I am several hundred opossums in a trench coat

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Ok, first up the players: Labor is the major centre-left party led by Anthony Albanese, Liberals are the centre-right (think economically liberal) led by Peter Dutton, Nationals are right wing, Greens are left wing, and there are a handful of “teal” independents who are mostly politically centre women with an environmental focused. The Liberals and Nationals make up the Coalition and essentially act as one insane party with the Libs at the helm, so you can mostly treat them interchangably.

    Labor won the last federal election in 2022 by a slim majority (2 seats), but the Coalition lost in one of the worst defeats in our history. The Liberals were hit the hardest, losing 19 seats, putting them at their lowest representation since their formation in 1944. They were in power since 2013 and lost for a lot of reasons, but a major one was that Prime Minister Scott Morrison was rightfully loathed.

    Since the last election, the Coalition has been steadily growing in popularity due to the same reasons other non-incumbents have globally (ui.e., inflation, high energy prices, etc). Add to that a (mostly true) perception that the government was doing too little to fix problems like our crumbling healthcare system wasn’t helping.

    Finally the election is announced in late March (our elections aren’t fixed) and the parties start campaigning. Dutton, the Liberal leader, looks like he is going to win a majority at this early point. The following things happen:

    • Labor announces and immediately implements a universal tax cut, Dutton announces he will repeal it and replace it with a cut on fuel prices.
    • Labors announces a major initiative to improve bulk billed healthcare (bulk billed = free to the patient), which Dutton immediately matches. Labor runs a major attack campaign claiming that he cannot be trusted, since last time his party was in power they tried to destroy bulk billing among other things.
    • Dutton announces a cut of 41,000 jobs to the public service, a substantial portion. He faces significant backlash as people worry it will result in degraded frontline services, remembering the issues with veterans affairs and Medicare last time they were in. The 41,000 he wants to cut is how much the public service had grown since 2022, so this seems like a reasonable worry. He “clarifies” that no frontline workers will be cut. He also adds that the cuts will be through attrition, not firing. Following continued backlash, he “clarifies” that he always meant the cuts were to come from Canberra, the capital. This is a mathematical impossibility, as he would have to gut the upper ranks of every department and probably defense to achieve that number.
    • He announced an end to work from home for all public servants. This is bad for the Liberals, because they’ve had massive problems with women in the past (including a woman allegedly raped in a ministers office and subsequently an alleged cover up), and people quickly pointed out that the policy would disproportionately affects women, who are unfortunately still expected to bear most of the burden of childcare. Banning working from home prevents them from holding down many jobs. Dutton responds, typically out of touch, that women can job share. He then “clarifies” he only meant it to apply to Canberra, then changes his mind about the policy completely.
    • He rejected Labor’s renewable energy transition and instead proposes a transition to Nuclear. No industry group except the one they hired thinks this is realistic, a good option, or feasible. Unrealistically short time-frames, bad assumptions, etc are used to make it look good on paper. Finally someone points out that the places they plan to put the plants don’t have enough water.
    • Just yesterday, on the eve of the election, they announced their budget they intend to introduce if they win shows a budget deficit worse than Labor’s during the next term, but magically improving after that. This exact tactic worked in 2013 but isn’t now.
    • Other minor things. They keep crashing campaign trucks into polling locations. Dutton has zero charisma and looks creepy, and was a Queensland cop (that’s really bad, they’re as corrupt as the worst American cop).
    • Also a Liberal Senate candidate for this election personally tried to induct me into a culty MLM a few years back so fuck them specifically.

    This has resulted in polls gradually sliding for the Coalition to the point that it now looks like they will lose even more seats this election and Labor might even gain one. Dutton may lose his own seat. It looks like the teals may pick up another member, with the Greens and fringe right wing parties staying about the same.


  • Fair use commentary generally requires as little of the actual original work to be used as possible. Summary may be ok, clips/recordings are ok, but they must be minimal. That commentary must also be substantive.

    Reproducing a work in full (thus obviously limiting the commercial viability of the original work - another factor considered) with light commentary over the top probably wouldn’t hold up in court. The commentary just avoids automatic systems in the increasingly poorly moderated internet.


  • I think it would be great if more men read (or just read summaries of) basic feminist texts, especially Judith Butler and people of her ilk. Before I realised I wasn’t a man they helped me. I think the deconstruction of gender that feminism offers serve men just as much as women - it made masculinity feel like less of a prison (nevermind that I ultimately largely moved more feminine).

    I remember reading authors like John Stoltenberg, the aforementioned Judith Butler, and some perspectives of feminism/masculinity in a working class context.











  • It’s important to note that this is them moving in-development branches/features “behind closed doors”, not making Android closed source. Whenever a feature is ready they then merge it publicly. I know this community tends to be filled with purists, many of whom are well informed and reasoned, but I’m actually totally fine with this change. This kind of structure isn’t crazy uncommon, and I imagine it’s mainly an effort to stop tech journalists analysing random in-progress features for an article. Personally, I wouldn’t want to develop code with that kind of pressure.







  • Ok rather than responding in kind with some snarky comment, I’m going to make a good faith effort explain what I mean.

    My statement that “beauty standards are based in white supremacy” is talking about what we, as a whole society, consider attractive. I am not talking about your personal taste, I am talking about the kinds of bodies, faces, and styles that are elevated in society and pointing our their basis in white supremacy.

    Firstly, we need to understand that beauty standards are not some platonic ideal of beauty, they are socially constructed and therefore informed by the society in which they exist. This also necessarily means that current standards are an evolution of historical standards, reciprocally changing as people both influence the standards and are influenced by them.

    That means that if we want to understand today’s beauty standards, we also need to consider them in a historical context. I hope it is not a controversial point to say that most white countries (i.e. Australia where I live, and the US where much of the discussion often centres) were historically white supremacist (if not presently, but that is a different can of worms). Like they openly stated it (i.e. “White Australia” being official policy) and legally elevated whites, this isn’t up for discussion. I would hope it is not difficult to imagine that such a society would also base its definitions of beauty around white features: white skin, white facial features, blonde hair, etc. A cliche example of this would be the historical masculinization of African-American people and their bodies. Pernicious stereotypes like “Jezebel”, “Sapphire”, and more modern incarnations like “Angry Black Woman” are prime examples of this, where black women are given qualities or cast into roles considered, in a societal context, incompatible with femininity or even outright masculine.

    Therefore, to evaluate my claim that beauty standards are “based in white supremacy”, we need to determine whether our standards have substantially deviated from that history. I would argue it has not, that our beauty standards are clearly descendant. To look at the modelling industry as a prominent signifier, even with notional improvements in the diversity of models, the presence of eurocentric features is largely maintained (see 1, 2, 3). That is not to say there isn’t work, particularly from passionate activists, to move on from this history - but we are not there yet.

    Finally, in regards to this entire thread, I want to point out that, due to the global hegemonic nature of whiteness - historically and presently - to some uneducated eyes the premise of my argument here - that beauty standards are not objective but subjective and socially constructed - may be dismissed out of hand. A naive look at other prominent non-white cultures that attempt to recreate the aesthetics of white beauty standards (i.e. skin lightening products in south-east asia) could appear to suggest that they may be formed from an objective standpoint. This is patently and obviously untrue. Other cultures and periods of time had extremely varied beauty standards to those we have today, and it is a blatant case of presentism and ignorance to assume that our particular version is “correct”. We should be skeptical of claims that, unlike so many other aspects of society, beauty standards alone are not impacted by the global history of colonialism and the dominance of white countries globally.