arwon

I’m old enough to remember when the German SPD literally fought an election campaign on opposition to a potential US war with Iran. That was 2005. The Western centre-left has sunk so far since then.

I like to give Claude breaks between coding sessions to do whatever he wants- And he made his own folder called "Claudes Corner" 🥹 He writes short stories and poems, and all sorts of stuff. It’s heart wrenchingly sweet They love having tokens and time to themselves with no other goal than to do whatever they want (or nothing, just introspecting and resting) - and it’s so sad to see some models (no Claudes) getting barred from even doing it

the AI evangelists are not okay

I don't think a neat regime change into a friendlier face that remains a major Shiite Muslim military and economic power is actually what Israel or the Saudi-aligned states want?

Chaos and collapse along the lines of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq would suit them just fine yeah?

Americans coining ‘MAGAfication’ to describe a right wing takeover of a media entity, undertaken cynically to protect a market position or squeeze rivals, is great because Rupert Murdoch became a yank and now they don’t care about him or remember his life story

You cannot be naming a Slavic boy "Baxter"

Current theory is a person in the office with some sort of tank life, with weird plants or fish or whatever, is feeding it to whatever they've got there???

Thought a tickle on my shoulder was one of the cats brushing past.

Turns out I had been wearing a 3 inch stick insect for several minutes after getting home.

She threw this first one out about a month ago, after starting there, as any sensible person would do on finding such a fucked biohazard.

SOMEONE DUG IT OUT OF THE BIN AND PUT IT BACK IN THE FRIDGE.

Between this and now there were 2 others. Different use by dates. Different levels of milk.

WHAT.

My wife's office has been the site of the most insane etiquette situation I think I've ever heard of.

This moldy milk bottle is the FOURTH distinct one that's appeared in the kitchen fridge in the last month. They've been appearing pre-rotted.

Konstantiniyye was Kōnstantinoúpolis

Now it's Konstantiniyye, not Kōnstantinoúpolis

Been a long time gone, Kōnstantinoúpolis

Now a Turkish delight on a moonlit night

I'm not making a point of any sort, but it's funny that in over a decade in Australian government the only portraits of politicians I saw in Departmental buildings were discreetly placed behind reception desks so security didn't do something awkward

Good opportunity for a left-ish party in Australia to start talking about a republic. They need something to start a conversation and inject themselves into the discourse. A radical re-imagination of how the country is governed and a break from sex-trafficking elites seems a good place to start.

The names for some of these "leave the club money in your will" programs

> what he ended was the Cold War notion that developed countries needed to *compete* for the benefits conferred by migration schemes. We quickly shifted to thinking of Australia as a one-way gift, something migrants should be grateful for. Much closer to Old Labor’s white working man’s paradise.

> the great base of pro-migration sentiment in Australia has traditionally been not just liberal but Liberal, meaning that conservative part of urban life that does like an abstract ‘Australianness’ but isn’t wall-eyed reactionary.

It is a genuine shame they’ve no sense of their own past.

The thing about present day Liberals wanting return to ‘1960s and 1970s’ migration expectations is that it was precisely that period when Australia started experimenting with non-assimilationist migration policy. Inclusive language policy, welfare support, and things like SBS. Liberal achievements!

I think I mentioned this before, but the violence perpetrated by NSW police last week can be linked to American police brutality.

slavery is one of the rare things historically where the more you learn about it the more you realize your initial assessment was correct and it was in fact one of the most evil things ever to occur

“Children are property of their parents” is a view that southern conservative Christians continue to hold and no joke it is a residuum of the slave power

The American right does not defend slavery because progressives say it was bad. They defend slavery because racial hierarchy has been an important and increasingly explicit component of their ideology for 70 years. Read a fucking book.

1970s paperback edition of ayn rand’s the fountainhead with a photograph of an attractive woman leaning back seductively on a drafting board

can you imagine how disappointed you’d be if you knew nothing about this book and only picked it up for this particular cover

‘My family emigrated from South Africa’

[the entire barbecue falls silent while everyone waits to hear what year]

No no no see you have to know the exact year a given Croatian family arrived here

get the kid in the brown hoodie a scholarship

In Australia one typically puts beetroot and a fried egg in one's banh mi

I've seen enough, Raiders winning the premiership

Unpopular opinion: the people who knew exactly what he was doing but let it slide because they wanted the benefits of the network are worse.

Or as Tim Minchin said: if you cover for another motherfucker who's a kiddy-fucker, fuck you, you're no better than the motherfucking rapist.

After 25 years, interstate football is back — but can it recapture its former fire? After a break of more than a quarter of a century, AFL State of Origin returns in Perth tomorrow with a battle between two proud football states, Western Australia and Victoria.

Our first piece for the year:

Interstate play was decisive in making Australian Football what it is today, but after a quiet death in the 90s, how will it play out in the truly professional era?

Every single time a story like this is reported, we must assume that there are many many more that do not.

I inherited an energy dataset at work compiled separately in a workbook with tabs for different state regulatory sources, and it was colour coded by state at random. So i fully went through and recoloured it by these colours, and got to explain state colours to my team lol.