abff08f4813c

Yeah, they should clarify that being at the G7 and also being a convicted felon is unusual.

Came here to say this. I wouldn't be surprised if he became obese because of the 33 years he put into the job, always working and not having enough time to himself to self-care.

The party I’m calling centrist is viewed as centre-left here by the media and general public.
Greens and Labor split each other’s votes, not Labor and LNP.

Sounds reasonable enough, actually.

(Why about 20% of left-wing voters prefer the right-wing over the centre I will never understand.)

Hmm, puzzling. If they were USians then I'd suggest that it was because they confused over the name (liberals are always on the left, right?) but I digress.

Ah, but it was never that.

Isn't it though? As you wrote,

The precipitous drop in support for the LNP mostly went to help Labor

Just as it'd be confusing why left-wing voters would support a right-wing party over a centrist or centre-left party, it'd be equally confusing why right-wing voters would support a left-wing party (the Greens) over the centrist one. Well, sounds like they didn't.

(With IRV of course it's not that this happened because of a split vote but that because Labor had more support in the first preference that it survived over the Greens, when normally it'd be the other way around - so the specific reasons are different and a bit more complex, but this specific result which occurred is intuitive to someone who only understands FPTP. More generally, both FPTP and IRV suffer from spoiler effects (as explained in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler/_effect ) - while IRV is better than FPTP there are still cases where spoiler effects can happen and this example of a Green losing to a Labor due to a loss of support by the LNP is one of them - it just feels more intuitive to someone familiar with FPTP because this is the worst when it comes to spoiler effects).

we here in Australia had another parallel to your election.

I didn't realize this, but this is really interesting. Thank you for the hattip!

In essence, a drop in support for the right-wing candidates resulted in a centrist candidate winning where previously a left-wing candidate had won. That’s an aberrant result that doesn’t really match anyone’s intuition of how elections should work.

Unless, like me, you grew up in a FPTP system - then this is exactly what you'd expect. (As you already know in FPTP the votes would be split, so with the centrist and the right-wing splitting the vote, the left-wing would win. But if the right-wing drops out, then the votes would mostly go to the centrist instead, likely putting the centrist ahead now.)

I didn’t realise it was in response to a specific article, but I gathered it was a response to general comments from some in the LNP praising FPTP.

Accurate enough - the article that it was responding - well, it was basically what you wrote above.

I was responding primarily to the headline suggesting we should be “proud” of what is literally the worst acceptable voting system.

I took this with a fair bit of humor. I would have said that it's not the worst voting system because FPTP is worse, but then,

(Personally, I consider FPTP completely unacceptable and anti-democratic; it should not even be part of any discussion among serious people.)

So actually, you are right. Agree 100% here.

a proportional system would be better.

And here too.

This is awful. He was sentenced to four years but ended up serving five. One wonders if the false confession actually helped reduce the time at all in that case. (I don't doubt that he would have signed anyways, not after being deprived of food and water and being beaten for two days straight, but still... it's even worse if signing was pointless.)

Thank you! This is exactly why folks should comment and not just only downvote.

Those who actually read the article know that E.M. is a woman and the victim who is giving testimony (and whose full name can't be released pubicly), no connection at all to Musk aside from coincidentally sharing the same initials. But for illustration she might be named Ellen Marks, Eva Manns, Ellie Monet, etc.

Agree 100% - this was a non-ludicrous but entirely reasonable and well-reasoned response.

That being said I do think there's many good points made in the article. The Greens are doing better in Australia, while they hurt quite a bit here in Canada due to FPTP being in use. And it really hurts to see the NDP fall so much, which likely would not have occurred if Canada had the same system as Australia.

The linked article is a response to https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/preferential-voting-system-ousts-half-a-liberal-ministry-of-talent/news-story/7cd4e33e0a05e786a8c4943645c5525d?amp=&nk=d1a6519026cb614e2502f09a887f82c4-1747124133 and I think Canada makes the perfect case for that article being wrong - Canada actually has FPTP but the leader of Canada's CPC still lost his seat. If FPTP had been in play, perhaps all those Liberals would have still lost their seats, as folks started using strategic voting instead to ensure a Labour win (but also then hurting independents and other parties like the Greens) - which is exactly how it played out in Canada.

