pronouns: she/her is fine.

I am a conniving rat with plans of an international uprising against tyranny! I keep getting distracted by tasty food, gardening, gadgets, games, and books though.

Inside me are two wolves, I desperately need surgery.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • A lot of the Aussies you’ll chat to on the internet don’t realise how recent there was heavy segregation even among people broadly considered white now.

    If you look at the last names of powerful people even now you’ll find that while they’re general all white dudes Irish last names are underrepresented, despite being around as long as English ones. A lot of migrants from Greece/Italy/Poland etc were heavily sidelined too.

    Lets not even get into treatment of native peoples and non white migrants cause we’ll fucking be here all day.

    This country is definitely heavily divided by class, last oecd report I read found 4 generation median time for bottom quartile income to next quartile up. That’s bonkers.


  • Everything is feedback cycles. Yes there’s homegrown bullshit but it’s naive to ignore how that is encouraged by for example the usa exporting neoliberalism and encouraging/bullying other countries to deregulate their own markets (like media ownership that lets people like Murdoch rise) for favourable political treatment.

    It’s naive to ignore that when usa media, usa products, usa megacorps all arrive somewhere that they wont swing the culture.

    The usa has almost certainly interfered in our elections ffs.

    Being a country the usa has military interest in is incredible corrosive. It’s not just Australia where this has happened.


  • we elected a socialist in the 70s. It ended in a constitutional crisis and his successor was groomed by the CIA. rhymes with certain things no?

    we had a publicly owned transport system, telephony, healthcare system, a thriving public service. Then we started getting leaned on.

    We had a collectivist culture, government funding for our own media with our own values, then we started getting leaned on.

    It goes on.

    Even our slang is being replaced, people are pronouncing things your way, the media of the usa is replacing everything and that’s intentional government policy.


  • While it is true that insane propaganda is off the charts, for example in my own country Australia we’re chaining ourselves to the fading star of the usa and the UK militarily despite having:

    • different trade interests
    • different geopolitical interests
    • different cultural interests

    all while the usa government tries it’s hardest to undermine our economic policy, erase our culture, and distort our politics towards their own demended lines.

    There is zero evidence the chinese government does not want to do the same. They have interfered in our media, our education systems, there has been stupid petty trade squabbles with both “sides” using us for their own ends.

    When chinese diplomats speak to our media, even in excruciatingly fair interviews, the pattern is the same slimey deny deny deny and legal quibble that usa diplomats engage in. Their media is insanely critical of Australian life too.

    There are no good guys in this power struggle and looking for one is childish thinking.

    Even this article refuses to address the notion that the chinese government has ever conducted itself in a condemnable manner.



  • This doesn’t really apply because harm to a pedestrian during an impact isn’t a linear scale.

    There are sharp decreases in fatalities and permanent injuries, particularly to children who are often the ones hit in neighbourhood streets, below about 30 km/h so there’s a strong incentive to have drivers travelling at speeds no higher than that to avoid child murder and maiming due to inattention.

    Below those speeds, and given that people do often belatedly apply the brakes when they’re driving recklessly there is a much weaker case for further reduction in speed limits. At least until car geometry changes again to make them even deadlier /shrug shrug


  • definitionally you aren’t vegan if environmental impact is your terminal goal. It would be like saying you’re Christian for the cathedrals or something.

    Veganism is a philosophy and life practice of trying to minimise harm to other earthlings. It can involve environmentalism as an instrumental goal, that is protecting the environment to avoid mass suffering, but a world of perfect environmental preservation where all ants have depression would be unacceptable to a vegan but not to an environmentalist.

    Many people with environmental goals adopt a plant based diet and/or lifestyle.






  • Yeah it’s just the result of progress. I’ve watched people my age get stunlocked by carburettor issues or the concept of a choke. It’s unfortunate but sleekness often trades off with user serviceability.

    Rather than being all “hgngh grrr the damn kids with their geegaws and whimgets don’t know how to use a simple butter churn” we have to teach people how to feel confident learning different ways of doing things and most importantly why they should care to do so.


  • Something I often need to keep in mind is that when I was growing up the home PC was pretty crude and mysterious. You had to learn what a command line was, you had to learn about data backups and file trees, you had to learn about navigation and discovery of the web.

    Sure you might not have done any of this stuff for decades now, depending on how you engage with the infernal devices, but if you see a forum you know what that is, how it works, what you expect to find inside. If you see URLs with like foo.com/place@otherfoo you kinda intuitively grasp what that is saying.

    But if you’re like 20 now probably the first computer you ever touched was a magic box where you just clicked things to open stuff and they managed their own little things. Clicked a thing to install other clicky things. You don’t know what a config file is, why would you? you don’t really use URLs much, you just click the internet and start typing and then click the right link etc.

    To a lot of those people some of this stuff is as arcane as like arch linux is to your average millennial PC user. Despite fedi (and arch! I use arch btw) actually being really simple and obvious there’s a barrier of unfamiliarity and a lot of basic skills you need to learn first.



  • Sorry I missed this.

    I feel like this is potentially a bait post but if I steel man you for the sake of civility and learning:

    I am not the most knowledgeable about the USSR, my grandparents came from occupied poland and thus had certain opinions, that’s a large part of my exposure and likely biases me. That said, the revolutionary movement and corresponding government seems to have gone through many phases, and have expressed various degrees of leftism at various times. Was assassinating lots of people, forcibly occupying people, collaborating with nazi germany, and engaging in genocide very leftist? I would say definitionally no. Even for the time there was considerable pushback from other leftist personalities and organisations.

    On the other hand for many, many people there was massive increases in freedom, prosperity, and rights compared to tzarist russia. Including my grandmother, who was allowed to hold a technical office job! wow! (until she moved to Australia and was forced to work in a factory and be treated like an idiot. Not wow).

    This seems like one of those situations where trying to fit something into a simplistic box will inevitably break down. I feel comfortable saying the USSR accomplished both wonderful and terrible things, that overall it was probably better than tsarist russia but it fell short of the ideals that founded it.

    If I met someone who say volunteered to feed the homeless, agitated for unionism at work, volunteered to educate disadvantaged people, but also thought I should be executed as a social deviant (I’m mega queer) I would probably call them leftist even while I thought they were massively misguided and extremely dangerous. I’ll note I’ve never actually met anyone like that though.