Shane2me

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

Well, that was wild. I'm at the Australian Parliament and just left a meeting with two staffers for the governing party. They told us that the government needed more power to censor things like the upcoming US execution of Nidal Hasan.

When I asked why they needed to censor that video, one said it was to prevent copycat killings. Copycat killings by governments? I asked. Er, no, they said. Copycat killings like of a backpacker, several decades ago.

So, under that logic, I pointed out, the government should censor things like last year's Bondi massacre, where two Muslims killed 15 people, no? Well, that was news, they said. Didn't they realize their bill would allow the government to censor news? They didn't seem to know, or care.

They also admitted that they did not know that the bill would allow the government to create and operate an unlimited number of fake social media accounts to attack its political enemies and spread disinformation. Having presented them with information they had never heard about a bill they had clearly not read, they emphasized to us, strenuously, that they were moving forward with the bill.

So there you have it. The government wants the power to arbitrarily censor scenes of violent crime, or violence, for any reason. And it wants the power to use an unlimited number of fake accounts to wage offensive disinformational warfare against the Australian people.

Given that the Bondi massacre last year increased public opposition to mass migration, and support for the populist One Nation Party, it seems obvious that the government wants to censor such events in order to protect its political power.

It's quite telling how obediently governing party members insist such a law is needed without even knowing what's in it.

[Pauline Hanson 🇦🇺 @PaulineHansonOz]

Labor is copying the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship playbook.

China learned long ago that you don’t need to censor every citizen, you just need to create a culture of fear and make the platforms do it for you.

These tactics have been used by authoritarian regimes across the world to gag their political opponents time and time again.

The powers will make sure social media companies feel the only option is to over-censor.

The Minister and e-Safety Commissioner get open-ended power to classify anything as harmful.

Today that’s harm to children’s safety. But tomorrow these powers will be abused to censor complaints about immigration because they harm Labor’s version of “social cohesion”.

There are some issues on social media. But this can’t be an excuse to bring in a China-style censorship regime.

Social cohesion under Labor means sit down, shut up and don’t complain.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers wakes up everyday dreading the next social media post he makes because he knows he’ll be smashed by thousands of comments calling out Labor Lies.

Minister Wells complains that Australians don’t believe her after Labor’s Lies.

Senior public servants being paid more than the Prime Minister are complaining about their embarrassing answers being shared on social media.

This is a government that hates transparency and hates being accountable to the Australian public.

Labor hates Australians having the ability to voice their disagreement on social media.

After losing a safe Labor seat in the Secret Harbour by-election, the government is desperately trying to censor the internet to keep their jobs and their grip on power.

Labor knows they can’t win the debate, so they’re changing the rules and making social media companies gag you.

One Nation says no to Labor’s censorship power-grab. Australians have the right to have their say.

[Pauline Hanson 🇦🇺 @PaulineHansonOz]

Tasmania’s largest farm has been sold to a foreign corporation who will destroy it for “carbon credits”.

The sale was approved by Labor Treasurer Jim Chalmers today, Wednesday 8 July.

The loss of 22,000ha of productive, irrigated farmland currently supporting dairy, beef and previously sheep is a hammer blow to Tasmanian and Australian food security.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers said he believed the sale was “not contrary to the national interest”.

As if it isn’t bad enough it’s being sold to a foreign corporation, it won’t even continue on as a farming operation.

Chalmers and this Labor government have allowed their obsession with net-zero to put Australia’s food security at risk.

Our ability to feed ourselves is clearly in the national interest. Destroying productive farmland for scam “carbon credits” is an act of national self harm.

In the middle of a cost of living crisis, how much will this decision put up the price of cheese and milk? How much more expensive will steak or mince be when Australia stops producing it ourselves?

One Nation’s plan for cheaper groceries and national food security is clear. Ditch net-zero which is destroying productive farmland. Ban foreign ownership of farmland (and housing). Get Australian farmers back to farming and putting affordable groceries on the shelf.

One Nation has always opposed foreign ownership of farm land while Labor’s war against Australia’s world-leading agriculture sector continues. Australia is already a net importer of fresh food, seafood and dairy and this is only going to make matters worse.

Australia must be self-reliant and able to feed ourselves. Jim Chalmers and Anthony Albanese think we can eat solar panels and carbon credits.

This decision is a national disgrace.

[Max @minordissent]

This is a common perspective but it’s completely wrong. Executives are not stupid. The overwhelming majority of the time their IQ is much higher than the technical staff member who thinks they are retarded. It only appears otherwise because technical staff can rarely separate technical competence from intelligence, something most executives are bad at.

But more often than not, this is an intentional choice by the executive. The best execs used to be engineers, and usually the best ones. And they eventually decided to delegate and outsource their thinking on the technical details precisely because it is so easy to hire an engineer who can do that stuff (technical competence is a dime a dozen), while it is an order of magnitude harder to hire someone with good business acumen.

They want you to “treat them like a child” because spending 4 hours walking through the technical details is a genuine waste of their time. They do not care about perfect technical aptitude, thats what they hires you for, they care about time efficiency and information compression. They need you to spend 100 hours digging through all the details and then give them the 5 minute high level summary and 3 options so they can do the thing they are 10,000x better than you at: make good, risk adjusted decisions, quickly.

