Tag: united kingdom

The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked

femmebosskoopa:

Okay.

It took me days to get time together to read this whole thing, but I have finally done it.

This is it. This is the one article you need to read to understand just what is going on in Britain, America, and Russia.

This is the one piece of writing you need and can use to reference the very chilling reality that these countries have been tied together in the machinations  of just a few billionaires, and how Facebook and Google tie in insidiouslyi.

I keep telling y’all to stop fucking with facebook but that’s moot now. It’s so much bigger than this.

“Was that really what you called it, I ask him. Psychological warfare? “Totally. That’s what it is. Psyops. Psychological operations – the same methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change. It’s what they mean by winning ‘hearts and minds’. We were just doing it to win elections in the kind of developing countries that don’t have many rules.”Why would anyone want to intern with a psychological warfare firm, I ask him. And he looks at me like I am mad. “It was like working for MI6. Only it’s MI6 for hire. It was very posh, very English, run by an old Etonian and you got to do some really cool things. Fly all over the world. You were working with the president of Kenya or Ghana or wherever. It’s not like election campaigns in the west. You got to do all sorts of crazy shit.”“

This is not just a story about social psychology and data analytics.

 It has to be understood in terms of a military contractor using military strategies on a civilian population. 

Us. David Miller, a professor of sociology at Bath University and an authority in psyops and propaganda, says it is “an extraordinary scandal that this should be anywhere near a democracy. It should be clear to voters where information is coming from, and if it’s not transparent or open where it’s coming from, it raises the question of whether we are actually living in a democracy or not.”

“And it was Facebook that made it possible. It was from Facebook that Cambridge Analytica obtained its vast dataset in the first place. Earlier, psychologists at Cambridge University harvested Facebook data (legally) for research purposes and published pioneering peer-reviewed work about determining personality traits, political partisanship, sexuality and much more from people’s Facebook “likes”. And SCL/Cambridge Analytica contracted a scientist at the university, Dr Aleksandr Kogan, to harvest new Facebook data. And he did so by paying people to take a personality quiz which also allowed not just their own Facebook profiles to be harvested, but also those of their friends – a process then allowed by the social network.”

Read this. Read the entire thing. It will take you a while and it’s a lot to digest but you need to know.

Signal boost.

@sunderlorn we’re finally completely united in propaganda, isn’t that nice!?

The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked

eisoj5:

smartwittyurl:

fishcustardandclintbarton:

If you’re a UK blog who relentlessly reminded people vote in the US election last year, then i really hope that you’re doing the same thing for our general election on the 8th June, and are registered to vote. Because otherwise, shut up, go online, register to fucking vote and do your civic duty on the 8th.

Honestly, the same needs to go for US followers.

For the love of Christ, please reblog any post you see reminding UK voters to register and then to vote. 

Please.

Deadline to registering to vote in the UK is May 22nd

The general election is June 8th

The link to register to vote is: https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote

And remember you can remove yourself from the open register, or change your status on the open register.

Let’s get the Tories (and UKIP) the fuck out of the Commons and local politics.

I know I’ve got some international friends! GO UNFUCK SHIT.

some of my favorite silly plotlines from Scottish ballads

thethoughtcircus:

thebibliosphere:

intentandinvention:

rottenappleheart:

  • Small village thinks illicit whiskey stills are its biggest problem until raiders show up and trash their everything. Death, destruction, etc. Raiders find whiskey still, get lit, pass out. Villagers murder them. Peace restored. Whiskey is king.
  • Shepherd lad spots fair maid skinny-dipping. Fair maid pleads for her virtue and/or clothing. Shepherd lad is complete gentleman, escorts her home with clothing and virtue intact. Fair maid demands to know what she has to do to get laid around here.
  • Plucky heroine’s boyfriend goes to sea, fails to return.
    Plucky heroine dresses in drag and goes to find him. Plucky heroine discovers
    boyfriend happily married to someone else. Plucky heroine shoots his head right
    off.
  • Do Not Stop By The Local Weaver’s House, You Will Get So
    Pregnant, Like, Super Pregnant, I’m Not Kidding, This Has Been A Public Service
    Announcement.
  • Wealthy farmwife habitually searches her maidservants’ dorm
    for SIGNS OF MEN out of concern for their virtue. Maids less concerned for
    their virtue are having None Of It. Maids hide scarecrow in dorm, farm mistakes
    scarecrow for prowler, farmwife decapitates scarecrow. Farmwife believes
    herself a murderer. Maids now permitted to do as they please, virtue-wise. 
  • Idiot son sent to market to sell cow. Scheming lass seduces
    idiot son out of cow, pants, and even shoes.
  • Dad returns from business trip to find daughter Super
    Pregnant, demands to meet the man responsible. Dad takes one look at man
    responsible and tells daughter “okay, you’re off the hook, I would have banged
    him too.”
  • Handsome stranger bribes fair maid to leave town with him.
    Fair maid rejects various bribes until handsome stranger flat-out offers her
    money, which she accepts. Handsome stranger turns out to be, to no one’s great
    surprise, the actual devil. Fair maid regrets her life choices.
  • Gallant knight goes forth to slay dragon. Dragon eats knight, but has indigestion.

