Linkage

Well, that's Australia. Punching above our weight in punching down, while simultaneously a world leader in shooting ourselves in the foot.

A commentator here drew my attention last night to a new policy paper from the Restore Britain group that has been launched by former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, who now sits as an independent MP for Great Yarmouth in the House of Commons, and who, this weekend, launched his own political party.

That party is called Restore Britain, and sits further to the right than any other likely to attract media attention in the UK at present.

Entitled Mass Deportations: Legitimacy, Legality, and Logistics, this paper claims that the UK could remove every undocumented migrant now living in the country within a few years through sweeping legal change, administrative expansion, and a deliberately hostile environment designed to force voluntary departures. 

[…]

In short, it would be one of the largest state economic programmes in modern British history, put together with the deliberate intention of pursuing hate whilst imposing threats, fear, intimidation, incarceration and violent relocation on many hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions of people.

The supposed numbers involved are staggering. The suggestion is that up to 2 million people might be forced from the UK within three years. About 75% half of those would supposedly leave voluntarily due to the hostile environment the policy would create. That environment would undoubtedly target all migrants, regardless of their legal status. It would be totally foolish to think otherwise. The remainder, the report suggests, would be forcibly removed. Official estimates do not suggest that anything like that number of people are illegally resident in the UK.

[…]

We are often told that the state is powerless. That includes the claim that it is powerless to house people, powerless to fund social security, and powerless to invest in care.

This paper implies something quite differently. The implication is that the state is immensely powerful. The suggestion is that it is capable of tracking, detaining, transporting, and expelling millions. The contradiction is obvious, but it exposes something deeper.

The choice revealed is whether the state wants to do things that are good, to which the answer from the current political establishment is that, apparently, and for reasons that are not clear, it does not, or something straightforwardly evil, which is what this paper proposes, of which it is apparently thought to be capable.

The question is not, then, about whether the state has power. The question is about how that power is used, and to what ends.

Mark Aitken, a registered nurse for 39 years who spent 16 years in aged care roles including assessing elderly people for support and funding, said he quit his job in regional Victoria just four months into using the tool.

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“Eight times out of 10, the outcome was different to one that I would have recommended, or my colleagues would have recommended,” Aitken said.

It follows previous controversies over automated decision-making tools being used by the government, including the robodebt welfare scandal, and concerns about algorithm-driven disability funding through the NDIS.

The IAT user guide does not explain how the algorithm weighs risk, need or complexity, and Aitken said this information was never revealed to assessors.

When he asked at a government seminar about the evaluation framework, including what data was being collected, how accuracy would be assessed, and whether results would be publicly reported, he said he felt “shut down”.

“I left my job because I didn’t want to be part of a system that removed the ultimate decision-making about support from real, experienced people who care,” he said.

“The government valued the algorithm more than people with skills, intelligence and knowledge.”

He said some assessors began “gaming” the system, inputting information they knew would generate the level of care the person needed even if that information did not accurately reflect their situation.

“People shouldn’t have to put in fake information,” Aitken said. “I just started to feel like it was going to be another robodebt, I became very uncomfortable, and just felt the tool wasn’t ethical.”

In evidence this morning the judge overseeing the case, Justice Michael O'Bryan, asked Coles to explain what it was telling customers with its prominent marketing campaign, featuring giant red hands pointing down.

"It's really asking a bigger question about what ordinary consumers understand about the Down Down program," Justice O'Bryan said.

In response, legal counsel for Coles John Sheahan KC said: "In terms of what consumers would take from the advertising campaigns and the red hand — not much."

"It's an indication that Coles is trying to keep prices low," he said.

[…]

Mr Sheahan said the ACCC case was too complicated because it relied on an assumption that the average shopper understood the many factors that went into deciding a price while they were browsing the aisles.

"It's too complex to credibly attribute to an ordinary, reasonable consumer walking down the aisle at Coles," he said.

"What they would be concerned [about] when they're walking down the aisle … is whether the claimed discount was, to use of the expression yesterday 'fair dinkum.'"

[…]

"In the end, all prices are temporary. Nothing lasts forever," Mr Sheahan said.

He said both sides accepted that the pricing tickets customers were shown in store were "literally correct".

Mr Sheahan repeated Coles's defence that it also reflected a genuine discount.

If Coles added background information about the price history to the ticket it would be too difficult to understand, he said.

There's video of Roberts saying all this, if anybody needs an emetic:

"But where there continues to be disagreement is on what you do with adults. At Heritage, we believe that so-called transgender surgery is bad for anybody because of what you saw in Rhode Island yesterday," said Roberts, referencing a domestic violence shooting at a Rhode Island ice rink the day before. "There does seem to be a mounting body of evidence that suggests a correlation between that surgery at any age, mental health issues, and increasingly, although we're running the numbers on this at Heritage, acts of violence. We have to come to grips with that as a society, in a way that transcends left versus right, because this really is about the human condition." "How do you address this, though?" replied host Patrick Bet-David. "You outlaw it," Roberts responded.

Then, when asked if transgender adults should have their medication taken away, Roberts endorsed the idea, stating, "We like that idea, too. One of the reasons is that we not only work in coalitions, but we often work toward an ultimate goal via incremental steps—sometimes people will call us radical incrementalists. We're willing to take a quarter of the enchilada if we can keep working there. So if that's the kind of thing that policymakers can agree on left and right, Heritage would be fully supportive of that, knowing that ultimately we have an ideal position that would be much stronger than that."

