The Freedom to Meme is the Freedom to Speak

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

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91 thoughts on “The Freedom to Meme is the Freedom to Speak”

  1. The “100 authors against Einstein” reminds me of a comment I’ve made on a couple of occasions:

    If truth were to be found in consensus, we wouldn’t be here, because Columbus would have sailed off the edge of the flat Earth.

    The “labor of others” one is really excellent.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Well, educated Europeans and sailors knew that the world was round. Columbus’s mistake was thinking that the distance to Asia was much closer that it actually was.

      And his sailors were worried about running out of food and water.

      Fortunately, Columbus found a land-mass that Europeans did not know existed (and Columbus apparently died thinking he found Asia).

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      1. Yep, that’s one of my buttons.

        “Look, Dante knew the world was a sphere in the early 1300s. Go read the Inferno, for pity’s sake!”

        (Although as I get older, the Inferno gets more and more disturbing).

        Liked by 1 person

      2. What’s more, the bulk of the evidence pointed to the correct size. The only evidence he had was that sometimes things washed up on the Canaries that were too intact to have floated the entire distance from China’s real location.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. There’s been speculation that he may have heard about the Vinland Saga or about reports of fishermen sighting land to the West.

          But yes, the evidence was against him.

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  2. c4c (because I don’t have anything better to say). [Twisted Grin]

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  3. Thank you for the memes! I’m not sure whether I’m more amused by Milei and St. Augustine being on the same page, or the pastor and Darth Vader. cat flotation device is brilliant. The vacuumed carpet and lack of random empty containers on the floor in How Men Live are the tells that it’s fake ;)

    Liked by 1 person

  4. “Get her a cat and she’ll be off her phone….”

    Because Indy will need spare parts for his project……😸🐈😸🐈😇

    Liked by 1 person

            1. I had an enormous cat many years ago. After several attempts to keep him from overeating, we put a chain and combination lock on the cabinets.

              He would spin the lock’s dial back and forth and hang off of it. The chain had tooth marks. He never figured out the combo, though.

              Also, RE: “comment comment comment, reply reply reply”

              From 2002:

              https://web.archive.org/web/20021017230900/http://www.bash.org/?23396

              <Donut[AFK]> HEY EURAKARTE
              <Donut[AFK]> INSULT
              <Eurakarte> RETORT
              <Donut[AFK]> COUNTER-RETORT
              <Eurakarte> QUESTIONING OF SEXUAL PREFERENCE
              <Donut[AFK]> SUGGESTION TO SHUT THE F UP
              <Eurakarte> NOTATION THAT YOU CREATE A VACUUM
              <Donut[AFK]> RIPOSTE
              <Donut[AFK]> ADDON RIPOSTE
              <Eurakarte> COUNTER-RIPOSTE
              <Donut[AFK]> COUNTER-COUNTER RIPOSTE
              <Eurakarte> NONSENSICAL STATEMENT INVOLVING PLANKTON
              <Miles_Prower> RESPONSE TO RANDOM STATEMENT AND THREAT TO BAN OPPOSING SIDES
              <Eurakarte> WORDS OF PRAISE FOR FISHFOOD
              <Miles_Prower> ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AND ACCEPTENCE OF TERMS

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            1. …. he already talks to Morrigan a lot. (Younger DIL.) Apparently her belly rubs are the BEST.
              He is alert when her car pulls in the driveway, way before we hear anything. (The driveway is on the other side of the house from where I am.)

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        2. Sorry. I COULD see taking Havey. He’s placid and adores people. Indy would run off to explore first chance he got.
          He also likes people (And loves having belly rubs) BUT he’d want to explore all the new place, and quickly get lost.

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  5. The Bob Ross ones got to me. I recently bought a skeinmof yarn with a Bob Ross quote: “There are no mistakes, there are only happy little accidents.”

    As good a motto as any.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. That motto gets a tad more disturbing when you are using a flamethrower…

      Still good. But disturbing. And quite illuminating, too.

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  6. That may be because no one was selling electricity as a way to predict which employees are planning to find another job…..

    https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/blog/oracle-expands-fusion-cloud-hcm-analytics-enhance-workforce-insights-2021-11-02/

    Built on Oracle Analytics Cloud and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, Oracle Fusion HCM Analytics delivers the insights HR organizations need to understand workforce diversity, mitigate employee attrition, optimize recruiting efforts, predict employee retention trends, manage compensation ratios, and analyze data in support of other essential activities.

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    1. Sure, AI is going to get used for harmful things. It’s what humans do. Look at the uses for radiation in the 50s. It’s horrifying. it’s not the tech.

