You make a good point that law shouldn't be applied based off belief.
However, and I'm not saying this in regard to your point but as an independent sidenote, we must remember that Sewer isn't just someone who believes things, they lead a violent cult. They've been repeatedly convicted of affray and violent disorder among other things. Neo-Nazism isn't some abstract harmless idea, and given their context, these threats are not the same as if you or I performed them.
Whether or not you meant it, your post is quite poetic. A tragedy in two lines, or perhaps a koan, the irony of their true inactivity screaming out to them in vain.
Do you know if anyone's tried to contact the person running all those accounts? Their Lemmy accounts would be flooded with post replies so I doubt the owner even looks at them. I don't have a microblog account so let's see if this ping works:
@Dwazoup@mastodon.social, hello! I'd like to hear your point of view on these posts :)
I think the video is a bit mistitled since it's a single house inspection but it's a solid glance in to the trends of current properties.
(The real welcome to our property nightmare IMO would be looking through Site Inspection's videos and seeing million dollar homes with balcony supports made of styrofoam, mold bait windows, exposed screws and floating supports.)
As they mentioned, the Eureka flag has long been associated with the labour movement here. Some of the Rail Tram Bus Union comrades have it printed on their jacket's arm, CMFEU fly it next to their union flag on sites, and I've seen it flown consistently at Gaza rallies by union socialists (including sometimes a red variant similar to my profile image).
Props to the few who did stand up to them, who are highlighted in the video.
Thanks for the detailed reply.
It doesn’t suggest that speculative vacancies are a driver of the housing crisis in Australia.
I was quoting that to explain that speculative vacancy can be a valid, highly profitable strategy for investors. That quote alone isn't evidence, yes.
An investor reluctant to “shell out” for upkeep and maintenance is exactly the type of investor that needs the regular rent income to help cover the other costs of ownership like rates, body corporate, interest, et cetera.
I don't understand how this can be assumed. Investors wanting to reduce cost and risk doesn't imply they need regular income. Rich investment funds would have the same incentive to do that, right?
They do however demonstrate that vacancy is not the cause of the current housing crisis.
Yes, it's not going to be the cause. There isn't going to be a single cause, like you said it isn't even the only cause of mass vacancy. In fact, given it's used as a long-term investment strategy, I suspect that this is a long-term factor that enabled or accelerated the crisis, rather than being an immediate catalyst that suddenly happened a few years ago.
Results were wildly different in different rallies. For example, in Sydney, the crowd was about 50:50 on boos and cheers for the neo-Nazi speaker. This is very different to Adelaide where the organisers rightfully (albeit far too late) tried to deplatform the NSN once they took to the stage and spewed their garbage, leading to a fight and the end of the event.
I believe it was only the Sydney one that let one of them speak
They owned the only microphone being used at the Townsville rally and they owned the podium used in the Melbourne rally with widely-used footage of Sewer speaking there. So you have to be pretty out of the loop if you honestly believe that.
Just because some bad people try to co-opt something it doesn’t mean that they were bad people protests. The overwhelming majority of people there were there for the stated reasons, none of which were racist or “neo nazi”.
We can't generalise everyone, you're right that a majority probably wouldn't have supported neo-Nazis, many in larger rallies may not have seen them there before they took the stage, and plenty of attendees I wouldn't consider to be racists, even if they're expressing or supporting racist rhetoric. But this doesn't change the fact that most of them attended a racist rally and should understand that and learn for next time this nationalist cover is tried.
It was co-opted before 99% of the people going there even heard of it. It was well-publicised in advance that many organisers were known neo-Nazis and white supremacists. The official promotions kept posting racist rhetoric about Indians, framing European immigration as acceptable. At the end of the day, it was largely a neo-Nazi attempt to appeal to broader nationalists, with some, limited, success. There were plenty of cheers among the boos during their speeches. "The overwhelming majority" didn't fuck off or fight back once literal Nazis took the stage, and in most cases, kept the stage for the whole speech.
The anti-immigration rhetoric, that the housing crisis is caused or heavily impacted by immigration, is a racist deflection of real economic issues. I'm not suggesting that people repeating the argument are racists, or even that they realise it's a racist argument. It's a very normalised argument and once even promoted by Labor politicians and mass media. But that doesn't change the fact that it's racism being used to deflect the housing crisis, the education crisis, the hospital crisis and more away from the government and the owning class. Stopping migration won't even begin to solve those issues.
There were exceptions to the rule, but taken as a whole, the organisers of the Australia ones were neo-Nazis and related cryptofascists. This was well-known in advance.
The Melbourne rally literally used Thomas Sewell's own podium that you can see in their own NSN videos.
The Townsville rally used the NSN's branded megaphone, Katter says there was no other one there.
The Sydney organiser, Bec Freedom, is a white nationalist with strong links to the NSN. Before the rally, it was well-publicised that they were a white nationalist in conversations with neo-Nazis. 1+1.
“There’s a lot of people trying to claim the rally as their own and turn it into a unity march,” Freedom said. “I understand why some people are saying it’s not about race. Though people like that … they’re scared. But if we break it down, this is how I tried to explain it to somebody. I said, OK, so protect Australian heritage, culture, way of life. Next step, protect European culture, heritage, way of life. The next step is protect white heritage."
'Auspill', one of the earliest and central promoters has strong known links to the NSN and creates memes supporting esoteric Nazism concepts like Hyperborea. In a word, Auspill is a Nazi.
The main March for Australia website originally had and then redacted a call for the neo-Nazi wolf-whistle of 'remigration', you can see this in archived copies of the website and it was widely reported. The rally Facebook page consistently and repeatedly advocated for including the NSN at the march and downplayed them.
I haven't tried any Piefeds or mbins. My impression is similar to yours: interpreted language and "no fancy design patterns" gives me the idea it's probably great for quickly prototyping new features like categories and moderation tools, possibly at the cost of performance. If you're looking at hosting, maybe reach out to a few piefed admins, ask what they think about it and if/when they tried Lemmy for a comparison.
The great thing about the Fediverse is afaik you can test other instances and even other softwares while still getting access to the same communities and posts.
None of them except the first paragraph are false, and even that one could be true if it were qualified instead of generalised.
They have biases, they might suggest and emphasise parts inappropriately, but the fact is this event, or rather these events were more complex than most articles or comment sections said.
Even some of my earlier comments were affected by missing information, generalisation and a bit of shock. For example, after having talked to a few different (socialist) people who were present visiting the racist rallies in Sydney, they pointed out that:
Now, this does not change that it was well-known and well-publicised in advance that neo-Nazi organisations would be present, that they were involved in the organisation of many of the events and the main website.
It does not change that the protests themselves were based upon racist deflectionary arguments, including ones made by Labor members. This doesn't mean all marchers are inherently racist, or that they were aware of the racism, but they're repeating and supporting racist claims that immigration is to blame for various crises, or that some cultures (read: non-white cultures) are a major problem while others aren't.
It does not change that a large amount of attendees were openly white nationalists, and that a large amount of attendees were knowingly tolerant of neo-Nazis. It does not change that the attendees who didn't contest the Nazis accepted and emboldened them.
But we should try to avoid being careless and suggesting that everyone there is irredeemable and was there to be racist. It was foolish, ignorant and harmful for them to attend. But in my opinion, this was a way for many people to voice legitimate grievances which they believed were unvoiced, like housing. And so long as Liberals and Labor deflect that crisis onto immigrants, and as long as those to the left can't get their voices heard in the mainstream, fascists will be there to collect their rage. If you want to stop neo-Nazis from being validated, we have to let citizens know we're fighting for them.
The idea of "AI solving" some social crisis is a farce. The problem isn't that we don't know what policies will improve the situation. An AI program or a simulation doesn't have the political power necessary to solve any of these problems.