David Sligar

I remember he had a tragic alt right phase

overhead a gen z convo in Newtown last night: "who's heard of the smashing pumpkins?"

Attlee taught Labour to walk, now he watches on as they fly

"Turn around or you're going to get the dog."

Flexible

there is no love like the Australian boomer male’s love of spraying herbicide

looking for home office colour laser printer (but mostly black and white)

only basic requirements:

1) modest maintainance and refill costs
2) no constant paper jams
3) easy & intuitive to use (no mysterious error messages, constant catch 22 frustration etc)

would appreciate options

“I’ll declare war on you if you don’t give me the peace prize” is an incredible bit

Here's my primer on Americans: they're weird, and usually think they are the only country in the world.

We're meant to have these things called the Australian Federal Police and also the National Anti-Corruption Commission who are both certainly authorised to act in the scenario where a government department is recovering >$3.5m a year in fraud without even really actively looking.

all Americans have "taxation is theft" brain from birth, they helplessly fall into it unless actively concentrating

that’s right

drinking is tanking among young people.

thinking informally about this for a moment I think if, specifically, the ratio of dangerous drinking to non-dangerous drinking is falling (and I don’t know it is), it would be a case for cutting tax

news.flinders.edu.au/blog/2025/10...

I’m not a punitive person but Aus uni administrators belong in prison

the tone is pitched at teens. does this does this mid 40s man have any significant personal, professional or research experience in suicide by current teens? do any teens even read him? suspect the answer is no and basically no. just sounds like confected persona cultivation, tough love freddie

is it true that a normal reaction - from friends - is to ridicule a friend’s suicide? not what I’ve observed!

is it a useful prevention strategy to tell people to stop dramatising, that no one really cares anyway? that’s not expert opinion! maybe tread carefully, with humility, kinda high stakes!

Don't Kill Yourself; First, They'll Make Fun of You, Then They'll Forget You Today is publication day for my new novel, The Mind Reels. In the book, the protagonist Alice confronts the possibility of killing herself, as many people with bipolar disorder do. Somewhere between 3...

uncle Freddie & his hardboiled gritty realism to scare the youths straight. it’s such a tedious schitck

here, he says people who suicide do it for status elevation, and thus tells readers not to suicide because their friends will laugh and mock their death

open.substack.com/pub/freddied...

Australia Brain would do this with vigorous household income means testing seamlessly merging into an income contingent loan, which would allow us all to wax lyrical about its efficiency, whilst reducing net-benefit to human welfare by about 90 cents in the dollar. Oi Oi Oi!

find someone who validates you like chatgpt validates you

News Masked federal agent throws chemical irritants outside Logan Square grocery store: 'My eyes are burning' Video taken by several witnesses captured the moments where the agent can be seen dropping a canister from a white SUV.

ICE is out of control in Chicago. Now just tossing tear gas canisters out of the car in the middle of one of our neighborhoods as kids are walking home from school, people out going grocery shopping.

chicago.suntimes.com/news/2025/10...

I don’t like the “you only just realised?”accusation when directed at ordinary people, but an elite journalist only just became aware of the reactionary nature of an ultra high profile political influencer in the governing party? Only after they clashed personally?

getting serious about skin protection

Gets muddled because "the middle class" who own their own home are relying on extracting surplus value from society's land. Home owners as much as landlords tbh, just depends on the total value of their ownership.

Hopefully no one ever solves home ownership because if so people below median age are shifting right really fast.

like Gandalf, sent back post Balrog, as his job wasn't done

was thinking all of Tolkien's work would be public domain now.

retrospective extensions are the absurd peak of pure rent seeking. What's the behavioural change? JRR Tolkien come back to write more books?

not enough talk on the absurdity of the retrospective copyright extensions - in Australia, from 50 to 70 years, in 2005 for no reason except USA told us to.

What does the Nicole Kidman/Keith Urban split mean for the Sydney property market?

It certainly appears the United States murdered an innocent fisherman who was a husband and father to four children, claimed he was a "narco-terrorist," posted a video of the execution, and then made jokes about it

I think the Trump admin assumed no one would try to find out who the people on the boats they blew up really were