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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • We dont have much in the way of animals but we have birds. The Tui is common in suburban gardens here, but they are beautiful and even as a local I still like seeing them. Pukekos are everywhere but for those from the UK/ Europe/ USA they’re prett exotic. Down South, Wekas are absolutely everywhere outside the cities and will walk right into people’s homes - I once experienced coitus interruptus when a Weka jumped up on the bed I was in with a guy.

    When I was in South Africa I was super excited to see baboons, locally considered something of a nuisance. And in Queensland, Australia, the first time I saw an Australian white ibis, locally known as a bin chicken, the locals must have been very amused to see me chasing it with a camera getting photos




  • I joined on here a bit over 9 months ago after I was permabanned from reddit for ??? reason after I posted a Google Streetview link of a layby. This happened to coincide with the third party API fuckup and several other irrational and counterproductive changes so I arrived here right in the middle of a period of huge growth. I havent left since then per se but have had periods of reduced activity. Have started another profile on reddit (which was stupidly easy) as there are still a number of niche communities there that have no activity on their equivalent communities here. Am settled, and will likely gradually spend more time here as reddit management continue to find more feet to shoot themselves in






  • Well I upvoted because this is an excellent question that has applications and relevance far beyond just the current Hamas atrocities.

    Facing up to and dealing with the fact that a small percentage of any population is psychopathic (which is a rough clinical descriptor/ analogue for what the man in the street would call evil -lacking in conscience, empathy or morality) is something we do not do well, at least in the Western world, and it is something which we do need to grapple with. And when evil men gain power and set the social and cultural norms - as in 1930’s Germany - the larger population can be persuaded or at least coerced into doing evil. We’ve seen this before, from the Armenian genocide, the Nazi regime, Rwanda and now this



  • How did they manage to do so spectacularly badly? I think part of the problem is that they were trying to predict times and locations, rather than focusing on individual offenders. Past record is highly predicitive of future behaviour, i.e. if an offender has committed assault half a dozen times, it is highly probable that they will commit another assault or similar violent offence again, we just dont know when or where. Poor quality data may also be part of it - garbage in, garbage out





  • Currently in most of the Western world we have very stringent standards that have to be met in order to adopt a child (and quite rightly too in my view). But in order to conceive a child naturally? Nothing, nada, zilch. Full blown neo-nazi? Meth addict? Huge track record of violence? Rapist? Paedophile? All of the above? Find a partner of the opposite sex and you’re good to go! This is a massive inconsistency that I can see we will have to face up to sooner or later, maybe not to the extent you propose, but some sort of minimum standard needs to be put in place for being able to reproduce, for the sake of those children that will otherwise be brought up in horrific, abusive nightmare environments if nothing else.