Interesting Links for 17-05-2015

[andrewducker]

I concise guide to the current UK Cabinet. Well worth a read. (tags: uk politics conservatives ) JavaScript at 20 (tags: javascript ) Exercise alone won’t make you lose weight. (tags: exercise weight ) Beware Eurosceptic versions of history and science (tags: history science Europe ) How Many Americans Are Married To Their Cousins? (And how

Comments

[cartesiandaemon]

I often find it hard to pick things up from context if I'm not paying attention to them, and one example of that is where I THINK I know what a word means, and then don't notice that everyone else in the world is using it differently. I think nowadays, most of the time "trolling" probably means "obnoxious harassing" (or worse), even though I'm still used to assuming it means "fishing for a reaction" and write off everything else as an exception. But it seems lots of talking does the reverse, when they describe patterns of behaviour including things like SWATing (which to me looks like practically attempted murder, given the likelihood of someone being seriously hurt) using terms like "trolling" which lump it together with things like obnoxious comments -- that it describes the new-ness of crime, but completely fails to recognise it's seriousness...

[andrewducker]

Yeah. I'm happy to leave people obnoxiously trying to provoke a verbal/written reaction as "trolling".

I hadn't really thought about the expansion of its use until I read that article.

[cartesiandaemon]

Yeah, now I think about it, it's like, it's shifted, and shifted again, and isn't really usable in any sense -- trolling might mean "sneakily provocative behaviour" or it might mean "excessively obnoxious behaviour" or it might mean "harassment, stalking and death threats", and part of the problem here is people conflating the last two and underplaying the seriousness of the death threats. And in theory they could be called something more specific and "trolling" could go back to its original meaning, but that's probably unworkable, partly because it would still be ambiguous because most people are used to the shift in meaning, and partly there's not a sharp line between people being obnoxious by making up obnoxious opinions, and people being obnoxious by exaggerating opinions they know people will find obnoxious.

Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster

[apostle_of_eris]

really?

Re: Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster

[andrewducker]

You have _no_ idea.

See, for instance, how MPs resign:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resignation_from_the_British_House_of_Commons