RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
In Australia we have 18C. Speech is free so long as you're not racist. Plus we have pretty aggressive anti-defamation laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_18C_of_the_Racial_Discrimination_Act_1975
RandomRanger
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15d ago
Melbourne is rather leftist and conformist by Australian standards, it's reasonable that they're more feminist than US feminists.
RandomRanger
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27d ago
Electronic cash is basically the same thing as a CBDC, they just haven't added all the AI-enabled fine-grained control and monitoring yet. They can print and freeze money at will, it's just a hassle for them to do so.
Taxes are easy to evade all around the world because the administrative capacity and technical methods are poorly developed, especially in Russia. But they won't be poorly developed forever. China's social credit scheme is pretty benign at the moment, you just can't get certain train tickets if you're a scammer, have to put down deposits to rent an e-bicycle. But it won't stay that way forever, they're testing and developing it over time.
RandomRanger
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3d ago
It does rather undermine international law if America cheers and applauds when the ICC issues arrest warrants for non members in Russia and calls for arrests against non-members China and Iran, while threatening sanctions and force should Israelis or Americans be targeted. Then they complain about double standards!
RandomRanger
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8d ago
Anti-colonialism.
If you look at Irish history, they had settlement and land expropriation from their stronger, religiously distinct, ultra-Western neighbour. They had vicious and protracted wars with Britain, insurgency, atrocities and terrorism.
It's quite similar to Palestine v Israel. More Western vs less Western, stronger vs weaker, religious conflict, land confiscation. Britain has been closely aligned with Israel since Suez.
RandomRanger
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13d ago
Can't they rehire people as a contractor and effectively give them a pay rise? This is standard practice in many bureaucracies, as far as I understand it.
There are all kinds of Yes-Minister style games you can play.
RandomRanger
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26d ago
The optics would just be terrible
This wouldn't stop Israel. The optics were terrible when they shoot children in the back but they do it anyway and clear it in court. There's no shortage of bad optics on either side.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/16/israel2
If IDF snipers were systematically targeting civilians (doctors, elderly, kids, etc), that would be outrageous and well worth mentioning
Well they sure did shoot at them before the war: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session40/Documents/A_HRC_40_74_CRP2.pdf
Imagine you're Israeli. All your life you hear about suicide bombings, attacks, rockets, problems all coming from these dirty uncivilized Arabs who belong to a death cult that hates your religion and routinely sneak-attack on your religious holidays. You hate these people.
Imagine you're Palestinian. Israeli troops will knock down your door at night-time and search your apartment. You're not allowed to move freely, they cut power off, they steal your land like they've been stealing it for decades now. You spent your whole childhood punctuated by bombs, assassinations of peaceful protestors, dead family members, dead neighbours, arrests, torture... You hate these people.
This is a war of hatred. They hate eachother (as a collective). Not all of them hate eachother but enough do. We cannot model this war without understanding that there's intense hatred. Trying to model leadership or boots-on-the-ground as calculating, rational plotters is not going to yield good predictions.
RandomRanger
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8d ago
In Australia we just expelled a Chinese student for working on linking drones together to navigate through environments without GPS, since it was apparently 'WMD-related'. You should tread carefully, a lot of people are getting very excited/scared about drone navigation and targeting.
Honestly they're not wrong, I'm waiting for the moment 10,000 kill bots swarm out of a shipping container somewhere, they'll make 9/11 look like a joke.
RandomRanger
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14d ago
In Australia tax bills are itemized in proportion to the budget, they give you a little chart that shows where all your money is going. I didn't even know we still did 'industry assistance' but we do. All the little fish would be put down in 'other' though.
RandomRanger
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7d ago
Yes, there's a whole twitter account of commercials that go out of their way to make white men look like fools: https://twitter.com/StupidWhiteAds
https://twitter.com/StupidWhiteAds/status/1781491226354585957
"Why yes, we at Doritos imagine our customers as impulsive white manchildren who are treated with contempt by their despairing (white) girlfriends"
Even Joe Biden is talking about it:
“I challenge you: Find today, when you turn on the stations, sit on one station for two hours. And I don’t know how many commercials you’ll see, eight to five, two to three out of five have mixed-race couples in them. That’s not by accident. They’re selling soap, man,” Biden said to a laughing crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “Not a joke,” he added.
There's more at the below link. Sure, sometimes they're reaching for anti-white animus where there is none. But there's certainly something happening in the Netflix 'viewshaming' ad, you'd have to be pretty dumb to mix the subtext. Or the British anti-grooming film that was rejected because it dared feature a South Asian man grooming a white girl, it needed to be replaced with a white teen grooming other whites (and one African-Carribbean girl).
Primary was meh, very disorganized state schools.