[…]

One thing is clear: gender-affirming care bans have never been about science, despite attempts by far-right organizations to launder their lobbying efforts through pseudoscientific hate groups and overseas "reviews." Rather, it’s always been about hate. That much is made clear by the openly-stated agenda of a billionaire-funded political machine that has always been working towards one goal: the elimination of transgender people from public life. The only thing that has changed is that they are now saying it out loud.

Remember when Roberts voiced support for self-avowed Nazi Nick Fuentes and the respectable mainstream media cried with one voice "He's gone too far! This is the beginning of the end of the MAGA coalition!"?

Nope. They're only getting louder and more brazen.

The real gender ideologues at work:

Aiv Puglielli, the Greens’ equality spokesperson, on Wednesday moved a motion calling on the upper house’s legal and social issues committee to investigate the scale of such crimes, as well as the state’s current response and support available to victims.

It follows what Puglielli described as a “disturbing” and “terrifying” series of attacks targeting gay and bisexual men across several states and territories since 2024. In some instances, videos of the attacks have been recorded and posted on social media.

As of October 2024, 35 people had been arrested in relation to such incidents, Victoria police confirmed in a statement to Guardian Australia.

Police said the alleged offenders – most aged between 13 and 20 – had used fake profiles on dating apps to lure their victims.

“The victims are then allegedly assaulted, robbed, threatened and subjected to homophobic comments,” a police spokesperson said.

[…]

During the June 2025 sentencing of a 19-year-old Victorian man who met and assaulted two people after speaking to them on the gay dating app Grindr, the court heard he admitted to police he had been inspired by vigilante-style videos he had seen on TikTok.

Puglielli said the inquiry would examine how influencers sharing far-right, misogynistic and homophobic “alpha male” content operate online, and how to protect young people from their messaging.

He alleged some perpetrators, often very young men, had been “groomed and radicalised by far-right manosphere influencers”.

I was at a United Nations treaty negotiation in Ottawa, Ontario, and an industry group had set up a nearby showcase. On display was a case of Heinz baked beans, packaged in “39% recycled plastic*.” (The asterisk took me down an online rabbit hole about certification and circularity. Heinz didn’t respond to my questions.)

This, too, was part of an old trial. The beans were expired.

Pyrolysis is a “fairy tale,” I heard from Neil Tangri, the science and policy director at the environmental justice network Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. He said he’s been hearing pyrolysis claims since the ’90s but has yet to see proof it works as promised.

“If anyone has cracked the code for a large-scale, efficient and profitable way to turn plastic into plastic,” he said, “every reporter in the world” would get a tour.

If I did get a tour, I wondered, would I even see all of that stubborn, dirty plastic they were supposedly recycling?

The industry’s marketing implied we could soon toss sandwich bags and string cheese wrappers into curbside recycling bins, where they would be diverted to pyrolysis plants. But I grew skeptical as I watched a webinar for ExxonMobil’s pyrolysis-based technology, the kind used to make the fruit cup. The company showed photos of plastic packaging and oil field equipment as examples of its starting material but then mentioned something that made me sit up straight: It was using pre-consumer plastic to “give consistency” to the waste stream.

Chemical plants need consistency, so it’s easier to use plastic that hasn’t been gunked up by consumer use, Jenkins explained.

But plastic waste that had never been touched by consumers, such as industrial scrap found at the edges of factory molds, could easily be recycled the old-fashioned way. Didn’t that negate the need for this more polluting, less efficient process?

Dannie Dai, lead author of the report, said the hope is that the study "will help policymakers understand how gender-affirming surgery is being used by both cisgender and TGD people," as "health policy should be driven by facts" rather than partisan or religious views on sex and gender.

“Our findings highlight a bitter irony: that by banning gender-affirming care for only TGD people, these bills are targeting a group that in reality accounts for the minority of gender-affirming care use and for whom gender-affirming care has been most clearly shown to be lifesaving," Dai said. 

This is an interesting overview, though obviously quite dated:

The fetal brain develops during the intrauterine period in the male direction through a direct action of testosterone on the developing nerve cells, or in the female direction through the absence of this hormone surge. In this way, our gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender) and sexual orientation are programmed or organized into our brain structures when we are still in the womb. However, since sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy and sexual differentiation of the brain starts in the second half of pregnancy, these two processes can be influenced independently, which may result in extreme cases in trans-sexuality. This also means that in the event of ambiguous sex at birth, the degree of masculinization of the genitals may not reflect the degree of masculinization of the brain. There is no indication that social environment after birth has an effect on gender identity or sexual orientation. 

This is so, so important to read in full. For me to be told that a critically important part of my identity is reducible to my sexuality — an embarrassingly marginal part of my life — is not merely insulting but ridiculous. To tell children that not merely what they have, but what they are, is a fetish and that therefore they are for all practical purposes not allowed to even discuss it until they turn eighteen is murderous cruelty. Post-egg-crack, I don't know what I would have done if I'd not been able to establish friendships online with other trans women my age who had similar life trajectories.

Queer identity is one of being born into a secret society that you as a member have to discover as rite of induction. If you fail, misery tends to visit you again and again, without having a good explanation for it, dissatisfaction, and shame from an unknown source.

In this light, the push to #AgeVerification for social media and internet access is especially awful. With "queer" being equated to sex stuff exclusively, queerness is effectively banned in the era of life where teens are supposed to discover love, and have first, clumsy experiences. But while the cishets generally experience queerness from porn and get their fingers sticky to what they view as fetish, it is so much more. Especially for trans kids, research on who and what they are is postponed to a time when devastating damage is already taking place, and a lot of it in fact irreversible, or a huge effort and cost to correct.