We have a small population and mandatory voting means everyone gets a vote by default. We also have a different culture around voting because the majority of us have to do it. We have sausage sizzles and democracy dogs. I’ve personally worked at polls all over my state and there’s never been a line longer than 10 people. It takes most people like 5 mins max to vote. We make voting easy in Australia because everyone has to do it.

It’s worth noting that it’s not all that mandatory. It’s relatively easy to simply avoid enrolling to vote. You’re not automatically enrolled in other words. Also it’s really easy to just sign your name off at the poll and hand in a blank vote. The worst outcome of not voting is a fine that you can pretty easily get out of as well.

As an autistic person that’s a double fuck you from me

Human civilisation feels like it’s regressing.

Fuck yeah Germany!

Can we please just have a good ending with this one where the Germans protest the nazis out of town. The world kind of needs this right now. Please Germany, show us that anti-fascist resistance is possible and history is not doomed to repeat itself forever.

More war. Not necessarily WW3 but an increase in the number of proxy type conflicts.

I lost what little faith I had left in our current arrangement of society and our capacity to cooperate within this context. My worst fears were realised as it became apparent just how many people, entire governments even, are more than willing to abandon the vulnerable to the capitalist machine. The fact that at one point people were trying to argue that death is actually not that bad and not being able to go to bars and cafes was actually the real injustice. I’d say that’s a pretty long term consequence for me personally.

I’m autistic so for me it was speech first. Didn’t really learn to read body language until my teenage years and it was something I had to actively force myself to learn. Still can’t really do it all that well though to be honest.

Thank you for your service

I dramatically strain for something that’s too high up for me to reach it. Pretend to try and weild the force to pull it towards me. And then wait until my very tall partner just comes along to grab it.

I think OP is guided by virtue ethics actually.

Going to space! I’m disabled so it’s highly unlikely that I would be able to, even if it was commercially available.

Late stage capitalism on steroids

Pretty good for me on a personal and professional level, but pretty shitty in the general world sense. We had a referendum in my country about including Indigenous Australians into our constitution. It failed to pass and was just a shitty few months overall, especially for our first nations people. The level of income and wealth inequality feels like it nosedived in the wrong direction. The ‘K shaped recovery’ from covid is now very apparent. And the climate crises is getting worse, one of the scariest images I saw this year was the Antarctic sea ice graph.

I disagree. Sewers are useful and serve an important function in society. X does not.

Psychotherapy is about building a working relationship. Transference is a big part of this relationship. I don’t feel like I’d be able to build the same kind of therapeutic relationship with an AI that I would with another human. That doesn’t mean AI can’t be a therapeutic tool. I can see how it could be beneficial with things like positive affirmations and disrupting negative thinking patterns. But this wouldn’t be a substitute for psychotherapy, just a tool for enhancing it.

Nothing justifies bombing children. Noone’s ‘right to defend themselves’ should include this.

I actually don’t blame you because I would feel the same way if I lived in America. I hate guns, but would feel the need to have a gun if I lived there. It seems like such a cycle of mutually assured destruction that just keeps escalating out of control.

Australian here. We had one really bad mass shooting and then our government (who was also one of the most conservative governments in the last 50 years) banned guns. Haven’t had one since. Guns just aren’t a thing here and we kind of think you’re a weird country for being so obsessed with guns. I also personally think it’s weird that guns are like the symbol of your freedom, yet you don’t have universal healthcare. Universal healthcare offers so much more freedom than guns do.

In saying that a lot of countries have guns and don’t have the same problem with mass shootings. What the US has is a cultural problem in terms of your relationship with guns and violence. Unfortunately, doing a mass shooting is now a normalised way to deal with your problems. Not all of you, obviously. But enough of you that it’s gotten completely out of control. In Australia I don’t think it was just the banning of guns that has reduced mass shootings. We have a culture in Australia of ‘don’t be a dickhead’. I think when we had our mass shooting we all collectively just said yeah nah mass shootings are next level dickhead behaviour.

If Argentina votes in the anarcho-capitalist guy who gets policy advice from his dogs (technically one dog that’s been cloned several times) then this will really take the cake for darkest timeline.