I want some of whatever you’re on, this is incoherent. The gov system you’re defending can be fired by the GG or through a DD resolution. Mechanisms to fire governments are in all non totalitarian systems I’m aware of.

Suppose you vote me in on my platform of not killing you, but surprise! I lied! you can’t hold me accountable for 3 (or 6!) years. That is obviously messed the fuck up, if you have no power to recall me I’m not representing you, I’m just someone who convinced you to give me some power for a while.

why do you dream so small? why are you convinced that it’s this pathetic little dribble of political power or we murder each other in the streets. Fuck dude, anarchic societies are usually pretty peaceful even in the case of zero external government. Anthropologists have spilled a lot of ink on this.

Are you high? They’re just an example of Democratic governance that’s all.

Don’t put words in my mouth, democracy has nothing to do with getting what you want is has to do with participation and voice in the decision making process.

We have almost no representation in government, no choice as to whether or not we are bound by it, we have no democracy at work, deciding economic priorities anything like that.

You’ve been told you live in a democracy but aside from being told that what evidence is there that you do? Can you even fire the government? Your boss? Do you really have a voice?

here’s a Democratic government.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Liberation

what do you mean? Any number of things… The system you have with your friends to decide who hosts the next movie night, your community astronomy club annual meeting, your Union, idk what are you involved in? What is this question even? Democratic decision making is as old as time and as varied as the seasons.

It’s a higher standard than tabloid rags but I feel like they’re doing this a massive disservice by repeating it at all, especially without adding context such as the number of times various senators have mentioned religion, the mandatory religion in Parliament, and consequently that this is obviously an islamophobic smear campaign.

Their own stats say that very few people read more than the first paragraph (I can’t find them but they had this whole campaign on it using their metrics). It’s obviously inflammatory and most readers won’t remember the nuance, they’ll remember vague concerns of scary Muslim god stuff and not supporting Israel.

Yeah maybe, again though zero context and dubious evidence.

She might just not want a two state solution. That’s a reasonable stance, whether or not you think it would shake out nicely I can understand feeling like Israel is an illegitimate nation. At this point regardless of how it was founded I feel enough reasonable people ended up there either through birth, feeling persecution, exile or sale (yep… countries sold Jewish people to Israel. Fucking horror show that is) that not allowing them to stay in at least some of the claimed area and self govern is naïve. Although I would probably feel differently if the state killed my parents, gaoled my spouse, and blew up my kid so my opinion is questionably neutral.

Would labour MPs support a 2 state solution of the second state was to be founded in Australia’s sovereign territory? maybe made up of fragments of their houses?

Giant fucking mess of a sitch.

Really? I got kicked out of Christian Education in highschool for eating a bible and I’ve said “It’s in God’s hand’s now”. Admittedly as a humourous way to sum up “I’ve done what I can, now we see how it shaked out” but all the same.

It’s just an idiom. No doubt sometimes people literally mean it as handing off responsibility to a supernatural, interventionist entity but I would not assume that without seeing evidence someone was a fundie.

That’s not the context she appears to have said it in. The quote appears to be in the context of whether she would support a bill requiring a two state solution as conditional for recognition. That is relayed by a third party and a reasonable assumption is the context being “It’s not up to me if this bill passes or not, I don’t know if I’d support it at the moment. Let’s see what happens”.

Remember, you are hearing a fragment of something said by an unnamed source who has the incentive to portray her as bad, and is likely trying to cover for labor continuing to absolutely nothing for Palistine while tacitly supporting crackdowns on protest.

Ain’t that the truth.

Depending on what you mean that might be naïve. As it stands something like half of us are religious and many people who are religious would say it significantly shapes their views on things.

It’s not even clear where the boundaries between religious and nonreligious views are sometimes.

I think it’s reasonable to ask for a politics that’s reasonable, earnest, compassionate, and understanding. I think it’s also true that fundamentalism can be awful and used to make frothing bigotry seem more reasonable than it is.

But idk, if someone says “a fundamental creed of some system I believe in is non violence and helping the weak, and I meditated on that in my appropriate cultural building last night, so I will be voting against the ‘kill the target minority’ bill proposed” is that such a bad or unreasonable thing?

I think there’s some nuance, and it doesn’t seem that much more silly than standing before an ocean storm, feeling the sublime, and that moment triggering a reduction in ego or whatever.

Millions of addicts can’t be wrong!

I think you’re ascribing too much benign intention to something which was realistically the result of a complex power struggle between monarchs, nobles, intellectual elites, and a new class of merchants/financiers where everyone was trying to use everyone else to fuck everyone else in their favour and riling up the proles as needed.

It’s not some planned genius system carefully crafted for utmost morality. It’s a way for rich business owners to get a slice of the pie normally reserved for nobles while offering enough compromises/threat of revolt to keep the smaller but culturally and militarily powerful class of old money happy enough.

Your participation as a prole is highly limited, you are basically unable, short of mass violence, to hold anyone accountable for any particular decision; you are not allowed to force certain things to even be discussed or debated. It is not a system made for you to participate in, it is a system where you have some (extremely limited) participation because your class of people were a piece on someone else’s board.

Compared to actual democratic institutions which work by consensus and direct representation, or representation at the continued will of a consensus body it is a joke. It does not require your consent, and what little privilege you have does not extent to any practical considerations in your life (housing, work etc) which remain dictatorial.

Dream bigger dude.

brain dead take.

Always a racist slave state? sure. A military cult since like 1910? sure. A broken oligarchy? sure.

Fascist? defs heading that way. Not always.

We are actually kinda involved, as a US protectorate (Prove me wrong pollies, prove me wrong! defy your masters. Ask the Kurds how always allying with the US works out) we tend to support their interests in the middle east, also we ship Israel weapons except we claim we don’t because apparently if I give you a trigger, a barrel, and a receiver and you have the rest I haven’t technically given you a weapon under international law 🙄. I think Australia has helped them repair some of the planes they’re using to murder children.

But I do broadly agree with your analysis. I think the issue isn’t as simple as “loyalty pledge evil! mean evil labor” but also like what it’s being used for here is absolutely horrible and could most charitably be interpreted as a system backfiring and least charitably ghoulish power brokers squashing the soul out of a decent person to back warhawks.

I don’t always agree with the party’s ordering. Some people I just fundamentally do not trust. I think there’s some concern with weird vote exhaustion (e.g. my 2nd is party 1st, my 1st is party 2nd, my 3rd is party I don’t want. My 1st goes to my 2nd, which doesn’t win, so my 3rd is counted and party 2nd loses by one vote) but I don’t know how likely that really is in practice and I mostly just drop horrible people and political schemers /shrug

TBH I’ve basically lost faith in the Westminster system. I participate because absolutely fuck disempowering yourself to any degree but I put my energy in smaller scale stuff and trying to build community.

Idk, I can’t vote for her and I don’t vote labor except once all my actual preferences are exhausted so I’m not really paying much attention to this. I don’t vote labor because they pull nonsense like this, acting like there’s some way “not being divided” over mass murder is worth a damn.

If they’re talking about an IR bill or whatever then idk maybe not getting wedged makes sense but children are dying. I don’t really know how much more obvious the right side of history can get than “the side which stops children dying”.

I vote below the line also and think labor is accepting and aiding a genocide here. Hence my tongue in cheek wording about people who vote below and my less tongue in cheek wording about right and wrong being real.

We can debate the merits of loyalty pledges till the cows come home but if you use them to silence people trying to stop or slow a genocide you’re actually um a nightmare clothed in human form and I hate you and want you to die 👍. The labor party can fuck themselves with a rusty chainsaw on this one, they’re wrong and history will remember them as murderers.

To add some nuance to this most people vote by party in the senate.

Look I don’t really agree with our system on so many levels and would probably come down on “we don’t actually have a democracy” overall so please don’t take this as some mewling defence of the status quo. replyguyinhale however she’s a senator and for better or for worse most people vote by party in the senate. The number of superior, awesome, and somewhat democratically responsible people who vote below the line is a statistical blip, apparently most of yous are happy having your vote mysteriously distributed according to back-room fellatio.

So, if I was the sort of person who might become a labor mp or support the party, I could mount a defense of their loyalty pledge thing on the basis that particularly in the senate you are being voted in as a sort of embodied vote of the labor party’s will and the party internal selection mechanism has deemed you specifically worthy of having a voice in the party room.

If that is their stance, and that is the implicit social contract of getting put on the ticket and receiving support from the party and its donors then you can sort of see where they are coming from. I have no idea if this is how most of the labor voters in her state feel or not but it’s certainly how the party does.

For me? Well I actually believe in shit like right and wrong so…

Depression, anxiety, dementia and chronic liver disease are emerging as some of the fastest-growing chronic conditions.

Woooh yeah deaths of despair baby!

Society is going strooooong

All we’ve done is massively increase inequality, poisoned the world, taken an axe to social services, and let everyone get infected with a virus that causes cumulative brain and heart damage. Who could have predicted this?

I’m shocked, shocked and appalled I tell you.

I miss thinking the future was gonna get better but neoliberalism had entrenched itself so firmly in politics/APS/economics most people don’t even realise it’s an ideology and not fact, most of the contamination (plastics, pfas, agrichems) are long lived and we’re also dependant on them, and climate change is about to get mega spicy if the models are correct and Indonesian, Indian, and islander people are gonna be (rightly) demanding some of this continent’s habitable land.

interesting times ahead for us!

The algorithm assigns weights to nodes in a neural network. These weights are derived by statistical association of tokens in the training data after they have been cleaned.

That is so enormously far from how we think humans learn (you don’t teach a kid to understand theory of mind by plopping them in front of the Gutenberg project and saying good luck, and yet they learn to explain theory of mind problems all the same) that it is just comically farcial to assume something similar is happening underneath.

It is very interesting that llms are able to appear to be conversational but claiming they have some sort of mind with an understanding of maths is as ridiculous as suggesting a chess bot understands the Pauli exclusion principle because it never moves two pieces into the same physical space.