Zagorath
@Zagorath@aussie.zone
- Comment on The New South Wales government has called on Gareth Ward to resign after the state MP was found guilty of sexually abusing two young men 2 minutes ago:
Not sure if the Guardian article mentions this, as I just finished reading the ABC article about the case. But apparently he was re-elected while being tried for these crimes. Wtf is wrong with the people of Kiama?
- Comment on Taking the time to put yourself in their time period rather than just looking back at them 11 hours ago:
Bibulus’s were blatantly anti-democratic.
You’ll note that I did not, at any point, suggest that this was a matter of “Bibulus good, Caesar bad”. Because “Bibulus good” is far from the truth. Any reference to whether Bibulus’s actions were themselves justified is irrelevant.
Everything else you said I basically agree with. The Roman institutions were fundamentally flawed. It was corrupt as hell, ruled for the elite to an extent that even the worst modern democracies would find shocking (famously, Caesar basically bought both his consulships straight-up, and that wasn’t even criminal), and reform had become basically impossible.
Rather than facing civil justice, he submitted himself to vigilante violence.
Unfortunately because of the rules of your instance, and the instance this Community is in (that even theoretical references to supporting violence, even if it is legally-justified violence, will get you banned), I am forbidden from sharing my feelings in this matter.
- Comment on The next time you hear someone say they're just vibing in life without a job, just look at this image. 11 hours ago:
✝️🙅♂️
- Comment on Taking the time to put yourself in their time period rather than just looking back at them 13 hours ago:
There are certainly arguments that can be made criticising both sides, but Caesar’s actions were blatantly unconstitutional. Completely disregarding vetos by a tribune of the plebs, drumming up violent mobs to prevent his political rivals exerting their lawful powers. Completely ignoring a rival’s use of lawful powers when he did make use of it… And that’s just the stuff he did specifically in relation to Bibulus, before all the other illegal stuff that led to the Civil War and the eventual end of the Republic.
Caesar was a populist. His policies themselves might or might not have been genuinely good ones. Personally, looking back from the perspective of an entirely different world over 2000 years later I’m inclined to think I like them. But that cannot justify the incredible abuse of power he resorted to go pass them.
Incidentally, one of those other later things he did was convinced the Senate to let him run for consul again without resigning his proconsulship , specifically because he was immune from being prosecuted for his crimes as long as he was proconsul or consul. And he knew full well that he was guilty of crimes and would be tried for them if he resigned as proconsul and returned to Rome as a citizen. Essentially, he was abusing the immunity provided by the office to protect himself from being prosecuted for crimes. Reminds you of anyone?
- Comment on Taking the time to put yourself in their time period rather than just looking back at them 18 hours ago:
The truth is that the Roman Republic named its years by the names of the two consuls who were ruling that year. The two consuls were kind of like co-presidents. So 50 BC was actually “the year of Paullus and Marcellus”. In theory always equal, though they would tend to share power by swapping out one month each.
I explain this because of another fun fact. In 59 BC Julius Caesar and Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus were elected consul, “the year of Caesar and Bibulus”. But in March that year, Caesar’s supporters assaulted Bibulus and forced him to back down from a significant policy. After that he retreated from public and was barely seen all year. It became known as “the year of Julius and Caesar”.
- Submitted 20 hours ago to ausmemes@aussie.zone | 3 comments
- Comment on Itch.io apologise for "frustration and confusion" after delisting thousands of NSFW projects 20 hours ago:
Because a paid library is kinda fine as a concept. A library has to function, repair chairs, change lightbulbs, pay security guards and, ahem, librarians, pay for new books and electricity and so on.
Yeah, but taxes can pay for all of that. And being able to read, to access the Internet, to do the many other things provided by library services are fundamental to the human experience or to modern society. You shouldn’t be prevented from these because you cannot afford to pay. A paid library is fine as a concept, but only if it doesn’t decrease the availability of free libraries.
And the more complex your set of rules is, the more it turns into “money buys right”
Well, no. Things being at the whim of who has the most money is what turns it into “money buys right”. It doesn’t matter how complicated the rules are, if the rules don’t permit money to play into it. If libraries were paid, that would certainly turn access to reading into a “money buys right” situation.
Simple laws are great, and you should avoid laws that allow loopholes. But sometimes a more complicated law is required because the situation is more complicated.
in too many levels of representation allowing power to affect representatives
Quite the opposite. Give too much power into one central authority and that allows power to affect representatives. More distributed power at the local level, with restrictions on the abuse of that power coming from a higher level, is a much more equitable solution.
in not wide enough participation
This thread is not about any one particular country. In fact, it’s specifically about multinational companies bowing to the pressure of one minor lobbyist. That said, compulsory voting works wonders. We’ve seen it quite clearly here in Australia. Make everyone vote, and surprise surprise, the impact of a loud minority gets drowned out! Combine that with a voting system other than FPTP and you’re well set for a much better democracy.
