Interesting Links for 27-08-2021

[andrewducker]

Britain needs to eat less chicken in order to save jaguar and giant armadillos from extinction

(tags:UK SouthAmerica chicken nature )

No, cotton carrier bags are not 20,000 times worse for the environment than plastic ones

(tags:environment plastic fraud )

electricityMap - Live CO₂ emissions of electricity consumption

(tags:maps electricity co2 )

Hiding Images in Plain Sight: The Physics Of Magic Windows

(tags:glass image physics mathematics light )

Transphobic bigots at both Ofcom and the BBC. We really are living in worrying times

(tags:LGBT transgender bigotry BBC OhForFucksSake )

Humans have stripes!

(tags:humans colour )

Why are antivaxxers eating horse medication?

(tags:pandemic OhForFucksSake )

Google Scholar is terrible on names, particularly affecting trans people

(tags:Google names academia OhForFucksSake transgender )

Comments

[nancylebov]

I thought the big deal with cotton/recycled plastic bags is that if you forget to bring one, you buy another.

[andrewducker]

Well, yes. If you don't reuse them then that's definitely an issue.

Bigotry Appointments to BBC and OFCOM?

[dewline]

Well, that's just bloody terrifying and rage-inducing.

Wondering - in a paranoid way - how this affected the recently announced change-up at Doctor Who...

Re: Bigotry Appointments to BBC and OFCOM?

[hairyears]

OFCOM is a particularly disturbing capture by hate-cultists and politically-ambitious sociopaths who seek to build their own careers on a hate campaign's success.

OFCOM isn't a broadcaster, not even a dominant national media channel: it's their national regulator.

So there is now no impartial body adjudicating complaints about hate speech, and more subtle hate propaganda, directed against transgender people.

Indeed, transphobia can now progress from being the acccepted norm, to being an openly-promoted and advancing source of media advantage and political popularity, without regulatory sanction.

Oops.

As always, it's a journey, not a destination: and the friends we're making along the way, and normalising as a part of the national discourse, are a nasty collection of fundamentalists and cranks and violent extremists on the Right.

TERFs and other transgender hate campaigners keep alarming company, and keep very quiet about who's funding them.

So it should come as no surprise that an established base of transphobic hate becomes a bridgehead for propagating slurs about sinister Jews secretly funding the erosion of gender norms - yes, a new edition of the Blood Libel is now going mainstream - and that other cranks and hate groups use the bridgehead, too: everywhere transphobia is normalised and nurtured, you'll find Antivaxxers, too.

And, just to repeat the point: this isn't a cliquey parish council going off the rails like MumsNet did.

It's the national media regulator, whose job and duty is - or was - to stop exactly that from taking hold in national media outlets.

Re: Bigotry Appointments to BBC and OFCOM?

[dewline]

OFCOM being equivalent to Canada's CRTC or the US FCC, then...

*shivers*