Prone to rants & long silences not at same time though. Unsure what society, Social Justice is working towards (sure it's Dystopian though). -Lux Ex Tenebris-
Northern Wastes
Joined January 2014
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Western progressives being so self-absorbed and myopic that they can't imagine anything outside their miniscule "lived experience"? NO, tell me it is not so! Next you'll tell me that their inability to imagine hardship greater than their own is why they believe they're oppressed.
Marchosias retweeted
I’m politically homeless in the UK. People often ask what would make me vote for a political party. My answer usually explains why my ideal party will never exist, and why I find what’s on offer so utterly lifeless and unappealing.
So here it is…
I don’t want another long line of Westminster lifers, professional bullshitters and policy wonks who’ve never had to make anything fucking work.
I want mavericks, I want dynamos, I want people with the nerve to fuck shit up, and the competence and desire to build something infinitely better.
I want people willing to shatter Westminster’s cosy little racket and expose, in all it’s disgusting glory, the putrid cesspit underneath it all. Including when it’s their own mates who are swimming in it all.
I want people who want to build, to unleash the animal spirits of a country that’s spent far too long in a slumber, being told to sit down, shut up and accept that everything in our lives has to be a bit shit.
I want people who aren’t terrified of upsetting someone. I want people who can tell a vested interest to fuck off without first consulting a focus group.
I want a giant bonfire of our labyrinthine tax code and the excessive regulation that makes building anything worthwhile feel like an act of civil disobedience.
I want people willing to shut down the useless institutions and taxpayer-funded talking shops that survive every single failure, achieve absolutely fuck-all and somehow always need more of our money.
I want people who demand accountability for failure instead of handing out knighthoods and promotions for it.
I want people who understand what government should be for, can also actually do the job, and know where its authority and influence should end.
I want people who can see how absolutely fucking miserable this country has become and offer a vision of something better that we can all strive towards. Where everyone can participate.
I want a country where you can build a business, build a home and build a future worth looking forward to and be able to celebrate it for the great thing it is, rather than have it torn down.
I want a country where ambition has somewhere to go.
But most of all, I want people in power who understand how much this country could do if government would get the fuck out of the way.
Any takers?
@SDPhq @eleanorrofe I'm looking at you. Fancy it?
Marchosias retweeted
Our useless UK government making uninformed decisions that make you both miserable and less safe.
Also known to the common folk as....fucking Tuesday at this point.
You know we used to have a really good safeguard that avoid dumb shit like this, we called it parenting.
UKs Online Safety Minister has announced all in-game chat will be placed behind an ID gate. Cutting of teenagers from the ability to socialise, risking the cybersecurity of gamers and driving up costs for Gaming industry gamersvoice.org/uk-gaming-re… #SaveOurGames #Stopkillinginternet
Marchosias retweeted
Many Western nations managed to "uplift farmers and the working class" without killing upwards of 30 million of them.
We did this, generally, without empowering student mobs to trash all the history we now claim we're proud of, and without massacring the wealthy and the educated on the altar of cultural revolution.
One of the many ironies of the modern Chinese nationalist is that, were it not for generals countermanding the Red Guard, the evidence they claim for their greatness would have been totally destroyed by Mao's own faction.
We have no equivalent of Mao's campaign against the Four Olds, having largely gotten over iconoclastic religious hysteria in medieval times.
We never went around killing sparrows to avert famine (which caused a surge in locusts that made famine worse) — of all our many retarded leaders, none have been so retarded as that.
Our war heroes did not hide in mountains waiting for the Kuomintang to do all their fighting for them, only to emerge and claim credit after the fact. The Communists are not war heroes. They drove the war heroes out of the country they fought to save.
We have managed to make modern nations of citizens, not subjects; and our technological prowess today is the product of invention, not theft.
We have empowered our ethnic and religious minorities, almost to a fault, while the Chinese government locks them up in camps that we consider horrors.
