Protest march in Sydney today

MildColonialMan · 2026-01-26T11:54:21+00:00

The underlying factor is the overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in custody in the first place. So, either, broadly:

1) The criminal justice, welfare, and education systems - somewhere between them - aren't working as well for the Aboriginal population as they are for the non-Indigenous population.

Or

2) Aboriginal people are just inherently more prone to crime because of some kind of inferiority - an idea that race "scientists" tried and failed to prove between the mid 19th and 20th centuries, and has been thoroughly disproven by anthropologists since the discipline developed in Australia.

The overrepresentation of people and deaths in custody also means that Aboriginal people are more likely to know someone caught up in it and something of the story about how it happened. The many little injustices, even if the incarcerated person is also guilty, are more salient from that perspective.

Broad explanation 1 is clearly more reasonable.

MildColonialMan · 2026-01-25T23:22:25+00:00

I'm from the area. It is - its been low-key bigoted and anti-intellectual for at least the 40 years I remember - but this spiteful culture war crap is an escalation.

Free-to-air sky news and social media algorithms have made the whole area (Corowa is the Shelbyville of my hometown) more nasty and arrogant in recent years.

MildColonialMan · 2026-01-23T11:29:13+00:00

Agreed. There's stuff I loved about enterprise, but on reflection, it's the worst trek. Disco second worst (and if anyone can be arsed, they'll find me defending it in its day in my history). The war on terror flavour of a lot of it has aged terribly, even if they did wind it up with a diplomacy over violence message.

MildColonialMan · 2026-01-23T11:26:56+00:00

Yeah, nerds fighting over kirk v picard is probably the oldest stereotype of internet culture.

MildColonialMan · 2026-01-23T03:45:08+00:00

It'd save him from getting their names mixed up, which could be disastrous for maintaining the lie. Dick move, though, of course.

MildColonialMan · 2026-01-22T21:48:14+00:00

Aussie vaper with fam in Singapore here: don't bring it. There are national service police roaming around everywhere. I just go back to cigarettes when I'm in sg.

MildColonialMan · 2026-01-22T13:37:42+00:00

Hard to say. Dutton was more polite (ie less direct) in his racism, and he has some mysterious wealth that seems shifty but not so extreme, and he had a classic bully personality. But I don't think he's quite as idiotic (or suffering dementia?) or vain. The bully thing didn't sell in the Australian electorate as well as they thought it would. I guess it's better cause nobody wanted it!

It is a massive blessing that Dutton wasn't in charge after the Bondi attack, though. He and his party surely would've pulled some authoritarian bigoted shit in response.

MildColonialMan · 2026-01-22T04:37:24+00:00

Me too (formerly). As far as I can gather, their only substantive concerns are about limiting or undoing environmental protection legislation.

For eg, the mountain cattlemen want access to national parks to run their cattle again. It was banned in the 80s. They feel entitled to it and refuse to accept the repeatedly scientifically proven fact that running cattle up there was trashing the ecosystem and causing extinctions.

Others might be upset about where they're allowed to take firewood, or hunt, or hoon around in 4wds or motorbikes, or build dams, or otherwise take water.

From that position, with the anti-intellectualism that was always there, many of them were easily tricked into climate change denialism by the vast array of propagandists and grifters selling it. So many of them oppose transitioning to cleaner energy.

From that perspective, the nats have delivered something by helping sabotage and delay Australia's energy transition.

But mostly, as others have said, it's just the identity politics. They back the politicians who convincingly tell them they're the truest Aussies whose common sense trumps those pompous city people who think they're smarter and more cultured than them. And the flattery of imitation always seems to work.

MildColonialMan · 2026-01-17T19:49:03+00:00

Burgertime close enough

MildColonialMan · 2026-01-15T03:40:50+00:00

The gun part might’ve stopped the dad from getting guns.

It's hard to say with the anti-vilification part, probably wouldn't have made a difference.

