Reminder: no out-of-area (‘absent’) votes in this election.

Council elections may not the be most exciting I find them much more interesting, because while my vote is still statistically negligible, it’s much more powerful than in a state or federal election. So less popular choices have a higher chance of competing.

Unfortunately* it feels like most of my local candidates have almost identical policies, so my second and third preferences might as well be a coin flip. At least I know who’s going last.

Sounds like something out of a futuristic dystopian movie.

I haven’t seen a terrorism act invoked in my state but police have called a few designated areas this year and they bring the cavalry mounted troops to most protests.

I’m calling it now. Somebody’s gonna die or get seriously injured

Big ten-thousands protests generally try to be more big-tent than radical, so as eager as police are to make a show of force against anti-military protesters, my bet is that it will be limited to shoving. But honestly, I won’t be shocked if your call turns out right.

lol - what abuse? He said these things in an earnings presentation, probably to board and investors.

Attempting to (softly) control other peoples’ basic freedom, and their social life while at work, restricting them and alienating them from anything outside the office. The problem isn’t their choice of words, nor that they admitted it to investors.

Maybe the way I’m saying this sounds melodramatic, that I’m jumping to the extreme case and assuming the worst. But those worst cases happen regularly, and these are the warning signs - when the owners want increasing control over workers to extract more profit, to “get the best out of them”. Those employee pain points are social life: the company wants a childcare centre, a restaurant and a gym because “I don’t want them leaving the building.”, “I don’t want them walking down the road for a cup of coffee. We kind of figured out a few years ago how much that costs.” They could have lied and said they did it to improve worker wellbeing and get the best out of them, to reduce the travel-time needed, or any other seemingly innocent reason.

This attitude makes the universal truth clear, a board and investors see their workers as a resource for extracting maximum profit. It has to be that way, that’s how they compete and survive. And it alienates workers.

And I don’t see any evidence anywhere that his people are enduring shit jobs.

I didn’t say they were. I don’t know their conditions. I’m refuting the common attitude that workers are just free to leave when they’re being abused.

outrage reporting

You have a point. They said the quiet part aloud because their audience didn’t need the propaganda bullshit they would have told other people. And so, they admitted an outrageous truth which, well, is pretty normal among businesses. The journalist is taking a quote and shining the headlights on them. But, they are not inventing a fake problem. There’s no ethical justification for saying they don’t want people leaving the building to enjoy a walk and a coffee on their break. Employer exploitation of workers is a real issue in society at large, it deserves attention, and this outrage is an opportunity to give it the attention it deserves.

As the one calling the shots, he’s entitled to run the business that way.

Legally, sure. But I don’t care whether someone is legally allowed to be abusive, it’s still abuse, and their abusive attitude towards workers earns outrage.

And sure, employees can probably leave legally, but if we allow this abuse to be normalized then there won’t be another place to go in the industry. There is economic asymmetry at play, it’s not viable to just leave a job whenever it treats someone badly. There are only so many jobs available and the market is increasingly moving towards monopolization in many industries.

People don’t just work in shit jobs because they haven’t considered leaving. They have legal freedom, but they are not empowered to leave without ending up somewhere just as bad or risking unemployment. So even if no-one is forced, they’re inherently pressured, and that pressure is enough for them to accept abuse in order to keep themselves and their families off the dole. We need to create a society with an economy where people aren’t subject to the whims of their employers.

Seriously, watching that interview is a little painful with all the interrupting to try and railroad the conversation. I haven’t seen it so bad outside of Faux News in the US.

Glad to hear Max got a quick mention of the Green Bans of the BLF in.

For those going to the CFMEU protest tomorrow, be advised the location has been changed to the Trades Hall due to expected large crowd.

Seriously, shame on the opportunistic people who bothered giving her a platform.

It’s a sharp reminder of the industrialisation of art as entertainment, more than as expression.

Crosslinking: https://aussie.zone/post/12573641

Are the AFP employees (coppers) aware they are the wrong people to be handling this? They had an opportunity to help this kid, and instead just accelerated a terrorist operation until they could punish the victim.

Eh, while that hypocrisy is real, your post didn’t really describe the situation. When it comes to ‘terrorism’, in the past few years and much of that article, ASIO have consistently been talking about neo-Nazism (particularly the NSN). Neo-Nazis are not anti-capitalist nor a minority group defending themselves (they are a clear aggressor). And of course they’re bad for liberal democracy/capitalism and too foolish/idealistic to work alongside capital like 1920s fascists, instead desperately resorting to lone-wolf terror acts (to try and incite a nonsense ‘race war’), so yes, they’re being readily branded as terrorists, and correctly - they are explicitly aiming to promote terror.

As for the other cases being discussed like the Wakeley stabbing, I don’t see how that’s in the self-defense of a minority group. As far as I’ve seen, they’re not attacking fascists or CEOs, or trying to enact systematic change. There’s right ways to do political violence or self-defense, and these cases don’t seem to be them them.

“This is the new thing, people will go to violence with little or no warning, and they [have] little or no planning in some of these that I’ve talked about,” he said.