Secondary was excellent, went to an expensive private boys school. Nearly everyone was very clever and most were very rich, getting dropped off in Porsches or BMWs by their lawyer-doctor parents. A small fraction got in via networking and were more interested in rugby than academics. We had big exams for every subject twice a year, everyone took them quite seriously. The classes for each subject were sorted from A to F or H based on the results from the exams, there was a very clear and objective hierarchy. I think this was a great source of male motivation: competition and prestige. Latin and Ancient Greek were offered, the teachers were paid as if they were university professors (and some had been). It was like a trip to an alternate dimension, we sang patriotic hymns in assembly. At one point the sports reports were read out as (quite good) poems. At one point they brought in a leading quantum physicist to deliver a speech about their work in quantum computing, it went right over 99% of our heads, faculty included. One boy asked a pretty incisive question, he managed to understand the content.
But you could tell that corrosive modernity was digging into the heart of oak and sandstone. A lot of kids cultivated imaginary mental disorders that got them more time in the important state exams for university entry. The younger generation of teachers were much more wishy-washy and progressive. We started getting land acknowledgements and denunciations of Pizzagate where we used to get hyper-abstract philosophical speeches in Assembly. Rumours abounded that they'd try to bring in girls at some point, though I've seen no evidence that they are. There was female-teacher-on-boy sexual abuse (I got a look at the teacher, definitely not the 'I wish that was me!' physiognomy) going on 2 years above me, they snuffed that story out of the media with a lot of skill.
I got along pretty well with people. Teachers were fine but some took themselves overly seriously, like it was their solemn duty to teach us music, languages or geography we had no particular interest in. Met some great, fun, smart people with the same exotic interests as me - friends for life hopefully. Some people, myself included, got pretty arrogant when comparing ourselves to ordinary kids. Arrogance has its virtues when you are indeed right and everyone else is wrong but it also has social pitfalls.
RandomRanger
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28d ago
South Africa did feel quite threatened, they were trying to develop their own modern fighter jets to counter the Mig-29s they expected Angola and nearby Soviet allies to receive. At any point the Border War might flare up. Unlike Israel they had no superpower backer to get advanced weapons from, nor did they have access to world markets due to the weapons embargo. They tried developing their own Atlas Carver but the cost of developing advanced fighters was too high.
A shortage of will sure but South Africa also had a less fortunate position than Israel. Though the critical error was probably letting so many blacks into the country, rather than any military issue.
RandomRanger
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6d ago
How about King Charles's mildly satanic painting?
I don't know why you'd make yourself look like you're bathed in blood or wreathed in unholy flame. Rand Al Thor can pull it off but he is the Dragon Reborn, greatest hero of two ages. When King Charles takes a cursed sa'angreal sword from an ancient fortress and faces down the forces of darkness, then he can appropriate fantasy hero aesthetics for official portraits.
I've argued in the past that there is a certain malign or subversive element in some elite art, consider people like Cleon Peterson or the Pope's rather unusual looking sculpture. Apparently that has all this special Christian symbolism - I would've thought that a cross would be more appropriate but what do I know?
There's also this (somewhat nsfw?) painting of a child getting throatfucked which somebody vandalized, much to the displeasure of Macron: https://x.com/Censor__This/status/1658938149844791300/photo/1
I could add in the CIA plot to spread abstract and modern art, though it's only relevant in the broader sense that art is political and related to politics. I don't have much of a thesis aside from 'a lot of modern art is quite disturbing and indicative of cultural trends towards shock value and dubious tolerance'. There's a time and a place for everything and sometimes that place is sites like bestgore, liveleaks or the artistic equivalent of AO3 rather than art galleries, in my mind.
RandomRanger
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24d ago
The Tories are a party of mass immigration, that's what their policies have achieved in the real world. They say stuff like 'we'll be tough on immigration' but they don't actually do it, they flail around paying Rwanda and achieving nothing. Different policies but similar results for the Australian centre-right - Abbott successfully stopped illegal immigration but kept legal immigration very high.
In the UK neither illegal nor legal immigration are combatted. In Australia Labour adopted Coalition border policies, so there's no distinguishing difference there. So on immigration both parties are roughly equivalent to their Labour equivalents. AFD is actually different.
Labour generally promises young people some kind of patronage in uni education, welfare and so on. The centre-right tend to support the old in housing and welfare. Furthermore, young people tend to revile the centre-right parties, it was considered cringeworthy to vote for Scott Morrison (former centre-right PM) in Australia. Labour and Greens parties are more socially progressive and young people care about climate change.
Germany, Sweden and continental countries are also much whiter and more homogenous than Australia, the UK or especially America. Also the German Greens have tarred themselves with the horrendous performance of the traffic-light coalition and their economically damaging policies. British and Australian Greens haven't had much chance to do real damage.
The Australian equivalent to AFD is One Nation, which is much more boomer-skewed (and pretty irrelevant politically). It's run by a woman called Pauline Hanson who's nearly 70 years old. They appeal most to rural white Queenslanders, the whitest parts of the whitest state in the country. Same in Britain, UKIP targeted old rural whites because there were more of them. AFD leaders are much younger, in their 40s. They appeal most in East Germany, which is the whitest part of Germany.
I think right wing politics of the anti-immigration kind has a lot to do with whiteness. Western right-wing politics in general too, to a lesser extent. In the Anglosphere the whitest demographics tend to be the old, so anti-immigration rightist parties naturally evolve to target the old. In Europe there's a broader base of potential supporters and they can target the young, so they do.
RandomRanger
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4d ago
US leadership has been behaving somewhat hysterically with this latest war, they've been going around threatening the ICC with the gravest consequences if they dare charge Netanyahu:
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000018f-4e0e-d759-a9ff-ff4ee9420000
Issuing arrest warrants for the leaders of Israel would not only be unjustified, it would expose your organization’s hypocrisy and double standards. Your office has not issued arrest warrants for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or any other Iranian official, Syrian President Bashar al Assad or any other Syrian official, or Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh or any other Hamas official. Nor have you issued an arrest warrant for the genocidal General Secretary of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, or any other Chinese official.
Finally, neither Israel nor the United States are members of the ICC and are therefore outside of your organization’s supposed jurisdiction. If you issue a warrant for the arrest of the Israeli leadership, we will interpret this not only as a threat to Israel’s sovereignty but to the sovereignty of the United States. Our country demonstrated in the American Service-Members' Protection Act [also known as the Hague Invasion Act] the lengths to which we will go to protect that sovereignty.
The United States will not tolerate politicized attacks by the ICC on our allies. Target Israel and we will target you. If you move forward with the measures indicated in the report, we will move to end all American support for the ICC, sanction your employees and associates, and bar you and your families from the United States. You have been warned.
How exactly a threat to Israel could be a threat to the sovereignty of the USA is hard to comprehend, though it does explain the stance of the Republican Party.
RandomRanger
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13d ago
COVID was a big deal, so were the Floyd riots, so is inflation. The GFC was also a big deal and had correspondingly large media coverage. 9/11 and the global war on terror were likewise.
It's just that more important things are happening now than in the 2010s.
RandomRanger
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7d ago
Yes, Kierkegaard mentions that asterisk and notes that it doesn't significantly change the conclusions one should draw. It's rather hard to get a high sample size for white on black rape if it doesn't exist.
I think you meant rape is largely intraracial, which it is.
RandomRanger
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15d ago
The Australian govt is great at doing things with Indigenous issues, there's no shortage of activity! Only results fail. We shuffle the welfare system around from time to time. Cashless to non-cashless benefits and back again, trying to lower the drunkenness and violence. Every so often we put down a youth curfew in horrible places like Alice Springs and the Northern Territory. When the Right was feeling brave they tried a big crackdown. When Left were feeling brave, they tried for a referendum to enshrine indigenous legal bodies in the constitution. Nothing worked, though I'm sure many public sector jobs were created.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Territory_National_Emergency_Response
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Australian_Indigenous_Voice_referendum
RandomRanger
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17d ago
Wouldn't it be funny if beatings, bloodletting, alcohol and prayer actually worked?
Imagine life in 1300s Europe. There's a 30-50% chance your child will die as an infant. You might have chevauchee Englishmen/Frenchmen/Germans running around looting and killing. Sudden illness could randomly kill you. You likely work long days in the fields, famine is an everpresent danger especially if the lord decides to take your food. You might be drafted to fight in some war where you'll wait between bursts of extremely gorey, personal violence and interminable waiting as disease picks your comrades off. If you sin you face a very real and universally accepted penalty of eternal hellfire. Esoteric doctrinal differences to the church? Welcome to a world of blood and fire, brought to you by your local crusaders. Alternately, if you're in range of the Mongols you can experience blood and fire without needing any heresy. The less said about Meso-America the better.
This is a pretty stressful lifestyle! WEIRD people don't have any of these problems, only social alienation and other such high-Maslow issues. I won't dismiss the psychic damage inflicted by Microsoft PowerPoint but it's on a totally different level to ubuiquitous deaths in childbirth. Yet there's loads of anxiety, depression and so on today.
RandomRanger
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26d ago
Imperial Germany suffered enormously before capitulating. In the winter of 1916-1917 about half a million people starved to death in the 'Turnip Winter' so-named because that's all they had to eat. The food distribution system broke down completely. By 1918 they were in a famine. Children were running around breaking into warehouses trying to get food and dying in the tens of thousands. This is one of the reasons the Nazis were so fixated on securing agricultural land later on.
In tsarist Russia "Working-class women in St. Petersburg reportedly spent about forty hours a week in food lines, begging, turning to prostitution or crime, tearing down wooden fences to keep stoves heated for warmth, and continued to resent the rich."
It takes a lot of pain to bring down a country in a major conventional war. There's a certain level of stubbornness and sunk-cost that seeps in after serious blood has been spilled and national pride is on the line. Attitudes harden. Ukraine has not experienced anything like the mass suffering of a world war. There is no mass starvation in Ukraine, no massive inflation (7% is not great but it's not 90%), no social breakdown. Lessons have been learnt since the world wars and Ukraine enjoys the support of wealthy backers.
Nevertheless there are signs of serious problems - the videos of men being forcibly dragged into vehicles by recruiters, desertion and so on. What is that if not ambivalence/non-cooperation? States can do a lot with ambivalent but not-yet-rebellious people.
RandomRanger
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1d ago
I can't help but see such "inclusion" as actually being rather alienating to women
I recall some of the dehumanizing language they used for women:
https://www.jostrust.org.uk/professionals/health-professionals/nurse-gp/trans-non-binary/language
Bonus hole – An alternative word for the vagina preferred by some trans men and/or non-binary people with a cervix. It is important to check which words someone would prefer to use.
There's also 'birthing persons' for to denote what would otherwise (problematically) be called real women.
Inclusion can mean throwing these novel terms at people, getting everyone to announce their pronouns even though there aren't any trans people there. Creating new words puts people on the back foot, amateurs/students who don't know the technical jargon. It gets people to low-level signal their conformity and acceptance of the party line, mostly out of not wanting to be rude.
RandomRanger
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14d ago
In related UK news, the head of Cybersecurity for the treasury earns... 57K Pounds or 12% of comparable positions in business: https://twitter.com/jontafkasi/status/1641193954778697728?s=46
Just the other day the MoD was hacked: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/china-mod-uk-hack-data-breach-b2540489.html
I don't think they're solving their cyber problems any time soon. Joke country.
RandomRanger
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25d ago
Top of her class. Survivor of multiple suicide attempts, because she didn't take biology lessons past tenth grade, and Google wisely doesn't return results for "painless ways to commit suicide". Asked me on the first date how much paracetamol it takes to off oneself, for purely academic reasons.
Apparently paracetamol overdose blows up your liver in a painful and prolonged way, (if quora is to be believed). Seriously though, how hard is it to kill yourself painlessly? Helium's the way to go, is it not? I suppose that's not something you consider with normal rationality.
It strikes me that both women and the US government are very bad at killing people, preferring poison and overly complicated, ineffective methods. In contrast, gas and guns just work.
RandomRanger
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21hr ago
presidential micromanagement to not completely fuck up raises some extremely serious questions about the competence and professionalism of our military brass
Have you seen the Afghanistan papers? Or even Hanania's thread on the Afghanistan papers? The whole war was a massive farce, absolutely staggering waste and corruption. Soldiers on the ground knew this, they were grinding their teeth at our Afghan 'allies' raping children in the barracks. The Soviet Union had all kinds of problems but their puppet state had 1000x the integrity of our puppet state, theirs actually outlasted the Soviet Union, ours disintegrated before we even finished leaving.
It was barely even a war, there was no goal behind it. The revolving door of commanders (16 commanders of ISAF in about 12 years) had no idea what they were supposed to do. One guy arrived and went 'well, I may as well try and raise Afghanistan a few places on child mortality indices'. We were fighting a war based on vibes like being democratic and humanitarian, on looking good in the media.
Armies are tasked with achieving political goals, not implementing vibes. It's not as though Johnny Taliban was better trained or equipped - Coalition forces won all the firefights, they had all the firepower. The political front was even more lopsided, in the opposite direction. Our people had no idea what the goal was, they pointlessly shovelled money into the hands of the worst people on earth without any kind of coherent plan. They were given a budget and told to spend it. This made war profitable for the enemy (which became everyone who wanted our money) - blow up a bridge so you're paid to provide security and get the contract to rebuild it!
William Luther Pierce of Turner Diaries fame came up with Cosmotheism: Darwinism and German romanticism all wrapped with some early spiritual transhumanism and white supremacy. No slave morality whatsoever, he quotes Nietzsche, Wordsworth, Spengler, Shaw in support of the ethos.
It didn't catch on, it withered away when Pierce died. You need a certain kind of prophetic authority and a bit of luck to make new religions, failing that enormous amounts of money and manpower.
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