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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 15hr ago · Edited 15hr ago

Party realignment in Australian politics?

Opinion polls and a few minor elections are showing a massive shift in voter party alignment here. A bit of previous discussion here.

What do these abbreviations mean?

For the non-Aussies, this is the basic breakdown of the parties:

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) is our centre-left party. Former member of Socialist International before they got kicked out for being too capitalist, member of Progressive Alliance, still wears communist red. Fairly progressive - started their victory speech last federal election with a land acknowledgment, to cheers, and were behind the failed referendum to Constitutionally enshrine an Aboriginal lobby group back in 2023 - but is still to a large extent a trade union party. And yes, they spell it the US way, as they incorrectly predicted that US spelling would take over and never bothered fixing it.
The Coalition (LNP) is, as the name suggests, not really a party but a coalition of two - the Liberal Party which amounts to centre-right low-tax urban elites and wears blue, and the National Party which amounts to rural Australians and wears dark green. They've been in a long-standing coalition against Labour, although exactly how much of a coalition depends on state - in the Northern Territory and Queensland, they've formally merged, in New South Wales and Victoria they're in coalition (they divide up the seats and each seat gets one of the parties contesting it), and in the other states they do contest the same seats (though the National Party is basically nonexistent in South Australia, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory, and the Liberal Party essentially does double duty). The National Party is quite conservative, as you'd expect; the Liberals, on the other hand, have very much tried to take a middle road in the culture wars (the Liberals were split on the aforementioned referendum, although the leader eventually came out against; the Nationals took a more unified stance against although one dissenter did quit to become an independent). Note that the National Party has become more and more marginalised in the Coalition as the population has urbanised over time and thus the amount of rural electorates has declined.
The Greens (GRN) can largely be thought of as the hippie party, and wear bright green. Originally a single-issue environmentalist party, they quickly fleshed out their platform with a bunch of other hippie policies like drug legalisation... and then got utterly skinsuited by Social Justice in the 2010s. As you'd expect, they poll well among urban-core youth. I used to be a Greens voter until the aforementioned skinsuiting - previously, they'd been very liberal (usually specified as "small-l liberal" in Oz, to distinguish from the Liberal Party), but now they're an outright threat to democracy insofar as they want to ban political parties from being far-right.
Pauline Hanson's One Nation (ONP) is our alt-right party, wearing orange, and the one the Greens would like to ban. One Nation is actually quite old compared to most alt-right parties; it started when Pauline Hanson was kicked out of the Liberal Party for criticising Aboriginal special treatment and Asian immigration... in 1996-7, though during the 2000s they languished in obscurity. They've eased off the specifically-anti-Asian part AIUI, but they're still anti-immigration, anti-social-justice, and anti-globalisation. They were the first party to declare open opposition to the referendum. And as you can see, they've recently had a meteoric rise in popularity. They got more first-preference votes (though less seats) in the recent South Australian state election than the Coalition did, and they won a federal House of Representatives seat last week for the first time since Hanson in 1996 (this wasn't a general election; the Liberal Party swapped leaders and the ex-leader retired mid-term, leaving her seat vacant and triggering a "by-election" off-schedule).

Note that One Nation is not currently subject to a cordon sanitaire; it was during its founding, but by the 2010s the Coalition were putting One Nation above Labour on their how-to-vote cards.

Voting system issues

So, first point - vote-split is not a concern here. We are not going to have a copy of Britain's farcical election from two years ago. Australia uses instant-runoff voting, which is clone-independent and thus lets parties rise and fall a bit more easily.

What we are starting to see is the Coalition getting centre squeezed. Essentially, when it comes down to three candidates (Labour, Liberal or National, One Nation), if the Coalition comes in last of those three it's eliminated and its preferences distributed between Labour and One Nation, even if it's the Condorcet winner. This is IRV's big departure from the Median Voter Theorem which otherwise holds for a compulsory-voting country like Australia (and which is why the Liberals were trying to take a middle road on the culture war).

Why is this happening?