@thebibliosphere saw this and thought of you 😉

We have a rich a varied musical culture.

God bless the Scots

hazel3017:

Great Britain and the Netherlands opened their tournaments at the IIHF Division IIA Women’s World Championship on Sunday, with the Netherlands taking the game 5-4.

Dutch defender Cloë Keijzer’s team came away with the victory and British forward Katie Henry recorded two assists in a losing effort, but both of them came away winners.

After the game, 24-year-old Keijzer proposed to Henry, her longtime partner. As she got down on one knee, a group of her teammates pulled off their t-shirts to reveal warm-ups reading “#6 MARRY ME?”, prompting cheers from Dutch and British teammates as Henry accepted.

Though they face off against each other on the world stage, the pair are teammates more often than opponents.

The couple have played their club hockey together since 2012-13, their first of two seasons in the Swedish first division in Norrköping, Sweden. They moved to Stockholm-based SDE HF in the Riksserien (now SDHL), Sweden’s top league, in 2014-15 and have spent the past two years playing with the Solihull Vixens of the English Women’s Elite League, where Henry is team captain and Keijzer wears an ‘A.’

Video || Article

imperatorkhaleesi:

jewish-privilege:

micdotcom:

Jewish groups across the US receive bomb threats, forcing evacuations

  • Numerous Jewish community centers on the east coast received anonymous bomb threats via phone Monday, forcing evacuations and police responses.
  • Some of the calls were prerecorded while others were live, and likely came from the same telephone number. 
  • NBC reported threats were made to facilities as far apart as New Jersey, Florida, Maryland, Tennessee and South Carolina. In a statement, the Anti-Defamation League said threats were also received in Delaware.
  • Facilities across the county were evacuated, though authorities did not discover any explosive devices. 
  • Jewish schools in London also received bomb threats, though it was not clear whether the incidents are connected. Read more

Also in London. Nothing has changed from the 1970s to 2017.

Y’all. This is fucked the fuck up. Do not ignore this.

nestofstraightlines:

thebibliosphere:

nestofstraightlines:

thebibliosphere:

nestofstraightlines:

thebibliosphere:

gaol-is-ceol:

thebibliosphere:

apricots-from-nara:

the-redseeker:

thebibliosphere:

undernourishment replied to your post “The lady that runs the local bakery and I have been having a “debate”…”

…not to be snide, but its not that hard to find a good (English) scone recipe – but then I suppose there wouldn’t be a funny story if you’d just handed her the answer! (I like the 3c SR flour : 1c cream : 1c lemonade recipe myself – non-traditional inredients, but so easy, and makes perfect scones.)

@underanothername I can’t believe the scone post is still getting notes lol, but allow me to just say after living in America for 3 years—what Americans think of as a good “British” scone recipe (it varies depending on where you are in the UK) and what is actually a British scone is wildly different. (It’s also a palate thing. Most Americans in my experience like soft gooey sweet things. Most British baked goods you can throw against a wall and the only damage you’re going to do is to the wall, but by god you can bake ‘em using rationed food and also fight off invading forces if you have to.) For one thing, if I ever put lemonade near my recipe, my mother would ascend through the earth’s crust, tsk between her teeth and say “oh. you’re doing it like that are you?”