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

Social media feeds tell us to "read the classics!" and "dark academia" glorifies the aesthetics of old books.

But why should we read the great books?

Chesterton makes a powerful argument. On classic literature, he states: "it prevents a man from being merely modern."

Reading the greats exposes us to the full picture of truth, not just the popular ideas or slivers of truth that dominate culture at the given moment. We avoid becoming products of our time:

"To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness; just as to spend one's last earthly money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to the old-fashioned. The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns."

Even more, it inoculates us from dangerous half-truths, by exposing us instead to "the whole truth which humanity has found." Chesterton explains "half-truths" as follows:

"In the old world they were called heresies. In the modern world they are called fads. Sometimes they are for a time useful; sometimes they are wholly mischievous. But they always consist of undue concentration upon some one truth or half-truth."

"Whole truth" is instead found in the collective wisdom of the past, not the worldview of a single or select few authors.

And who is most vulnerable to fall for half-truths? Not people who don't read at all, but those who do read, but who don't read enough.

When supposedly "new" ideas or half-truths come knocking, you have to be ready to identify and expose them. Chesterton pointed out Nietzsche's apparently new concept of slave morality: the idea that ordinary altruistic morality was invented by a slave class to suppress the rise of superior individuals who would naturally rule over them.

We are only fully equipped to encounter such an idea if we've already read Shakespeare. 250 years before Nietzsche, Shakespeare penned Richard III, in which we read:

"Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe."
— King Richard; Act V, Scene 3

Shakespeare had indeed conceived of "slave morality" centuries before Nietzsche.

But, as Chesterton explained, "he weighed it at its proper value and put it in its proper place. Its proper place is the mouth of a half-insane hunchback on the eve of defeat."

The reason we read the classics, then, is so that we can put ideas in their proper place…

"What we call the new ideas are generally broken fragments of the old ideas. It was not that a particular notion did not enter Shakespeare's head; it is that it found a good many other notions waiting to knock the nonsense out of it."

[Shane2me @shane2me88]

@discernableco The shipping industry has been cying out for a strategic fleet for decades. It was on the agenda when Albanese was transport minister. This isn't a new concern, and the coalition is as culpable as the current labor government for the fact that nothing has been done about it.

[Shane2me @shane2me88]

@SteveWater0001 @BaptainCaptain @ProudofusUK Crecy was in 1346, but yes, another victory for the English 💪

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

>be Bill Gates
>made billions selling software
>watched documentaries about African poverty
>felt a feeling
>decided that what subsistence farmers in Ethiopia really needed was not land rights, clean water, or functioning markets, but your input
>traditional livestock agriculture has fed and clothed these communities for 8,000 years
>the cattle are currency, dowry, social infrastructure, and food security all at once
>none of that matters because you've done a spreadsheet
>begin funding synthetic protein startups to 'transition' African herders away from their animals
>explain that methane is the real problem here
>the herders, who have managed land regeneratively for millennia without being asked, are politely confused
>fly home on private jet
>write op-ed about saving the planet

The audacity required to look at a Maasai elder standing with his cattle on land his family has stewarded for generations and think: 'I know what this situation needs. Me.'

Staggering. Genuinely staggering.

[𝐍𝐢𝐨𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠 🇮🇷 ✡︎ @NiohBerg]

Dear @elonmusk,

Can you please make a change to X that forces public elected officials to open their replies?

Nobody should hold public office while hiding from the public like this.

It would be much appreciated.

Cheers 🙏🏻

[Shane2me @shane2me88]

@WellBuiltStyle I have a longer torso and shorter legs, and I can say that getting pants taken up has been the best fashion spend I've made.

I just make sure that when they get taken up that the taper remains the same, otherwise the pants look too wide at the ankle.

[Shane2me @shane2me88]

@WellBuiltStyle @SahilBloom calls this "playing a 'losers' game". Until you're at the very elite levels of your chosen endevour, tennis for example, you will make the most progress not by hitting winners, but by eliminating losers.

[Shane2me @shane2me88]

@_onlyones Gm Happy Birthday!

[Shane2me @shane2me88]

@_onlyones Whoever that hilarious, handsome and humble anon is, I hope they win 👍

[Shane2me @shane2me88]

@WellBuiltStyle I like nice watches, but also like to track fitness. How would you pair the two?

I don't like smartwaches, so I go for a wrist-based fitness tracker on my right and a watch on my left.

Would a fitness ring (oura) be more stylish?

[fixtheworld 🇦🇺⚡🍖 @f1xtheworld]

i’m voting for @LibertariansAus

[Shane2me @shane2me88]

@MaNiCArt_ @6529Collections Is voting now closed? I can't seem to follow the link, and can't find anything on 6259's site?

All the best, your work is fantastic 👍

[Shane2me @shane2me88]

@SaveYourSons GPT

[Inevitable West @Inevitablewest]

🚨BREAKING: Apple surrenders to the Labour government and removes highest level data security tool for Apple users

The government now has access to its citizens messages and camera roll.

This is the biggest breach of privacy Western civilisation has ever seen.

Britain is in big trouble.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

If you weren’t sure who the Deep State were, they all got pardoned today.

[Shane2me @shane2me88]

@TheCustomerGuy It's nice the bots are taking an interest 🤣