• 4 Posts
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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2024

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  • The problem isn’t that people are offending people, it’s that neo-Nazis are propagandising proudly in public.

    Banning specific symbols is a non-solution. The symbols aren’t the problem. I tore down some of this group’s stickers this week and none of them had swastikas or salutes on them (they had things like the sonnenrad/“Black Sun” symbol and the NSN’s four-arrow logo blurred out in that article). And if you ban those, they’ll find other wolfwhistles. It’s really not hard to allude, adopt and evade. There are historically successful strategies for dealing with these kind of groups, and they rarely end with the law or police. For example, the BUF in Britain started dissolving after the Brighton police intentionally only sent one officer to their rally so the fascists could have bricks thrown at them by the '43 Group. That’s when Mosley stopped going out in public.

    The fact that they’re doing these petty little masked-up rallies for photo-ops in relatively small rural towns really sings out to the fact that they’re scared of doing this in cities with established anti-fascist presence. They have to travel out to towns (and make no mistake, most of them aren’t even local to the region, they gather from various states just to make up numbers for a small rally) and make unannounced rallies with no-one around just to be safe in public without police protection. Those masks aren’t hiding from police (like some protestors do), they’re hiding from the community.


  • About 1,000 people at the CPAC conference in Brisbane also heard the former Conservative party leader blame the “unelected Bank of England”

    Demanding elections for businesses? That’s sounds a bit like socialist rhetoric, Comrade Liz!

    Truss said that while many were campaigning against conservatives, “the public” was on their side.

    Ahh, the ‘silent majority’ routine! It’s funny how the article has to constantly use scare quotes when repeating all these nebulous spooky concepts like ‘the argument’ and ‘the public’. What argument? Which public? The publics which voted out ‘conservative’ parties in Britain and Australia?





  • Reminder: no out-of-area (‘absent’) votes in this election.

    Council elections may not the be most exciting I find them much more interesting, because while my vote is still statistically negligible, it’s much more powerful than in a state or federal election. So less popular choices have a higher chance of competing.

    Unfortunately* it feels like most of my local candidates have almost identical policies, so my second and third preferences might as well be a coin flip. At least I know who’s going last.





  • Sounds like something out of a futuristic dystopian movie.

    spoiler

    I haven’t seen a terrorism act invoked in my state but police have called a few designated areas this year and they bring the cavalry mounted troops to most protests.

    I’m calling it now. Somebody’s gonna die or get seriously injured

    Big ten-thousands protests generally try to be more big-tent than radical, so as eager as police are to make a show of force against anti-military protesters, my bet is that it will be limited to shoving. But honestly, I won’t be shocked if your call turns out right.


  • lol - what abuse? He said these things in an earnings presentation, probably to board and investors.

    Attempting to (softly) control other peoples’ basic freedom, and their social life while at work, restricting them and alienating them from anything outside the office. The problem isn’t their choice of words, nor that they admitted it to investors.

    Maybe the way I’m saying this sounds melodramatic, that I’m jumping to the extreme case and assuming the worst. But those worst cases happen regularly, and these are the warning signs - when the owners want increasing control over workers to extract more profit, to “get the best out of them”. Those employee pain points are social life: the company wants a childcare centre, a restaurant and a gym because “I don’t want them leaving the building.”, “I don’t want them walking down the road for a cup of coffee. We kind of figured out a few years ago how much that costs.” They could have lied and said they did it to improve worker wellbeing and get the best out of them, to reduce the travel-time needed, or any other seemingly innocent reason.

    This attitude makes the universal truth clear, a board and investors see their workers as a resource for extracting maximum profit. It has to be that way, that’s how they compete and survive. And it alienates workers.

    And I don’t see any evidence anywhere that his people are enduring shit jobs.

    I didn’t say they were. I don’t know their conditions. I’m refuting the common attitude that workers are just free to leave when they’re being abused.

    outrage reporting

    You have a point. They said the quiet part aloud because their audience didn’t need the propaganda bullshit they would have told other people. And so, they admitted an outrageous truth which, well, is pretty normal among businesses. The journalist is taking a quote and shining the headlights on them. But, they are not inventing a fake problem. There’s no ethical justification for saying they don’t want people leaving the building to enjoy a walk and a coffee on their break. Employer exploitation of workers is a real issue in society at large, it deserves attention, and this outrage is an opportunity to give it the attention it deserves.


  • As the one calling the shots, he’s entitled to run the business that way.

    Legally, sure. But I don’t care whether someone is legally allowed to be abusive, it’s still abuse, and their abusive attitude towards workers earns outrage.

    And sure, employees can probably leave legally, but if we allow this abuse to be normalized then there won’t be another place to go in the industry. There is economic asymmetry at play, it’s not viable to just leave a job whenever it treats someone badly. There are only so many jobs available and the market is increasingly moving towards monopolization in many industries.

    People don’t just work in shit jobs because they haven’t considered leaving. They have legal freedom, but they are not empowered to leave without ending up somewhere just as bad or risking unemployment. So even if no-one is forced, they’re inherently pressured, and that pressure is enough for them to accept abuse in order to keep themselves and their families off the dole. We need to create a society with an economy where people aren’t subject to the whims of their employers.




  • So their argument is:

    No, that’s not what they were saying. For starters, they’re clearly pointing out that the hypocrisy is that “The CFMEU [is being forced into administration] on the back of a handful of rumours and allegations”, contrasting that against the “damning findings” of the Royal commissions which were tolerated, not that the CFMEU “should be allowed to be corrupt” (where did that strawman come from?!). Also, the ETU are not the CFMEU.


  • That would miss the point of the protest. It was a mass action from the community, where a broad range of unions and non-union organisations participated, to rally together and voice our response to the extreme administration bills. I’ve gone into a little detail on my perspective here. Overall, we must recognise the way this bill was handled as a knowingly-inappropriate response to the situation and a threat to the whole labour movement.

    In case I need to state it, I’m not defending corruption, I’m not saying that there aren’t people who should be charged and removed. There are real problems with the CFMEU and the members should be empowered to root it out of their union. Putting in a dictator with huge conflicts of interest with the workers is not how to do that. That’s how to union-bust.

    and protest outside of federal liberal party headquarters demanding equal action on political corruption

    The Liberal party didn’t do this. The protest is critiquing the Labor party and their attack on the labour movement.

    The Liberal party also probably couldn’t care less about the protesters, might as well be vegans threatening to boycott a butcher. Union reps are a major component of the Labor party, and union rank-and-file are a large part of their voter support base.