• 5 Posts
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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: February 14th, 2025

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  • only an Australian would brutally genocide a bunch of indigenous people

    Yes atrocities were committed against Australia’s indigenous. You’re welcome to talk about that as much as you like. I will however point out that colonists the world over mistreated the indigenous wherever they found them. That doesn’t diminish Australia’s culpability, but don’t throw stones at glass houses or whatever.

    at least my direct ancestors aren’t convicted rapists

    This one is an interesting one. While some of the convicts transported to Australia probably were convicted of rape, it was far less common than things like petty theft, fraud, vagrancy, prostitution, and that type of thing. Violent criminals just didn’t make great colonists, and were usually executed.

    You’ll find that most Australian’s wear their connections to this era with some kind of pride. For example the first of my ancestors to arrive here was convicted of man slaughter. He had a drunken brawl in a bar and pushed someone down a flight of stairs, and they died. He was an accomplished clock maker, and worked on the mechanism in the town hall not far from where I live.

    He’s the only convict in my lineage of which I’m aware, but I admit there may of course be one or more rapists unknown to me, but I suppose I share that in common with most people including your good self.

    My comments weren’t intended to be a “country pissing contest”. I was merely pointing out this particular interaction will be difficult to understand through the lense of American gun culture.








  • I dont really know what the solution is.

    The harder you mandate it, the more people will get nutty about it.

    I do feel that anti-vax nutters are internalising the benefits of vaccinations (by benefiting from herd immunity) but externalising the risks (by enjoying healthcare when they get sick).

    In Australia unvaccinated kids dont get government support for things like day care or parenting payments et cetera.

    I employed a young woman who was earning $700 a week buy paying $500 a week for day care because they refused to vaccinated her. They were living on the husband’s salary. It seemed pretty bleak to me.

    Like in Australia you need to save every dollar to buy a house or retire. Sure you can have a few baubles but no one can afford $25k a year for this kind of idiocy.









  • Some pearl-clutches said “won’t somebody think of the children”, and then made the social media companies figure out how to implement the ban.

    It’s more than pearl-clutching though.

    Kids dependency on social is a genuine social problem. Any parent that cares about their kids is deeply concerned about this.

    I don’t really buy the “govt access to biometrics” angle. These companies have all the biometrics they could ever want.

    The ban is going to be easy to circumvent technologically, but not so much socially. At this very moment, being the evening of 10 December, families around Australia are having conversations about social media and the problems it can cause.