@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.

@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.

@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".

@V0ldek @self And not just the song title - the lyrics are so on point all the way through:

You still think swastikas look cool
The real Nazis run your schools
They're coaches, businessmen and cops
In a real fourth Reich you'll be the first to go

@froztbyte @AcausalRobotGod "So the tablecloth is the Internet routing mesh, right? Now imagine that this squeezy bottle of ketchup is a provider in Pakistan who just got ordered to block access to Twitter in the country but isn't quite sure of the right syntax to blackhole traffic from a particular AS..."

@Soyweiser @gerikson Plus the sets of "people who can DJ competently" and "people who are convinced that they should be allowed to DJ in public" do not, unfortunately, overlap completely.