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:
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.
I was replying to Tekila’s comment about ‘real life’ cows which I think are best thought of as ‘sentient’ but I appreciate your point.
Sentient: able to perceive or feel things.
Sapient: 1. wise or wanting to appear wise 2. relating to the human species, of the species Homo sapiens.
I think players are desensitised to unnatural dialogue. For example, to my Western ear lots of Asian games seem to have weird dialogue, no doubt due to poor translation. (Kojima is known to insist his dialogue be translated strictly and literally from the Japanese which explains, partially, why his games feel pretty strange. Plus Kojima is bonkers.)
I re-read the trilogy and progressed through them at a good pace but got bogged down on the later books (which I haven’t read before). I think the writing shows its age and are a little longwinded at times.
Groundbreaking story in concept and scope, that hasn’t changed for me.