Interesting Links for 23-03-2017

[andrewducker]

Hungarian secret agent reveals in detail how serious the Russian threat is (tags: russia spying viaFanf ) Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation (tags: simulation philosophy computing ) Parliament shooting: Police officer and another man shot outside House of Commons (tags: guns violence uk government ) Edinburgh transformed ahead of

Comments

Jokes

[woodpijn]

Those are awesome! Most of them I hadn't heard before.

RE: Jokes

[andrewducker]

Me either! And a good spread of them too.

[ext_2864067]

The 4chan thing doesn't add up. If the person had guns, why didn't they use them?

[andrewducker]

Good point there. I'm curious as to what _was_ going on.

So, You Want To Test A Nuclear Weapon?

[cartesiandaemon]

Sort of, though not as much as i want to see them fall into the sun

(The article was interesting, but that was my reaction to the title :))

What it's like going to the Lib-Dem party conference

[cartesiandaemon]

Yeah, that sounds like a lot of policies i agree with.

Apparently "radical" has been overton windowed :(

RE: What it's like going to the Lib-Dem party conference

[newandrewhickey]

The only policy I describe there as radical is, I think, the sex work one, which is I think a massive departure from the policies of other parties. Most of the rest are sensible incremental changes.
But referring to myself as a radical liberal (or to Tim Farron as part of the radical tradition) is not Overton windowing -- "radical liberalism" is the name for a particular tradition of thought within the Lib Dem and previously Liberal parties, and has been used for that tradition for a hundred years or more.
(It actually *is* a radical viewpoint -- closer to anarcho-syndicalism than anything else -- and exists in the Lib Dems alongside centrists, libertarians, and mainstream social democrats in an uneasy alliance)

[ylla]

Why parliament *shooting*, as if the problem was with the actions of the police rather the actions of the attacker who killed two people with a car and one with a knife?

[newandrewhickey]

Presumably that was the headline when the story was first posted -- now it says "Westminster attack latest" rather than the "Parliament Shooting Latest" that's in the URL. When the story very first broke, all that was known was that shots had been fired near Parliament -- the press didn't yet know who had fired the shots and why.

[a_pawson]

Probably because in the UK firearms are used so infrequently. The UK police discharged firearms a total of 6 times in the whole of 2016. Any shooting in the UK is a pretty rare event and likely to attract such a headline.