Nah, you just think you get it. Getting black-out drunk might be stupid because of the direct impact on personal health. It does not, however, diminish the reasonable expectation that the people you encounter will not rape you. We tell people to be careful crossing the road or watch their belongings because there are…

I’m sorry for that part of my comment, I was exaggerating my reaction to the point I was picking you up on but you’re right, it was needlessly personal. I offer a sincere apology.

“Little would have changed in the movie on a practical level if the curse had been passed on by a bite or a touch instead of sex. It’s only on the metaphorical level that it matters.” - um, what? Challenging your overall opinion on the film is probably a fool’s errand, but you surely haven’t thought that specific…

The dissonance is that the part about the rapists implies they bear full responsibility but the part about the victim implies she bears some level of responsibility. The only other interpretation is that you think she shouldn’t have gotten drunk for reasons unrelated to the rape, in which case the dissonance arises…

You’ve gone from accusing Hawking of interfering with the administration of academic tenure to accusing him of NOT interfering with the administration of academic tenure.

On belief in a god I think Hawking was somewhere between Spinozist and agnostic, although it’s been over a decade since I read about any thoughts he had on the matter. But yeah, I had wondered if that was a motive.

1. You haven’t given any citations, you’ve just made your initial assertion more elaborate and given yourself more to prove in doing so. Also, what exactly do you mean when you say Hawking “kept his mouth shut”? That credulous faculty heads were so enamoured with Hawking that they pushed out dissenters and he went…

I’m guessing you meant to type “hasn’t replied”?

Do you have a link to info backing that up? I’ve Googled several permutations of “Stephen Hawking caused funding to be withheld”, and “criticism of Stephen Hawking” (which yielded some pretty nasty hatchet jobs about his personal life), trawled his profiles on Wikipedia and Rational Wiki (the latter are pretty good at…

What he really means is “I didn’t read the article properly and rushed to contradict the author like the pompous smartarse I am and now I’m reaching for something that doesn’t really even support my initial burst”. I wouldn’t bother with him

Very nicely put, although here in Blighty “mug” is slang for a stupid person, so I’d wager that as a portmanteau of “mug” and “muddle” it inherently sounds like an epithet for an oblivious person to British ears.

I’m pretty sure I enjoyed Scrappy when I was a kid (Scooby-Dumb, otoh...) but I pretend I didn’t because the conventional wisdom that he’s shit and his elevation to shorthand for “awful character added late in a show’s run” is also fun.

You can tell Brand is a horrorshow that sours on anyone who makes it apparent they aren’t going to be another sexual conquest for him to brag to Jonathan Ross about

With this news, I wish more than ever that sitcom Nathan Barley (co-written by Charlie Brooker of Black Mirror fame) would get the respect it deserves. It was laying into these poisonous new media brats well before it was cool.

I read with bated breath for a sliver of information to confirm that it was the same guy whomI knew that, up until the last paragraph, matched your description perfectly.

Does it specify EC as opposed to medical abortifacient, though?

Oh look, someone trying to out-Brooker Brooker by aping his Screen Burn writing style but with all the funny removed. That takes me back to 2006.

The notion of IRL discovering the Callister crew and what he might do hadn’t even occurred to me. Confronting the audience with the question of what any of us might do if we think we have the power to get away with it seems to have become a lynchpin for Black Mirror at this point.

Was it a happy ending, though? Daly is left to perish (probably) with a faint moral question mark hanging over the proportianality of his retribution. Real-life Nanette is likely to have her real life disrupted when Daly’s fate is discovered. And the AI who orchestrated the above are now on the loose.

So what did you think he meant when he emphasised that it’s a man’s problem?