I try this so often yet I remain terrible at these haha

Favourite (voting lifetime): Albanese (slim pickings for me lol)

Favourite (lifetime): Gillard

Favourite (all time): Whitlam

Most hated: Morrison (honourable mentions to Abbott and Howard)

I find it difficult to imagine a future in which humans aren’t making fun of impaired cognition.

I think the context is what’s most important, if anyone actually directs such language (be it retarded, idiot, etc) towards people with genuine mental impairment, that constitutes a slur. But the word ‘retarded’ literally means ‘slow’, and is still regularly used (including by myself) in scientific and technical contexts (compared to racist or homophobic slurs, which are only ever really used in a ‘slur’ kind of way).

I wouldn’t really have a problem with calling people ‘slow’ in jest, and I don’t think many would. Imo if not ‘retarded’, it’ll be something else with the same meaning.

This is awesome. So nice to see some good news for once.

Well deserved, although I’m still going to soapbox that the Baudin’s Cockatoo (which unfortunately didn’t win) is under immediate threat by the proposed Alcoa mine in the southwest Jarrah forests! It’s some of the last habitat they have left, and once it’s gone, it’s gone for good.

I do love tawnies though. They’re such characters.

This man can’t be stopped!

Really loving the heavier direction on this album, but glad he’s keeping up the crazy instrumentation.

Why restaurants?? There are perfectly good mining company offices right there!

Military background iirc

I’ve listened twice and I think this is probably gonna be my AoTY, but at the same time it’s so musically dense and all over the place that I need at least 10 more listens to make head or tail out of it!

Genuinely I think the world would have much better scientific outcomes if a decent portion of grants were just straight-up randomly allocated (from a pool that meets a minimum standard I guess). Everyone wants to fund ‘almost complete’ research but there’s such little money for the early-stage ‘high risk high reward’ basic research, which is what basically all applied research is built upon.

Vast nation with huge areas of uninhabited space to send foreign-born criminals to tiny island nation.

10 minutes of sun per day is typically less likely to give you cancer than 0 minutes. Vitamin D (and other compounds involved in the synthesis from cholesterol that you won’t get in supplements) upregulate DNA repair polymerases that protect against carcinogens. Of course after a few minutes the costs of UV exposure outweight this benefit though.

Watching the footy with my old man. Identifying frogs on iNaturalist. Listening to some Mastodon.

We needed a negative control, dammit!

“We show outright support for the escalation of this conflict, but can we have peace pls?”

At least when LNP are in power I don’t get my hopes up for a sane response to anything… I was hoping the spinelessness of the ALP was enough to at least keep any statement neutral, pretty pathetic to see them outright supporting the US.

Beautiful! I can almost hear the crunch.

Went on to play a few months ago with mates, all 4 of us had accounts deleted. Wtf, why wasn’t it an automatic process…

It sounds like we agree - they’re dying more in custody far more than non-indigenous because they are in custody far more than non-indigenous. Sorry if I misunderstood at any point.

While acknowledging the gravity of the deaths and always respecting cultural sensitivities, a successful systemic review should be focused on reducing overrepresentation in custody, not specifically just deaths in custody.

As a bleeding heart leftist, this is a very sound argument. I’m a huge advocate for indigenous rights, and I get worried seeing articles that essentially imply police brutality (specifically towards indigenous people over non-indigenous) is the root cause of problems, when the evidence is that it is much deeper, systemic, and more complicated than that. Perhaps people want the problem to be police brutality because that would be a more tangible problem, something that can be fixed in a reasonable amount of time with the right review or changes to policing.

I get it - it sucks even thinking about issues where there are no “good” solutions. It’s a tragedy that indigenous people are overrepresented in custody, but it’s ultimately poverty that leads to being in custody in the first place. I wish people directed more attention towards addressing indigenous poverty rather than band-aid fixes that won’t really lead to long-term healing.

With that said, any death in custody deserves proper review. There was no reason this arrest had to end this way.