Chairchucker

Guns. They've got guns in common. Yes, shootings are just one symptom of a bunch of problems in USA's society, but it would be much more difficult to express those problems in a violent killing spree if access to guns was more tightly controlled. Just give it a try, at this point the USA has tried nothing and they're out of ideas.

ABC website seems to think Green are likelyish for four house seats? Brisbane, Griffith, Melbourne, Ryan. And 12 senate seats.

Looks like we've got a higher than usual number of Greens and Independents. I'm happy with the result. Could've done with even more Greens and Independents, but overall I'm pretty positive about the weekend.

I voted on the weekend. Really thought early voting would let me skip the people handing out how to vote cards, but nope, still a few of them. Not much of a queue, though.

It's a nonsense dogwhistle on par with 'it's OK to be white' or 'all lives matter'. Israel is not currently the state in danger of being genocided. Palestine is. By Israel.

Interestingly the way you've phrased the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Palestine targets civilian buildings and houses 'as a strategy', whereas Israel merely 'overreacts' and civilians 'get killed'. Good use of the passive voice so it's hardly like Israel did it, the civilians got in the way. It's also weird that you should criticise Hamas 'not recognising Israel has a right to exist' when it is Israel that is occupying Palestine, not the other way around. Should Ukraine officially declare Russia has a right to exist?

I saw Everything Everywhere All at Once semi recently and I'm making the early call that it's the best movie of the year. Oscillates between absurd, disgusting, hilarious and heartfelt, and somehow makes it work. Great work from all the cast.

Dunno about technological, but there are a bunch of sociological - if not solutions, ways to mitigate/lower the rates of abortion. Better sex ed so unwanted pregnancies are rarer. Better social safety nets so prospective parents don't feel like they're choosing between an abortion, or having both them and their child live in poverty and/or starving to death. It's late and I should go to bed so I'm not gonna look up the exact stats but I think those were two of the bigger predictors of abortion rates. Interestingly, nowhere on that list: the legality of abortions.

You have to remember that in movies and TV, there are two sexualities, straight, and POLITICAL And two ethnicities, white and POLITICAL Anyway. I just watched the season finale of Moon Knight and it was really good imo. Pretty excited to see more of

The latest season of LEGO Masters Australia recently started, so I've been watching that. It's almost the only reason for free to air TV to exist, imo.

I have tried and failed a few times to articulate my reaction to the above re: MTG, I think I'll just settle for damn she is the worst.

I know you said you didn't need too much detail, but I've got the AEC website open on my other screen and I'm gonna break down my voting order for Senate and House of Reps. House of Reps: Green, Labor, Liberal, Liberal Democrats, One Nation, UAP (In House of Reps I guess I hate all the minor parties that aren't Green, hooray.) Senate: Independents David Po**** (lol I always forget about this site's dumb language filter) and Kim Rubenstein (still not sure on order), then (a lot of this is not yet settled, gonna delve through websites and see what I think) Australian Progressives, Greens, Animal Justice Party, Sustainable Australia (not sure tho) Legalise Cannabis Australia, (LOL. I'll check out their policies tho) Fuxin Li, Labor, (my votes will probs actually end here, but if I had to number them all....) Liberal, UAP, Informed Medical Options Party (Actual antivaxxers, screw these guys) If you see someone after the Liberal party in my rankings, I think they suck a lot.

I will be preferencing independents and parties with progressive policies, including the Greens party which is (kinda?) our third biggest party, then Labor. (Despite the fact that they embarrassingly spell their party the American way.) I'll have to read up a little on the latest changes to voting rules, but I believe these days I don't need to continue numbering past the first 6, in the senate at any rate, but if I did, I'd go Liberal after Labor, then the various conservative minor parties. (For some of these parties, read 'conservative' as 'racist and or/antivaxx') Specific policy leanings that I care about that will be contributing to Labor being at the bottom of that stack: I would prefer we treat refugees more humanely. Labor still seems to favour trying to discourage people from trying to seek refuge via boat, by making the experience less pleasant. I would prefer we listen to the scientific consensus that we're damaging our earth and should knock it off. Labor still seems to favour building new coal power plants. Those are the biggest things keeping Labor on the bottom of that stack. I think one of the reasons I like Independents and will probs preference them high in the senate is they're not beholden to a party; I get the impression there are probs people within the Labor party who would prefer not to be setting fire to our planet, but are required to toe the party line. Side note, both our two major political parties accept millions in donations from coal companies. So that's another thing I don't love. Other things are the usual 'not treating LGBT people like garbage under the guise of religious freedoms', 'making education free', 'supporting medicare', stuff like that.

Also we've got preferential voting, so even if (when) they 'both' suck you can vote for someone else and still contribute to keeping the less good candidate out of power.

Voting is made a lot easier in Australia than it is, for example, in the USA.

Mention of political correctness brought this to mind. Broadly speaking, the point Mr Lee seems to be making is that objection to 'political correctness' (insert also 'woke SJWs' or whatever terms are popular these days) seems to be largely driven by people who would very much like to continue to be awful to minorities without consequences, and I agree with his overall point that while they may not be perfect, they are infinitely preferable to what we had before.

I think falling to death also makes sense in kids' movies where you're trying to maintain the moral purity of your hero so you have the villain die to their own hubris, and falling to your death is a pretty good way of doing that.

Amateur nouns only, please.

I'll take 'the previous US President and associated administration' for 500, Alex.

Preferential voting seems like a more efficient way to get a similar result tbh

Apparently France has preferential voting so they can still vote for their favourites and just preference Macron before Le Pen EDIT: I'm wrong, you need an absolute majority and if not you vote again, weird

Huh, very progressive for the 20s, having a female character be a womaniser.

Unrelated: our PM just called Australia's election for 21 May. That's not long before my birthday, so hopefully as an early birthday present Australia will vote out these losers.

Probs the biggest example is Germany's fairly solid introspection of their own actions during World War 2, including creating a museum at Auschwitz dedicated to commemorating German war crimes. Has lead to a nation that tends to rather firmly reject Nazi ideologies these days.

You've added a 'just' and an 'only' there where they previously weren't. I'm aware of very few proposed history topics that include, as part of their subject, an explicit (or implicit for that matter) 'and these bad things are the sum total of what happened.' BUT In my opinion it is WAY MORE IMPORTANT to talk about the bad parts of history, ie the bits we need to not repeat.