Hey it’s Guy,
Wishing you all a happy Monday, I hope you have settled back into the bleak September grind.
I’m getting a bit big for my boots here, but I have linked my own Instagram among the others below, is that bad?
Lots of photos today, it may as well be Instagram that you’ve just opened ✌🏽
But first.
”It makes me extremely vulnerable but it does not make me weak”
Gareth Thomas speaks out about living with HIV
Former Welsh rugby international and Lions Tour captain, Gareth Thomas, released a video on Twitter explaining that he is living with HIV.
Here is his video.
It was really great to see the support flooding in from the rugby community, around the UK and all over the world.
Over the years Gareth has been a sporting icon both on and off the field.
Despite being the victim of Homophobic attacks physically and verbally, he has continued to speak out as a figure that so many can look up to.
He mentioned that the reason for going public about the virus was because of pressure and blackmail from ‘evils’; he received threats to expose his status.
“Public information campaigns in the 1980s, warning people to take precautions against Aids, have left a legacy of misunderstanding, he says.
Advances in medicine now allow people who are HIV positive to live long healthy lives. With effective treatment, the virus cannot be passed on.
…
"This is a subject that because of the 80s scenarios people don't talk about it because that's the only information they have."
He added: "The overriding question that everybody said to me - the first question everyone says to me when I tell them I'm living with HIV - is 'Are you going to be OK?'
"And it's a really compassionate question to ask. But, this is meant the nicest way possible, it's a really uneducated question."
(read more - BBC News)
This weekend, the day after his announcement, he completed one of the toughest Ironman triathlons in just 12hours 18minutes.
I am a big fan of ads and Guinness are renowned for their high production quality and moving stories, often progressive and making a point about our society.
Back in 2015, Gareth was the subject of one such ad, he spoke about how tough it was coming out as gay and the demons he felt inside him, but also about how his teammates were there for him.
This is the longer version of that ad, ‘his story’, I definitely recommend you give it a watch. I’m sure most rugby fans remember it well.
Also, just something that annoyed me so much whilst reading into this brave story:
The Mirror.co.uk re-published a piece, minutes after his announcement on Saturday night, with the headline - “Explosive moment Gareth Thomas came out as gay to wife Jemma without warning.”
What utter clickbait bullshit. Shame on them.
The story they are re-publishing is from 2009, when he originally came out as gay, and of course even then there is so much more to it than they imply.
For The Mirror to publish that, ten years after the fact, amidst so much support and positivity surrounding his brave announcement, I actually don’t know where to begin it makes me so mad.
Science & Humans 👪⚛️🔬
Bots can actually make it very easy to alter views of the electorate…
A study, published by Nature, has used computer bots in opinion polls to try and deliberately sway voters, and because of how we humans think, it works dangerously well…
The study used an online voting game, whereby as a player you win points depending on the outcome of a vote/election, and more if your party was on the winning side.
The catch was that you received the most points if your party won, some points if you lost, but crucially no points if there was a draw.
“This measure was introduced to encourage players to compromise. It mimicked real-life voting scenarios, such as when US lawmakers from opposing sides need to give some concessions to their opponents to agree on the government’s budget. When lawmakers do not compromise, the result is a government shutdown — the equivalent of a draw or deadlock in the voting game.”
Each player is assigned a political party - yellow or purple.
As part of the game, you are shown data from polls of each others voting intentions, which makes it interesting.
Naturally, if your party of preference is leading then you would stick with it, however, the study found that say, for instance, the purple party was slightly ahead, yellow voters may sway to purple just to avoid a deadlock.
Then they introduced bots to infiltrate the polls and deliberately sway opinions, and it worked.
“For example, when just a few yellow-party zealots were deployed strategically among a larger number of undecided players in the purple party, these bots were able to sway the majority opinion towards the yellow party. This was true even when the parties had exactly the same number of members, and when each player had the same amount of influence.”
In the era of Social Media, with allegations of Russia tampering in the US Elections, it is crazy to think that people’s opinion can be so heavily influenced by how others ‘appear’ to be voting and what ‘appears’ to be the popular choice.
Bots cannot vote on the day of the election, but they don’t need to, they just need to be cleverly introduced online in the months leading up to it.
The full paper is titled “Information gerrymandering and undemocratic decisions”, read more - Nature International Journal of Science.
Photography 📷
Think 🤔
April fools day is the one day of the year where people critically evaluate news articles before accepting them as true.
Profound 🤯🌊
Someone who says “I’ll be there in 6 minutes” will almost always arrive before someone who says “I’ll be there in 5 minutes”.
That’s all for now 🤙🏽
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Thank you,
Guy