Source A (written by a man) - ok, this is "personal opinion", but at least it's fairly apolitical: https://archive.is/F4gTu
And then Source B (author unknown), where most of the crap in the second sentence was pulled directly from: https://archive.is/TCR2v
Also, I meant *Caledonophile, apparently. The other one is (obviously) used in reference to Ireland.
There's also the social media age ban thing, which is, IMHO, a backdoor way to force us all into having a digital ID, and then linking that with social media accounts...
They'll pass that one, almost certainly...
This is legitimately already the case in parts of Sweden. At least your first bullet-point, anyway. But also the second, to some extent.
Also arguably parts of any of Australia's largest cities. Particularly Western Sydney... And like, South Auckland in NZ.
All for more or less the same reason. And mostly the same "groups", too, lol.
Hahaha yeah...
Though ironically, the most snakes and spiders I have ever encountered has been at my parents' house, so eh...
Encountering a goanna (monitor lizard) just wandering around the Uni res in Qld was pretty cool, though! All the girls squealing and cowering in the halls until someone came and took it away. Good times, good times... Lol.
But yeah, the wildlife is very much like Florida (or I guess Mississippi?) but on steroids, ha. Though if you live in the city (and not near bushland), you're rarely going to encounter anything larger than a possum (not the same as the opossum) or a decent-sized huntsman spider!
Edit: in terms of actual "danger", though, the meth-heads usually beat out most of the non-human wildlife. And the drunks.
In terms of the aquatic realm, however? Yeah, the creatures out/in there will seriously fuck you up, without question or prompting, lol...
Yeah, I grew up in a (relatively) very safe part of Aus, and I wasn't even allowed to catch the school bus. Ever. Not even as a teenager. The only way I managed to force my parents to allow me slightly more independence (such as to let me catch public busses) was to simply refuse to allow them to pick me up, walked into town with my friends, and caught the bus anyway, which in turn left them waiting around at the school gates for no reason. And this is like, when I'm 16...
They didn't even leave me home alone overnight until I was an adult (instead, if they had to go somewhere, I was forced to go stay with extended family. Never friends. Only "family"). They also dictated who I could be friends with (as much as they could, such as by losing people's phone numbers when I was younger) and only allowed friends they chose to visit my house.
These things really, really mess you up. Especially when you live in a rural area, and can't even just... Walk to the shops very easily, let alone go see your friends.
Consequently, I'm a terribly messed up adult, but if I ever do get to have children, I would never, ever put them though what I had to deal with.
Edit: To add to this, my parents raided my bank account (with my own earned money in it) multiple times, as a teenager and adult, to the point where I had to change my details at said bank. They also hacked my personal email account and social media. While I was at university. And finally, they would, not infrequently, turn up to places I was staying (uni accommodation, housing, whatever) unannounced, if they hadn't heard from me in say, five days, and demand that I accommodate them. In my dorm room. Interstate...
When I came back at age 23 for my five-year school reunion, we decided, as a group, to go to a bar after the official "event" was over. I had been living out of home for years at this point. But I "hadn't told [my parents] about the change of plans". So my mother drove around and around the relevant city blocks, following my group of friends as we walked down the street, to see what we were doing and where we were going.
I've never forgiven them for that. I didn't even go to my 10 year reunion, surprise surprise...
So when I say "shit was bad", I unfortunately really do mean it...
Anyway, I feel ya. And I'm sorry you went through that, too. But I also just felt like a rant, lol...
As a non-American (with more than 2% Irish ancestry, if that matters), dear lord that whole ad is cringe…
Having done the SSRI “route” for a bit, I would honestly say that I believe that is the aim of most, if not all, such meds…
Because when the world and/or your life is messed up, “chemicals” aren’t going to correct for that. Nor for loneliness. Nor for boredom.