For the most part, I dunno. I've been less attentive to domestic politics than I'd like the past few years, with my depression. I can name one thing that definitely pissed a lot of rightists off with the Liberal Party recently, which is the Bondi Beach shooting (a father-son pair of Islamic State gunmen shot a bunch of Jews in Sydney; the Labour/Liberal* bipartisan response included massively-broadening federal hate speech laws; while progressives do get hit for hate speech in Australia, usually for hoisting Hezbollah flags and such, conservatives still feel like they're being targetted and thus betrayed by the Liberals), but the rise in One Nation support started before that shooting. I thought it looked like Very Online youngsters swinging alt-right as an ongoing effect of the Twitter sale, but upon looking at crosstabs One Nation is getting most of this newfound support from millennials and Gen X. I'd like to know more about this myself, and would welcome info from our other Aussies.

*Note, not the Nationals; they broke from solidarity with the Liberals over this.

Is the Liberal Party screwed?

Maybe. The main thing keeping them safe from centre-squeeze until now has been the taboo around One Nation (despite the lack of formal cordon sanitaire - I'm talking about the informal social pressure exerted by SJ against voting for an "extremist" party), but that seems to have collapsed and would appear very hard to rebuild. They can pivot all they like, but it's not clear that there's currently enough room between Labour and One Nation to support a winning party (particularly since the Liberals in particular have... well, kind of a bad reputation as the party of the 1%; I've generally had a lot more time for the Nationals than the Liberals). Still, at the federal level this isn't an immediate problem for them; there's a Victorian state election later this year, and a New South Welsh state election early next year, but the next federal election's not until 2028. (And with world affairs being what they are, making predictions of anything that far out seems pretty risible; we could have had a nuclear war by then, or an AI rebellion.)

I will note that non-Labour parties in Australia do have turnover from time to time; the Liberal Party only dates back to WWII.

What does this mean for Australian politics?

Well, Labour's two-party-preferred vote against One Nation surprisingly doesn't seem to be all that dissimilar from its similar statistic versus the Coalition, so we might end up with a Liberal-One-Nation coalition in Victoria (it's an uphill battle, though; Melbourne's Labour heartland and has 75% of the state population). Would certainly be neat if I could stop being nervous about the state hate speech laws.

The bad news is that One Nation are the hardened culture warriors the Liberals refused to be, which means we're probably going to see politics heat up quite a bit here as the culture war takes centre stage. I'll certainly be tapping some of my sources to get a better read on the situation, as I'm a bit worried about the potential for Australian politics to get as hot as US ones.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 18hr ago

but perhaps I can remain blissfully ignorant in hoping that a mistrial was declared here. "The Court hereby finds a manifest necessity for a mistrial due to certain members of the jury being fucking retarded."

It was a mistrial due to hung jury.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 2d ago

Do remember that the modern soldier's response (as opposed to the policeman's response) to enemies in a house isn't "run up to the house and clear it". It's "call in fires to destroy the house". There are reasons that the Viet Cong and the Taliban had most of their hideouts underground.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 2d ago · Edited 2d ago

To answer Iconochasm's question for you, @magicalkittycat, below a certain level the people in the IRS (and most other government organs) are not considered "political appointees" and can't be fired without cause, due to the Pendleton Act. This is fine when dealing with individual loose cannons, as if they do something crazy they'll be fired for cause. The problem Donald Trump has, however, is that the #Resistance to him is/was systemic, and systemic sabotage is resistant to investigation because the rebellious employees will cover for each other against probes by management (and the Pendleton Act also stops political hiring to those positions, so the workaround of "bring in a bunch of new blood that's been vetted against the offending ideology, and use them to spy on the rest to spot the bad apples" was also blocked), so getting the evidence to fire people for cause is/was actually very difficult.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 2d ago

Do feminists actually oppose attempts to kill or control the dating site industry? I think the USA's distrust of socialism might be a bigger deal there, honestly (there could also be First Amendment issues).

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 2d ago · Edited 2d ago

"Suffragette" has two Fs.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 3d ago

It works! Thanks.

(I did take a look before asking, but I didn't know the right search terms; I used "turbobutton" (the console equivalent) and "turboclick" but didn't think of "autoclick".)

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 3d ago

Oh, I don't have a cat; I was just referring to my experience with others' pets.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 4d ago

Anybody know a utility for Linux that can spam-click? As in, I want to be able to set it up so that if I hold a key while holding down LMB, it delivers a click every frame.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 4d ago

I much prefer cats; they are fluffier and don't slobber on you.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 7d ago · Edited 7d ago

I mean, if Hamas livestreamed themselves committing gang rape then surely a link to it exists somewhere, right?

