Corduroy Academy

( Mostly) radical thoughts, ideas, and links from late stage colonial capitalism.

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    Aidan
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    Anthony Albanese says asylum seeker boat arrival ‘unfortunate’ but government not to blame

    Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says the arrival of a boat carrying several asylum seekers to Western Australia’s far north coast is “unfortunate” but not a failure of Operation Sovereign Borders.

    The federal opposition has gone on the offensive over the arrival of 39 men who say they travelled by boat from Indonesia to remote communities in WA’s north-west on Friday.

    In what world is the torturous subhuman conditions of offshore detention “successful”. The ALP are sponsors of genocide and unlawful incarceration of those seeking better conditions. They are class traitors and need to head straight to the guillotine.

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    The head of the UN’s lead agency helping Palestinians accuses Israel of seeking to destroy it

    The head of the main United Nations agency supporting people in Gaza alleged that Israel is intent on “destroying” the organization along with the idea that Palestinians are refugees and have a right to return home one day.

    Philippe Lazzarini accused Israel in an interview with the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger of having a “long-term political goal” of eliminating the U.N. aid agency he leads, which is known by the acronym UNRWA. It was created more than 70 years ago to assist Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes during the 1948 Mideast war over Israel’s creation.

    We’re really seeing the dissolution of all social support and Keynesian ideals. Capitalism is mask off, folks.

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    US to send weapons to Israel amid invasion threat in Gaza’s Rafah

    The United States is preparing to send more bombs and other weapons to Israel even as it pushes for a ceasefire in the war on Gaza and has said it opposes Tel Aviv’s plans for a ground invasion in southern Rafah where more than half the enclave’s displaced population is trapped.

    The proposed arms delivery includes about a thousand each of MK-82 500-pound (227kg) bombs and KMU-572 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) that turn unguided munitions into precision-guided bombs, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing unnamed US officials.

    The US is so filthily complicit and actively involved in this genocide – it’s disgusting. The propaganda machine hard at work to save Biden’s image ahead of the election, but he could just stop – and denounce Israel, and hell, throw weight behind Palestinian sovereignty. No? Propaganda and mass murder it is then. How did anyone ever believe the US was the good guy in all the conflicts it creates? And don’t get me started on Australia.

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    ATAR bonuses scrapped for WA secondary school students studying more difficult subjects

    Students studying more difficult ATAR subjects in Western Australia will no longer have additional bonuses counted as part of their scores, under new changes announced by education authorities.

    From 2026, students studying Maths Methods, Maths Specialist and languages other than English will not receive any bonus to their ATAR score.

    The changes will effectively alter the tertiary entrance aggregate used to calculate ATAR scores by taking away the previous automatic 10 per cent bonus that was added.

    The utterly chronic normalisation of “hard work” & meritocracy is such a bullshit capitalist construct.

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    Sora: OpenAI launches tool that instantly creates video from text

    OpenAI revealed a tool on Thursday that can generate videos from text prompts.

    The new model, nicknamed Sora after the Japanese word for “sky”, can produce realistic footage up to a minute long that adheres to a user’s instructions on both subject matter and style. According to a company blogpost, the model is also able to create a video based on a still image or extend existing footage with new material.

    “We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction,” the blogpost reads.

    Ah yikes.

    The tech bros jerking each other off over these emergent and ungoverned tools is horrifying. And the money being “made” around these technologies.

    Does anyone remember the dot com bubble? Rampant neoliberal capitalism is no ones friend – least of all the human habitable environs that are destroyed as a result of generating the power for these GPUs.

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    Fired Dozens Of “Rockets” Into Israel, Says Hezbollah

    Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, a Hamas ally, said Thursday it had fired dozens of rockets into northern Israel, a day after Israeli raids killed 15 people including a Hezbollah commander.


    “In a first response to the massacres in Nabatiyeh and Sawaneh, Islamic resistance fighters fired dozens of Katyusha-type rockets at Kiryat Shmona,” an Israeli town near the Lebanese border, Hezbollah said in a statement.

    At least someone can fight back?

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    Israel escalates aggression against southern Lebanon

    Israel launched a series of airstrikes against Lebanon on February 14, killing four, including a woman and her two children. According to Al Mayadeen the attacks targeted the villages of Souaneh, Adshit, and Chehabiyeh. Israel’s attacks are believed to be in response to an operation carried out by Hezbollah earlier in the day against the Israeli military command base in Safed which killed one and injured eight.

    The escalation in attacks between Israel and Hezbollah comes just a day following remarks by Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah on the annual “Day of the wounded and captured” on February 13.

    Considered to be some of the clearest and firmest warnings against Israel so far, the resistance leader called Israel the root cause of most of the problems in the region and vowed to respond to all the threats from it. He also asserted that people of Lebanon will never stop supporting the Palestinian cause as it is their “moral responsibility”.

    Genocidal terrorists, doing terrorism.

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    New Report Suggests The Games Industry Is Failing LGBTQ Players

    I’ve known that representation in games mattered ever since that day in 1987 when I finished Metroid and discovered that intergalactic bounty hunter Samus Aran was that rarest of things (for the time): a cool female video-game protagonist. I loved playing as Mario, or Link, or any intrepid hero, but I was particularly thrilled to see a game say that women can be heroes, too. Now, with games a more important cultural force than ever, the influential media advocacy organization GLAAD has released its first-ever in-depth report examining how games are doing in terms of LGBTQ representation. The data strongly suggests that, on one hand, games play an important role in the lives of many queer players, particularly queer youth, and on the other, that games are falling far short in terms of adequately representing and reaching those players.

    We’ve barely passed being able to play a woman character. The continued perpetuation of hegemonic shit by the media industrial complex is always disappointing.