Depending on your definition of ‘sidekick’, these may also count:
There might be more I’m forgetting.
And it’s also only banned on work devices. There’s no ban on government employees having TikTok on their personal phones, although I personally don’t.
We have four Major Parties - Labor, the Liberals, the Nationals, and the Greens. If you understand their relative power based on our system of government, you’ll see that we’re somewhere in between the US and the EU with regards to representational democracy. It’s not great, but in the Anglospheric context we do pretty well because the others don’t have our combination of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), Proportional Representative Voting (PRV) and Mandatory Voting.
Labor is the largest single party in the Lower House. The Liberal Party has (almost) never gained a true majority. The National Party, with whom the Liberal Party coalesces (known in Australia as The Coalition or the LNP) is our current major opposition, and they only hold that position as a coalition. The Greens regularly poll between 9-12%, which causes our Federal Senate to end up giving them a significant amount of power. We also (thanks to changes a recent government made) have a significant crossbench made up of The Greens, minor parties and independents. Our current senate (and most previous Senates) has many potential ‘kingmakers’ (including previous AFL legend David Pocock, Jacqui Lambie and others) which mean that governments can’t pass legislation without courting those outside their party.
To the outsider it may seem that we only have two parties, but in our context we understand it to be more complex than that. Many Australian jurisdictions have known minority-government, government-by-coalition and Lower House government tempered by Upper House diversity which tempers the passage of legislation.
Like I said, it’s not a perfect system (and pretty far from direct democracy) but we sit in this interesting position between the absolute Two-Party System of FPTP jurisdictions and other systems that produce 5+ parties that need to form government together. Our system is far from perfect, but it’s not terrible.
As someone who lives in a jurisdiction where every single vote I can engage in is RCV (Australia; NSW) I can honestly say that it’s so much better than FPTP. I don’t know what the perfect voting system is (frankly a subjective topic as it currently stands; please feel free to correct me with statistically valid alternatives) but RCV at the very least means that I can (and personally have) never vote for a major party as #1 and I can know for sure that my vote has never been exhausted, because I’ve never left a blank box. We also have mandatory voting, which helps to keep things sane.
In Australia, government election funding is only ever allocated to the parties based on #1 votes, so I can also confidently say I’ve never contributed to a major party’s election coffers as I’ve also never donated to any major party. I obviously support one major party over the others, as based on my preferences, but I’ll always give the election funding to a smaller party or Independent.
RCV is a wonderful step to take from FPTP. I understand that it may not be democratically perfect, and frankly no representative voting system may ever be, but it’s a far cry better than FPTP. It’s a known concept that here in Australia politicians vie to represent the ‘middle’ rather than the extremes, because the vast majority of voters aren’t overly-enthused political lunatics. We still have our issues to be sure, but I’d rather that the political class fight over the centrist majority rather than court the political extremes in order to convince people to actually vote thanks to mandatory voting.
That’s definitely the intent of vested American interests (read:billionaires). The social programming has worked on this person. They’ve been successfully disincentivised from engaging in the political process by being convinced that they have zero capacity to affect change, when the truth is that they do possess a minuscule amount of power. This person doesn’t realise the value of collectivism; of grassroots activism; of gathering with those who are like-minded and trying to shift the Overton Window through direct action. They’ve been convinced that all they have the capacity to do is sigh and wring their hands. It’s a real shame.
Edit: just read that their handle is ‘1984’. Like most who reference Orwell, I think you can make some fairly accurate assumptions about this person.
If this Biden feeling ‘jacked up’, I shudder to think what he’s like when he’s not. He’s not doing a great job of spruiking his own achievements and his answers are devoid of stats or figures - likely because they weren’t able to bring notes in. He’s sadly making trump look more coherent and lively by comparison.
This is an argument I’ve been pitching in the Australian context for some 20 years now - we should have been world leaders in solar technology, to the extent that by now we should have massive solar farms across the North of Australia in order to export clean, green energy up to Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and other near-neighbours. We could have created a whole new industry of both research and advanced manufacturing, and if we’d nationally sequester our resources correctly we could be doing every step of the way - dig out the minerals, refine them, manufacture them into panels, export those panels - all the while generating very low cost energy and exporting it for profit as well! Not to mention so many new jobs!
