Why is Australia trying so hard to become an authoritarian state? It's an island nation with few serious internal or external enemies.[1] [1] https://thediplomat.com/2016/12/australias-enemies-looking-w...
Perfect place for that, tbf
Surveilance bill rushed through Australian parliament in 24 hours
181–190 of 397 posts
Re: Surveilance bill rushed through Australian parliament in 24 hours
#182Crime rates have been going down for decades in the Western world (including Oz). Yet governments continue to pass surveillance laws to “fight crime.” If that doesn’t highlight their true aims, I don’t know what else does.
Perceptual and judgment creep.
Do we think that a problem persists even when it has become less frequent? Levari et al. show experimentally that when the “signal” a person is searching for becomes rare, the person naturally responds by broadening his or her definition of the signal—and therefore continues to find it even when it is not there.
Re: Surveilance bill rushed through Australian parliament in 24 hours
#183There and New Zealand both. The responses (extreme lockdown) of both countries to Covid has been nothing short of insane.
New Zealand's (as you describe it) "extreme lockdown" has worked. When dealing with a pandemic you are supposed to limit potential exposure, and their actions did that. As a result NZ has had one of the lowest infection rates in the world. Also, those actions let them "return to normal" quicker then anywhere else. It worked. Perhaps you feel that the mid-evil practice of nailing the doors and windows shut and posting…
If it's true that Covid is not going away, but will be endemic, it'll sweep through New Zealand one way or another.
Re: Surveilance bill rushed through Australian parliament in 24 hours
#184Interesting. I’m not from Australia but I thought the concept of an Administrative Appeals Tribunal interesting. It seems like a way to offload work from the main court system. According to Wikipedia it also does seem to have oversight by the Federal Court of Australia. [1] While I agree that this seems like a massive overstep. The actual body seems similar to the FISA court in the US. There wasn’t any detail in the…
Next step https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD_troika
NKVD troika or Special troika (Russian: особая тройка), in Soviet history, were the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD which would later be the beginning of the KGB) made up of three officials who issued sentences to people after simplified, speedy investigations and without a public and fair trial.[1] The three members were judge and jury, though they themselves did not carry out the sentences they dealt. These commissions were employed as instruments of extrajudicial punishment introduced to supplement the Soviet legal system with a means for quick and secret execution or imprisonment.[
Re: Surveilance bill rushed through Australian parliament in 24 hours
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
The child poverty rate increased by 10%. I would say that an increase of children living in inhumane conditions is more than an inconvenience.
I can't seem to find anything to verify your 10% claim - all I can find is stats showing that child poverty actually went down.. Are you able to post a source for that? EDIT: since my account has been rate-limited... The msn article below was released before the stats and is purely speculation. The stats before covid already indicate an increase, and NZ has long had fluctuating child poverty rates, which the current…
I've seen it mentioned in the past. Here is an article I was able to dig up.
https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/national/number-of-children-i...
Re: Surveilance bill rushed through Australian parliament in 24 hours
#186Well, just added Australia to the list of places I'm never going. > The two Australian law enforcement bodies AFP and ACIC will soon have the power to modify, add, copy, or delete your data should you become a suspect in the investigation of a serious crime. How would one prove the bodies didnt add/modify incriminating items? in the US that would be nigh impossible to argue against as the system implicitly trusts pol…
It’s nothing special anyway, not worth the long flight
Nothing special??? It has some of the most diverse and crazy flora and fauna in the world...
Re: Surveilance bill rushed through Australian parliament in 24 hours
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not about shooting them but rather deterring them from totalitarian government. That our ruling bodies understand there are lines and boundaries.
And yet American gun owners also tend to be the Americans who most believe their government is already totalitarian. Maybe they think waving their guns around just stops things from getting worse?
Brianna Taylor's boyfriend shot a cop breaking into their residence. It was classified as self defense. Gun laws in California were pushed decades ago to keep black people from owning weapons as a tacit acknowledgement that they knew they were mistreating people and didn't want those people to be able to resist.
No matter what a country dictates, for it to mean something, they have to send someone out to your house to enforce it. Guns quite literally put a very hard hold on how far they will go -- maybe not in passing laws, but definitely in enforcing them.
Re: Surveilance bill rushed through Australian parliament in 24 hours
#188There and New Zealand both. The responses (extreme lockdown) of both countries to Covid has been nothing short of insane.
New Zealand's (as you describe it) "extreme lockdown" has worked. When dealing with a pandemic you are supposed to limit potential exposure, and their actions did that. As a result NZ has had one of the lowest infection rates in the world. Also, those actions let them "return to normal" quicker then anywhere else. It worked. Perhaps you feel that the mid-evil practice of nailing the doors and windows shut and posting…
How about averting the easily exploited, "no cost is too great" mentality entirely? If the cost is a disease which kills people smack-dab on the average human lifespan, 99% of which already had a significant confounding disease. We live on an overpopulated planet amidst global ecological collapse. Nobody seems to care about the millions, mostly children under 5, dying of respiratory illnesses caused by pollution or crippled for their entire lives from malaria. Nobody seems to care that deaths from child abuse have sky-rocketed to unprecedented levels in the last year. Yet here we are grieving death in nursing homes, where people go to die. Covid is barely a blip in a long succession of diseases. Letting it do as much damage as possible is the best thing that could have happened to the survivors. Especially since for all that door-nailing, mask-wearing, and aggressive signage all we managed to do was spread a pandemic of emotional toxicity, so long as you weren't from a small isolated island. But hey, I guess we got some good drama and a reason to shame our friends and neighbors out of it.
Re: Surveilance bill rushed through Australian parliament in 24 hours
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
The child poverty rate increased by 10%. I would say that an increase of children living in inhumane conditions is more than an inconvenience.
I can't seem to find anything to verify your 10% claim - all I can find is stats showing that child poverty actually went down.. Are you able to post a source for that? EDIT: since my account has been rate-limited... The msn article below was released before the stats and is purely speculation. The stats before covid already indicate an increase, and NZ has long had fluctuating child poverty rates, which the current…
Claims to have found the opposite online while providing no sources, this is just an activist comment.
Re: Surveilance bill rushed through Australian parliament in 24 hours
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stop allowing email providers to control the domain of your email. Buy a $10/year domain and point it at GitHub pages (so it gains some trustworthiness). Send your email to that domain, and point the MX records at a mail provider (Fastmail or GMail or ProtonMail, doesn't matter).
I own several domains, and I have two valid email addresses at two personal domains hosted with a small US hosting provider, but I don't want those to end up in spammer lists so I use them sparingly. For a main email address I'm better off with a large email-focused provider that has tools to handle all the spam that builds up from an address used for online purchases and forum/social accounts, and as I mentioned Fas…
When people say use your own domain, they mean use your own domain at the email provider of your choice. You don't miss out on any of their tools by using your own domain.