Sternhammer

It my experience. I don’t normally catch the train but had cause to use the AirTrain and Redcliffe lines on Friday and Monday. Once the button lights up you can press it and the doors open automatically once the train stops.

I thought it was the Turkish they mostly celebrate for killing?

This phrase illustrates how profoundly you misinterpret these war memorials. These are not celebrations of killing, they are memorials to those who died, markers of grief not celebrations of conquest.

I live in a small village in Tasmania and I’m not aware of any war memorial however there is a grove of trees commemorating WW1 at the nearby Port Arthur Historic Site. I think this is interesting because Port Arthur is itself a memorial to a brutal, horrific past, a past that isn’t celebrated but remembered. The same site also contains a memorial garden that marks the deadliest mass shooting in modern Australian history, remembrance of a tragedy not a celebration of it.

What do you think? How should a community treat the memories of those who die in tragic events? Should they be forgotten or remembered? For that matter, do you think that wars should be forgotten or remembered?

“Those who ignore the lesson of the past, will be doomed to repeat it.”
George Santayana

This is known as optical alignment. It’s very common in font design.

This is an insightful observation.
I was raised Catholic as well, stopped going to Mass when I left home in my early 20s, and just never missed it. As a child I think I believed but as an adult religious belief seems completely unnecessary.
My son, who was raised an atheist, is now deeply religious—he’s a Benedictine monk (no, we didn’t see that coming!)—but even when visiting him religion seems like a lot of nonsense to me. (He’s happy and we accept his choice despite not sharing his beliefs.)

Some Australian cockroaches definitely fly but don’t seem to do it very often. They’re quite noisy when they fly—kind of like the propeller sound you make if you trill your tongue—and there’s nothing worse than hearing that sound suddenly stop very close to you. ‘Oh fuck! Have I got a cockroach on me?’ I hate them.

Still, the world’s most successful African American. /s

Yes, additive colour theory is based on red, green and blue (RGB). These are the colours you see if you look at your TV screen very closely.

Subtractive colour theory uses cyan, magenta and yellow. In printing black, abbreviated ‘K’, is added for contrast—CMYK. These are the inks used to print the dots you see if you look closely at a magazine photo.

I think people are confused by this because they’re taught a bastardised version of subtractive colour theory, using red, blue and yellow, at a very early age.

Good luck getting Optus, a communications company, to promptly and accurately communicate with its customers.

I could see this degeneration happing about 5 years back when our vice chancellor started calling herself ‘president’. They gave up on it after a few years but it’s very clear where their priorities lie.

Tower Bridge has its own website which has a little information about what’s inside (though it’s mostly trying to get you to do a tour).

Re: dickie for car boot (what Americans would call the ‘trunk’); some old two-seater cars had a third seat in the boot, known as a ‘dickie-seat’, at least in the UK, so perhaps it’s an old term that still survives in Indian English.

I wonder if doing the Moon Walk would get you burnt at the stake for witchcraft a few hundred years ago.

Some protestors I saw interviewed on TV wanted to abolish Australia Day entirely which doesn’t seem right to me. Many countries have a date that celebrates nationhood. Also, good luck convincing Australians to have one fewer public holidays.

How about we have a public holiday for ‘Arrival Day’ and another for ‘Survival Day’? Two public holidays are better than one.

Yay, the first Australian head of state!

I’m not a coffee drinker but my partner is. She says she had two decent cups of coffee in Italy (two weeks in Rome, Bolzano, and Venice) but every day in Australia she has better. Australians are complete coffee snobs.

I remember marching against this stupid war and naturally the Howard government ignored public sentiment in favour of boot licking.

It’s so embarrassing how Australian governments appear to be so obsequious to US administrations. Surely you’d earn more brownie points by holding out for a while than being first to tow the line.

Nah, your just use your increased intellect to get other people to push the button for themselves, increasing the pool of intelligent potential friends available to you.

Actually this reminds me of a story I read last year where two people are in a race to massively increase their intelligence. Neither can tolerate the potential threat the existence of another hyper-intelligent person holds so it’s a struggle to the death. If I remember correctly they gain there ability to effectively read people’s minds by reading body language, micro expressions, etc., develop new systems of logic and hyper-efficient language to think in and have an entirely mental showdown at the end.

Unfortunately I’m too stupid to remember the title.

Well said.

I’d also point out that dehumanising a subgroup is a powerful technique used to manipulate people. Tell people who to hate and you can get them to go along with anything while they’re focused on the scapegoats. Popular scapegoats include:

• immigrants (taking our jobs while, paradoxically, being a welfare burden)
• religious groups (Jews, Muslims, etc.)
• welfare recipients (dole bludgers, a burden on society)
• criminals (war on drugs, tough on crime)

Any time someone is demonising a group theres a good chance they’re just trying to manipulate you.

Indeed. As always when it comes to identity there’s a difference between how we see ourselves and reality.

There are several aspects of the Australian identity that look unflattering to modern eyes—gambling and drinking to excess come to mind. These things change slowly but they do change.

Incidentally I do think innovation is a valued aspect of the Australian identity.