Compulsory voting doesn’t mean you have to vote: it means you have to show up or have a good excuse to not have done so. Once you show up, you can lodge a blank ballot, write “FUCK THEM ALL” on the paper, draw a willy on it or whatever. Informal votes, as they’re known, are counted and, while they don’t decide who wins, they’re a gauge of dissatisfaction (a certain baseline amount is expected, though variation from that can indicate changes in public sentiment).

From an individual voter’s point of view it may seem pointless and annoying, though looking at it across the system, compulsory voting changed the dynamics of elections by eliminating the advantage of playing to one’s base to boost turnout. The result, as seen in jurisdictions such as Australia, is less extremism as parties tend to aim to appeal more to the broad public.

While Britain participated in the slave trade, they went out of their way to not do so in Britain; the slaveholders kept their slaves abroad and out of sight, in places where the laws of civilisation which rule such institutions to be obscene are waived. (Sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean were one such place.) And it was impolite to inquire too hard about the sources of fortunes that built stately homes.

The difference being that when the N-word was uttered in Britain, it was belittling and condescending in an exoticising way, like a colonial-era picture book of funny foreigners in their traditional costumes. In America, however, it had a more immediate edge of aggression and violence, implying an other that’s here rather than far away, and firmly below the speaker in the established racial hierarchy, and who must be kept there using tools including designating them as a (N-word).

He left out porn/erotic fiction/sexualised pop music (“erototoxins”, as the religious types call it)

L. Ron Hubbard would disagree.

Based.

Step 1. Feed coin into slot machine

Step 2. Pull lever

Step 3. Congratulations! You are now an open-source developer

The word carried somewhat less of a charge in the UK at the time, where black people were relatively uncommon until waves of labour migration from the Caribbean in the 1950s, than in the US, where it was freighted with the weight of slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow laws and such. Agatha Christie could call a book “10 Little N_s”, alluding to a children’s rhyme. This was an age in which the children who casually sang that rhyme probably had golliwog dolls.

( looks at harried, sleep-deprived parent wrangling four squawling children into a minivan) “This person fucks.”

That makes sense. Once nuclear is built, using it is a no-brainer: you’ve already paid for it, so saying no to energy produced at the costs of a few truckloads of fuel a year is purity politics at its most asinine. Building new nuclear plants, with their high capital costs and long lead times, is another question altogether.

Always has been.

The USSR from the Stalin era onwards had world-leading biological and chemical weapons programmes, largely due to having plenty of test subjects in the gulag system.

And here’s a version entirely as a WebGL shader, complete with vocals.

Anybody stealing one would be disappointed, as, like all wildcats other than F. sylvestris (the nearest wild relative of the domestic cat), they’d be too paranoid and aggressive to be domesticable.

Won’t someone think of the Nazis’ rights to peacefully advocate racial extermination being so brutally violated…

Slava ukraini!

Do London luxury-apartment towers marketed at Chinese investors also have floors numbered to skip the number 4 (i.e., floor 25 is directly above floor 23)? Buildings in Sydney and Vancouver sometimes have.

He sounds like a useful idiot

Everyone gets off at the slutstation

Not only a serial killer but also a cat burglar, pickpocket, arsonist and numerous other crimes. A regular Doktorin Mabuse.

Is this still being built?

“Here I will confess that I was anticipating the Schwebebahn to be a novelty, more of a gimmick than a real transit route, like Los Angeles’s Angels Flight funicular or San Francisco’s cable cars… I was immediately proven incorrect”

Tell me you’re American without saying you’re American.