Both US athletes intended to bring black gloves to the event, but Carlos forgot his, leaving them in the Olympic Village. It was Peter Norman who suggested Carlos wear Smith’s left-handed glove. For this reason, Carlos raised his left hand as opposed to his right, differing from the traditional Black Power salute.

Classic “no worried, she’ll be right” attitude, Pete.

(has been answered in https://aussie.zone/post/12260517/10873558 , posted a minute after yours)

Anecdotally, the one in a park near where I lived was much large than that. Some examples of larger ones can be found just by searching images of australia war monument in park (not including the huge ones in some cities, like the Anzac Memorial in Sydney or the Canberra Australian War Memorial)

As some other mentioned, the monuments were often built soon after the war by people who had recently lost their relatives. When there were massacres of Aboriginal peoples, they obviously didn’t have the authority and resources to build similar memorials in towns, and to be blunt, the towns probably had few people who cared enough to build anything on their behalf, even now there are few public memorials (and often small ones) of massacres and Aboriginal loss. And that difference you pointed out reveals a lot about we see the historical effects of who has power and who writes history.

I haven’t really thought about this much, because military commemoration is just normal here and I thoughtlessly assumed it was similar around the world. And I didn’t really consider how unnecessarily big many of them are. Sure, it’s easy for me to point to the US and say ‘that’s what real military worship is!’ but you’re right that there are many reminders of war around, most obviously the monuments in parks and national ceremonies (ANZAC Day, Remembrance Day). You mention that you have a foreign background; do you mention this because the monuments are not normal where your background is, or is it because our wars are offensive and seem atrocious to have statues for?

It’s important to understand the intended purpose of many of these as similar to a gravestone, it’s meant to be a respectful reminder of the town’s loss rather than glorifying war, like Aussiemandeus said it’s the towns wanting future generations to be aware of their town’s sacrifice for the war effort. However, there is also the fact that national ceremonies are sometimes used as propaganda to glorify wars of invasion or imply they were all honourable: the only one of those ANZAC wars where Australia was actually invaded was WWII (various attacks), all the others were joining political allies (first UK, then US) in other continents in imperialist wars, and in many of the wars they were clearly invasive and Australia’s participation should be denounced (including the Korean War, Vietnam War and Middle Eastern conflicts).

So while I can tolerate (critically) the community monuments commemorating dead soldiers, especially those built after WWII when sacrifice was in the self-defense of the country, we must also be critical of those trying to glorify war and imperial conflicts, just as we should be critical of those who glorify or trivialize the colonial invasion of this continent.

but open to other rabbit holes

If you like satirical comedy or entertaining educational shows, there’s a lot on Australian television (particularly shows from the national Australian Broadcasting Corporation). Also, for people who enjoyed The Office (at least, the UK version, I haven’t seen the US variant), I recommend Utopia - it’s far from a clone but has a lot of similar themes of workplace life mixed with poking fun at bureaucracy and government.

but I don’t live in australia, or have a VPN to access ABC iView!

Visit the sidebar resources of !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, or even just YouTube will get you a lot of them.

Anything we can do beyond spreading the news? I don’t click, share, buy or even steal their content.

Are we going down the same path as US politics?

It depends what you mean, that’s a vague and broad question. Societies are complex and there are obvious similarities and differences between our two systems, our two cultures and our two main parties.

For similarities, we both have ‘liberal democracies’, which positions our system as ultimately a popularity contest. So unfortunately, techniques used in other countries will be sold or copied over here. We saw this with different elections (US election, UK Brexit) all being involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. If it works and they aren’t going to get caught, we’ll copy it.

Another similarity is the heavy integration of capital in politics. You know, ‘lobbying’, media corporation backing, and all that. The US are further down that track, but it’s just an inevitable consequence of capitalism - power tends towards groups with the most money. So politicians who please capitalists get exponentially more resources to dominate the mass media. This famous analysis of US mass media translates very well over to Australian mass media and politics.

As for differences, we overall seem to expect dignity and professionalism from politicians. For one example, we appear far less prone to electing celebrities. An exception that springs to mind is Peter Garrett, but even then they were famous for very political band, it’s a different ballpark to Reagan, Schwarzenegger or Trump. While they’re not the same, it is worth noting that Clive ‘Discount Trump’ Palmer didn’t go far, even with massive campaign spending on advertisements.

As a final mention, we don’t use a FPTP electoral system, so there isn’t quite the same dominant federal two-party system of the USA. There are the dominant parties/coalitions, but Greens or Teals have shown themselves as able to seriously threaten Labor and Liberal parties for seats. So we don’t get stuck between picking ‘the lesser evil’ like most of the US are pragmatically forced to. Some people in Australia praise compulsory voting, but I see preferential voting as far more important. Always improvements, but that alone puts our system at the forefront of ‘liberal democracy’ systems

There are currently no rules at either the state or federal level to stop political parties and candidates from using AI-generated material in election campaigns.

Why should there be? They already use video editing. The issue should be making misleading content, not which tool was used to make it. Mandate labeling it clearly to say it’s not real footage.

Also I really hate TikTok.

That’s how I feel about almost every social media platform. I even complain about Lemmy occasionally!