British Sense of Humour? Not So Much

What a sad, sad day for this country:

A trainee accountant who posted a message on Twitter threatening to blow an airport "sky high" has been found guilty of sending a menacing electronic communication.

Now, the judge may not know this, but there's a technical term for this kind of tweet: it's what we Internet johnnies call a "joke"...

The truly sickening part of this judgement is the following:

a district judge at Doncaster Magistrates Court ruled that the Tweet was "of a menacing nature in the context of the times in which we live".

In other words, our society has become so corrupted by the cynical abuse of the idea of "terror" that we have lost all sense of proportion, not to mention humour. Tragic - and dangerous, since it is bound to have a chilling effect on Twitter in this country.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Nothing to See Here, Absolutely Nothing At All...

As we all now know, Climate Change is fake. Sure the precarious resource and geo-political struggle fossil fuels continues to place us in are clearly real but instead of investing in clean alternatives, we should continue to destroy and re-build nations half way around the world. That’s a much cheaper and more productive alternative than investing in our own infrastructure and innovating our way out of the very real logistical and foreign-policy problems we’ve created for ourselves.

Speaking of cost, we can’t afford to save the planet or invest in our future. That could hurt the economy and we can’t risk that. We can just switch planets or go back in time when the planet dies. At least the economy will be safe though. There’s no possible way that comparing the needs of the economy to the whole planet is a false dichotomy. Sure, the economy depends on the fact that our world remains as it is today – No mass migrations due to new extreme climates. No real shortage of energy. No resulting wars (well, not too many anyway). Land to grow things. The status quo is the most likely future scenario right?

To my shame, I fell, hook, line and sinker, for the first paragraph of this hilarious piece...

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Microsoft's Black Humour

Just yesterday, Microsoft Malaysia posted a new advertisement in a Malaysian daily which gloated that it now had control of all the software pirates in Malaysia. This new "feature" targets pirates by making the background of the desktops black, making it easy for law enforcers to fine the law breakers.

As this post points out, animadverting to screens of death is not a very clever move.