@dgerard @o7___o7 He was weird and creepy before that (see his attempts to make the Jargon File say that everyone in hackerdom was just like him), but yeah, hoo boy. Him and the LGF guy were prominent cheerleaders for Dick Cheney's wilder fever dreams back in the day. The LGF guy got better, ESR didn't.

@swlabr @mii One of the most notorious is the USA PATRIOT Act - Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act. Really.

Its counterpart in UK legislation is the Terrorism Act 2000, which manages to be both more informative and much, much shorter.

@gerikson @YourNetworkIsHaunted That and even hyper-cautious countries like Switzerland have been selling off their gold reserves to at least some extent, because they listen to sane economists rather than nut jobs.

@Landa @acb @gerikson @cstross Maybe he thinks his Aunt Tillie should fix it?

@mlen @Soyweiser And yes, they do random checks (sorry, Stichproben :) ) but they mostly consist of a person scanning the first few items they grab out of the bag and if they were all scanned previously then you’re good to go. Takes about 10 seconds.

@sailor_sega_saturn And given enough time and enough scale even the most improbably weird things will eventually happen. Update file corrupted by a storage controller that flips a couple of bits at random after every 720 hours of uptime but only if it’s 23.682 seconds after the hour? Weirder shit has happened.

@YourNetworkIsHaunted @swlabr As a parent myself I understand that my kids are not in fact my personal property but human beings in their own right who are capable of independent thought. That’s never struck me as being a particularly controversial point of view, but then I look at these creepy fuckers with their identically dressed kids smiling for the camera because they’ll get a beating later if they don’t and that just makes me shudder.

@Starseeder As someone with ADHD the only thing I find harder to cope with than the crazy, in-crowd bureaucracy of Wikipedia is attempting to read that mile-long polemic. Where do they find the time to write this shit?

@gnomicutterance @dgerard Has the Republican writing style guide been updated to mandate that Weird Capitalisation thing that Cheeto Benito does or something?

@dgerard Carry On Just The Racism

@dgerard Sometimes I feel like a hospital doctor who's worked in the clap clinic for decades and has had a series of name badges starting with "Venereal Disease" and passing through "Special Clinic" on the way to "Sexual Health Clinic". Same thankless job, just different labels.

@dgerard @Soyweiser I thought we were SREs now. At least, the message for years was "Sysadmins are useless shit now because they aren't software engineers and hell, they don't even call themselves engineers".

@db0 u wot m8

@Tar_alcaran @V0ldek That's why you need the good guy with a hammer!

@raoul Strong "that kid at primary school who took a few weeks of karate lessons then told you he could easily kill you so he had to be careful not to lose his temper now" vibes.

@fasterandworse @dgerard sorry, too busy dealing with my brain short-circuiting at the idea that anyone would think any of this was intended to benefit the poors.