Even once you take away all of the obvious arguments for climate change action (environmental, ethical, prevention of future disasters etc.) there was always going to be a strong financial incentive in a capitalistic market to move to technology that has the lowest input cost to generate energy, which just so happens to be renewables. It just baffles me that so many politicians crucified themselves on the altar of coal when they could’ve been remembered for ushering in simultaneous economic benefit and environmental benefit, with a long term impact of lowered inflation through cheaper power bills, but that’s what the minerals lobby in this country has managed to achieve. What a disgrace.
Good to see a world leader using the economic arguments in addition to the other more obvious ones.
Cubicle is the noun (mini office); cubical is the adjective (having cube-like properties). :)
Blood and Wine was honestly amazing. I haven’t enjoyed a DLC or xpac that much since Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. I think maybe the Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind’s expansion Bloodmoon was a great contender as well, but Blood and Wine just took Witcher 3 to a new level. It truly deserved its spot at the top of the heap.
British colonialism spread queerphobia. Islamic-governed nations currently push queerphobia. Both are bad, both are regressive, and both have lasting impacts on us today. We can talk about both being bad at once. We can walk and chew gum. We can discuss all of the impacts on queerphobia simultaneously, if we allow ourselves to understand that all issues of humanity are multi-faceted and that blaming a single concept or source for an issue is usually farcical.
There will always be loonies who hate us for being who we are. We shafted the last one we had from our federal government at the last election. We have no laws that cause discrimination towards my comrades and to try to pretend like a few crazies are somehow making being queer illegal is just disingenuous. Please speak to your own context, because you don’t speak for mine.
As a child protection caseworker, I’m right here with you. The amount of children and young people I’m working with who are self-harming and experiencing suicidal ideation over this stuff is quite prevalent. Sadly, it’s almost all girls who are targeted by this and it’s just another way to push misogyny into the next generation. Desensitisation isn’t the way; it will absolutely cause too much harm before it equalises.
The point of the article is trying to explain the persistence of anti LGBTQIA+ legislation in the world. This is discussing an alternative (or in scientific terms, confounding variable) that challenges the absolute notions laid out in the article. I have no stake in this argument and am making no points against the British Empire or the Muslim religion, but to state that this discussion isn’t relevant to the article is frankly disingenuous.
As a bisexual man of historical UK origin, I can see and understand both impacts simultaneously. I also think we can discuss all forms of queerphobia simultaneously, and that it does a disservice to all my LGBTQIA+ comrades to dissent genuine discussion over the impacts of both colonialism and religion on the presence of queerphobia just because that’s not the specific angle of this specific article.
Hey man, fair call - take from that information what you will. As a philosophical entity though, I tend to focus on the words that were attributed to Jesus and not the words he didn’t speak. If your reading of the Gospels has you believing that he was pro-slavery, there’s little I can do to convince you otherwise, but I guess I read them in a different context to you. We all take what we want from the written word. I think you’ll find that deep-diving the Gospels would convince you otherwise, as Jesus’ messages of love, care, sacrifice and hope are entirely incongruent with the idea that a person can own another person, but that’s probably just my own interpretation.
Queer Australian checking in here.
…what? Have you ever lived here or know what our laws are?
Same boat mate - Aussie govt employee myself who has access to flex. Personally I felt it was better when I was working for an NGO and they always gave me the choice between being paid overtime or banking it to flex later. It was nice to get the extra cash when I needed it and extra leave when the time came too. That should be the standard the employee should have the choice between OT or extra leave.
Hey mate, I don’t want to step on your toes, but what meaningful sacrifice can one anonymous person make for another on a platform like Lemmy? I get where you’re coming from; pretty words are meaningless unless they’re backed up with action, but what action could this person actually take that would meet the definition of ‘sacrifice’?
Just as an aside, love doesn’t always have to include sacrifice. I love my fellow LGBTQIA+ comrades and it doesn’t cost me anything to do so. I love my friends, and they don’t ever demand sacrifice from me. I love my hobbies, and they give me strength and energy. Love can give and bring you strength, if you let it.
I feel this in my bones
I don’t know why the text on this was altered just to remove the word ‘mate’ - that’s obviously Rupert Murdoch pictured in the middle.
Original source: https://facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2656977204337311
Denis Lushch - ‘The Bullshit Weaver’