Yeah last time we named a space-thing Eris, Pluto stopped being a planet. Maybe it’s a bad idea.

Last I heard, plenty of companies used Signal for certain secure messaging. And I don’t just mean dodgy off the record stuff, I mean confidential things that Teams is too open for.

Yeah, astroturf (both political and commercial marketing) is common but at least it’s a lower barrier of entry to get heard, more grassroots can spring up.

Cheers mate!

There’s an interesting discussion about whether forcing people who don’t want to vote into voting is a good thing.

I definitely think our mandatory voting system has some great benefits, especially that it makes voter suppression far more difficult. But at the end if the day, I’ve seen electors who couldn’t name two federal PM candidates or the party policies of the two main parties. What is the benefit of forcing such people into voting? They clearly don’t have an interest in making the correct decision for themselves or our state. So it simply makes the election less effective, turning it more into a gimmicky popularity spectacle than a decision making process.

fr why are you becoming a politician in Aus if you just hate democracy and transparency

People who care about those things don’t get the support of mass media major shareholders, huge financial backers, and other corporate interests that have the power to more easily sway elections.

The bottom line is our electoral system is dominated by people who don’t benefit from democracy or transparency. Bad politicians aren’t an outlier or corruption, but the system working as it’s been built to.

I’m being sincere, they compared it to a similar event to contrast the reaction.

One of the few positions where I can agree with them. Anyone who claims to represent me in government shouldn’t be swearing allegiance of a monarch.

The small protest did not disrupt proceedings, as it did when Victorian senator Lidia Thorpe gave the oath in 2022.

I’m glad the author added this line.

A test when you’re 18 that lasts the rest of your life? […]

Good criticism, I didn’t think that part through. Once every 3 years is probably to often. Somewhere in the middle would be ideal.

And the bottom line is that many people will just be in a hurry, stressed or tired. But I hope that this kind of thing would improve instinct and build habits that would reduce the impact of those inevitable factors.

And what happens if they can’t pass? Are they barred from voting?

Try again until they pass. Not registered until they pass. The test allows all the assistance that one would receive in a polling centre.

What’s the point of letting someone in the polling booth if they can’t fill out the ballot under ideal conditions? It’s not empowering them, it’s just compromising the democratic process.

That’s risky for both the reason of discrimination

I claim that if someone is unable to pass this test, their vote wouldn’t have counted anyway. It’s only as discriminatory as the election itself is.

Unless these people literally didn’t make it to year 6

That, and plenty of other edge cases too. There are a surprising amount of people who made it through school and remained illiterate or innumerate (I can’t easily find stats).

That doesn’t mean they will […] always want to.

It’s perfectly valid (IMO) to nullify your vote. What disturbs me is how many people seem to unintentionally cast an invalid vote despite wanting to vote. It points me to suspect a systematic issue beyond just apathy.

Thanks for that little extra in the title.

Machine learning (well, more specifically, the marketing term “AI”) has a bad reputation. It’s a tool. And we’re so used to seeing that tool wildly abused that it’s hard not to have an instinctual reaction whenever it appears in the media. But recognising writing and text is one of the legitimately reasonable uses of the tool, so long as it’s done properly and not misunderstood as an objective replacement for humans - it may have better accuracy that a typical person but still it’s not objective and its training data will inevitably have limitations.

Rather, the court is being asked to determine more mundane questions. Is that 1 actually a 7; is that 6 an 8? and so on.

It consistently amazes me on the level of inability people have when it comes to simple tasks like filling in a ballot.

Now, I understand that I have advantages that not everyone has, like over a decade of local school experience filling exams, so I shouldn’t consider what’s natural and obvious to me to be universal expected knowledge. But at some point, the government and AEC should just have a mandatory 30 minute voting test when you enroll, so you have no excuse not to know how to print numbers clearly (hell, teach us about 7 and other good habits), so you know how to read simple English voting instructions or know how to ask for assistance if you’re unable for any reason.

money not to scale

@zero_gravitas@aussie.zone

^this, but two land mines

‘economic coercion’

Mates, economic coercion is a daily occurrence for normal people. That’s how our entire economic system is built. You’re gonna have to come up with a better name than that.