As is usually the case, Communist doctrines of "colonialism" and "imperialism" - the latter a Leninist propaganda trick designed to save Marxism from all its failed predictions - are spread today to spare Communism the shame of its own deeds.
And we are able (and even encouraged) to criticise our most important leaders and heroes, while the Communist Party apparatchik must debase his own intellect before he is allowed to speak.
China does have a rich and wonderful history. Mao created none of it, and destroyed much of it. The fat ass of his legacy squats on what remains.
To us Chinese, Mao Zedong is our hero.
Mao uplifted farmers and the working class in China, united the Chinese people, led us to defeat foreign invaders, and founded an independent country so we could all live with dignity.
Mao supported the heroic struggle of the African people against imperialism and colonialism.
He was one of the greatest leaders in world history, and one of the most demonized by the West.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Mao's Great Leap Forward lead to ~15-55 million deaths. It is the largest famine and non-war mass death in history.
Mao's role against Japan was to hold back while Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist did the most fighting. China was independent before this, not founded by Mao.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lea…
ebsco.com/research-start…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Si…
Marchosias retweeted
BioWare is not, like, a guy. BioWare closing is not like Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino getting fired or cancelled.
BioWare is a business entity that existed for 30 years. During that time people — including lead creatives who were responsible for the great games — came and went.
Some video game studios manage to maintain a culture and a sensibility around excellence and the key creatives either stick around for a long time or pass the reins to handpicked successors who share their values and preserve the culture and standards of the studios.
What has happened in the game industry over the last 15 years is that there came to be a widespread belief that the cultures that incubated excellent games were exclusionary racist, sexist, homophobic boys clubs that needed to change in order to welcome in different kinds of people.
Instead of hiring people who shared their values and sensibilities, the people at these game studios were pressured to push their workforces toward being 50% female while achieving racial equity. The staff of the studios changed dramatically, the cultures of the workplaces changed dramatically and the games changed dramatically.
The pandemic sent a lot of people into their homes to play video games, which seemed like it was going to drive an era of growth for the industry. At the same time, the new generation of gaming hardware required more detailed assets, more animation, and therefore more people to make these massive games.
So there was a huge hiring boom at the precise moment that there was an overarching focus of the demographics of the industry, which means that nearly every Western game studio’s workforce was completely transformed. Over 40% of games industry workers under the age of 25 identified as LGBT or nonbinary on recent surveys.
Additionally, some studios have had unique pressures that have driven a lot of turnover. At Rocksteady Games, for example, a lot of the people who made the Batman: Arkham trilogy were not interested in building the live service game Warner wanted, so most of the principals on those games left the studio during the production of “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.”
The studio cannot pivot back to what used to be its strength at making single player titles after that failure because all the people who are responsible for the classic games are gone. They no longer have that strength. They no longer have the institutional capacity to make great games because great games are made by great people and the great people are gone. A similar thing happened to BioWare during “Anthem.”
They couldn’t just pivot back to making great “Dragon Age” or “Mass Effect” games after the failure of “Anthem” because too many people were gone and the culture had changed. They weren’t the same studio and they weren’t a great studio anymore.
The BioWare that was shuttered today is not the studio that made “Mass Effect 2” or “Knights of the Old Republic.” That studio hasn’t existed for many years. It was just the “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” studio.
unavailable
Marchosias retweeted
The biggest political party in Scotland was getting caught lying and getting bodied so badly by everyone that they are just straight up deleting their account lmfao.
Marchosias retweeted
I hate to break it to you, John, but the Kremlin meddles in everything, just as the CIA meddles and MI6 meddles. All nations are meddling in each other’s affairs, even when they’re allies. Especially when they’re allies. The Kremlin might be better at meddling than we are, but all the spook agencies are all a-meddling. It’s hardly a stunning exclusive.
What this ‘Russia swung the Brexit vote’ BS really smacks of is a desperate desire to believe that the British people would never have voted to leave the sacred institution of the EU had it not been for Vladimir Putin’s mendacious meddling. Because that’s how stupid and gullible the British public are in the eyes of our progressive metropolitan elites.
