Alison

What do you think of Maryland's flag?

Tyty!

Did notice a decent number from Animal Justice/Legalise Cannabis as well, who I don't think ran that many last time round.

Do you have a breakdown by party Casey? Saw SA-Best were running as many as the Libs in the LegCo.

The Greens in a few seats come to mind though it's one thing to attract little preferences because it's a Labor v Green contest and the Libs put you below Labor, and to have both majors put you last because of drug charges.

Opinion: Speirs is back in Black but with few friends in high places - News | InDaily, Inside South Australia Disgraced former Liberal leader David Speirs says going it alone will be a big bonus for voters in Black, but Mike Smithson is not so sure.

@kevinbonham.bsky.social This opinion piece in InDaily, about David Speirs, suggests that he'll require more than 50% first prefs to win Black due to Libs putting him last. Would you know anything about the primary vote needed in cases like this (say, third party pref'd last by both ALP and Libs)

I attempted an infographic.

YouTube video by kristy farquhar Pauline Pantsdown - I Dont Like It

I think the fact that the TikTok youths haven't yet rediscovered Pauline Pantsdown is a sign of serious American cultural hegemony. How has this banger not gone viral again yet? m.youtube.com/watch?v=D4tZ...

I think the building of the Wall makes a lot of sense to lock out the zombies of death, but there is no argument for not letting those north of the Wall come south. (Although I totally *get* why they didn't in the context of medieval sectarianism.)

Perhaps too much to ask but what notionally-Lib held seats would have ON in the final two on this?

I am cautious about not seeming like I am trivialising this sobering and chilling news, but I think shouting "Islamic State lives" when you're bashing a gay kid is best understood less as genuine ideological statement and more puerile provocation.

(Reply in concurrence to your point) It does seem quite bloody ludicrous to me how difficult it is to get cash today given how many places will impose a surcharge on not paying cash. Surcharge-free ATMs ought to be fat more common.

I would feel mortified if I asked how someone's mother was and it turned out they'd been hit by a car that morning, and if I was speaking to them personally, I would probably apologise. If they brought it up later and asked for an apology, I probably wouldn't, because I hadn't said a hurtful thing.

Sure, but I think the difference I'm trying to get at is an apology in the moment, for a social faux pas, as opposed to one being requested after the fact. If someone is unintentionally hurt by something I say, then I don't feel good they felt bad, but I also have nothing to be sorry for.

that apologies are expected simply when someone else was harmed by something you did. If I had no control what I did to cause that harm, or if I could not have reasonably foreseen that harm, it feels inauthentic to apologise, like I am devaluing what it should mean. (2/2)

I struggle a lot with this line of reasoning because, at least to me, apologising means you have done something intentional that requires redress. Perhaps if I knock someone past in the street I will apologise, but to avoid offense more than anything else. I struggle a lot with the idea (1/2)

It really annoys me. I think a bunch of it is downstream from a very sanitised version of mental illness, and the assumption that anyone who has a worse version of that is just doing it to get away with socially unacceptable stuff. Very very bad, I think.

This article cites at the bottom an extremely intriguing paper by Peter Chen on the de-amalgamation, but seems to mention none of Chen's actual thoughts or quotes from the many locals he interviewed, both from Benalla and Mansfield, on the Delatite issue.

III. THE HUMAN COST: MANSFIELD’S FIGHT BACK Theory met reality in places like Mansfield. Forced into the mega-council “Delatite Shire” with Benalla, the community watched their town unravel: “Services collapsed, administration moved to Benalla and Mansfield entered a period of social and physical decline. It was brought home to locals that when Local Government is moved elsewhere, not only do the roads deteriorate, but other unrelated services such as the hospital and the schools suffer in a spiral of declining funding and numbers.” Fourteen hundred locals formed the Mansfield District Residents and Ratepayers Association. They fought for years. And remarkably, in 2002 – against all odds – they won back their independence. The lesson? Amalgamation wasn’t inevitable. It was a choice—and sometimes communities could choose differently.

This article reads to me like it was generated, or at least edited with, the assistance of a large language model. The phrasing here specifically is verrry ChatGPT, and I say this as someone who's done a lot of research on Delatite. Calling it a "mega council" is...a bit much.

So are they running services through the Metro Tunnel, Anzac-Sunbury? Not the most intuitive wording here

Not that it's any of my business but I personally am rooting for Connie Bonaros, both because she has been a very effective reform-minded crossbencher, but because I think it would be good for a teal-style politician to win under the banner of a party, and to not be white Anglo-Saxon as the rest are

A graph of polling for South Australia's Legislative Council, organised in a bar chart. A header reads "Polling in SA's Upper House" with the caption "Percentage of intended votes in SA's March 2026 state election." The colours of each bar seem to be selected entirely at random, with Labor and One Nation both shades of blue, and in some cases the bars are sorted incorrectly, but from top-to-bottom, here are the results: ALP: 38% One Nation: 21% Liberal: 15% Greens: 11% Family First: 4% Legalise Cannabis: 2% Animal Justice: 3% Stephen Pallaras - Real Change SA: 2% SA Best: 1% Liberatarian (sic): 1% Jing Lee - Better Community: 1% Sarah Game - Fair Go for Australians: 1%

Interesting poll in South Australia. Drawn most to the absolute shitfight for that last seat, which the folks at DemosAU seem to think could go to any of Connie Bonaros, Chris McDermott, and Stephen Pallaras. Actual poll figures somewhat support this. www.indailysa.com.au/news/just-in...

Reckon those numbers would elect a caucus that makes the Jacqui Lambie Network look positively unified and stable.

I'm sorry, I'll be sure to never share my thoughts on American politics again.

I don't really disagree (I certainly don't think it reflects well on her, looking back), I just don't think it was a seriously offensive thing for her to have said.

Have you been following the Dunk and Egg series?

I thought it was basically fine. Nothing Crockett has done in the last few months makes me look more kindly on it but MTG was insulting her in a heavily racially coded way and even if it basically a homophobic schoolyard insult I struggle to get seriously offended by it.

Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links If DDoSing a blog wasn't bad enough, archive site also tampered with web snapshots.

The headline does not convey how completely batshit this story is. The Archive Today (archive.ph etc) admin weaponized the site's captcha to attack a blogger who wrote about them and *altered archived screenshots* as part of the attack.

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

I am rooting for SA-Best, not only because Connie Bonaros has actually been a rather good MLC, but chiefly because it would be very very funny if SA-Best managed to survive another eight years

imo the most interesting thing to watch here will be how One Nation manages to do in the exurban/growth suburbs of Adelaide. A big One Nation gain in the country would suggest they're mainly cannibalising the Lib vote, but I'd keep my eye on Ngadjuri, Light, Taylor etc to see how much is from Labor.