AIUI that would be considered rape porn and nonconsensual* porn (usually given dysphemistic legal names) in basically all jurisdictions, and therefore illegal to (host, view, download, link to) (maybe strike out the last one in the US), and therefore purged from all legal websites including the ones that normally function as anti-Orwell archives. I suspect that @FtttG doesn't want to literally commit crimes trawling darknet sites in order to commit more crimes supplying you with a link to illegal material.

I get that this is a bit frustrating when the illegal material is also (if it exists) critical historical evidence.

*As in, not all the people in the video consented to the publication of the video.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 7d ago · Edited 7d ago

I mean, Freddie's main argument in the essay is that:

Public schools have terrible metrics.
A bunch of RWers want to abolish public schools, because of the terrible metrics.
But public schools don't have terrible metrics because the schools suck. They have terrible metrics because they're the school of last resort for the children who suck.
So abolishing the public schools won't fix anything; those children will still suck wherever they are.

That argument holds water.

There's a secondary argument, more implied than stated, which goes:

Public schools have bad metrics.
This makes non-sucky parents pull their non-sucky kids out of public schools.
This very effect, rather than the quality of teaching, is why public schools have bad metrics, in a vicious circle.
Hence, non-sucky parents are wrong to do this.

This argument does not hold water; propositions 1-3 are correct, but while parents doing this solely for quality-of-teaching are indeed making a mistake, there are two other valid reasons to do it: 1) their children could be harmed by the sucky kids, 2) the sucky kids may directly impair the ability of non-sucky kids to learn (I hear this one is particularly a thing recently in the USA due to various court cases and policies). I can certainly sympathise with reason #1, having had an arm broken and a tooth knocked out at one of the bad kind of public schools (my mother actually predicted that I'd lose teeth before I went there), if perhaps not reason #2 (I think better classroom control is/was in place in Australia, at least during the late 90s-early 00s when I was there).

I will note that there is a socialist solution to the problem of roughhouse public schools, and one that's fairer to poor-but-non-delinquent kids who beat the lottery - remove the delinquents from the normal public school system and put them in less-common reform schools that explicitly only serve delinquents (and possibly have the required infrastructure to stop the delinquents beating each other up). I have a vague feeling that this isn't permitted in the USA due to the aforementioned court cases and civil rights laws, although I don't know the particulars and could be wrong. But yeah, were that solution in place, Freddie would be mostly right about the secondary argument.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 11d ago · Edited 11d ago

There's definitely been more than one human migration out of Africa, the first one ("Out of Africa I") being the source population for the Neanderthals and Denisovans (that's why sub-Saharan Africans don't have significant Neanderthal blood and why non-Austronesians don't have significant Denisovan blood: the Neanderthal hybridisation events occurred in Europe and Asia, and the Denisovan hybridisation appears to have occurred on the islands of the West Pacific). I was referring to the non-Africans' Homo sapiens sapiens forebears ("Out of Africa II"), which do seem to be singular (to be clear, there are no full-blooded Neanderthals or Denisovans anymore; all non-Africans are hybrids between those two migration waves).

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 11d ago

Far Cry 2 released in 2008 was a gameplay demo. What narrative there is, is paper thin, but what Far Cry 2 did was codify the genre of the "3D open-world action game with crafting and collectibles". Blazing the trail that games like Skyrim, the Assassin's Creed series, Batman Arkham City, Ghosts of Tsushima, and Cyberpunk 2077, would all follow.

Um, no. Skyrim isn't copying Far Cry 2; it's copying Morrowind, which came out in 2002. Like, come on, I know Arena and Daggerfall are pretty obscure (and don't fit that description), but Morrowind is pretty well-known and Skyrim's literally a sequel to it.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 13d ago · Edited 13d ago

I'd agree with lactose tolerance and should probably have included it; skin colour isn't all that recent AIUI (I believe Native Americans are a lot more uniform with latitude than Old Worlders, for instance; I'm also not 100% sure whether Neanderthal admixture might have played a part in introducing the light-skin alleles, though certainly there's been selection before and since). @SkoomaDentist I'm not fully convinced on alcoholism resistance; there's a fair bit of evidence, enough to make me seriously consider the possibility (though I'd be mostly suspecting livers rather than brains, at least for this), but I haven't yet seen a smoking gun (have there been wide-ranging studies on Aboriginal liver function? I think you could trust universities to report that accurately).

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 13d ago · Edited 8d ago

Cracking open my hardback of "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" (for the first time, actually; I originally read it as a pirate PDF because of Australia getting the physical book late):

Even if you feel desperate, we caution against acts of violence and destruction. We don't think they work. Unlawful behaviour just makes it harder for the political forces trying to set up the sort of international coalition that could actually un-write our fate.

He suggested state violence, not terrorist violence, and has made that quite clear in his writings. He admits elsewhere that he would go out and be a terrorist if he thought it would actually work, but also notes that he does not think it would (in, I believe, every such mention) and that the bad PR would be counterproductive. I don't think that that constitutes culpability in terrorism. If you advocate for the reintroduction (or continuance) of the death penalty in the criminal justice system, and some fuckwit hears that and blows up the local prison, I don't think that's your fault; allowing fault to attach for something like that is BETA-MEALR-levels of safetyism.

(To be clear, I am in 100% agreement with Eliezer on this point; I have spent a long time idly considering how one could go about fixing the AI problem via terrorism, and while over the years I came up with some plans that might have an effect, I can't see any way to actually execute those plans with realistic levels of resources for a terrorist organisation.)

If they later give Ziz et al the EA equivalent of a tenured university position, or platform people that say (paraphrasing) "yeah I wouldn't do it personally but it's a good thing," so on and so forth, yes, they should be blamed.

Jack LaSota belongs behind bars for life; you'll get no argument from me. I will note that none of the Zizians' kills were actually in service of broader-Rat goals; most were of people who got in their way in some fashion (witnesses, cops), and while there were a couple with some ideological backing (both parents of one of the Zizians, and the Zizians' landlord), opposing "transphobes" and landlords is really more SJ-aligned than Rat-aligned. Hence, while there probably are some fuckwits who'll praise them, I'd expect them to mostly not be Rats on purely-banal grounds.

EDIT: Wait, I forgot. Slimepriestess defended the Zizians offing the landlord. Slimepriestess is a Rat and justified it in terms of decision theory. There's a caveat on this, which is that Slimepriestess is, itself, one of the Zizians (if apparently outside the inner circle); hence, it's not exactly uninvolved Rats/EAs praising the Zizians.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 13d ago

A massive increase in executions would certainly decrowd prisons without needing to decriminalise anything, and @Southkraut did implicitly include this via "non-prison punishments", although I'm not sure @Celestial-body-NOS would be up for that.

(Personally, I think it's at least worth considering for prison gangs, since imprisoning them apparently hasn't stopped them committing violent crimes.)

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 13d ago · Edited 13d ago

HBD is not really my area of expertise - it's questionable if it's anyone's, given the extreme political distortion of the field for at least the past two centuries - but:

I'm very sceptical of claims of recent large evolutionary changes. There's one that has definitively met the high bar, which is the terrible disease resistance of Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals due to not having plagues until colonisation (of course, this wasn't a change in them; rather, Old Worlders were massively selected for better disease resistance than the prehistoric norm).

I'm more open to claims of difference based on long timescales - the divergence of Homo sapiens sapiens within Africa (note that everyone besides sub-Saharan-Africans basically descends from one lineage of Africans that crossed into Arabia), and the hybridisation with other human subspecies (all non-Africans have about 3% Neanderthal admixture; the Austronesians of Maritime South-East Asia and Oceania have very large Denisovan admixture, sometimes over 10%; there may be some admixture from another subspecies in sub-Saharan Africans).

So from where I sit, this basically leaves only two groups with major question marks over them due to long separation and/or different subspecies makeup from most of humanity - the sub-Saharan Africans (including differences among them), and the Austronesians including Aboriginal Australians. These areas have been notoriously-far behind for most of history, so my best guess is that both of these question marks are probably negative in terms of cognition. My wild guess, if I have to give a number, would be 3-5 IQ points on average; not enough to swamp individual variation, but noticeable on population scales. As noted, though, probably some variation within Africa, and of course there are massive effects from nutrition.