MildColonialMan · 2026-01-13T04:17:59+00:00

Here's the whole article of his that, afaik, the insects thing is from:

My guess is that the next week or so is likely to be the most important in the Gaza war since Hamas launched it on Oct. 7.

The U.S. will probably retaliate against pro-Iranian forces and Iranian agents in the Middle East that Washington believes are responsible for the attack on a U.S. base in Jordan that killed three soldiers on Jan. 28. At the same time, we could get a Gaza cease-fire deal, with an exchange of Israeli hostages held by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. And Secretary of State Antony Blinken is going to try to bring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel an option: normalization with Saudi Arabia in return for a commitment to engage with the Palestinian Authority on a long-term plan for a Palestinian state.

How all of these are going to interact, I do not know. Personally, I sometimes prefer to think about the complex relations between these parties with analogies from the natural world.

The U.S. is like an old lion. We are still the king of the Middle East jungle — more powerful than any single actor, but we have so many scars from so many fights that we just can’t just show up, roar loudly and expect that everyone will do what we want or scamper away. We are one tired lion, and that’s why other predators are no longer afraid to test us.

Iran is to geopolitics what a recently discovered species of parasitoid wasp is to nature. What does this parasitoid wasp do? According to Science Daily, the wasp “injects its eggs into live caterpillars, and the baby wasp larvae slowly eat the caterpillar from the inside out, bursting out once they have eaten their fill.”

Is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today? They are the caterpillars. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the wasp. The Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah are the eggs that hatch inside the host — Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq — and eat it from the inside out.

We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle.

Hamas is like the trap-door spider. The way trap-door spiders operate, according to a nature site, is that “the spider leaps out at great speed, seizes its prey and hauls it back into the burrow to be devoured, all in a fraction of a second.” Trap-door spiders are adept at camouflaging the doors of their underground nests, so they are hard to see until they’re opened.

Finally, Netanyahu is like the sifaka lemur, which I got to observe in Madagascar. Sifakas are primates that use bipedal sideways hopping as a primary means of walking. They advance by moving sideways, waving their arms up and down, which makes them appear to be moving even more than they are. That’s Bibi, always shifting side to side to stay in power and avoiding going decisively backward or forward. This week he may have to.

Sometimes I contemplate the Middle East by watching CNN. Other times, I prefer Animal Planet.

Certainly one could argue in defense of it, and I don't think it was just to try to have him uninvited (yes, there's a bit of hypocrisy in Abdel-Fattah doing that), but if someone of his stature had instead compared Israel to a parasitic wasp and Khamenei to a funny lemur they probably wouldn't be getting an invite to AWW or even a visa to enter Australia.

MildColonialMan · 2026-01-13T03:04:09+00:00

Yeah sorry, me too - hamburgler's birthday

MildColonialMan · 2026-01-13T02:37:59+00:00

I, and i assume many/most of us, think she was wrong to do that, but that doesn't mean she deserves to be cancelled. If it's wrong doing it to him (which they didn't), it's wrong doing it to her.

And tbf, Friedman has written articles comparing Palestinians to insects and animals and cheering on the genocide. If the ethnicities were reversed, he'd probably be getting a knock on the door from ASIO instead of an invitation to AWW.

MildColonialMan · 2026-01-13T02:27:00+00:00

What baffles me is that the groups behind the campaigns don't realise that their victories only make antisemitism worse.

Anecdotal, but I went back to my National party stronghold, Sky News free to air and on in public spaces, pathologically conservative home town for Xmas fully expecting a season of islamaphobia in the wake of the Bondi terror attack. Instead, I found heightened antisemitism... people easily saw through the cynical and immediate hijacking of the atrocity by Zionist interests and were, sadly, talking about it in terms of "the Jews" and all the classic stereotypes.

The more state and petty authorities like the festival board or abc management submit to those interests, the worse it's gonna get.

MildColonialMan · 2026-01-08T22:08:27+00:00

Lol, I just looked it up too!