But they do turn you into a nice, numb, unquestioning slave, so there’s that, I guess…
Having said that, unmedicated (and undiagnosed) ADHD has probably ruined my life, and now it’s probably too late to get a diagnosis (in this country), so eh. I kind of wish there was a “happy median” between both extremes…
There's a casino in Vegas (can't remember which) where you can pee on a piece of the wall (encased in glass, I think) in the men's urinal, lol...
You should make a trip there!
On a slightly different note, I think I have a similar photo outside my old school. Obviously not at all the same, but I fucking hate that place, and everything that happened there...
Edit: Also sorry for what happened to your family. I didn't mean it to seem like I am making light of that, if it came across that way.
On the latter paragraph - I've always found that weird and irritating. Like, I just don't take photos of myself, most of the time. Even when in front of the Eiffel Tower recently, including myself in the photos was secondary to trying to get the best shot of the damn thing...
But almost every woman I've been with, and far too many men, spend almost the entire time either taking selfies, or demanding I take photos of (and more occasionally with) them. It... Really annoys me. And I always think less of them afterwards...
My father is one of the worst, for this, though, so it's definitely not just a woman thing. Perhaps that's played into me going the other direction, though...
Ironically, Denver airport actually is (mostly) shaped like a Swastika lol, and that's much more obvious than this supposedly is. Yet I'm sure the same people would claim that is a baseless conspiracy...
https://history.denverlibrary.org/news/denver/locals-guide-dia-conspiracy-theories
Denver Airport (not Stapleton - the new one) really is a very strange place - demon horse sculpture and all...
And I say that as someone who has spent far too much time in shitty airports around the world...
True that.
Though it's also woke corporate, too.
This is another "gem" I've seen today:
'It's cool to be different': Port ruck's unique approach to love and life
Which is similarly a woke word salad (buzzwords aplenty!), this time justifying grooming and "queerness" within a women's sports team as "inspiring young girls to be able to be different", lol.
By connecting the natural 'bush' environment to settler-colonial social issues and scenes, Gibbs's imagery and narrative reimagined the bush as a 'home' for colonizers, essentially 'indigenising' them in the image of white gumnut babies.
Fuck. This. Shit...
Just checked, my bridge edits are still there. Which very much proves your point, Heretic.
When you edit pages that the jannies/activists don't check, it's quite easy to get away with it, lol...
Someone did this with the page of an Australian (female) hockey player turned footballer turned pundit/influencer (yes, really). First they changed her nickname to "Nappies", and then when she had it changed back (because someone alerted her to it), they changed her birthdate to be nearly a decade older, lol.
Solid troll Though she sort of leaned into the "nappies" thing, afterwards, as a meme, so it worked out alright for all involved, I guess. Took it in good humour.
*Bark huts. IF that. Most of them didn't even get that far...
Though the propaganda has been so persuasive that my own parents now believe that they had agriculture, astrology, etc. (which they didn't)...
"Fields of yams", I'm now told. And "wild rice".
No one, literally no one would have believed those things, even 10-15 years ago, so it's quite astounding how quickly the "highly advanced civilization but also noble savage" myths have gained traction...
True, but in this case, that entire paragraph is sourced from the New Statesman article, which appears to be "original research". Obviously the Wiki jannie liked the sound of the argument it made, and pretty much copy-pasted the whole thing, which Goolag then quoted near-verbatim...
Which is pretty wild, when you think about it.
Lol, my IP address unironically got banned for "edit warring", when I tried to (anonymously) change a woke editor's claim that an Australian town is "sovereign, unceded Aboriginal land"...
So now I have to log in and/or spoof my IP address (obviously can use a VPN).
Though before that I successfully changed a few of those things, like removing the dual names in their Abo conlang (for example on pages for bridges over a river - reverting the name of the river to its European version. It's easy with obscure pages, as you point out), so believe me, this isn't my first rodeo, lol...
