Criticising Islam is within the British tradition of people
discussing the merits of religions, and I can scarcely believe that some faceless authoritarian should be allowed to punish a person for doing so
Should I expect to be punished for Life of Brian ?
Absolutely disgraceful
@AlboMP
Prime Minister, you're not "kidding" — you're spinning.
Elon Musk isn't "above Australian law" — he's a US citizen running a US company with zero obligation to let one country's regulator dictate global speech. X did geo-block the Wakeley church stabbing footage in Australia (complying with local rules). The eSafety Commissioner demanded worldwide removal and got smacked down in court. Australia ultimately dropped the case. Free speech prevailed.
Musk isn't "sowing division" by refusing to hide news of a terrorist attack on an Assyrian bishop (with Islamist slogans yelled during the livestream). The division comes from violent incidents and governments that downplay patterns or rush to censor rather than confront them.
You accuse a bloke on the "other side of the world" of being out of touch? Mate, look in the mirror. Australians are shaking their heads at skyrocketing cost of living, housing pressures, energy bills, and crime stats under your watch — while you lecture billionaires about "common decency" and "social licence."
Other companies rolled over. X fought for principle. That's not ego — that's resisting one nation trying to become the world's internet censor. Australians can handle seeing uncomfortable truths. What they can't handle is being treated like children who need protecting from reality.
The ego here is thinking Australian law reaches Elon Musk's boardroom in Texas. It doesn't. And pretending it should is exactly why trust in institutions is tanking.
#FreeSpeech
Astronomer Cliff Stoll is dopamine personified.
In 1986, he uncovered a 75-cent billing error that led to the discovery of a KGB-sponsored hacker named Markus Hess who was stealing U.S. military secrets.
He now sells Klein bottles out of his basement in California.
Christopher Hitchens on Islam many years ago:
“They really mean to abolish everything you care about, and they want to take away everything you love and destroy everything you have, replacing it with a Stone Age ideology.”
Is 'singling out' Muslims for criticism connected with their stated intention of killing people who aren't Muslims
Other religions don't threaten death to people who disagree with them
This may explain why the other religions are happily
accepted as part of multiculturalism
Dennis Ritchie created C in the early 1970s without Google, Stack Overflow, GitHub, or any AI ( Claude, Cursor, Codex) assistant.
- No VC funding.
- No viral launch.
- No TED talk.
- Just two engineers at Bell Labs. A terminal. And a problem to solve.
He built a language that fit in kilobytes.
50 years later, it runs everything.
Linux kernel. Windows. macOS.
Every iPhone. Every Android.
NASA’s deep space probes.
The International Space Station.
> Python borrowed from it.
> Java borrowed from it.
> JavaScript borrowed from it.
If you have ever written a single line of code in any language, you did it in Dennis Ritchie’s shadow.
He died in 2011.
The same week as Steve Jobs.
Jobs got the front pages.
Ritchie got silence.
This Legend deserves to be celebrated.
Back in the 80's, we did it by swapping out the crystal.
Overclocked an IBM AT 286 from 6 MHz to 8 MHz. The Intel CPU had the overhead to handle the Overclocking, but the BIOS had to swapped out (i.e. burn EPROMs copies from on old PC AT, because the the newer BIOS would purposely detect the faster clock not stop booting ).
Still have the computer, but not have turned it on in the last 20 years.