Zagorath @ Zagorath @aussie.zone

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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2 yr. ago

So, I just finished writing a rather lengthy comment about why you're so obviously wrong to say it's not about Gaza.

But I did also add that there are other equally valid possible interpretations because it's about applicability and metaphor, not direct allegory. Even so, I find your attempts here to compare it to China to be rather tenuous. The fact that the country produces "silk" and did a massacre is pretty much the only parallel. To me, the silk thing is more about adding to the obvious aesthetics of WWII French Resistance, with the silk thing tying in to France's famous connection to high fashion. I'd say the fact that Tiananmen Square was crushing an internal resistance, while on Ghorman, as well as in both WWII France and in Gaza it's outsiders seeking to invade and kill the locals, makes the Chinese connection especially weak.

They look pretty much the same in terms of skin tone. It’s not whites vs browns. They all just look Mediterranean

Who? Israel's dominant sociopolitical group are Ashkenazi. They're white. Pretending it's Mediterraneans vs Mediterraneans is playing into the Israeli lie that Jewish people are the true native people in Canaan and everyone else is an outside invader. When in reality some Jews are native to the area, just as the Palestinians are. But certainly not the 20th century neocolonial supremacist state of Israel.

You're misunderstanding the post. Yes, the reality of maths is that the integral is an operator. But the post talks about how "dx can be treated as an [operand]". And this is true, in many (but not all) circumstances.

∫(dy/dx)dx = ∫dy = y

Or the chain rule:

(dz/dy)(dy/dx) = dz/dx

In both of these cases, dx or dy behave like operands, since we can "cancel" them through division. This isn't rigorous maths, but it's a frequently-useful shorthand.

The operand is the target of an operator

Correct. Thus, dx is an operand. It's a thing by which you multiply the rest of the equation (or, in the case of dy/dx, by which you divide the dy).

The Ghorman Massacre was even in the new continuity as of (at least) the 2017 Rebels episode Secret Cargo.

And in Andor, the aesthetics were obviously drawing on the French Resistance in WWII.

But this doesn't mean the parallels to Israel and Gaza were not there. The "history repeats" aspect might be part of it, but because this was the first time the Ghorman Massacre was portrayed on screen in current canon, they had considerable leeway in how they told the story, what events framed it, and what parallels they were trying to draw.

There's a reason they chose to rewrite Mon Mothma's speech in the Senate from the one shown in Rebels, and that is that they wanted it to tell their message. They chose to frame it as a genocide that the overall population is wilfully ignoring. They chose to have disinformation campaigns coming from those in power which present the Ghormans not as the oppressed group of freedom fighters that they truly are, but as terrorists receiving aid from outside. They chose to show the Empire as willing to deliberately kill their own and have it blamed on the "terrorists". Heck, they chose to place it in a place specifically called, as @Objection@lemmy.ml notes, the Ghorman Plaza.

Still, even if it is directly informed by the Gaza genocide itself, it's obviously not meant to be a perfect allegory. It's meant to be broadly applicable to all sorts of freedom fighting against oppressive authoritarian states.

To quote the grandfather of the very genre in which Star Wars as a franchise sits:

I much prefer history – true or feigned – with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

La mort de l'auteur. The best literature can be applied to a wide variety of real-world situations, depending on what the audience's personal history is and which elements of the art they choose to concentrate on. So the Zionists look at the WWII French aesthetics and cling to that desperate to ignore the parallels to the crimes they themselves are complicit in. The most literate audience brings their own perspective, but also opens themselves up to hear other perspectives, and thus sees that there are multiple possible readings. The narrow-minded audience picks their interpretation and uses it as a reason to reject others.

I would argue that Andor as a show is really a political thriller and science-fiction. But the core movies and most of the animated shows are fantasy.

"operative" instead of, uh, something else

I think they meant "operand". As in, in the way dy/dx can sometimes be treated as a fraction and dx treated as a value.

Fake and gay.

No way the engineer corrects the mathematician for using j instead of i.

a school teacher is more likely to come from a wealthier, more conservative background

I couldn't find stats for Australia, but in America teachers are statistically more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, so I don't think this is supported.

It is also worth noting that, though I couldn't find anything on Australian educators' political leanings, teachers are one of the most highly unionised workforces in the country, and our centrist party (the one the media and many in the general public would call "centre-left", like your Democrats) has explicit ties to the union movement.

a school teacher is paid poverty wages

In Australia they're paid quite well. It doesn't scale as highly for the average teacher as it does in many other highly educated jobs, but the base salary is pretty good. There's the important caveat that teachers are largely expected to spend their own money on classroom supplies, though.

teachers are hired by administrators who are usually men, men who can have unaudited privilege

Teachers in Australia are hired by the department based largely on very impersonal factors like qualifications. There's not a huge amount of room, at the level of classroom teachers, for that kind of bias to have as much of an effect. What more personal decisionmaking does happen is done largely by principals, who are former teachers themselves. Because hiring is done at the department level, principles can get involved in decisions like who gets a job at which school, but the fact that they have a job at all is much more impersonal. The promotion and hiring of principles and other non-classroom positions may be a different question.

That said, I'm not disagreeing with your main point. It is a systemic failure. At a scale far larger than merely within schools.

Do they? Most cyclists I know do at least a bit of running.

Swimming though...even triathletes think swimmers are nuts.

More supply is part of what's needed, absolutely.

But there's more to it than just that. The amount of incentives to invest in housing means more people bidding on a house, which raises the price of the house, which makes housing an even better investment, so more people bid on the next house, which raises housing prices even further. We need to cut that off by strongly disincentivising the use of housing as people's primary investment.