The Sun-reading plebs are just ignorant pigs who will gobble down any old rancid swill that piques their prejudices. They don’t have the capacity to think for themselves, unlike the enlightened, Observer-reading metropolitan set. They spend their days chain-vaping, chugging Monster energy drinks and doom-scrolling social media, foaming at the mouth about immigrants. Obviously these fools voted for Brexit - they’re all stupid and racist after all!
Except that isn’t true, or what happened.
For decades, the British people were denied any meaningful democratic input into the UK’s gradual absorption into an increasingly integrated European political project that was steadily chipping away at national sovereignty. They noticed. They didn’t like it. And when they were finally given a referendum, they said, ‘No, thank you. Our democracy matters.’ It was a genuinely British act of quiet rebellion.
Of course there have been consequences. But the lesson ought to be that MPs should do more than pay lip service to British democracy. It’s not for sale to the highest bidder, or tradable for market access. It’s ours, and we’re keeping it.
And I say this as somebody who voted Remain.
Looking back, I realise I didn’t vote Remain because I believed the EU was particularly democratic, or even an especially good idea. I voted Remain because, at the time, it happened to chime with my political worldview.
But when I began to realise that much of the supposedly progressive establishment wasn’t particularly progressive at all, and had rather more authoritarian instincts than I’d appreciated, the EU suddenly looked a lot less appealing.
And here’s the thing. I suspect much of the Rejoin lobby would rapidly lose its enthusiasm for European integration if the EU became even moderately centre-right, never mind genuinely right-wing.
Imagine Brussels suddenly embracing such outrageous ideas as the immutability of biological sex, the absurdity of gender self-identification, and the principle that women’s rights should take precedence over those of cross-dressing blokes.
The same people currently demanding that we rejoin would be running around with their hair on fire, screaming that we must leave this dreadful, reactionary institution immediately.
Well, we’ve left.
Democracy has spoken. And apparently the BBC’s woke octogenarian still can’t come to terms with it.
Congratulations to Carole Cadwalladr, @carolecadwalla, who together with colleagues first revealed this story.
Marchosias retweeted
The British Government is preparing an apparatus of internet censorship without parallel in the modern era.
At the UN, Andy Burnham announced the creation of a National Centre for Information Defence — Labour’s Ministry of Truth.
The Prime Minister says the centre will protect us from hostile foreign powers such as Russia, which he accused of spreading lies and disinformation about Britain, amplifying “far-right narratives” and interfering in our democracy.
But the real purpose is to suppress dissent and silence those who criticise the Government or express views about the state of the country that run counter to Labour’s prevailing progressive orthodoxy.
FSU Director of Policy and Research David Rose has written a new briefing examining the threadbare research the Government has used to justify its plans. The Government is clutching at straws — and, ironically, already spreading misinformation about the threat of misinformation.
It has ignored a wealth of evidence from leading academics to push ahead with its new censorship regime.
Burnham’s Government is putting Britain in the same league as some of the world’s most authoritarian powers.
Watch the new episode of the FSU Podcast with General Secretary of the FSU Lord Young of Acton on YouTube and read @DavidRoseUK’s report below 👇
Isn't it humorous that the crowd that has been complaining about dog-whistles for the best part of two decades are now perfectly capable of drawing a distinct line between AntiZionism and AntiSemitism...
It would be churlish of me to assert their own standard of victim-perception
Marchosias retweeted
Technical analysis to explain why the UK government is using the word "comprehensive".
TL;DR: "Comprehensive" means identity verification for everyone so children can be banned. When adults are banned they can’t return.
Identity verification is designed to kill online anonymity. When accounts are tied to real people, behaviour can be tracked, scored, predicted, and permanently restricted. Apply that across social media, games, messaging and app stores and you’ve built population-scale surveillance under the banner of child safety. Privacy is destroyed. Parents lose control. The government gains the power to exclude identified people from civic online spaces.