You also can’t turn off “AI Overview”, on Google search, on desktop, now…
For a while you could, but then naturally enough they killed that lol. Because of course…
Obviously you can ignore it, but the fact that it is now forced upon all users, everywhere (I believe), whether we like it or not? That’s pretty scary, too…
Pretty much, yeh.
I've noticed this a lot, lately, when it comes to the Abo stuff.
Like, on the TV yesterday, and Abo "activist" was yelling, "Captain Cook killed my family!"
Well no. No he did not. He didn't directly kill anybody. Nor did he introduce disease which did so.
Did his voyages indirectly lead to atrocities against Aboriginals? Sure, that's definitely arguable, but blaming the one explorer for something which happened long after his death is... Very Current Year...
Absolutely wild that this is where we are at, now.
The "source" in question:
The Wikipedia page has been edited since that archive to make the reference even more blatant, but the context of the claim is the same.
All of which, in turn, comes from a New Statesman article by one author with an agenda.
And that, ladies and gents, is how you change a narrative. Put out a bullshit, "original-research" article, get it in a "reputable" publication; have it cited on Wikipedia and then have Google's AI scrape the Wiki page and present its content as undisputed "fact".
Scary times.
On the topic of Australian government (or in this case, government agency) fearmongering, this fucking ad (disturbing, but SFW):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6NEn4NHxoY
They showed that to us in "Defensive Driver Training" in high school. It unironically scarred me for life.
To this day my biggest fucking fear is becoming paralyzed and dependent like the girl in that video. Yeesh.
So, did it "work" in scaring me? Yes (though it hasn't exactly changed my behaviour, subsequently. I still take lifts with randos, lol). Was it necessary, as something to beat schoolkids over the head about? I'm not so sure...
I think the UK is more oppressive in some ways, and Sweden is perhaps more "Kafkaesque" (annoying, petty bureaucracy, essentially), having lived there for a bit, but part of the trouble with Aus is how isolated we are here, and how damn hard it is to get out (if you can even afford to, given CoL at the moment)...
Which the government obviously took advantage of during Covid. They know this, which is why and how they get away with what they do.
I mean, fuck, even Singapore is 5 hours from Perth, which is ~4 hours from the East Coast itself, so...
I think that plays into our psyche more than people perhaps realize.
Plus all the immigration from autocratic Asian countries (and lately, Africa) in the last few decades. That has definitely fed into it...
Honestly, living here (again), I'm continually astounded by how apathetic most people here are, about shit like this. I hardly know anyone IRL who gives a shit, and certainly don't know anyone who will change their vote because of this issue...
As long as people have their reality TV slop, the cricket team is doing ok, and the media tells them that anyone who disagrees is "like those Trump voters in Yankee-land", then people will just lap this and pretty much applaud it, as their rights are taken away...
Not that Germany, NZ or Sweden would be any better. But nonetheless...
If you were in/around Duisburg or, I believe, Gelsenkirchen, then kind of, yeah…
There is a hell of a lot of Turks, at the very least.
Also Köln seems to have quite a few, as we saw from the attacks a few years back…
Eh, I’m not sure they are, per se…
At least if we removed the historical context of last century, anyway. And I guess you also have to factor in that they don’t have free speech, so who knows what they think and say privately (from experience, it can be pretty extreme, lol)…
But it is interesting that even Duisburg and Kreuzberg (Berlin), while having a lot of Muzzies, haven’t been “taken over” at an institutional level to quite the same extent as Hamtranck, Dearborn, or even Western Sydney (Australia) have…
Nor has Malmö in Sweden, despite the very noticeable presence of these individuals there…
I’m not sure exactly why that is the case, but us Anglo countries sure do seem to struggle with stopping the Muzzie takeover, once they reach critical mass…
Scotland even had one as “First Minister”, FFS…
I honestly worry what the consequences of this, and other "AI overviews" on places like Facebook and Quora, will be, for impressionable young people, if these "tech companies" continue to be able to make them virtually impossible to opt out of...
Genuinely crazy how fast this has all happened...