There are other things that could be done, like a levy on unoccupied homes (including "holiday homes" which might be occupied only a few weeks or months per year) and on unregulated hotels (Airbnb). And better protections for renters. And preventing developers from land-banking or drip-feeding homes onto the market rather than building as much as they can.

Realistically, the housing market is so fucked, we need a mix of all of these.

not counting plugging in cars

fwiw you can get wireless car-mount docks.

Happy cake day, frend!

Mandatory military training makes sense in places like Finland, South Korea, and Taiwan. Places with neighbouring countries that are highly aggressive and believable threats. It makes no sense in Australia, thousands of kilometres away from the nearest potential threat and girt by sea surrounded by ocean. Where, if we did come under threat, the more highly specialised fields of the standing military (navy and air force, far more than army) will be a more relevant part of our protection than any conscripts with 18 months of training when they were 18 ever could.

Splitting lanes is not legal in the vast majority of the United States but idk where you’re from

Where I am it's explicitly allowed for motorbikes (at a maximum speed of 30 km/h), thanks to a relatively recent law change. Pushbikes are a different story. There's no law explicitly allowing it, and this has led to some people (even people in positions of perceived authority, such as the social media team of the Department of Transport and Main Roads) to suggest that it's not legal for bikes. But the reality is that it is legal, as a necessary side-effect of the fact that cars are allowed to overtake bikes without leaving the same lane. Basically, bikes are allowed to share a lane with another vehicle, and this has the effect of also allowing a bike to come up through congested traffic.

It’s very very rare for me to see a car blow through a red light outright

I find this rather hard to believe. First, remember that an amber light does not mean "be careful" or "get ready, you might have to stop soon". It means stop right now, if it's safe. How often have you seen drivers actually do that? I've had so many times where, as a driver, I saw the amber and found myself in that awkward position where I didn't know whether it was appropriate to keep going or to stop, and eventually decided to go through; a situation where it is obviously going to be the case that anyone behind me should stop, because I was on the borderline, so anyone behind me must be well over the other side of the line. And yet, so many times not only has the car behind me gone through, the car behind them did too. And that's before we even get into the daily cases where they don't even start to enter the intersection until after it has turned red. I've got a mate who rides a motorbike and posts helmet-cam footage on Facebook at least weekly, and every one of his compilations includes at least one case of a driver who runs a fully red light.

For cyclists, recall that there are some places in your own country that explicitly allow cyclists to go through a red light if it's safe. Not everywhere does (nowhere in Australia, to my knowledge), but those places that allow it do it for a reason. Evidence shows that it makes cyclists safer. Not all lawbreaking is equal, and the evidence pretty clearly tells us that when cyclists break the law, it tends to be for far better reasons than the reasons drivers break the law, even though the rate of lawbreaking is the same.

They’re motorized vehicles when its convenient to them and pedestrians when its not

Almost like...they're neither? What you describe here is perfectly legal.

They split lanes

Legal

blow through red lights

Imagine thinking cars don't 🤣

and they loooooove to go out in big groups

Not remotely against the rules

and take over the road

Please define. Because as someone who has spent many hours in a car, I've been prevented from going at the speed I would like to go by other cars far more than bikes. And my life has been put in danger by cars, not by bikes.

The simple fact is that data tells us cyclists and drivers break the law at roughly the same rate at worst. (Incidentally, one study from a place with better infrastructure shows that when good infrastructure is in place, cyclists break the law considerably less often than drivers.) Studies also show that cyclists break the law to keep themselves safe (this has been backed up by multiple studies). When drivers break the law, it's because they think it's more convenient not to bother.

The simple fact is that though @makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml claims it's cyclists being "dictators" and you claim they "take over the road", the reality is quite the reverse. When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. And no demographic in our society (excluding socioeconomic and racial discussions) is more privileged than drivers.

V5 was a mess? I'll admit I've only read through the rulebook and watched LA By Night, never actually played it. But I really, really like the system. It feels like it strikes a pretty great balance between an amount of detail that can give you meaningful character choices, while also being really elegant and intuitive to play with. The same thing that made 5e so successful for D&D.

Werewolves have never really interested me, so I never looked much at that. But I quite liked the idea behind Mage so I was looking forward to seeing what they'd do with it, both mechanically and in the metanarrative.

I can't speak for horses. I've only once in my life encountered people on horses while on a bike. It's an exceedingly unusual scenario.

I can tell you that, as a matter of fact (not anecdote), drivers and cyclists break the law at roughly the same rate. But that in crashes between cars and bikes, the car is the responsible party in 80% of cases. And that studies have established that when cyclists break the law, it is overwhelmingly done in the interest of their own safety, while drivers break the law in the interest of perceived convenience.

I only realised after writing the above that that you mentioned "trails". Sounds like you're talking about mountain biking. I can't speak to that, I'm almost exclusively a roadie, using the bike either as a means of transport or for exercise/training on the road. Saying "you" doesn't really work here. The amount of overlap between mountain bikers and road bikers is surprisingly small.

Yes. Cars are the bullies and the dictators. But as the famous saying goes, "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression". Drivers like @makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml are pretending that cyclists are the ones being "dictators", merely for existing, because they perceive that existence as a personal slight against them. Drivers feel entitled, and when that entitlement faces even the slightest pushback, they accuse the others of being dictators.

Would you like to try answering the questions?

I'm still waiting for an answer from @makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml.