Interesting Links for 27-05-2025

[andrewducker]

1. The US health system is now overseen by vaccine deniers. The effects are entirely predictable

(tags:disease pandemic usa vaccines doom )

2. Hong Kong children urged to get Covid jabs as 'whole paediatric ward full'

(tags:pandemic HongKong china children doom vaccination )

3. An Oral History of 'Lilo & Stitch' (the original)

(tags:animation movies Disney Hawaii history )

4. German court rules cookie banners must offer "reject all" button (if they have an "accept all" button)

(tags:cookies surveillance germany dataprotection GoodNews )

5. It makes no sense to cut funding to mental health services when that costs you money in the long run.

(tags:mentalhealth money edinburgh )

6. How much energy does AI use?

(tags:ai electricity )

7. Owls! in! Towels!

(tags:owls cute photos )

8. Explaining a 31-month sentence for a tweet

(tags:racism riots uk law )

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

#8. Why is it racist, I wonder. Is it because everybody knows the race(s) of illegal immigrants, whom Connolly was talking about? This probably means that she was reflecting the common feelings in the country. (I'm clueless about what's going on actually, so all this looks pretty weird to me. To me, she was expressing her opinion. I believe, the only illegal part of her tweet was the word "mass", because with mass deportations you won't be able to maintain human rights. The rest: deportations, burning hotels, it's all legal, if done in a due process. Say, if she wrote something like "we need a legal process to deport illegal immigrants, and we need to destroy the hotels the only purpose of which is to host illegal immigrants", would that be legal?

As an immigrant, I'm pretty much against illegal immigration. But which immigration should be viewed illegal, must be carefully defined. Refugees, are they illegal? I don't think so.

[andrewducker]

If you incite violence, by saying that we should set fire to hotels full of people, then that's a crime. If the people in the hotels are mostly not White British, then that's going to be taken as racism, particularly if the context was lots of rumours about a murder being carried out by an immigrant.

She could have disputed all of that, of course. But she pleaded guilty.

(Also, those are normal hotels, just currently being used to house asylum seekers.)

[juan_gandhi]

That part, whether the hotel is supposed to be full of people, escaped me. Maybe she meant it, then yes. But I just didn't see it in the text.

Well, she pleaded guilty to avoid a harsher punishment, I suppose.

And thank you regarding what kind of hotels we were talking about. It's a different case in San Francisco, so I was not aware.

Ok, in short, it's a British context.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes. I absolutely don't mind explaining, because I expect that it's very different for different people!

[haggis]

The other connection was that the only thing that was known about the Southport killer at that point was his race and that was the thing he had in common with most immigrants living in those hotels.

Calling for people to be burned alive in response to a vile but unrelated crime is absolutely a criminal act, as David Allen Green notes.

[juan_gandhi]

Definitely. But whether one can read in that tweet a call to burn people alive, it varies, probably, with the culture. I just couldn't imagine.

[haggis]

There were riots and crowds of attackers outside buildings where immigrants are forced to living happening at the time she posted that tweet. It wasn't theoretical and the context wasn't ambiguous. It was a deliberate call for mass murder.

[channelpenguin]

It's actually happened here in Germany, places have been set on fire, and I think people hurt/killed. (I don't deliberately watch/read/listen to news for at least 20 years, for my own mental health and survival, so I'm not sure of the details.)

[juan_gandhi]

Yes, I got it. I was too naive. Thank you.