I must say that it's the rare case that I see an upvoted comment on the fediverse that, behind a veil of ignorance ( https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/veil-of-ignorance ), agrees with Israel-supporting Jewish biologist and professor Jerry A. Coyne on anything. ( As per https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/10/15/a-few-thoughts-on-the-war/ he also no longer finds a two-state solution viable. )

With that in mind I'm deeply troubled by one of the comments made in the comments section of the linked article.

Tuvi Todd
A "2-State Solution" would be a step backwards, where now there are already 3 states:
- a peace-loving Jewish State of Israel,
- a terror sponsoring PA "state" in the "West Bank", and
- a war criminal PA "state" in Gaza/

But this is completely wrong and bonkers. The middle comment is the most off, the West Bank is under Israeli military control and the nominal authority, the Palestine Authority, doesn't exercise any actual control over the territory (as it should be).

The third comment is also off, as neither Gaza or Hamas are independently recognized by any country as a state, and unlike the Palestine Authority lack status or any sort of recognition in the UN. (Also Hamas explicitly rejects the authority of the PA from what I understand, so calling it a PA state is also too much of a stretch.)

Only the first comment is accurate in terms of statehood - but I can't really agree with the peace-loving comment.

And, the last two should receive no international assistance, unless they end their support for
"The Palestinian Resistance" of murder, terrorism, and war crimes.

But the PA did - https://www.jfeed.com/news-israel/spzypn

{A} - The Jewish State of Israel targets only Islamic Jihadist militants in northern Gaza attacks, who
-2- Use schools, hospitals, cities, and civilians as human-shield, and thus {B} - Only Gaza's Islamic Jihadist militants are responsible for all the subsequent -2- Killings of over 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza attacks

I feel that this ignores a lot - in particular the recent news report of a hospital being mistakenly misidentified as hosting a hidden underground military base - because it got confused with a school that was next to the hospital that had some odd markings, https://news.sky.com/story/gaza-hospital-attack-analysis-contradicts-israels-evidence-justifying-airstrike-13367823

Or the concerns from Holocaust survivors such as Veronika Cohen about how the war is hurting innocent Gazan children, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/25/we-have-lost-our-humanity-holocaust-survivors-call-for-end-to-war-in-gaza

So a couple of thoughts here.

First of all, the page itself just correctly warns that orcas can't just be freed. It's not like we should go ahead and literally dump them into the ocean and abandon them. No one is advocating for this. Doing this generally with most types of animals still causes all kinds of problems (see for example https://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/07/23/snakehead.poison/index.html )

On the flip side, when a well prepared effort is launched, captive orcas have survived in the wild successfully. See https://killerwhales.fandom.com/wiki/Vasilievna for a good example - and this is what folks are pushing for.

Finally, I have some concerns about the source itself. From https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Environmental/_Literacy/_Council it seems that enviroliteracy.org is part of the George C. Marshall Institute.

In case you don't know much about that institute, here's the most important bits:

The George C. Marshall Institute (GMI) is a "non-profit" organization funded by the profits from oil and gas interests and right-wing funders (listed later). It has received substantial funding from Exxon's Exxon Education Foundation.
Its nominal creators, aside from Exxon-related entities and others, were William Nierenberg, Frederick Seitz and Robert Jastrow. This industry and right-wing front group

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=George%5C_C.%5C_Marshall%5C_Institute

The article doesn't really explain why though.

Captive-born dolphins have been successfully released into the wild before, see for example: https://www.thedodo.com/another-seaworld-myth-debunked-751539462.html

"Annessa, a captive-born Atlantic bottle-nose dolphin held at the Dolphin Research Center in the Florida Keys, disappeared and was feared lost during a hurricane in August, 1992. Annessa survived the hurricane, however, and was adopted by a pod of wild dolphins. She has been sighted numerous times - healthy and foraging on her own. One dolphin; Captive since birth; followup successful."

Edit: Oops https://whalescientists.com/captive-dolphins-release/ were still wild born. Replaced with a better example

They can be, albeit that it may require some serious $$$ to actually do it the right way, but it's been done before, the most famous example being https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/latest/blogs/story-keiko-first-captive-orca-returned-wild/

Edit: and for dolphins born in captivity, see https://www.thedodo.com/another-seaworld-myth-debunked-751539462.html

My solution to this is that I accept the other job offer, and I don't quit until the night before I start my first day in the new one. As a result I've never spent a single day unemployed. If something I'm counting on doesn't come through I'm already at my backup plan.

If companies won't be loyal to us in this way, why do we owe any loyalty to them in return?