics, doomed

Here is the British government’s new ‘plan for drivers’. And here is a quote from it:

We will explore options to stop local councils using so-called “15-minute cities”, such as in Oxford, to police people’s lives

We are now ruled by people pushing conspiracy theories: either knowingly because they think that provoking further divisions in society will keep them in power, or because they believe the conspiratorial nonsense they’re peddling to be true. I don’t know which is more terrifying, but in either case these people are grotesquely unfit to be in office.


Wayback machine link because rewriting history is pretty much certain here.

15-minute cities

:: politics, doomed

The government of Britain wishes to stop councils — councils elected by local people — implementing schemes where essential amenities are always within a 15-minute walk for their voters.