Linkage

In any big trial that attracts public interest, a defendant can hope to draw on public sympathy. Except in this case.

In 2024 the social licence of the big supermarkets is utterly broken — their reputations befouled, their brands synonymous with impersonal corporate rapacity. This is an awful time for them to be attempting to mount a defence to a major charge.

[…]

I’m going to share a quote from Chief Justice of the High Court Stephen Gageler, one of Australia’s senior jurists, that ACCC boss Cass-Gottlieb recently highlighted in a speech. It talks about the definition of “unconscionable conduct” and points out that what is unconscionable must depend on society’s values.

“For a court to pronounce conduct unconscionable is for the court to denounce that conduct as offensive to conscience informed by a sense of what is right and proper according to values that can be recognised by the courts to prevail with contemporary Australian society,” she quoted him.

Contemporary Australian society is not interested in giving the supermarkets an easy pass. In this case a tiny fine will not satisfy the public. The customers of Woolworths and Coles include Australia’s most vulnerable people.

It's also worth remembering that supermarket employees include Australia's most vulnerable people.

It clears up a lot of confusion when you understand that the US empire is not a national government which happens to run nonstop military operations, it’s a nonstop military operation that happens to run a national government.

The wars are not designed to serve the interests of the United States, the United States is designed to serve the interests of the wars. The US as a country is just a source of funding, personnel, resources and diplomatic cover for a nonstop campaign to dominate the planet with mass military violence and the threat thereof.

This campaign is not waged to benefit the American people or their security, but to benefit the loose international alliance of plutocrats and unelected empire managers whose wealth and power are premised on the world order of continuous violence, exploitation and extraction which the campaign of global domination upholds. This campaign of global domination and its manifestations as a whole may be referred to as the US empire, which has very little in common with the US as an individual nation.

Until you understand this, nothing the US government or the US war machine does will make sense.

This isn't earth-shatteringly important. Just kind of sweet.

I had become resigned to living the rest of my life as if it belonged to someone I emailed with a few times but never actually met, but then came an unexpected 12-month span that turned everything around. My son had graduated from college and my daughter had just started, so they had clearly moved on with their lives. I discovered home movies of my biological dad, who had died before I was born so I’d never seen anything but some photos of him. I turned 60. And there was a pandemic, which brought with it endless hours of isolation and contemplation.

[…]

Once you’re past 60, your internal “fuck counter” hits zero, so I have none left to give. I don’t have time to waste worrying about what others think of me. I only have time to let others see that it’s never too late to be who you’ve always wanted to be.

It’s taken so long for me to find my path, but now that I have, walking along it appears to suit me. Recently, I had drinks with some friends I hadn’t seen for a while. After a couple of minutes, one of them stared at me, waving her hands in my direction, and said, “This just feels right.” That was a phrase I honestly never thought I’d hear.

In retrospect, the most honest and accurate rendering of Biden’s policy was found in his remarks to donors last December, in which he assured them that, while his administration would continue seeking to build a broader regional security architecture, “we’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel in the process. Not a single thing.” If he was willing to constrain Israel at all, it was mainly in preventing the war from spreading beyond Gaza. This was perhaps his true and only red line for many months. Israel would be free to turn Gaza into a killing field, provided it didn’t escalate regionally. Yet today, Netanyahu is rolling over that red line too in Lebanon, and possibly soon in Iran, to the exultation of all of those who have been most stupendously and consistently wrong about the region over the past 20 years.

And why shouldn’t he? By taking the option of suspending military aid off the table, Biden signaled from the outset that his red lines were meaningless. 

[…]

The story that is now being crafted through friendly journalists is that Biden tried his best but his effort to bring the war to an end was ultimately frustrated by Netanyahu’s shenanigans. But Biden wasn’t hoodwinked by Netanyahu any more than he was by George W. Bush when he chose to back the Iraq War. He chose this path, and stayed on it despite constant warnings of exactly where it was leading. Having done so, when he exits the White House, he and his team will leave this world a more dangerous and lawless place, America’s credibility more broken, the so-called “rules-based order” even more “so-called” than when he entered. 

“The costs of these new rules of war” that Biden has co-authored in Gaza, wrote Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, “will be paid with the blood of civilians worldwide for generations to come, and the U.S. responsibility for enabling, defending, and normalizing these new rules, and their horrific, dehumanizing consequences will not be forgotten.”

This is why I find the "attacking LGBTQ people is a vote loser," arguments no consolation. There are six good (i.e. bad) reasons why fascists do it, and winning votes is only one of them:

This report explores the connection between two escalating crises: the systematic targeting of LGBTQ communities and democratic backsliding worldwide.

It examines how the rhetorical, political, and physical attacks targeting the LGBTQ community are, in addition to a critical rights issue, a key tactic in the authoritarian playbook, cloaking themselves as culture war politics as usual. 

[…]

It outlines six goals of LGBTQ scapegoating: 

• Stigmatize: By censoring discussions and depictions of marginalized groups, perpetrators further stigmatize them, reinforcing their status as scapegoats.

