hooman posted:

I like how basically every time someone bothers to read Australia's constitution our entire parliamentary system goes into seizures.

EDIT: "Sir, a year 10 doing P&L has taken it upon himself to read the constitution"
"Oh god no, we have to stop him before it's too late"
*two days later*
"The High Court has ruled that this duck is actually the prime minister."

quote:

Prominent British Labour figure Ed Balls says neo-liberalism has failed but neither Jeremy Corbyn's socialism nor Donald Trump's nationalism are the remedy for the inequality which is driving the current political crisis gripping the west.

Mr Balls touches down in Australia on Wednesday for a week-long series of talks with former treasurer Wayne Swan and as a guest of the Labor think tank The Chifley Research Centre and the left-wing think tank The Australia Institute, to mark ten years since the global financial crisis.

hooman posted:

I like how basically every time someone bothers to read Australia's constitution our entire parliamentary system goes into seizures.

EDIT: "Sir, a year 10 doing P&L has taken it upon himself to read the constitution"
"Oh god no, we have to stop him before it's too late"
*two days later*
"The High Court has ruled that this duck is actually the prime minister."

Birdstrike posted:

We regret to inform you the duck is racist.

Solemn Sloth posted:

*duck personal approval ratings skyrocket*

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2017/08/15/xenophon-rules-out-dual-citizenship posted:

Prominent crossbench senator Nick Xenophon is confident he has never held Greek or Cypriot citizenship.

The South Australian insists he contacted the Greek embassy and Cypriot High Commission in 2007 to renounce any citizenship claims.

But Senator Xenophon is not certain there's any official documented response to his renunciations.

"I'd have to go through literally boxes and boxes of archives from an election campaign 10 years ago," he said

"I have never had citizenship of another country, never wanted citizenship of another country."

Senator Xenophon was born to Greek and Cypriot parents at the Burnside War Memorial Hospital in Adelaide.

Senator Xenophon said his understanding from other MPs in a similar position was that those making such citizenship inquiries often don't receive a response.

"The issue of whether an MP is a dual citizen or not will be a festering farce until there has been a full audit of all MPs and senators and there needs to be a resolution through the High Court."

Labor senator Sam Dastyari appeared at the end of Senator Xenophon's doorstep for what looked like a set piece.

"I am not an Iranian citizen," Senator Dastyari said in Farsi.

"I am not a Greek or Cypriot citizen," Senator Xenophon said in Greek.

"We're feeling much more Aussie than our colleagues today," Senator Dastyari said in closing."

Doctor Spaceman posted:

https://twitter.com/Ann_SudmalisMP/status/897384610752901120

JBP posted:

All this talk about nukes and Nazis is distracting us from the real enemy, the new Zealand Labour Party.

The Rabbi T. White posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exl4ka_Bc94

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

Guys I'm worried that the New Zealand Labour party is up to something.

Cartoon posted:

Never mind however, a new distraction looms:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-15/melbourne-council-votes-to-ban-references-to-australia-day/8810286

adamantium|wang posted:

https://twitter.com/dyrenfurth/status/897599483151831040

quote:

While criticism came from both sides of the political aisle, the left’s hysteria over Trump’s response to the Unite the Right rally packs no punch because the eagerness to label evil doesn’t stretch far beyond white supremacists. When it comes to putting a name on Islamic terrorism, the ­reaction is very different. It’s a case of what Mark Steyn calls tilty-headed wankerishness. No naming evil here, only candlelit vigils, hashtag campaigns and inclusive interfaith dialogues.

adamantium|wang posted:

https://twitter.com/dyrenfurth/status/897599483151831040

quote:

The US President routinely uses Twitter to slam all manner of people, from Democrats to Republicans to televisions hosts, in 140 characters or less.
His early tweets last weekend lacked their usual clarity when 20-year-old Ohio man James Alex Fields drove his grey Dodge into a crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing a woman and injuring 19 others. Donald Trump should have mustered some fire and fury against the white supremacists, members of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis who marched on the weekend to anti-Semitic chants and homophobic rants in Charlottes­ville.

While criticism came from both sides of the political aisle, the left’s hysteria over Trump’s response to the Unite the Right rally packs no punch because the eagerness to label evil doesn’t stretch far beyond white supremacists. When it comes to putting a name on Islamic terrorism, the ­reaction is very different. It’s a case of what Mark Steyn calls tilty-headed wankerishness. No naming evil here, only candlelit vigils, hashtag campaigns and inclusive interfaith dialogues.

In March, after 52-year-old Briton Khalid Masood drove a car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, the Dean of Westminster, John R. Hall, announced that the nation was bewildered.

“What could possibly ­motivate a man to hire a car and take it from Birmingham to Brighton to London, and then drive it fast at people he had never met, couldn’t possibly know, against whom he had no personal grudge, no reason to hate them, and then run at the gates of the Palace of Westminster to cause another death? It seems likely that we shall never know,” Hall said soon after the attack.