Not sure, but I see articles from the past couple of years saying employees were were going to Fairwork about a 50% RTO mandate.

10 senate seats and 12% of the vote is a bit more than a handful mate. My primary vote usually goes to parties around 0.1% before ending up at the Greens. Greens actually have some institutional platform and power, and the two main parties are no longer a majority of primary votes.

The electoral change has been slow, and too slow to have faith in if we want to save the planet (like you said, radical politics is needed), but it’s real and indicative.

You’re on the ball. In Australia, a member of the current biggest neo-Nazi group (Stuart von Moger IIRC) tried to join NDIS and got investogated when they asked to be assigned to disaffected young men. This is an established strategy across the Western world and one certainly at play here.

From an interview with Ron H. Barassi (not to be confused with Ron Barassi):

Art Income Dialectic, on the B side of the single, is a delightful soliloquy of yours Ron. May I ask you which Shakespearian character’s soliloquy do you feel most comfortable with; that of Hamlet -

"Drown the Stage with tears

And cleave the general ear with horrid speech

Make mad the guilty, and appal the free";

or that of Macbeth?

"I am in blood

steeped in so far that, should I walk no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o’er."

RHB: Blood haunts Macbeth. It becomes synonymous with the gradual flooding of his wife’s subconscious sense, or morality, and the destruction of his own. My copy of that play is still marked by the notes I made in my HSC year. I can remember sitting at 11.30pm, when the rest of the family had gone to bed, with the lights just on enough to read and making lists of the references to blood in the play. With growing surprise, as the scent from my father’s flower-beds drifted in, I realised blood was a cohesive pervasive symbol throughout the play. It was a warm night because that was only four weeks or so before the exam. I realised that Shakespeare could be read as poetry, with the compression of language that the word poetry implies, as well as a drama. In fact it was this poetic notion of Shakespeare that attracted me the most because I’m yet to see a production of his which doesn’t bore the shit out of me.

Honestly, I analyse and satirise literature in my spare time, and I’ve read a few nonfiction theory texts that are well above high-school level, but I don’t think I have ever read an entire assigned text in its entirety. Every addition material I selected for exams was a film.

but perhaps a more general form of mandatory national service could be useful

I’d be fine with mandatory SES training.

Jeez, “we have to meet the people where they are”. Basically admitting they’re outsiders.

the trend of everyone i don’t like is a nazi

Yes, that’s a real problem, when some people carelessly throw around “nazi” as a generalized slur against bigots. It’s tactless and does trivialise the specific threats that neo-nazis pose, as opposed to the different threats posed by those more imminently harmful politicians (Gina et al is involved in policy making, just indirectly).

We, all of us, need to use more specific ways to describe politics than “nazi commie fascist liberal” buzzwords, because real neo-nazis love to utilise the overuse of “nazi” as cover - if someone who is clearly contradictory to Nazism is called a Nazi and experiences that non-Nazis are called Nazis by “the left”, then actual self-identifying neo-Nazis will exploit this and say “yes, pink-hair SJWs also called all these normal people Nazis too!” when they’re talking about actual crypto-fascists promoting actual neo-Nazi ideology. As part of this tactic, they also like to exaggerate how common this phenomenon is through memes/social media, but it does happen.

But with all that said, it’s not a tough one for me. Someone being legally charged for that is ridiculous, and it’s very clear in context that they are not promoting or glorifying neo-nazi ideology or its persecution. If we charged everyone who used political symbolism poorly, the entire continent would have to be a prison colony again. They’re being harassed for insulting certain politicians, and whether the charge is technically legal or not doesn’t change this.