Here’s my breakdown of Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy’s speech along with my technical analysis:
🇬🇧 "We will be the first in the world to introduce a comprehensive social media ban for children".
💡 Everyone knows the UK is not the first to introduce a social media ban for children. So what does she mean?
💡 For that statement to become true, the government would need to mandate something that hasn't yet been said out loud in Australia. A "comprehensive" social media ban means everyone has to verify their identity.
💡 She’s effectively saying "We will be the first in the world to introduce identity verification for everyone". There’s no other technical or legal explanation.
🇬🇧 "where abusive content is not just removed, but removed forever".
💡 The only way to achieve that is to ban repeat offenders permanently. That requires knowing who wrote or shared the content. Technically, that means linking people’s identities to what they post and share. Once an account is tied to a real identity, creating a new account with a different email address no longer works. If you’re banned, you’re excluded for good.
🇬🇧 "Women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are non-negotiable".
💡 I agree. But the government wants to use that as a trojan horse to take away everyone’s right to privacy, including women who wish to remain anonymous. Privacy is a human right, which by their own admission is non-negotiable. They want to decide when human rights are accessible.
🇬🇧 "But, friends, shouldn’t we be ashamed that decades of violent indifference has come to this? Having to remove our children from social media altogether because we cannot protect them from harm".
💡 Any parent who believes their child is unsafe on social media can restrict social media using the parental controls built into today’s smartphones.
🇬🇧 "Because our online spaces live in the palm of our hands and the cables that run under our feet. They’re a civic space, like any town hall or high street".
💡 The UK government arrests around 30 people every day over communications offences involving things posted online. If the government gains the ability to permanently exclude identified people from online services, people will censor themselves.
(In Australia, Ireland and the US, they use "robust" age assurance to mean identity verification because no government wants to say what they really mean.)
💡 Please know this.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy and the rest of the government and their advisors, are not technically savvy enough to understand basic technical aspects of this subject.
I advised the British government and its main child-safety advisers during the first Parliamentary Inquiry into Online Child Protection in 2012. That process led to opt-out filtering across UK telecom networks and ISPs.
They’ve been looking for ways to force identity verification for years. I know because I challenged them about it directly during formal in-person meetings and private briefings in London.
My BBC Newsnight interview at the time showed me demonstrating how poor parental controls were. Unfortunately, we didn’t discuss what I thought of the government’s approach to default-on pornography filters, which meant adults had to actively remove restrictions to access blocked content.
💡 Smartphones today give parents the technical controls governments claim they need legislation to provide. Parents can block apps, block websites, restrict content, approve downloads, control purchases, and set time limits and curfews for their own children. They’re a hundred times better than they were in 2012.
💡 That removes the child safety justification for banning social media.
💡 A digital identity system kills online anonymity.
Removing anonymity is a core technical requirement for governments to gain digital surveillance because once identity is linked to activity, behaviour can be monitored, analysed, predicted, and controlled.
If the UK government rolls this out across social media, games, messaging, app stores and other online services, it creates the technical foundation for population-scale surveillance and control.
Countless schools and many parents already use mobile based parental controls. Banning social media for everyone’s children takes rights away from guardians and parents.
If I was on Newsnight today, I wouldn’t demonstrate weak parental controls like I did in 2012. I’d demonstrate how good they are now and ask why the government feels the need to ban social media instead of educating parents about the controls they already have.
---
I’ll publish my full technical analysis of Chat Control today. Writing this here to hold myself accountable. I’ll summarise it here, but Substack gives me the space to break down the entire system properly.
Plain English. No jargon. Free.
'We will be the first in the world to introduce a comprehensive social media ban for children'
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy addresses issues surround children and women's safety online
trib.al/JF5tYLU
📺 Sky 501
Marchosias retweeted
🚨A majority of Britons believe that the Government only protects the free speech it agrees with.