Politics should not end at the ballot box, however, and getting people more involved in political life in general would be a great thing. Through communicating regularly with representatives. Through joining a union. Through attending protests. Etc. I’m also quite a fan of sortition.
in there being too much professional bureaucratic entities inside the government
We’ve seen first-hand how terrible it is when someone who thinks the government is “too much professional bureaucratic entities” comes into power, in the US. This is absolutely terrible anti-intellectual rubbish.
I don’t much care one way or the other about 3, it’s an insignificant irrelevance. I have no idea what 6 is even supposed to mean. 7 might be the only genuinely fantastic point.
- Comment on Itch.io apologise for "frustration and confusion" after delisting thousands of NSFW projects 20 hours ago:
Jesus christ are you just trolling at this point?
- Comment on Itch.io apologise for "frustration and confusion" after delisting thousands of NSFW projects 21 hours ago:
Infiltrated? Who said anything about infiltrated? Are you just making shit up now?
What happened is incredibly simple.
- Some regressive organisations with no power other than persuasive power told payment processors to stop supporting NSFW content.
- Payment processors caved in to this pressure and told Steam and Itch that their current NSFW content is not allowed and to remove it.
- Steam and Itch, wanting to be able to keep making revenue at all, responded to this demand by removing NSFW content.
Anyone can do 1. I could go to Visa and say “stop promoting cats, tell Steam to stop selling Stray and Little Kitty, Big City.” It’s up to Visa whether or not they consider my pressure worth responding to. If they do, Steam has to stop selling Stray and LKBC if they want to stay in business. The blame here lies with Visa for choosing to listen to me even though, in this scenario, I’m being a total fuckwit. In reality, Visa would turn around to me and say “lol no, fuck off”. (Or, more likely, ignore me entirely.)
3 is an inevitable result if 2 occurs. If they can’t take in any money, they can’t continue selling any games. They can’t afford to pay the bills for their servers, or pay their employees, or anything. The only option is to give in.
That leaves 2 as the variable. They decide whether to respond to the pressure or not. And they deserve the blame any time they do.
- Comment on Itch.io apologise for "frustration and confusion" after delisting thousands of NSFW projects 22 hours ago:
You’d have to ask them.
- Comment on Itch.io apologise for "frustration and confusion" after delisting thousands of NSFW projects 1 day ago:
The regressive asked the payment processors to do this. The payment processors themselves are the ones that actually did it. The regressive barely had any actual leverage. The payment processors chose to cave.
- Comment on Itch.io apologise for "frustration and confusion" after delisting thousands of NSFW projects 1 day ago:
We can blame the religious organisation as much as we want, but the fundamental problem here is payment processors. They should be common carriers. Content-neutral middlemen who facilitate payment to anything that isn’t literally unlawful. This is no different to an ISP throttling access to Netflix because they operate their own streaming platform. If the storefront, the developer, and the buyer are all ok with a transaction, there’s no good reason for a fourth party to stand in the way of that.
- Comment on Bats the size of a small dog 1 day ago:
I mean, sort of? Megabats and microbats are just two sub-groupings of bats used in biological classification. Megabats can be found in most of southern Asia (from Pakistan eastward, and as far north as roughly the Himalayas), most of sub-Saharan Africa, and northern and eastern Australia. It’s less that Australian bats are unusually large, and more that Europe and the Americas only have small bats.
- Comment on Greens and Coalition bristle against Labor’s changes to the standing orders [to allow kicking out MPs for longer and to avoid recording the names of MPs who on some motions] 1 day ago:
The only problem with this idea is that it could result in people who would be very good politicians choosing not to go into politics because they can earn more money elsewhere. This is especially true of people who are coming from unprivileged backgrounds. If they don’t have a partner who makes a huge amount to support them, and they don’t have family wealth to rely on, but they do have qualifications that would allow them to make more than median wage, if politicians only made median wage, it might not be economically feasible for them to go into it.
- Comment on Greens and Coalition bristle against Labor’s changes to the standing orders [to allow kicking out MPs for longer and to avoid recording the names of MPs who on some motions] 1 day ago:
Happy cake day!
- Comment on Greens and Coalition bristle against Labor’s changes to the standing orders [to allow kicking out MPs for longer and to avoid recording the names of MPs who on some motions] 1 day ago:
You can’t even know if they were in Canberra at the time. Many politicians may have been in their home division, unwell, in in a meeting, or in a pairing arrangement with someone on the other side.