Indians aren't far from being white with dark skin; the gene flow through Persia was always pretty significant. East Asians are more different, but are still basically Eurasian (there's detectable Denisovan admixture, but it's orders of magnitude smaller in China/Korea/Japan). Arabs are white except to the degree they've had recent sub-Saharan African admixture, which is usually minimal AIUI. "Hispanics" are heterogeneous; usually they're some mixture of white, Native American and sub-Saharan African, although the proportions vary drastically and many are outright missing one or two of those components. Native Americans can be treated as North Asians with shitty immune systems and don't have the question mark. Those with substantial sub-Saharan African ancestry have some portion of it (proportionally; do note, of course, that one-drop classification is a pile of shit, as generally everybody has a tiny bit of everything - the human race has never been fully sundered, and the most recent common ancestor may have lived within the span of history).

Obligatory disclaimer: I don't think slight statistical differences in cognition merit massacre or explicit discrimination in everyday life. They're still human beings, and the bell curves have massive overlap! About the only policy choice where I think my opinions are significantly influenced by this is the native birth rate vs. immigration question in First-World countries, but I should note that there are other, non-racist, reasons to prefer native-borns (native-borns get put through a better education system, and there are also cultural-continuity issues with massive importation from Third-World countries that are not secular, liberal, stable democracies, particularly with salad-bowlers around sabotaging assimilation - and in the case of the PRC, there's an outright security risk from those who've been through its education system and/or have family in Mainland China as potential hostages).

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 14d ago

You don't even run into non-trans SJ busybodies about the trans issue? "Allies"?

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 14d ago · Edited 14d ago

You know, I have a very hard time believing that a heterosexual male (that is, a member of the sex responsible for a good >90% of indecent exposure arrests and unsolicited photos of their genitals sent to people they barely know) has wholly innocent reasons for inviting a female person to inspect his genitals within an hour of meeting her, even if he has maimed said genitals beyond recognition.

We could always take the Brave New World/free-love-hippie view of "the sex taboo is bad actually, sex is a fine topic of casual conversation".

(I am mostly sold on that view, although I'd like to see it studied a bit more before rolling the full system out worldwide.)

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 14d ago

I didn't say that all SJ inquisitors are trans

And from a non-trans person, if someone is annoying me with their pet hobby horse, I might be free to say "Give it a rest, come on," or if that would be overly aggressive for the situation, I would at the very least only suffer a smirk and a snort if I were to roll my eyes. But with a trans person... Tag.

*scratches head*

This is what pegged my Wrong on the Internet instincts, because the people I've met on the "Tag" end of things haven't been trans.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 14d ago

Tag.

I think the category you're basically talking about is "social justice inquisitors". This is a real category, and it is not unreasonable to be angry that hostile inquisitors exist and one must (in many areas of life) hide from them to avoid massive retaliation. But not all social justice inquisitors are trans (indeed, my understanding is that most aren't), and not all transfolk are social justice inquisitors - the correlation's positive and even large, but it's not 1.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 15d ago · Edited 15d ago

I mean, Chesterton's Fence in its original form refers to something that was put up with a purpose but whose purpose has been forgotten. Technically, that doesn't apply to things without telos, but the basic conservative principle underlying it does. The lack of greater-than-OMG-available-energy particle collisions on Earth doesn't seem to be purposeful, but I'd still recommend against ending it until one knows what will happen (doing it in space would appear safer).

The conservative principle here actually is satisfied in the case of "substantial excess of women"; male mortality from combat has reached very high levels in the past, such that there have been large female excesses without apparent issues. This is why the objection I made was a purely "it looks like the political consequences of this could be dystopian" one, because doing this with women's suffrage would translate to full political matriarchy, where values that are mostly only held by men are totally shut out of policy, and AFAIK that is unprecedented with perhaps some hunter-gatherer exceptions. I suppose the social justice movement does try its best to centre women's values, so it's kind of a prototype, but it's not a full society, and it's not exactly reassuring.

(I hate staring into this abyss.)

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 18d ago

My point was that this adds on to the list of shit Hitler ruined for Germany and Germans.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 18d ago

Hitlers success at making Germany great again was very short-lived, and most German nationalists would not claim that a few years of ruling most of Europe at gunpoint was worth the eventual defeat, the splitting of Germany (with the East still worse off than the West today) and the destruction of the Germany cities, even if they were totally indifferent to the pain the Wehrmacht inflicted on the rest of Europe.

From a German nationalist point of view, East Germany wasn't all that bad compared to the rest of what Stalin did - the annexation of Prussia, Silesia and the Sudetenland, with the entire German population of those regions expelled. There are plenty of Germans today for whom the land of their ancestors is forever gone.

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Party realignment in Australian politics?