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      1. I’m happy to report that we were able to have a rational discussion about the legitimate uses of AI by writers and artists at the panel at InConJunction today. I’m hoping we’ve turned the corner, and soon a lot of the people who jumped on the “AI is inherently thefty” bandwagon will soon be pretending they never really meant such an extreme position, that they were just asking for caution while the legal precedents were worked out, etc. (in particular, I’m hoping that the family member who’s repeatedly posted “call AI plagiarism software, because that’s what it is” memes is one of the people who feels like they need to be seen taking a position, rather than actually believing in it — I really don’t want to be in a position where I need help and get told “we don’t help thieves”).

        Liked by 1 person

        1. :ehug:
          And the folks who say that sort of stuff strangely seem fine with accepting help, demanding help, and even taking-without-asking because they “need” it. Which isn’t theft. For reasons.

          Liked by 1 person

      2. Try the 1920’s and 30’s. There were shoe-fitting fluoroscopes that exposed your feet and lower legs to a year’s dose of radiation in a few minutes. The Radium Girls, of course, instructed to lick their paintbrushes to get a fine point for applying radium paint to clocks and watches. And then there’s this:

        https://theodoregray.com/periodictable/Files/Revigator.pdf

        The Revigator! A ceramic pot lined with carnotite uranium ore, so you can energize ordinary water with miraculous radiation (actually radon gas) right in your own home!

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        1. There was a Craig Kennedy story written sometime in the 1910s where the villain had gotten ground radium into either the paint or the wallpaper of a room and them waited for his victim to die of cancer.

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      3. The issue isn’t that there will be ways to abuse the technology; the issue is that many of those issues were foreseeable and should be prevented as far as we can.

        As it is, too many people are being sold hard on the idea that AI can be cited as an “unbiased decision maker”. Instead, it will take “the computer made a mistake” to new depths, because neither the developers nor the users know exactly what correlations vs coincidences its’ decisions were based on.

        Using AI to write dreck fanfiction or produce dreck art is one thing. Using it to make decisions that you know affect other people’s lives in horrible ways is a whole other level.

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        1. I’m of the opinion that the current drive for AI to proliferate in everything won’t be curtailed until a couple of foreseeable disasters in public. Only then will there be more conscious decisions to apply the technology to things that won’t have immediate dire consequences for innocent people in the public. The current versions of AI don’t really think, they just have access to a much larger database of information to draw from to perform activities that can fool people.

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          1. We’ve been enjoying this essay: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/#fn:1

            Warning: salty language.

            AI reminds me strongly of cryptocurrency as a tech hype object. Many of the people pushing it in the media and to investors have never written a line of code. (I’m not a programmer, to be clear.) I wonder, what other, more productive activities are being drained of support due to enthusiasm for castles in the clouds? It’s a very expensive, energy-intensive technology. Like crypto, AI uses energy on a vast scale.

            Actually, I’d submit that if AGI were to have emerged, it would need a reliable source of electricity. Thus, it is quite likely that AGI has emerged.

            Liked by 1 person

      4. Pixy’s “Daily Tech News” sums it up nicely.

        http://ace.mu.nu/archives/410449.php

        Tokens are a big reason today’s generative AI falls short. (Tech Crunch)

        One of many big reasons.

        The biggest being they are using language models without a corresponding fact model, and if you get the fact model right the language model becomes largely irrelevant.

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  7. I’ve been re-reading, “The Fellowship of the Ring,” and am sorry to report there was no cave troll in the original battle. Frodo was attacked by an Orc chief.

    OTOH, Boromir’s almost casual, “We’re so screwed,” tone when he says, “They have a cave troll,” is one of my favorite lines from the film.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. As the possible neighbor in the other LOTR reference meme, this is correct.

      Regarding the theft of weapons in the other spurious post, I refuse all accusations! There may or may not be numerous stabby slashy pointy flinging things in various states of readiness, repair, and restoration, but none of those have any (living) legal owners that I (or the law) am/are currently aware of.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. It’s Gandalf who says, “there is something else there. A great cave-troll, I think, or more than one.”

      Then Frodo stabs something that sounds an awful lot like a troll, from the description, in the foot. It retreats and the orcs attack. After they are beaten off, Gandalf says, “Let us go, before the troll returns!” And that’s when the orc chief shows up and attacks Frodo.

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  8. Give Send Go works for me.

    This week’s Facebook desecration was the decade-by-decade predictions. My reply to their fact checkers was that their AI was so stupid, it made Joe Biden look like a genius.

    Liked by 1 person

  9. The “America F* Yeah!” image is making me cringe.

    1. Seat that rifle properly. There’s no brace to it and it’s going to kick out of her hands (probably breaking a finger in the process.)
    2. Trigger discipline! No finger on the trigger until you’re ready to shoot—and she won’t be until she seats the butt of that rifle in that nice little shoulder pocket.
    3. Eye and ear pro would be nice, though certainly not period. It’s grimly funny to watch the old rangemasters try to talk with one another when they all have hearing damage.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I’ve shot skeet once (and badly) in my life many years ago. (The path with station pads makes it clear). Wiki says Olympic Skeet is done with the butt at mid-torso until the target shows. OTOH, that’s piss-poor trigger discipline. FWIW, Wiki says American Skeet is done with the shotgun mounted at the shoulder.

      1969 Pontiac Grand Prix, maybe?

      Liked by 1 person

  16. Gen X, the Waffle House of generations? Lessee.

    Open and working in nigh all situations? Can feed a metric F***ton of people tasty food at the drop of a hat? Has exactly ZERO discriminations based on race, sex, religion but plenty on “will you show the F up and do the job?” Is pretty much everywhere, quietly and competently doing the job that needs to be done? Adapts to challenges with impressive flexibility and has an extensive “what if?” contingency system to remain in operation, no matter what, so long as there is even a sliver of a chance of doing so? Could possibly be THE hidden support system that holds the universe together?

    Wait, that last one’s libraries. Nevermind that one. But the rest of them? Dang, I think we Gen Xers have been complimented most graciously.

    Liked by 3 people

  17. Ref the IRS:

    2nd wife started a new job with a federal agency. About three months in she came home with an odd look on her face and said “There are signs all over the office today saying “Just because you work for the federal government doesn’t mean you don’t have to file your taxes”, and the guy training me read one and laughed. Said he hadn’t filed taxes in four years.”

    Makes you wonder how many others, doesn’t it?

    Liked by 2 people

    1. my bet is most of em, clain 8 exemptions and never file, you get almost the full wage except for the ss and such.
      personally im sick of giving over 28.6% of my earnings, will never see a dime of it

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  18. Samuel Whittemore.

    ….I want to be that tough.

    Wow. Born in 1695, and still got to make it all the way to the constitution being ratified….

    Four years of community service? Oh yes, please.

    …It’s never a good week to be a child or virgin in D.C.

    How pro 2nd amendment… I thought the movie Tank was awesome. There should be more legit tank owners out there. (There are only several thousand! We need to up our game!)

    …I am familiar with those horsemen. So that’s who eats my snacks!

    Romania. Caaaaaackles…..

    Toxic trait yep….

    These are awesome!

    Liked by 3 people

  20. I kinda cant wait till they start pulling that BS like the one with the lady and her kids standing at the ATM,

    thatll be the day theres no reason to be reasonable anymore, better on yer feet than layin in a sick bed somewhere.

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  21. I only knew enough about Azur Lane to know that it’s a mobile game with WW2 era ships represented as cute anime girls. Seeing the meme made me wonder, which ships are those? So I found an Azur Lane wiki and looked through the images until I found their matches.

    The “British” ship is the Royal Navy battleship, HMS Queen Elizabeth.

    The “American” ship is the Eagle Union battleship, USS Washington.

    “Royal Navy” and “Eagle Union” are factions in the game, but even so I feel like the use of those two ships gives the meme an extra layer.

    And now I can go to bed.

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    1. As someone who played Azur Lane quite a lot for quite a while –

      It’s a mobile gacha waifu collector that’s uses “bullet hell” gameplay. The setting has “ship girls” that are basically World War 2 warships as cute females with mechanical attachments (“riggings”) that are based off of their original WW2 hulls. Because it has a World War 2 focus, and because the developer is in China, and because Japan is a *huge* source of income for any game like this, the country names have been changed up somewhat. So instead of the US, United Kingdom, Empire of Japan, and Nazi Germany, you have the Eagle Union, Royal Navy, Sakura Empire, and (non-Nazi) Iron Blood. There are also a few others (including China, and both Vichy and Free France) mixed in. It’s probably the single most popular of the various “ship girl” games that have appeared (though afaik only the original “ship girl” game could have had a shot at dethroning it, and… there are Reasons(tm) that didn’t happen).

      As you noted, the ships shown are HMS Queen Elizabeth, and USS Washington (state). Elizabeth is the head of her faction (she’s named after a monarch, and is both the oldest Royal Navy ship named after a monarch, and the oldest monarch that a Royal Navy ship is named after), and notorious for being a bossy royal. USS Washington is a less prominent character within the setting.

      Biggest Game Pro – It’s a very inexpensive game for a gacha game. It’s more or less expected that if you regularly play the game, you will get every single ship that’s released – including the rare ones. And ships from past events will eventually be added to the game in another fashion. The developer makes most of its money via outfits sold for the girls.

      Biggest Game Con – The Eagle Union and the Royal Navy have a vast reservoir of ships to draw upon, based off of the actual ships in the US and UK navies. The other countries… not so much. Those other countries have fans, though. And the developer wants to keep those fans interested. So quite a while ago the game started releasing ships that either were never completed, or never left the design room. Much to my chagrin, I once had to explain in a forum for fans of an historical ship combat miniatures game, to a fan of this game, that the ship that he was asking about in that forum never existed, and appears to have been linked to the barely started and never officially named second Graf Zeppelin-class hull. Meanwhile, the Eagle Union has roughly half a dozen of its Essex-class carriers, and won’t run out of potential new ones anytime soon.