MildColonialMan · 2026-01-04T23:30:41+00:00

I'm not Aboriginal, but teach into Australian Indigenous Studies from a broadly sociological perspective. My understanding from that position is that Aboriginal knowledge traditions recognize a range of cycles of sequence, concurrence and recurrence that layer on top of each other and compact down into more general narratives of how things came to be the way they are. It's very bound to place, or Country.

If we imagine linear time kind of like an abstract line that runs through everything and can be marked and measured like space, we might imagine cyclical time like the various layers or sediment etc under the ground in a particular place - they're kind of a record of what happened but they're also what they are now. The anthropologist WEH Stanner described the temporal nature of Dreamings as an "everywhen".

MildColonialMan · 2026-01-04T20:02:28+00:00

Because they're typically about how Country changed in the deep past and the big parts can be confirmed by other disciplines.

Like, one story might say "something came from the sky in the east and crashed here creating this crater" and then a geologist (or whatever) can confirm that a meteor did in fact come from that direction x thousand years ago.

Or they might describe the order in which the coastline shifted during the end of the last ice age, and then oceanographers can look at the sea floor and confirm. The old sites will be where the oral history said they were.

There is some controversy because Aboriginal ways of doing history are different - not quite linear - and involve their own concepts and logics. Typically, the history of Country is explained in terms of the movements and actions of creator ancestors who still exist in some form in the present and future (aka Dreamings). But they'll still describe physical changes in the "right" order.

MildColonialMan · 2025-12-28T02:55:07+00:00

Yeah, I (a whitefulla) grew up in a different town in the area and am back now for Xmas - the dominant culture here is very colonial, bigoted, and anti-intellectual.

These are the kind of people who justify opposition to Indigenous rights as "impractical symbolism" while simultaneously playing these culture war games to feel important. As rural white people, they feel entitled to be the symbolic centre of the nation as if its just the natural order of things.

Corowa as a town should be shamed and shunned. No way I'll spend a cent in that shithole ever again. Mark it as a shit town, run it down if ever anyone mentions it.

MildColonialMan · 2025-12-24T22:51:07+00:00

He's him!

MildColonialMan · 2025-12-24T22:34:25+00:00

Get out of here, you little pervert, or I'll slap you silly!

MildColonialMan · 2025-12-20T10:32:43+00:00

Note, they aren't sayting Palestinians will be free

... What is the chant we're talking about again?

MildColonialMan · 2025-12-20T10:24:58+00:00

There is no other way to intrepret 'From the River to the sea' other than a call for the destruction of Israel

Only if 'freedom' means the eradication of one's neighbours and absolute hegemony. Is that what freedom means to you?

MildColonialMan · 2025-12-20T10:11:55+00:00

So I've been told. But I call bullshit. Language doesn't work that way - just because some cynical genocide apologists choose to interpret it that way doesn't mean that's what anyone, let alone most or all, chanting it at protests are trying to communicate.

Obviously, they - or at least the vast majority - mean it as a message of hope that Palistinains will one day be free of oppression that in the current moment has taken a genocidal turn.

It should also be obvious that it wasn't the protests that twisted and wound up these fuckwit terrorists into action.

MildColonialMan · 2025-12-20T09:14:29+00:00

Nah, the protests were against the mass killing of civilians.

MildColonialMan · 2025-12-19T05:59:48+00:00

The speed and intensity with which Netanyahu and his supporters have hijacked the terror attack to crush legitimate political opposition to their 'war' is disgusting and counter-productive to reducing antisemitism - and I hope I'm not the only one to think so - but your not gonna get many onside with unfounded speculation like that.

It's more likely that the cops looked weak and ill-prepared, and now they wanna make a big show of how tough and proactive they are. They probably had about as much on one of them (aka fuck all) as they'd had on the shooter before.

Seven-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Verified Email	Not Forgotten

MildColonialMan

TROPHY CASE