The RBA, 3 years late to the party, last week confirmed profits drove the sky high inflation in 2022. In 2023 they attacked our research, & briefed media companies about how we were wrong. I guess they'll apologise now? Me for @thepointau.bsky.social thepoint.com.au/opinions/260...

RBA's own research shows that profits drove post-pandemic inflation, not wages

Last week, research by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) confirmed that they were wrong in 2023 to criticise research by The Australia Institute, which showed rising profits were the significant cau...

thepoint.com.au

Ten years ago we got a space fighter with style. Here's Sin Vega on House of the Dying Sun. www.jank.cool/house-of-the...

House Of The Dying Sun rescued space from the nerds, but we let it go again

This machine kills traitors

jank.cool

Sooo glad to see Sin dig into extremely slept on space sim House of the Dying Sun. One of the most stylish takes on the genre.

Jank@jank.cool · last wk.

Ten years ago we got a space fighter with style. Here's Sin Vega on House of the Dying Sun. www.jank.cool/house-of-the...

I usually share the Guardian's coverage of conservation efforts and the climate crisis. It's not often that I get to share their coverage of #Animorphs. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

How to feel optimistic in the face of crisis? Ask the kids fighting slug-like aliens | Alexander Hurst

The Animorphs books taught my generation about digging deep in the face of an existential threat. We need that spirit now more than ever, says Guardian Europe writer Alexander Hurst

theguardian.com

And like, yeah, thinking about it... He saw some police appear, unannounced, at an openly queer Christian space, and take the guy who was in charge that day outside, alone, to an isolated corner of the graveyard. As an Iranian, what other assumption was he gonna make?

Finally, what about the people IN those prisons getting zero education or rehabilitation support because they’re too overcrowded? We don’t care about those people. But we should. When they’re released and inevitably reoffend, there’ll be a whole new set of victims for the PM to worry about

My bullshit is bespoke, artisanally made, hand-crafted and individually polished bullshit. We do not serve any industrially mass-produced bullshit here.

honestly recommend being in a non American timezone because you can avoid most discourse

i haven't really pushed back on the anthropomorphizing pushback because i'm still thinking through it but it seems to me that whether or not you need theory of mind you need theory of behavior, and you might as well build it on the language the agents are using to communicate with each other

Anyway, war is bad and we should do less* of it and also fascism is really bad and we should do none of it. ("But Bret, why aren't you saying we should do *no* war?" "Because sometimes there are fascists.")

watched Lesbian Space Princess, and p much as I expected, it's an very earnest first-time effort from a small indie team with some authentic heart, a couple of sequences that maybe shoulda been rethought, and not super great editing. it was made Hate Object Du Jour because it's queer. that's all.

🌟Shortlisted for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction🌟 Through the perspective of Maw, who was once human but is now something else, Claire North wrestles with capitalism, collective choice, fascism, gender, freedom, art, and the question of how we decide what—and who—matters.

I (I'm sure one among many!) nominated this book. Remarkable work. Thumpingly unsubtle indictment of the current moment's political & economic response at climate change but so well written (both at a sentence level & in terms of character and plot) that it entirely works.

Ursula K. Le Guin@ursulakleguin.com · 7d ago

🌟Shortlisted for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction🌟 Through the perspective of Maw, who was once human but is now something else, Claire North wrestles with capitalism, collective choice, fascism, gender, freedom, art, and the question of how we decide what—and who—matters.

Welcome to Bluesky. Please familiarize yourself with the following accounts to understand the range of opinions it is acceptable to express

You know who else has an unfair advantage in sport? Naturally talented athletes. And people with high hemoglobin. And rich people with money for sports camps and coaches. Why should they be allowed to compete? “Fairness in sports” my ass. Never since NFTs have I heard such bullshit.

It smacks of the aristocracy, that the dead person both “owns” the seat and it belongs to their family. I realize we’ll never get my “no immediate family member of a politician can run for political office” anti-dynasty ban, but certainly in the 21st Century we can end this foolishness.

Statement on ANU apology for ‘indefensible treatment’

Does that mean fascism has always existed? NO. Fascism, the ideology, is what happens when these ancient, pre-historic instincts for war - the desire for a uniform group, a strong leader, for violence against outsiders to take their resources - collide with *modern* economic and social structures.

FWIW I always in discussions described fascism as “an endemic social movement which occasionally gains political power.” Like the aristocracy, you gotta wake up hating it every day.

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux@bretdevereaux.bsky.social · last wk.

I want to expand on this in a short thread. Fascism sucks. It is also not going away: it is an effectively permanent part of modern representative politics because it is an effectively permanent part of human nature. We have to be prepared to push back against it, basically forever.

Nor, it is worth noting, has appeasement, has giving the fascists some of what they want, *ever* worked. Instead, we need to educate against it, create culture against it, mobilize politically against it, vote against it. Or else we'll have to fight it in the streets.

But you cannot remove 10,000 years of cultural evolution or a few hundred thousand years of actual, biological evolution at a finger's snap. Deep down, emotionally part of us likes to be in the exclusive in-group, to see the outsider humiliated, to dominate, to master others. It's the 'hardware.'

Fascism is not (sorry Marxist friends!) a product of hyper-capitalism. Social democracies produce fascists; communist countries, through an almost political carcinization, come to resemble fascist regimes (see: Stalinism or North Korea or the evolution of the CCP into a authoritarian nationalism).

Though of course part of our takeaway here should be 'fascists do insane, destructive things' and think accordingly about our politics and our foreign policy. But that was less obvious in the 1930s because WWII hadn't happened yet.

So you get four quadrants: - crunchy and ever-present (eg pathfinder 2e) - crunchy and optional (eg classic world of darkness) - streamlined and ever-present (eg most pbta games) - streamlined and optional (eg most osr games)

It's baffling that people still like these things. If you want children's magic books read Earthsea. Fuck, read His Dark Materials. People don't want that though, they want to be a stupidly wealthy child.

That is the world these sons of bitches want to take us back to with their "it's all overdiagnosis and fakery" gaslighting.

The thing about “woke 1” was that it was substantially correct.

I was a pretty troubled teen, and used to skip school to hang out at the city library. I often searched for this book and must have read it a hundred times during my life. Now I own it. 🥹 It’s so beautiful and I’m reading it while very sick and parenting my kid who is a in your face extrovert type

I think it's key to understanding their worldview that they imagine a world not *without* immigrants, but one in which immigrants' inferiority is permanently asserted and they become a subservient caste. All these people worship the Gulf States.

Jo Wolff@jowolff.bsky.social · 2w ago

What is the right-wing vision for a world where immigrants have been deported and public services cut? Care and other services would dry up. The return of living in squalor for those beyond working age? The workhouse? The pauper’s grave?

Like, it's not him being funny or badass; he very much Could Not invent the combustible lemons. He could not actually burn cancer's house down. It was pure rage and cope. He did all that stuff and got super rich and died anyway