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  24. I’ve got that 1930’s feeling. The Popular Front has swept to power in France promising to implement their “entire program.” The center “right” had better start to have a good, hard look at themselves. Not that they’re going to, but they should. First the UK, now France. Things are bad, very bad.

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      1. I have. This is the commie alliance. LePen came third. they’re talking about massive tax rises, wealth taxes, 90% tax rates, increases in spending, 10% raises for government drones housing subsidies. that’s just the start of it and never mind law and order, immigration, and alphabet soup.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. Green new deal, Palestine, the whole sad story. Now France being France where the assembly isn’t actually all that powerful and Macron staying on as President, they probably won’t get all of this. Further, they’re almost certainly going to shatter now that they’re in power. They’re still going to do a lot of damage and, yes, I have that 1930’s feeling. Economic malaise coupled with political stupidity and cupidity led to the extremes of left and right in power and Les extremes se touchent and all that.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Glenn Reynolds on Instapundit – “If you’re a French Jew, it’s time to leave. An Islamist/Left fusionist ruling coalition is about the worst possible outcome. But hey, they beat the “far right” crowd that just wanted to have a normal country.”

          First Poland, then Britain and now France. All three ended up with leftist governments within the last year. The Reader doesn’t believe in coincidence.

          Liked by 1 person

                    1. No. No, they aren’t. No discipline. After all, look at the French left. When they lost the first round of the elections…they rioted. When they won the runoff round…they rioted.

                      They are, however, useful cannon fodder for those who see them, and are willing to use them, as the blunt instrument they are.

                      Liked by 1 person

                2. If we have to pacify that rolling shitshow again, this time we geld the annoyances and colonize it properly. Pax Americana, and their sons will be our sons.

                  -End- it.

                  Liked by 1 person

                  1. The Reader (and he is sure many others) have no interest in pacifying that shitshow again. The most he will offer anyone there who wants to restore it are lessons in manufacturing AR-15s. And frankly, the Poles are perfectly capable if the want to.

                    Liked by 1 person

                    2. There are outcomes worse than “Americas again has to pacify the European shitshow”.

                      -Far- worse.

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                    3. Mailclerk – here is a more serious thought on Europe and NATO the Reader posted elsewhere.

                      In 1991, I was in favor of NATO throwing the world’s biggest victory party and having everyone go home after the hangover recovery. It succeeded in its goal – keep the Russians out, the French in (sorta) and the Germans down. We’ve let it drift (and grow like an amoeba blob) for 30+ years without a serious conversation about what we need it for. In fairness those 30 years gave the Eastern European countries a chance to recover from being an unwilling part of the Soviet Bloc. NATO’s expansion has come largely from its bureaucrats looking for something new to do and providing an additional country count so those countries that don’t fund their own defense could feel better. Now we are at a point where the Eastern European and Baltic countries concerned about Russia are starting to pull their own weight, but the Western European countries still persist in snoozing their defense away. We can’t fix this now without the threat of going home and sooner or later the leftist governments in France, Germany, Spain and Britain are going to respond to the threat with ‘go ahead’. At that point, do we carry out the threat or back down? I believe it is time to leave NATO behind and instead support the creation of an Eastern Europe / Baltic defensive alliance. The US can provide support, training and resources but not be committed to boots on the ground. Note that that alliance will need its own nuclear deterrent and we should support its development.

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                    4. believe it is time to leave NATO behind and instead support the creation of an Eastern Europe / Baltic defensive alliance.

                      The problem with that is that all of those Western European free-loaders…. will continue to freeload, because most of the land and air routes will be covered anyway, and they rate the Russian Navy as a target rich environment, but not for long, since they don’t have many operational hulls. Besides, they might not really mind being swallowed if it means those Eastern European Untermensch will be surrounded. spit

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              1. Possibly I’m too insomniac or weird guts today.

                But, I’m not changing my mind from where it last was when I slept well, and was not spending the day on angry tirades.

                So, my analysis is ‘sure they have ideas’, but also ‘I am not supposing that their ideas can be implemented in reality’. Or ‘analysis’.

                I would definitely not swear that I have done any thinking today.

                If I were calculating, and able, calculated apathy might be my answer to attempts to evoke emotion. Energized people? For what end?

                But, we all understand that I am crazy, and that my thoughts and feelings may be useless to persons here.

                Dunno.

                Liked by 1 person

              2. The Reader notes that the Supreme Court would be forced to parse both the 25th Amendment and the last sentence of the 12th Amendment – “But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.” The Reader wonders who would have standing to bring the case.

                Liked by 1 person

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