I actually had so many people ask me how to make traditional (Scottish) scones so often I put the recipe in my profile page lmao.

As for the baker in question, she did eventually make the Perfect™ traditional scone based on taste testing, from one baker to another. But because she’s primarily baking for Americans it’s not a thing she can sell without people complaining it’s not sweet/soft/dense-cake like enough, so she’s back to making dense muffins and calling them scones. Though thankfully not with rosewater and lavender :p

Most British baked goods you can throw against a wall and the only damage you’re going to do is to the wall, but by god you can bake ‘em using rationed food and also fight off invading forces if you have to. 

This is 100% accurate and brings back fond memories of my grandad’s scones and cakes. You could have them for tea, or you could just as easily use them to fill a hole in the garden fence.

I was always told scones require buttermilk to get them to rise right, but I’ve never been able to test it myself. Never heard of using lemonade. 

I looked up scones and they look very much like the biscuits we have here. Which are as you say, super soft and fluffy, unless of course they are a bit old. They are never ever sweet, and are more or less a bread.

The scone i am familiar with is this. They had them on Wednesdays at my highschool for breakfast.

image

they were a bit sweet (most of the sweet comes form the icign they often had, the ‘bread’ itself was mildly sweet) , super dense and hard. often having fruit in them, like rasins, or my favorite, cranberries. They sound kind of similar to what you are talking about =0

Course they could of been as hard as they were cause its a highschool cafeteria, so the food is sub par.

See to me those look more like rock cake lol, which is scone like but harder.

why would you put icing on a scone thats sacrilige. either some jam or butter if its a cheesey scone. treacle scones are pure and need nothing extra. 

TREACLE SCONES YES

If your scones are wall-denting, you’re baking ‘em wrong. They should be light and fluffy, with a crumbling crust and a glazed top. And also round. I get the impression American shortcake is quite a similar thing.

Icing is just… it’s an odd addition. Scones are intended as a mildly sweet base for (butter), jam and cream, not really intended to be eaten unadorned.

British baking is not commonly hard, dense and heavy (I don’t know where the OP was eating to get that idea, but bad baking exists in every country and if we were going to judge a country by the worst it can produce, I’d have to flag up Cakewrecks as my counterargument).

(And I have a frustrated relationship with the American stereotype of ‘bad British food’. I will take that accusation from Italy, not from the land of kraft cheese.

My theory is that this is a stereotype formed the last time Americans happened to be over here in great numbers – US troops during the war. When we had rationing. Hardly a fair time to judge our culinary creativity. Rationing lasted into the 50s, so an entire generation grew up without having been exposed to interesting, non-local food in their youth. British cuisine during the 60s and 70s really was bland and stidgy by all accounts. But so was American food (at least, in both cases, if you were a white non-big-city-dweller).


I don’t know where the OP was eating to get that idea

I’m from Scotland and worked for 10 years in a Victorian styled bakery where we made everything by hand. And I didn’t say it was hard and dense, I said you could throw it at a wall and it’d stay intact, as in, it’s not barely held together and still soft in the middle which is the bane of my existence over here since I’ve moved to America. It was a gag, based on a Pratchett post earlier in my feed.

The French would argue with you though. They find British baking incredibly hard and dense.

Oh, well, yeah, the French are allowed to with their cakes made of air. They take things altogetheer TOO FAR thiugh and produce things like macaroons. But I still disagree that British baking tends towards the dense. But I’m coming from a southerner’s perspective, I know Scots are a bit more resilient in their approach to a good crust. Definitely T’ Bread Wi’ T’ Edge

It keeps the damp out :p

And ah you’ve no lived till you’ve had an irn bru flavored macaroon. (Also known as: how to make your French exchange student rage cry)

Is it wrong that this sounds amazing to me

v1als:

A quick note based on my post-Brexit experience in the UK – in the time period after the election, your biggest threat will not be Trump and his government. It will be your newly validated bigot neighbours. After Brexit, hate crime shot up by 60% in the UK nearly overnight and it still hasn’t returned to its pre-Brexit level. I imagine the same will happen in America. Be careful. No matter who they are, Trump voters are not your friends. Be safe. Your biggest enemy right now is the neighbour you went to church with and the people you pass on the street every day. Lock down. Go to ground if you have to. Look out for one another. Please, be careful.