• Mobilize a Base: Turning LGBTQ communities into a common enemy energizes and consolidates political support among certain factions.

• Win Elections: Exploiting fears related to the scapegoat helps gain electoral support and secure victories in political contests.

• Polarize: Manufacturing controversies along fault lines unifies authoritarian movements and sows divisions within a political opposition.

• Distract: Inflaming fear, disgust, and anger at scapegoats diverts attention from critical issues, government failures, or unpopular policies.

• Normalize Political Violence: Targeting LGBTQ individuals through intimidation, violence, and militia activities desensitizes the public to violence against this group and society at large.

Today both researchers and policy-makers agree that refugees admitted to the European Union constitute a net cost and fiscal burden for the receiving societies. As is often claimed, there is a trade-off between refugee migration and the fiscal sustainability of the welfare state. In this lecture, Peo Hansen shows that this consensual cost-perspective on migration is built on a flawed economic conception of the orthodox “sound finance” doctrine. By shifting perspective to examine migration through the macroeconomic lens offered by Modern Monetary Theory, Hansen is able to demonstrate sound finance’s detrimental impact on migration policy and research. Most importantly, this undertaking offers the tools with which both migration research and migration policy could be modernized and put on a realistic footing. Empirically, the lecture brings these tools to bear on the case of Sweden, the country that, proportionally speaking, has received the most refugees in the EU over the years while also having one of the most comprehensive welfare states in the EU.

This is genius:

Academic publishers claim that they add value to scholarly communications by coordinating reviews and contributing and enhancing text during publication. These contributions come at a considerable cost: US academic libraries paid ($1.7) billion for serial subscriptions in 2008 alone. Library budgets, in contrast, are flat and not able to keep pace with serial price inflation. We have investigated the publishers’ value proposition by conducting a comparative study of pre-print papers from two distinct science, technology, and medicine corpora and their final published counterparts. This comparison had two working assumptions: (1) If the publishers’ argument is valid, the text of a pre-print paper should vary measurably from its corresponding final published version, and (2) by applying standard similarity measures, we should be able to detect and quantify such differences. Our analysis revealed that the text contents of the scientific papers generally changed very little from their pre-print to final published versions. These findings contribute empirical indicators to discussions of the added value of commercial publishers and therefore should influence libraries’ economic decisions regarding access to scholarly publications.

The Consumer Guarantees (Right to Repair) Amendment Bill now before parliament offers some hope. It builds on the Ministry for the Environment’s 2021 consultation document, “Taking responsibility for our waste”.

The bill seeks to force manufacturers to provide spare parts, repair information, software and tools to consumers for a reasonable period after the sale of goods. But there is still too much doubt about how long those goods and parts should last in the first place.

To give manufacturers and consumers more certainty, establishing minimum product lifespans is essential. This would be defined as the period for which a product can perform its intended function effectively.

Repairs can extend this functional lifespan. So it is also important to factor in a “repairability period” when products can be repaired at the consumer’s expense, beyond the manufacturer’s implied or expressed guarantee. Spare parts, repair information and necessary tools must be made available.

[…]

Planned obsolescence can involve integrating components that are likely to fail sooner than the product itself, withholding spare parts, or requiring prohibitive information and proprietary tools for repairs.

Ultimately, it is about maximising profitability, and extends from smartphones and appliances to automobiles and farm machinery. It fosters a throwaway culture, adding to the strain on waste systems and landfills.

For well over a century, radicals have debated whether systemic change might come through reform or revolution. Strategists — particularly within the socialist tradition — have disagreed on whether gradual steps might incrementally bring about a new society, or whether a sharp break with the existing political and economic order is required.

During the New Left of the 1960s, Austrian-French theorist André Gorz attempted to move beyond this binary and present another option. Gorz proposed that through the use of “non-reformist reforms,” social movements could both make immediate gains and build strength for a wider struggle, eventually culminating in revolutionary change. A certain type of reform, in other words, could herald greater transformations to come.

The Australian Inequality Index is a ground-breaking new tool that provides a multidimensional measure of inequality across a range of economic, social, and demographic indicators. By tracking changes in inequality over time, we hope to enable a richer, more nuanced understanding of the root causes of inequality and develop targeted solutions to address them.

The over-reliance of economists and policy makers on traditional measures of progress, such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or Gross National Income (GNI), is understandable: it has been the dominant measure of economic progress for the better part of a century. Yet there is a shift afoot, with many policy thinkers and leaders now acknowledging its limitations as a tool to measure genuine social progress.

This shift can be seen in the rise of movements advocating the implementation of wellbeing budgets as a core part of government policy processes. That the Australian Federal Government has recently embraced the wellbeing framework underscores the utility and timeliness of our Index.

The Index provides seven conceptually sound, easy to follow sub-indices, and a composite index that brings these seven dimensions together. The sub-indices provide a useful set of insights into progress achieved within each of the chosen dimensions: income, wealth, gender, generation, ethnicity, disability and First Nations.