Linkage

On the weekend of October 14-15, the state Labor government in New South Wales threatened to ban a pro-Palestinian protest in Sydney, on the grounds that it could result in incidents of violence and hate crimes. A demonstration opposing the bombardment of Gaza in Melbourne was also met by a massive police presence.

Actual Nazis, walking through Melbourne like stormtroopers and hunting for Jewish people, received a tiny fraction of the negative media coverage that the mass peaceful Palestinian protests did. This glaring disparity only underscores that the official campaign over anti-Semitism is a conscious fraud. The media is cynically using the accusation against people it knows are not hostile to Jews, while largely responding with indifference to those who are actual anti-Semites.

As governments across Australia urgently seek solutions to the housing crisis, a number of councillors, housing groups and urban planners have raised concerns we might be sacrificing living standards and at risk of creating new urban slums.

The Fairbnb Co-op, which began in Europe in 2014, soft-launched a Canadian platform on Wednesday. It doesn’t have any listings yet, but once a critical number of hosts have signed up, the platform will officially launch in South Georgian Bay, Ont.

In many ways, FairBnb serves an identical function to its namesake. But it will be different from Airbnb in two important ways.

First, hosts must prove that the property is their principal residence, cutting out the estimated 50 per cent of hosts on Airbnb who manage multiple listings. And 50 per cent of the platform’s service fees go into developing community land trusts (CLTs), which are non-profit corporations that own land and use it to benefit their communities.

Inside Airbnb is a mission driven project that provides data and advocacy about Airbnb's impact on residential communities.

We work towards a vision where communities are empowered with data and information to understand, decide and control the role of renting residential homes to tourists.

A surge in people being forced to live in bed and breakfasts and other temporary homes in England is costing the taxpayer £1.7bn a year, “shameful” council data analysed by the Local Government Association has revealed.

The worsening shortage of social housing and increasingly unaffordable private rents are among reasons councils are now paying for 104,000 households to live in temporary accommodation – more than at any time in the past 25 years.

[…] 

The LGA, the councils’ umbrella group, is demanding the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, use his coming autumn budget statement to increase housing benefit to make more private rented homes affordable to people on welfare, and to reform housing rules to allow councils to build more social housing.

“Council budgets are being squeezed and the chronic shortage of suitable housing across the country means that councils are increasingly having to turn to alternative options for accommodation at a significant cost,” said Darren Rodwell, the leader of the London borough of Barking and Dagenham and the LGA’s housing spokesperson. “Councils need to be given the powers and resources to build enough social homes for their residents so they can create a more prosperous place to live, with healthier and happier communities.”

It is practically first principles in the study of group identity that when we identify with a sports team, religious group, or political party, our self-esteem is bound up with that group. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt has famously shown, our group allegiances take on a deeply moral element. We naturally tend to associate our group and its values with moral goodness and our competition with moral depravity.

For Republicans (and Democrats), admitting that fascists and Nazis are on their side of the ideological spectrum—that they have any overlapping worldviews, values, or tactics with “us”—is a tribal psychology no-no. Fascists and Nazis, the exemplars of political evil, must share space with our partisan opponents. It works like a syllogism. Leftists are the bad guys. Fascists and Nazis are also bad guys. So fascists and Nazis are leftists.

Consider Republican governor and presidential hopeful Nikki Haley’s lament, posted on social media in June 2023, as she made a play for Trump supporters: “Do you remember when you were growing up…how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country.” The operative phrase here is “when you were growing up” — that is, when you were a child and therefore likely to be less aware of, or at least bothered by, disturbing news stories, complicated events, and hidden dangers. To claim that life itself is less simple and easy today is to confuse a life-cycle effect (what is true of people at a certain age) with a period effect (what is true of everyone at a certain point in history).

Although some people may think that intersex people are rare, they actually make up around 1.7% of the population, which is comparable to the number of people with red hair in the world. Many children are born with ambiguous genitalia, meaning that doctors are unable to identify their sex as either male or female. However, let’s get one thing clear: Sex is NOT binary.

[…] 

However, the ambiguity of intersex people’s sex leads to healthcare professionals operating on infants to adjust their sex in order for it to conform to either male or female sexual characteristics. Doctors are legally allowed – with the consent of the infant’s parents – to perform surgeries on children, stripping them of any kind of agency over their own bodies. These procedures can also cause serious problems such as infertility, pain, incontinence, and mental health issues.

Last month the government’s tender website, AusTender, published a contract between the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) and ShadowDragon Holdings, LLC. The contract runs for two years and is valued at $563,040.

ShadowDragon Holdings is an American company that sells software collecting “open source intelligence software, unique datasets and training” to organisations, including the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency as well as state police forces in New York and Michigan.

ShadowDragon’s products pull data from a range of public online platforms — reportedly more than “200 unique sources and datasets” — to make them searchable for its users.

The full list of places isn’t published but its promotional material lists places including Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, YouTube, X, Google, Amazon, Tumblr, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Reddit, 4Chan, Skype, Spotify, Twitch, Xbox network, PornHub, SoundCloud, Gab, Foursquare, Tripadvisor, Tinder, Etsy, PayPal, Flickr, Imgur, Disqus, eBay, GitHub, DeviantArt, Blogger, FetLife, BitChute, parenting forum BabyCenter, social network for Black people BlackPlanet and more. 

Many seniors rely on Centrelink for vital government services and payments. But recently, there has been growing concern over outrageously long wait times that seniors face when trying to contact Centrelink by phone or have their claims processed.

Despite Centrelink receiving fewer calls this year, the agency's performance in answering calls and processing claims has 'deteriorated'.

Only 60 per cent of calls are being answered within 15 minutes, with 9 million calls annually met with a voicemail asking callers to try again later due to high demand.