Human rights organisation Liberty commissioned new polling by More in Common, which found that 54 per cent of Britons surveyed believe the Government only protects free speech with which it agrees.
This striking polling comes a week after the Prime Minister announced the creation of a ‘National Centre for Information Defence’ at the UN to tackle Russian information warfare. However, it will inevitably become Labour’s Ministry of Truth, clamping down on the ability of UK citizens to criticise the Government.
Liberty described the findings as a “very clear warning sign” to Prime Minister Andy Burnham and said they were fuelling “accusations of two-tier enforcement” of free speech laws.
Since Labour came to power in July 2024, the free speech crisis has become considerably worse. Another recent poll showed that a majority of Britons believe their free speech rights are less secure than they were before Labour came to power. Meanwhile, FSU membership has grown from 14,000 in July 2024 to 48,500 today.
Major concerns listed in the survey include restrictions on protest, arrests for online communications offences, the police visiting a prominent journalist, the proscription of Palestine Action and the Labour Government’s failure to robustly defend free speech since the 2024 General Election.
Luke Tryl, Director of More in Common, said:
“While free speech is often treated as a battleground between the political left and right, this research suggests that concern about the ability to speak freely is something that crosses party lines.
“Britons prize their ability to criticise the Government, express their views without legal or professional consequences, and debate issues openly.”
Read more below 👇
Marchosias retweeted
A pint of draught beer now costs about £5.34 in a British pub, and £6.55 in London.
Much of what you pay is shaped upstream of the pump, by decisions taken department by department across Whitehall, and no department holds the combined view.
A guest opinion by @garyb_pro
gbtt.info/guest-opinions/the…
The best thing to come out of this whole Trans debacle is watching one set of feminists realise, now they're fighting against other feminists, how bullshit the whole feminist argumentation process is.
Marchosias retweeted
“If misinformation really were the threat ministers describe, one would expect its footprint to be visible in what people believe.”
Labour are planning to build the most restrictive apparatus of speech control since Charles I. The evidence it relies on does not survive contact with reality.
In July, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy flounced off X, taking her government department with her, blaming mis- and disinformation for her departure. Weeks earlier, her department had published its green paper, Watch this Space, which suggests platforms be compelled by law to give prominence to “regulated public service media” such as the BBC. Meanwhile, Lucy Powell, Labour’s Deputy Leader, wants platforms brought under “some of the same requirements” of accuracy and balance as licensed broadcasters during election campaigns.
Beneath this sits a single document: a 136-page “evidence review”, commissioned by the Government Office for Science (GO-Science) from a seven-person team at Sheffield University. Its authors made no attempt to establish what was actually true or false online. Instead, by their own account, they relied on summaries generated by large language models of 228 academic papers they had not read.
More significant is what the review missed. A Nature paper by Budak and her colleagues states that “public intellectuals and journalists frequently make sweeping claims about the effects of exposure to false content online that are inconsistent with much of the current empirical evidence”. Visits to 490 websites deemed “untrustworthy” made up just 5.9 per cent of Americans’ clicks on news sites; with television included, “fake news” accounts for roughly 0.1 per cent of the average media diet. “This reality,” the authors observed, “is not reflected in public discourse about social media.”
Britain has been here before. In July 1637, the Star Chamber of Charles I decreed that nothing might be published without a licence from approved authorities.
The Government’s case rests on a review that read nothing, measured nothing, and ignored the research that contradicted it. The case for the most far-reaching apparatus to restrict peacetime speech since the ousted Stuart king amounts to misinformation about misinformation.
Read more from FSU Director of Policy and Research @DavidRoseUK in The Critic and his report below 👇
Marchosias retweeted
Hey folks,
I'm launching a website today: videogamescritic.com
It started as a little database I built for myself. I use Metacritic and OpenCritic a lot and they're clearly useful, but to me as a designer the user experience always felt a bit lacking.
Then the thing kept growing, and at some point I realized it had become genuinely useful for any gamer, not just me. So here it is, for everyone.
My main problem with the existing aggregators: Their scores tell you how the press felt about a game, not how players did.
That made sense 20 years ago. I cared a lot what GameSpot gave a game back then. But today we can actually measure how players felt, and to me that will always matter more than how the press did. On videogamescritic.com, players hold at least two-thirds of every score, by rule. Press still counts, it just can't outvote the people who bought the game.
The other big problem: Those sites rate a game once, at launch, and then never really touch it again.
But that's not how games work anymore. A game can launch rough and get patched shortly after, but on Metacritic and OpenCritic it carries that scarlet letter forever.
No Man's Sky is the obvious example: Famously rocky launch, and Hello Games has spent the years since relentlessly improving it. Its Metacritic score has never moved. On videogamescritic.com it launched at 50 and sits at 82 today, because scores here are LIVE: launch-era reviews fade out over time, and reviews written after a significant patch count the most. When player sentiment changes, the number changes. Simple.
And since press does still count, I ended up reviewing the reviewers too. Every outlet and creator gets a trust score based on one question: When they reviewed a game, did players end up agreeing? You can see who consistently calls games the way players see them, and who doesn't. Again, simple and fair.
And everything is transparent. Every game page shows exactly how its score was computed, and the full methodology is public. No editorial opinion, no magic number.
Anyway, I hope you get a kick out of it! Even just as a way to see the best games on each platform, find something you missed, or browse a site that isn't wallpapered in ads, I think it's already pretty useful.
Enjoy!👍❤️
Absolute revisionist nonsense, this DEI nonsense was engrained into academia over decades and then whenever people call out this root cause, idiots come out saying crap like "playing cheakers [sic] instead of playing chess" as if it's nefarious and conspiratorial.
"This was just about DEI and Cambridge. Arday was just incidental to that".
He is saying the quiet part loud enough for us to hear. These guys believe they are fighting a war against DEI. Jason Arday was just collateral damage. Nothing more.
The day we stop playing cheakers while these people play chess, is the day we start to fight back against what is clearly an orchestrated campaign to roll back the gains of many decades.
teapawt.net/yinkanubi/status/20919…
Marchosias retweeted
They are all already told all of this when they are first let in the country. That stupid booklet is entirely performative and just makes the government look even dumber.
Also I thought we were overexaggerating the problem so why was the booklet necessary?
Andy Burnham has defended the Home Office guide that tells asylum seekers not to rape or harass people.
Asked about the booklet, the prime minister said the government wanted to make UK law "explicitly clear".
Politics latest: trib.al/G8EcKQF
📺 Sky 501 and YouTube
Something that has cropped up with the Berlin Pride Terrorist attack, the "answer" of Deport is in danger of becoming a mantra of the Right, even when completely inapplicable.
It requires more thought such as removing citizenship for people pledging to ISIS and other terror orgs.
Marchosias retweeted
This is exactly why more and more gays want nothing to do with the alphabet soup that now speaks over us.
An Islamist drives a van into a Pride parade, killing someone and injuring dozens, and at the vigil an activist is more distressed that the attacker was not a white Christian than by the fact gays were deliberately targeted.
The narrative must be protected at all costs. German authorities are treating the attack as Islamist terrorism.
It is the same cognitive dissonance every single time.
Gays are attacked by Islamists, but queer activists panic about “Islamophobia.”
Gay kids who do not conform to stereotypes are encouraged to question whether they were born in the wrong body, but the same activists insist they are fighting conversion therapy.
Women object to males entering their sports, prisons and changing rooms, and somehow the invader becomes the victim.
Gays who no longer recognise a movement supposedly representing us, are told to shut up by these same people who’d rather protect those who want to kill us than the victims of extremism.
They do not care about gays as people. They care about us as characters in a political story. The second reality interferes with that story, they play the victim.
You cannot build a movement around denying what we can all see right in front of us.