Except we did know. But when it comes to Islamic terrorism, labelling evil gives over to mumbling, fumbling dissembling. It’s a curious lapse in moral clarity given that Islamic terrorists have no time for Christianity, let alone religious freedoms or women and the feminist cause, or homosexuals, let alone LGBTI rights.

The thundering hysteria against Trump after Charlottesville is another case of the left’s wonky moral compass.

CNN hosts censured Trump for not immediately condemning the white supremacists spoiling for a fight last weekend. But the faces of CNN didn’t rally to label evil when an Islamic terrorist ploughed into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, or when another Islamic terrorist rammed a truck at a crowd at a Berlin Christmas market, or when an Islamic terrorist mowed down pedestrians on a promenade in Nice on Bastille Day last year.

After an Islamic terrorist detonated a bomb and murdered teenagers at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in May, London mayor Sadiq Khan didn’t condemn Islamic State — even though the terrorist group claimed responsibility. It was the same in June after three Islamic terrorists mowed into pedestrians on London Bridge before going from bar to bar, stabbing and slicing at patrons with 30cm hunting knives. Not even a clue from one of the ­Islamic terrorists, who shouted “This is for Allah” before stabbing a woman more than 10 times, helped Khan name the evil.

A fortnight ago, after Australian security authorities foiled an alleged plot to bomb an Etihad Airways flight out of Sydney, Islamic Council of Queensland spokesman Ali Kadri lodged a complaint when Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin described the evil plot as “Islamic-inspired terrorism”.

Why wasn’t the Muslim group condemned by opinionated hosts at the ABC for refusing to name the alleged evil given their eagerness to condemn Trump for the same error of judgment this week? For the same reason three days after the violence in Charlottesville, the ABC was still leading its news bulletins with Trump’s reaction yet it can barely bring itself to say Islamic or even Islamist ­terrorism; truth in labelling is an ad hoc business on the left.
When Man Haron Monis held hostages at gunpoint in Sydney’s Lindt cafe in December 2014, many on the left rushed to suggest he was mad, not bad. The coroner found otherwise, but it’s a standard response when violence is committed in the name of Islam. No one suggested the 20-year-old driver in Charlottesville was mad, not bad.

When Islamic terrorists strike, we are correctly reminded not to tar all Muslims with the actions of a few. The same may be said of those who marched in Charlottesville. Not all of them are anti-­Semitic nutters or Klansmen or neo-Nazis. Not all of them drove a car into the crowd. But no one warned against tarring everyone at the Unite the Right rally.

Instead, a determined ignorance defines the modern left. Charlottesville mayor and Democrat activist Michael Signer said: “I place the blame for a lot of what you’re seeing in America today right at the doorstep of the White House.” They also could lay the blame for the widespread illiberalism and violence erupting across American campuses at the feet of the divisive identity politics ­fuelled by Democrats such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
It’s a hard truth for the left that the Obama presidency begat the Trump presidency. Rather than blame Trump, it’s worth exploring how the rise of white supremacist groups is an inevitable consequence of identity group politics where groups vie for prominence on the basis of skin colour, race, creed, gender and sexuality.

Writing in The New York Times last year, self-described liberal Mark Lilla concluded that American liberalism had become a flawed movement based on the politics of moral panic about ­racial, gender and sexual identity that prevented it from being a unifying force.

Last week Lilla added to his compelling critique in The Wall Street Journal: “There is a mystery at the core of every suicide, and the story of how a once-successful liberal politics of solidarity became a failed liberal politics of ‘difference’ is not a simple one. Perhaps the best place to begin it is with a slogan: The personal is the political.” As Lilla says, the phrase coined by feminists to unite people has been turned on its head to mean the political is the personal, where the “forces are all centrifugal, encouraging splits into smaller and smaller factions obsessed with single issues and practising rituals of ideological one-upmanship”. The result is a movement that divides people rather than bringing them together.

What’s left of the left is a marketplace of outrage where emotion and politics trump intel­lectual honesty and moral clarity. From blinkered feminists who refuse to focus on real misogyny in the Middle East to human rights activists who mock free speech, from same-sex marriage advocates who trample on tolerance to those who demand that only white supremacists, not Islamic terrorists, be named and shamed, the left has become a hollow shell of hyperbole and hypocrisy.

Claims against Trump and his supporters will have real clout and credibility when the needle on the left’s faulty moral compass stops swinging so feverishly in one direction.

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

Today on Hack: The Holocaust, did it really happen, and if it did, was it really that bad?

GoldStandardConure posted:

hooman posted:

"Bagel Jewstein calling in just wanting to say that the fake holocaust has been a really great tool for us filthy Jews to control the media and create the new world order. Also I'm definitely a Jewish man and am in favor of white genocide."

JBP posted:

Did the guy that rang up as Herschel put on an "oy vey" accent at the very least?

gay picnic defence posted:

ed balls

GoldStandardConure posted: