What's on your mind?

[Dead1]

50 minutes ago, Thatguy said:

You're fucked if you go ahead and probably fucked if you don't as the AFL will have iron-clad contracts (i.e. they have the government by the balls).

Oh yeah the government has committed to paying AFL $4.5 million a year if stadium isn't finished.

There was nothing approaching due diligence here.  It's not uncommon especially under current regime.

 

Current Premier is a muppet whose fucked the health service even more than previous guy and is now out to fuck the rest of the state. 

[FatherAlabaster]

Business as usual, I see!

Still lots of packing left for us. I finished all of my outstanding projects a week or two ago and I'm in the middle of dismantling my studio and packing recording gear and guitars away, which feels sad and wrong. We start the actual moving process next week. I hope to get stuff done today, but we've got 90+ temps rolling through so I might just be sitting in front of the AC trying not to melt.

I was lucky (and maybe a little stupid) to buy something of a dream guitar in the middle of all this - an actual Gibson 7-string Les Paul. They hardly ever come available near me and they're always insanely expensive. This is now the nicest electric I own. It's basically perfect. I'd almost forgotten what it was like to have an instrument that actually inspired me to play. Hopefully I can get set up in the new place soon and work on stuff more regularly. Maybe I can post some pics.

[RelentlessOblivion]

Good luck with the move mate.

 

re the AFL, now I’ve done the required reading, hopefully they will lose the funding if the allegations being brought before the Human Rights Commission are proven. I admit my initial take was made from a place of ignorance.

[AlSymerz]

Fucking hell! I just had to drop a snake down the kitchen drain pipes because they were blocked. What came back up with the snake was truly disgusting. In the words of Kenny.

 

[JonoBlade]

6 hours ago, AlSymerz said:

Fucking hell! I just had to drop a snake down the kitchen drain pipes because they were blocked. What came back up with the snake was truly disgusting. In the words of Kenny.

I did a double take here because, being Australia, one could be forgiven for believing you have trained snakes to unblock drains...

You're a good boy Bubby. 

[AlSymerz]

What does the rest of the world call the long snake like thing that plumbers used to clear pipes?

 

[RelentlessOblivion]

I’m not drunk enough to ramble, so I’ll just say I’m glad to have my enrolment finalised for culinary school.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

4 hours ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

I’m not drunk enough to ramble, so I’ll just say I’m glad to have my enrolment finalised for culinary school.

Don't cut your fingers off. I often wonder if should have gone to culinary school. But it's too late now and just as well because I probably would have cut my fingers off. 

[RelentlessOblivion]

ah there’s cut resistant gloves these days, besides I already do about half the cooking at home and if a completely blind woman can win MasterChef I’m sure this nearly blind man can be successful too.

Cthulhu says I’m not allowed to make calamari though…

[Dead1]

It amazes me that in my mild bureaucratic job, I end up doing so much psychologically battling against people.

 

Just today I had to:

1. Stop the guys in the capital city (Hobart) from taking over funds specifically allocated for regional areas.

2. Try to prevent Hobart offloading some old clunker of an electro convulsive therapy machine on to us when we need a new machine to replace an obsolete clunker.

 

Meanwhile Hobart gets all this shiny new stuff and gets to duplicate services while trying to deprive the rest of the state of anything.

 

Tasmania really is three separate regions that I swear one day will wage genocidal war against each other (Hobart (most of the south matters little to them either), North and North West).

[GoatmasterGeneral]

We're in big trouble now.

Orcas are 'Orca-nizinng'?!? An orca named Gladis has been teaching other orcas to attack the rudders of yachts and capsize boats off the coast of Spain. And all this time we've been worried about the machines and AI.

 

 

 

 

[Dead1]

What did they expect?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/17/hamtramck-michigan-muslim-council-lgbtq-pride-flags-banned

 

[RelentlessOblivion]

I have no opinion on that, it’s America and I’m not sufficiently informed.

 

On my mind? I need a wine fridge, that or to build a cellar, but one of these is far more practical

[Dead1]

8 hours ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

I have no opinion on that, it’s America and I’m not sufficiently informed.

 

On my mind? I need a wine fridge, that or to build a cellar, but one of these is far more practical

Not much to do with politics but rather expectations of a religion whose "moderate" arms are on par with extreme fundamentalist Christians.

 

I also saw other fooyage pf Muslims and fundamentalist Christians stomping Gay Pride flags.

 

https://www.westernstandard.news/news/watch-muslim-children-in-ottawa-stomp-of-pride-flags/article_9b772e58-06e8-11ee-893f-6fa04276070f.html

 

The irony is woke progressives thought Muslims would be a natural ally against evil white males but didn't actually read anything about the religion which shows it to be intolereant (like most Abrahamic religions).

[RelentlessOblivion]

Equally though Ilhan Omar is Muslim and has spoken in support of the LGBT community. Ultimately I think it’s interpretation and assumption creating the problem. Intolerant people will be intolerant and justify it however they like.

[Dead1]

That is one person in a religion of over two billion people. In most Islamic countries, LGBTIQA+ have no rights and are heavily persecuted by both state and the people themselves.  Hell, neither do women or other minorities.

 

Indeed as an atheist I would be executed about 13 Islamic countries and imprisoned in many more (including "moderate" ones like Malaysia and Egypt).

Intolerance isn't just some random thing people have.  It is tied in with culture which includes religious and social aspects.  It is often part of a key value set and is usually viewed as a positive thing.

 

Indeed you don't even realise how much normal human instinctive intolerance western societies had to break to get to where they are today.

 

Other cultures never had the Renaissance or Counter Culture movement or moderate Protestantism or whatever that put the individual at the forefront.

[Nasty_Cabbage]

4 hours ago, Dead1 said:

Other cultures never had the Renaissance or Counter Culture movement or moderate Protestantism or whatever that put the individual at the forefront.

This is true, although I have to point out that movement you're thinking of is commonly called the reformation, which it could be argued was an offshoot result of the renaissance, but is most definitely a separate thing.

It strikes me as a little bit reductive, though, to lump some of this stuff in with Abrahamic religions, since those religions make up for a massive majority of recorded religious history. Religions of any variety have been used as a justification for war and violence for as long as they've been around. We see this even in religions commonly thought of as more peaceful like Buddhism or Hinduism.

Please understand that I'm not picking on you, and your points do still stand. I just think perhaps searching for a starting point we need to be careful with what we assign as a symptom, and what we assign as a cause. I view religion or the homogenous presence of a single religion within a culture as more of a condition that makes a society more or less likely to engage in both individual violence and large scale warfare. It's very difficult to get a population to risk the lives of entire generations if the goal is openly stated as empire and wealth expansion. Religions have philosophical moral weight and meaning beyond simple economic standing, so when present and fully internalized within a culture, it's much easier to manipulate into a justification. Colliding storm fronts under any number of other conditions are conducive to tornadoes, but far from being an objective "will happen" or "will not happen" predictor, and violence is just human weather to me.

[RelentlessOblivion]

I would add that modern western society really isn’t all that tolerant of out groups. I.e Stoccastic terrorism perpetrated by right wing extremists is regarded as one of the main threats America face.

[Dead1]

2 hours ago, Nasty_Cabbage said:

This is true, although I have to point out that movement you're thinking of is commonly called the reformation, which it could be argued was an offshoot result of the renaissance, but is most definitely a separate thing.

It strikes me as a little bit reductive, though, to lump some of this stuff in with Abrahamic religions, since those religions make up for a massive majority of recorded religious history. Religions of any variety have been used as a justification for war and violence for as long as they've been around. We see this even in religions commonly thought of as more peaceful like Buddhism or Hinduism.

Please understand that I'm not picking on you, and your points do still stand. I just think perhaps searching for a starting point we need to be careful with what we assign as a symptom, and what we assign as a cause. I view religion or the homogenous presence of a single religion within a culture as more of a condition that makes a society more or less likely to engage in both individual violence and large scale warfare. It's very difficult to get a population to risk the lives of entire generations if the goal is openly stated as empire and wealth expansion. Religions have philosophical moral weight and meaning beyond simple economic standing, so when present and fully internalized within a culture, it's much easier to manipulate into a justification. Colliding storm fronts under any number of other conditions are conducive to tornadoes, but far from being an objective "will happen" or "will not happen" predictor, and violence is just human weather to me.

 

 

Actually I meant Enlightenment - got brain fog from a bottle of wine when I was initially typing it. 

 

Reformation was a dark event that spawned hundreds of years of sectarian violence some of which still lingers today (eg Northern Ireland).   Martin Luther and early Protestants were closer to ISIS in intent - they wanted to return Christianity back to a "purer" state as the Roman Catholic Church was viewed as completely corrupt.

Protestants later evolved into something supportive of modern rationality, science and individualism but it's initial history is violent, bloody, genocidal and fantatical.

 

Note European Jewry also embraced the Enlightenment wholeheartedly too - hence the birth of a long Jewish scientific tradition that has revolutionised the world (indeed 20% of all Nobel prizes are awarded to Jews).  Sadly though the Orthodox Jews and in particular growing Haredi sect never did and they are now the biggest threat to Israel - due to religious edicts, they don't work, they have lots of kids, they don't serve in the military and they're becoming a large voting block whose eyes are set on Palestinian lands.

 

I agree with the rest of your premise.  However Islam has a lot of built in violence that can't be reinterpreted.  Islam is far more totalitarian than other religions.  It has it's own massive body of codified law (Sharia) in addition to its basic texts (Koran as well as Haddiths). 

Islam doesn't just prescribe general or vague values but rather provides a one stop shop for every facet of life.

And that's were a lot of violence and misogyny is baked in - be it jihad or legal rights of women (eg you need two women's testimony to count as 1 man's testimony) or right to own sexual slaves from conquest (provided they're not Muslim).

Muslims universally rejected the UN definition of universal human rights and created their own based on Sharia, which of course solidified misogyny and violence (Cairo Declaration of Human Rights In Islam).

 

So the acts of that Michigan council are very much in line with universal Islamic values.

 

As for non-Abrahamic religions, don't get me stared on Hinduism with its horrific caste system - so engrained we have problems at work with this amongst university educated doctors.  

[Dead1]

1 hour ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

I would add that modern western society really isn’t all that tolerant of out groups. I.e Stoccastic terrorism perpetrated by right wing extremists is regarded as one of the main threats America face.

No society or even many individuals (see Harvard Implicit Bias Test)  are naturally tolerant of outgroups.  Hence the amazing collective achievement of west to do this to some great degree (really due to trauma of WWII I suspect as well as growth of capitalism). 

The right wing or nativist threat is actually natural human response as much as Iraqi's fighting American or Ukrainians fighting Russians is or Fijian attempts to wrest control of Fiji from Indians (who had become main dominant group up to recent history).  It goes back to that outgroup intolerance.

It doesn't help that the US system no longer benefits the bulk of the people in terms of improved living standards.  Inequality breeds resentment.

 

Not justifying it, but merely stating it's a natural response.

 

I will say the greatest periods of human achievement are by homogenised societies or societies enforcing/creating/promoting homogenisation.  Compare the relatively homogenised Nordic states to the diverse mess that is my homeland of ex-Yugoslavia.   Or compare the success of  culturally homogenised Japan and South Korea with muCh poorer results in diverse Indonesia and Malaysia. 

 

 

Even formerly multilingual, multi-religious but successful empires such as Britain or France promoted and forced homogenisation in their core territories in order to gain benefits of homgenisation.  Eg French as we know it wasn't even spoken in a lot of France until it became the formal language of France and was essentially forced down the other regions throats.

Same was happening in Britain - eg by the 1960s only 20% of Welsh people spoke Welsh.  

Russians through Empire and USSR tried the same but without as much success.  The religious, ethnic and social differences were too big to keep Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Latvians etc in the empire and even today Chechens, Tartars and others are looking for ways out of Russia's yoke (one reason why Russia feared Ukrainian and Georgian integration into west).

 

Homogenisation removes a lot of problems associated with development ie allocation of resources and power to each key cultural group and conflicts that arise from it. 

It is why societies such as Libya (rampant tribalism), Afghanistan and Iraq (multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian) failed to thrive after US military action unlike say homogenised Japan and South Korea.  They were only held together by totalitarian regimes.  Indeed modern Russia can only be sustained through totalitarianism - otherwise it collapses (like USSR did in 1991).

Remove the dictator and you've removed the barriers to each group trying to gain more power and resources.  Democracy doesn't work here.  

 

A progressive fellow by the name of Dr Robert Putnam discovered multiculturalism actually lowers social/community trust and cohesion, lower faith and trust of institutions and lower investment in social/community resources. 

 

There are some examples of successful long term multicultural states such as Switzerland or Belgium.   But note Belgium does suffer from a degree of dysfunctionality - indeed it became a haven for Islamic terrorists because of compromises made to accommodate its main Flemish and Walloon ethnic groups.

Some people might call Spain one but it pretty much expelled its entire muslim population by 1610 (3 million people), tried to wipe out its Jewry and even today areas such as Basque and Catalonia are trying their best to wrangle their way out of Spain.  And Madrid fears this, knowing if Catalonia or the Basques leave, Spain will collapse.  Hence they beat up old ladies protesting for independence and arrest pro-independence activists.

[RelentlessOblivion]

I was aware of some of those facts. The main point I was getting at is there are numerous reasos why people are in parliament and not all are linked to their religious beliefs. Intolerance also expresses itself in different ways, for example cancel culture on the left where excepted cultural standards of today are applied retroactively to various people, works of literature, etc this is cancel culture on the right, where they tend to react with greater hostility to anyone, or anything, which seems to move the needle towards excepting some  out groups, boycotting Chik-Fil-A for example. So while in your original example, it is more likely than not a decision motivated by religion, there are any number of other factors at play as well. In a hypothetical situation, where the council, where all white Democrats, and atheists, we would probably all bridge a different inclusion.

[Dead1]

3 hours ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

I was aware of some of those facts. The main point I was getting at is there are numerous reasos why people are in parliament and not all are linked to their religious beliefs.

 

Possibly but on the basis of facts presented, I doubt "other factors" matter much.

You've got a council comprised of a bunch of members of a certain religion with a highly homophobic outlook vote in laws that adversely affect LGBTIQA+.  

If we replace Islam and Michigan with say fundamentalist Christians and Arkansas, you would probably have a different opinion. 

 

Quote

Intolerance also expresses itself in different ways, for example cancel culture on the left where excepted cultural standards of today are applied retroactively to various people, works of literature, etc this is cancel culture on the right, where they tend to react with greater hostility to anyone, or anything, which seems to move the needle towards excepting some  out groups, boycotting Chik-Fil-A for example. So while in your original example, it is more likely than not a decision motivated by religion, there are any number of other factors at play as well. In a hypothetical situation, where the council, where all white Democrats, and atheists, we would probably all bridge a different inclusion.

If it was all white atheists and members of Democratic party then everyone would be freaking out even more.  It would bring out accusations of selling out to right wing Republicans etc.  

[AlSymerz]

ARGH Fucking insurance companies!!

I've spent over a month in an email tag discussion with my life insurance company because I can't log into their online portal. Their password recovery system sends an SMS verification, after a week they asked if the number they were sending to was correct, it wasn't. Supposedly they changed the number but I'm still not getting the SMS messages. Nearly 4 weeks later and 6 different people responding I'm still getting told my phone number is wrong, but the system wont email me the verification because it only looks at the phone number despite stating that it goes to both email and SMS. I've told them to delete the number completely so it's forced to email, they claim they can't do it. I've asked them to send me a temporary password, they claim they can't do it. I could probably fix it by ringing their help line but I shouldn't have to, especially not when their website states that they are having high call volumes and wait times are high so email communications are preferred.

[Thatguy]

4 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

their website states that they are having high call volumes and wait times are high

It's strange how there is unprecedented activity on almost any 'help' line whenever you need to contact the bastards. Perhaps they need more staff...

[AlSymerz]

Covid is too blame!