Okay, you can talk about how it works in theory, but in practice we see the rightward ratchet effect. The LNP won an election and immediately raided the ABC journo’s offices, which led to David McBride’s prosecution, and they did robodebt and prosecuted Richard Boyle.
Then the ALP comes back into power and just allows those prosecutions to continue. We’ve got another whistleblower prosecution just the last couple of weeks.
That’s literally the ratchet effect. They are barely doing anything, just marking time.
The rightward ratchet is not a purely US thing, it is how liberal democracies all over the world behave. The mechanisms are all slightly different but the reality is that our governments are captured by the wealthy and powerful, and they want them to go right, so that’s where they go. The two sides of electoral politics are simply a more sustainable method of maintaining that rightward movement.
You say preferences send a message, but I don’t feel particularly heard, do you? You know what sends a stronger message? The removal of PMs that go against US interests. Our politicians know exactly where they stand.
I don’t think that’s it at all. Wealth and power makes people stupid, and in order to keep believing in their own superior status, they have to believe we are stupider than them, which is very stupid indeed.
Like it or not, even “monsters” have to have a model of the world and a theory of mind in order to operate. If they didn’t think about us, they wouldn’t be able to exploit us. If they didn’t treat us with contempt, they wouldn’t be able to exploit us. So, contemptuous consideration it is.
It’s just that is a poor model of reality, so it’s going to be part of their downfall. They are going to keep treating us as idiots until we surprise them by suddenly not acting the part anymore. These abuses are clear and they are piling up. We remember the panama papers and what happened to those journalists. We remember what happened to Snowden, Manning and Assange. This has an undermining effect on the legitimacy of the system.
You don’t see the termites until the house is already falling down around you.
I’m fascinated by this because I recently stopped having coffee in favour of tea. For a day or so I got the worst withdrawal headache, but now I’m sleeping better and I feel more settled during the day.
I miss the flavour of coffee, but also the problem is obviously not just the caffeine, since tea also has that. Does anyone know if decaf coffee removes whatever it is in coffee specifically that causes these withdrawals?
Those benefits were won by the actual labour movement.
Parties like the ALP coopt the movement and put an official face on it. They take the wins and put them into legislation so people believe the wins were given to us by our government, which dupes people into thinking our government is legitimate.
Oh and as a bonus legislation can compromise what was actually won by watering it down, so we accept less.
Also you characterise them as “hanging in there” which actually perfectly reflects the pawl in the ratchet. That is exactly what they are doing.
They think we are so fucking stupid, don’t they?
What info got spies killed exactly? Aspersions were cast but no actual information ever came out about that, and presumably if they’re already dead then it can be released.
If that had actually happened, the government would have been howling from the rooftops about it, we’d all know their names.
But the reports on what damage it did were entirely redacted, and the worst thing they could say was “likely to have lethal consequences”, which presumably means it hadn’t had lethal consequences. Pretty weak shit, and even then we’re just supposed to trust them when they relay the contents of blacked out pages to us?
Also they’re bitching and moaning about how it will weaken their ability to do spy shit and like… good. Why do we want them to do that shit? Everything we know about what they do is basically universally evil, so maybe Snowden is a hero actually.
Nah, it’s bullshit, they’re just trying to assassinate his character and it sounds like you fell for it.
Then you are not the target market. Idk what to tell you, your personal opinion doesn’t invalidate the whole concept.
You’re probably right.
Fun fact! “Mongoloid” is an old timey way of talking about down’s syndrome as well as a very old timey way of talking about races, and we don’t use it anymore because it’s literally equating congitive impairment with racial characteristics.
Anyone using it today as pejorative is saying something worse than the R-slur, because it’s not only ableist, it’s racist too!
Oh boy I love learning.
I’m so glad we get to hear from our neighbours in the .ml instance still for some reason.
What the fuck is that stock image? They really said “contemplating suicide but make it corporate”.
And I’ve never got a good answer to “why can we trust the state capitalists to not just be capitalists?” The answer generally seems to be “they have correct socialist theory” which is literally idealism, which is not something tankies like to hear as long as they understand enough theory to know that idealism is not a good theory of change.
I’m curious about how they handle retracting the quote in an open source federated model where the behaviour of other instances can’t be ensured. Does the instance hosting the quote simply refuse to honour the quote link?
And I suppose if an instance uses a hostile workaround like simply embedding a copy, that would be seen as a bad mark against the instance which could lead to defederation?
I’m not saying it’s impossible, just interested in the specifics.
It should be trivial to run the software on other devices because it will be so low-powered, so that problem disappears.
In fact you literally said so yourself. Is that a point in the system’s favour or isn’t it?
If the physical device is also cheap then I think this could easily take off.
That’s like saying you could play PICO-8 games on anything, because it’s true, but the point is to impose limitations, not to make something you could never theoretically do with another device.
Like think about the PICO-8 version of Celeste, which can run inside the main game, but which never would have been made if the PICO-8 didn’t exist, and all the other games made for that platform that wouldn’t exist if that fantasy console had never been invented.
This is similar - by creating a console with very limited resources and I/O, you create a very limited set of expectations, and then it’s easy to make games for it because Skyrim or whatever just isn’t an option, so more people can make those games.
You know being born into wealth isn’t a great deal either. Does Musk seem happy to you? Or any of the other ghouls in that orbit?
There is plenty of evidence that large amounts of wealth has a similar effect on the owner as brain damage.
No, you don’t want that. Having enough to be comfortable is good, but wealth is not.
I was gonna say the same thing. The members of my family that wave that fucking flag also have the most reprehensible boot-licking attitude.
I hate the goddamn thing. Atrocities of every kind have been committed under it, we’re just a little more sheltered from it, because its part in the global imperial project is smaller, and it gets less coverage than the US’s blaring parade of shame.
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I’ll tell this story as often as it’s relevant - I was made to recite the pledge of alliegance in school at 5 years old. I wasn’t a citizen, I should have had no reason to swear fealty, and our family was denied green cards, so the allegiance was not reciprocated.
Kind of dodged a bullet if I’m honest, but still, I remember it verbatim to this day, because I was indoctrinated when I was too small and naive to know any better. Not reciting it was not an option I was presented with. I don’t think anybody in charge would’ve thought twice about it either.
Oh my god I saw that a long time ago, I just checked the trailer and it is what I remember.
Even as a teenager I remember thinking that the final race was absolutely unhinged. Like what about the enormous pile of dead or maimed teenagers that the camera cut away from just in time to maintain its G rating?
In the trailer there’s a bunch of kids that slide under a moving semi trailer but lose too much momentum to make it out the other side, or it looks like they do. We never see what happens to them. Main character even looks back at them for a second, just long enough to see that they’re still on the ground and not moving but fuck them because our hero made it and he’s on his way! Huzzah!
I mean the movie is memorable, it’s fun and all, but that scene just lost me so hard. Like actually maybe fuck everyone who thinks this race is a good idea and worth winning. They can have their race, and I will win the broader game of natural selection.