More to the point, as I said in the previous comment, most people aren’t looking at individual politicians’ individual votes and also cross-referencing how their colleagues voted in votes they didn’t attend. Certainly tools like They Vote For You won’t do that, and that’s how most people are going to evaluate politicians’ actions.
- Comment on Greens and Coalition bristle against Labor’s changes to the standing orders [to allow kicking out MPs for longer and to avoid recording the names of MPs who on some motions] 1 day ago:
And the information will apparently be recorded
Oh? Where did you read that? From what I could find, they only seem to be recording the names of people who voted in the minority. There’s no way to differentiate between non-voters and those who voted in the majority.
- Comment on Greens and Coalition bristle against Labor’s changes to the standing orders [to allow kicking out MPs for longer and to avoid recording the names of MPs who on some motions] 2 days ago:
No, you definitely can’t. A lot of votes happen without everyone attending. Popular tools like They Vote For You look at the Hansard record of who voted to determine how they vote. If they don’t show up as having voted, those tools aren’t going to just presume they would have voted some way.
- Comment on Greens and Coalition bristle against Labor’s changes to the standing orders [to allow kicking out MPs for longer and to avoid recording the names of MPs who on some motions] 2 days ago:
Thanks. Fixed.
- Comment on Greens and Coalition bristle against Labor’s changes to the standing orders [to allow kicking out MPs for longer and to avoid recording the names of MPs who on some motions] 2 days ago:
I found out from this post shared by Elizabeth Watson-Brown, Greens MP for Ryan:
In one of the first acts of the new Parliament, Labor have made a sneaky change to procedure in the House of Representatives that means major party MPs won’t need to go on the record as often on how they vote.
The new rules means that when 6 or less MPs vote on one side, the votes of the majority - typically the government and the opposition - won’t be recorded.
The government wants to let their MPs off the hook, so they can go home to their electorates without having to justify their voting record. It’s about protecting themselves, not serving the public.
The combined major party vote is at historic lows and this is reflected in a crossbench that is larger than ever, but the major parties would rather hide than be honest with the people about what they’re voting for.
What this means is that resources like “They Vote For You” will be less valuable, because any issue where Labor and the LNP agree, along with half the cross-bench, you will know who voted against it, but you won’t know if the others voted for it or abstained (or were merely not in Parliament). It has the effect of making it much harder to prove times when the major parties act in unison, and thus harder to make accusations that they are “both the same” (or at least are “the same” on a particular issue).
- Greens and Coalition bristle against Labor’s changes to the standing orders [to allow kicking out MPs for longer and to avoid recording the names of MPs who on some motions]www.theguardian.com ↗Submitted 2 days ago to australianpolitics@aussie.zone | 24 comments
- Comment on Australia joins other nations in call for an immediate end to war in Gaza 3 days ago:
It’s a pretty damn milquetoast statement. No mention of the ongoing genocide Israel is carrying out. No mention of the war crimes being committed in service of that genocide. No mention of the apartheid conditions Israel imposes on Palestinian people which were the initial cause of the war.
They can’t even name the state of Palestine properly.
I guess it’s nice that we’ve signed on to it. But it means nothing if it isn’t backed up by real action.
- Comment on North Korea and South Korea isn't working. Let's try West Korea and East Korea instead. 5 days ago:
Does this mean Busan gets upgraded to capital city status? I think I could get behind that.
- Comment on I'm intrigued 5 days ago:
I’ve only ever seen a couple of episodes and I was shocked at how well this script fit what I’ve seen.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 days ago:
Separatist scum!
- Comment on [deleted] 5 days ago:
I like how you capitalised CIS, implying not that you’re talking about the opposite of trans, but that you’re a member of the Confederacy of Independent Systems.
- Comment on UwU brat mathematician behavior 6 days ago:
Ok that’s some really interesting context I didn’t know. I’ve only ever seen it done the mathematician’s way with dx at the end. Learning physicists do it differently explains why the person in the post would want to discuss moving it around.
But I still think they have to mean “if dx can be treated as an operand”. Because “if dx can be treated as an operator” doesn’t make sense. It is an operator; there’s no need to comment on something being what it objectively is, and even less reason to pretend OOP’s partner was angry at this idea.
- Comment on Gringos out here wilin' 6 days ago:
Yeah. Like “Leslie”, without the “lie”. Or like the French plural definite article (when the final consonant is pronounced due to a liaison) “les”.
- Comment on Independent MP to push for lowering of Australian voting age 6 days ago:
Yeah for sure. If it had been presented as an aside, like “btw don’t let her support of this good idea distract from all the other bad stuff she’s done”, I think there would have been significantly less pushback.
- Comment on [Satire] C’mon Aussie! Nation gets around our Rupert after Trump sues him for defamation 6 days ago:
One American sues another American, why would Aussies have anything to do with that?
