hambeet posted:

Nacho posts

Solemn Sloth posted:

While we are all saddened by the damage to historic sites in Palmyra, we shouldn’t forget that ISIS took a lot of wayward youth and gave them a real sense of purpose

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

Tommunist posted:

Imagine sharing a pen name with a conversion therapy doctor through only a massive coincidence!!!!

Zenithe posted:

Joe Hildebrand has joined 2GB. I’m sure this revelation will shock you.

Knobb Manwich posted:

The gif was just two days away from retirement.

Recoome posted:

Really turns out a lot of places arent paying a living wage

Tommunist posted:

Just make fun of space wolves

Solemn Sloth posted:

But how many friendly shirdies jorts?

Megillah Gorilla posted:

Get it quick before it's gone:


Image reuploaded here in case the tweet is deleted

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

The arse posted:

Strange but true … Donald Trump is better for us than Joe Biden
GREG SHERIDAN

A Donald Trump victory would be better for Australia than a Joe Biden presidency. This counter­intuitive view is widely, if semi-­secretly, held in Australian national security circles, and it is ­almost certainly right.

On foreign policy, despite the crazy tweets, frantic and destabilising turnover of key administration personnel, frequent bouts of boorish personal behaviour from Trump, and numerous outright mistakes, the Trump presidency has been significantly more successful than Barack Obama’s. And much better for Australia.

A Biden presidency would likely reprise Obama, but in a weaker and more woke fashion.

These judgments are provisional, on-balance judgments. Either Trump 2 or Biden 1 could go in several different ways.

The question might seem academic, given how far ahead Biden is. But don’t write Trump off quite yet. The election still depends on turnout, and Trump voters are more enthusiastic than Biden voters. The Republicans have been registering more new voters than the Democrats. RealClearPolitics still has Trump a fraction closer in key battleground states than he was to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

And consider this: at this point four years ago, the Access Hollywood tapes were disclosed revealing shocking remarks by Trump regarding his private behaviour. In reaction, there was hardly a cricket team’s worth of people in the whole of the US who thought Trump would become president.

Yet he won. That doesn’t mean he’ll win this time, but don’t count your chickens too early.

On Trump versus Biden, the arguments are strong that Biden would be more problematic for Australia. On bilateral issues, Trump has been a very good president for Australia. There is not a single issue where Canberra could have asked for much more. This reflects well on Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, the two PMs who have dealt with Trump, and on our diplomacy. It also reflects well on Trump, and the standing Australia has within the US system. Congress and the US bureaucracy supported Australia throughout Trump’s term.
Trump honoured Obama’s deal to take asylum seekers from Manus Island, even though he hated it. He levied tariffs, including on steel and aluminium, on many nations including US allies, but not on Australia. Intelligence co-operation could not be closer. Trump went to great lengths to be a lavish host for Scott Morrison’s visit last year. Such gestures inform the US bureaucracy, and political community, about a relationship’s standing. Military co-operation has increased. Though it started off under Obama, the US marine rotations in the Northern Territory continued to grow.

OK, Trump critics would concede he has been pretty good to Australia bilaterally but has trashed US standing internationally and hurt multilateral institutions. This ultimately damages Australia’s interests. But this is not quite true, or at least there are two sides to it. Trump has done much better in Asia than in Europe. Much of what is labelled global disgust with Trump is actually ­European hostility, plus The New York Times and Hollywood. But a global outlook that doesn’t include Asia isn’t a global outlook at all.

The Trump administration, though it prefers deals to institutions and unilateralism to multilateralism, will build institutions, especially in Asia, where it’s useful. This week in Tokyo, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue had its second foreign ministers’ meeting. Foreign ministers of the US, Australia, India and Japan convened. This is a significant stage in the Quad’s evolution. It is the first time an Indian foreign minister has travelled overseas specifically for a Quad meeting, rather than a Quad gathering on the sidelines of a big multilateral meeting. It was important in bedding down the strategic identity of the government led by Japan’s new Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga. And it was the umpteenth visit to the region by US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who held a long bilateral meeting with ­Aus­tralia’s Foreign Minister, Marise Payne, the night ­before the Quad.

This development of the Quad owes a great deal to the statecraft of Pompeo and US diplomacy. As ever, Asia prefers a Republican administration in Washington rather than a Democrat administration. The Republicans are the party of the Pacific, the Democrats the party of the Atlantic.
Many of Trump’s most ardent critics in Australia demonstrate the narrowly derivative and inadequate nature of their inter­national outlook by slavishly replicating the trans-Atlantic critique of Trump, while displaying no appreciation of the Asian view.

Of course, within Asia the ­Chinese don’t like Trump at all. But the five Asian nations that have stood most strongly for their national interests and against Chinese hegemonic tendencies in the region — Japan, India, Vietnam, Singapore and Australia — have all had a pretty productive experience of Trump.

Asian nations are, like Trump, characteristically much more concerned with results than with process. Trump himself is concerned with what nations do more than with what they say. Australia, partly because of our increased defence effort and our straight­forward political style, has achieved a unique closeness to the Trump administration — certainly much greater closeness than we ever achieved with Obama. This is most unlikely to be repeated under Biden. That is important, because we would ­likely have less influence with a Biden administration than we do with a Trump administration.

Southeast Asia, too, has generally found the Trump administration quite OK to deal with. It is true that Trump withdrew from the Trans Pacific Partnership, but Hillary Clinton had promised to do likewise and Obama had never submitted the TPP to Congress.

The other area where Trump has manifestly done much better than Obama is the Middle East. Trump has midwifed two new peace treaties between Israel and Arab nations. Everything Obama touched in the Middle East turned to absolute dust. Trump has been a force for stability in the Middle East, while Obama was a force for chaos — as in the fallout of the Libyan intervention and, earlier, the Arab Spring. Biden would re-adopt all the destructive elements of the old-think Obama paradigm in the Middle East, including ­recommitting to the plainly in­adequate Iran deal.

On China, Trump has been ahead of the US political leadership class. He has been erratic at times, and has certainly made some serious missteps, but he has understood the profound ways in which Beijing flouts international norms, and the depth of the challenge it poses to the US and its ­allies. If these issues are now more widely understood, this is partly because of Trump’s advocacy, even as Trump has not been able to make a comprehensive and ­coherent case.

What about Biden?

In some ways, the future trajectory of a Biden presidency is unknowable. There are at least three separate foreign policy traditions in the Democratic Party. One is the hard-headed Democrats associated with Kurt Campbell, the former Assistant Secretary of State and author of the Obama pivot to Asia, which promised more than it delivered but was better than nothing; and Michelle Flournoy, who if we are lucky, might become Biden’s ­Defence Secretary.

These are muscular Democrats, particularly realistic in their views of China.

Then there are the Obama-era global engagers and multilateral institution types, associated with John Kerry, the former secretary of state; Susan Rice, who could well become Biden’s secretary of state; and Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former deputy national security adviser.

This group tends to believe that engagement itself is the objective of foreign policy. It is preoccupied with global institutions and global issues. It is deeply conventional — indeed solidly and anachronistically old-fashioned in its analyses. It suffers acute paradigm paralysis. It is drawn to the lyric poetry of foreign affairs as a kind of spiritual substitute for religion. It is perennially preoccupied with climate change and with sweeping, grandiloquent declarations on such issues. And it is very uncomfortable with, and ineffective in, the use of power.

The Chinese have learned to play this group like the strings of a harp. Thus Xi Jinping recently ­declared that China would be carbon neutral by 2060. This earned Beijing worldwide good publicity, but only a very few commentators stopped to ask how you could square this alleged commitment with the fact that Beijing has approved the construction of more new coal-fired power stations this year than in the past two years; that it is financing new coal-fired power stations all over the developing world; and that a vast ­proportion of its Belt and Road ­initiative projects are fossil fuel projects.

The reconciliation is actually simple. The year 2060 is science fiction territory for any government commitment. Beijing can make these announcements and not be impeded or constrained by them in any way, do just what it likes at home, and gullible ­Western opinion — European opinion, especially — will fall for it every time.

Biden gives every sign that he will be a dithering and weak president. He often tells friends that all politics is personal. Kam­ala Harris said at the vice-presidential debate that Biden told her foreign affairs is not complex, it’s just relationships.

In this, Biden betrays the same conceptual confusion as both Trump and Obama, to think that personality will seriously influence geopolitics. But it is surely London to a brick that Beijing will seduce Biden with some nonsensical falderal on climate change, and in return face significantly ­reduced geostrategic pressure from Washington.

The third Democratic Party foreign policy tradition is the “new left” wave of woke activism, which is where all the energy in the contemporary Democratic Party resides. That will merge with the second tradition to almost certainly make climate change the centrepiece of Biden foreign policy — a priority he has already announced anyway.

Biden and Harris are both committed to cutting US defence spending, which means probably an inferior US presence in Asia.

Taken altogether, this all likely means trouble down the track for Australia. Obama sandbagged former prime minister Tony ­Abbott with a viciously partisan speech at the G20 summit in Brisbane. It was the most blatant US interference in our domestic politics in decades, and it was done without notice or consideration for Washington’s Australia ally.

The hyper-partisan Democrat activists who produced that monstrosity, on fire with self righteous zeal for their pet causes, are influential in Biden’s camp today.

A second Trump administration, on the other hand, would likely be a somewhat moderated version of the past four years. Trump has much more experience now. He will still be constrained by the fear of im­peachment and all the normal checks and balances of the US ­system, plus the normal loss of authority a president experiences in his second term.

Anchored as we are in Asia, not Europe — even less Manhattan, Hollywood or Silicon Valley — Trump Mark II would likely be better for Australia than Biden.

Strange, but true.

Tommunist posted:

100% this. I'm absolutely furious at the way state + federal governments have dealt with the pandemic.

I havnt seen my friends or had a meaningful human interaction in 6 months, my career i worked 5 years to build is dead and im going to have to go back to study (my courses were canceled this semester already lmao). I'm basically broke and living at my parents and im almost 30 while the government winds back pandemic support. Like no poo poo its important to beat this pandemic but it doesn't make mine (and im not doing it nearly as bad as a bunch of other people) or a ton of other peoples situation any easier.


I havnt broken restrictions because its not worth it but I feel utterly betrayed and let down.

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

Why is this thread so easy to troll?

NPR Journalizard posted:

Yes, but evidence points to your standards for burg not being monumental.

Amoeba102 posted:

AFP to investigate the 30M land grift for the second airport. No other details but there is a story saying this on ABC. Will something come of this?

Fakedit: Theyll arrest someone for releasing the cost and value of the sale.

Guardian AU posted:

Three federal infrastructure department officials and federal MP Angus Taylor separately met with Louise Waterhouse while she lobbied for potentially lucrative changes to her vast landholdings near the Western Sydney airport.
....
The department would not say whether it brought probity advisers into the meeting, a common practice when discussing planning matters with individuals who stood to gain from them.

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

https://twitter.com/albericie/status/1317365576314974208

Did she think this through?

Solemn Sloth posted:

I don’t think there’s anyone in Victoria that is clamouring for open borders to WA that is remotely worth listening to. It’s all federal scrunts

Electric Wrigglies posted:

There was a post a few pages ago bemoaning that Australia is lucky/successful despite being a strong "she'll be right" culture. After spending 10 years overseas, I honestly think it is harder to find a country that is more opposite of it than Australia. The best example I can think of is sitting in a car with an Aussie driver overseas - it is a constant stream of the Aussie driver obviously frustrated with the queue jumpers, the speeders, the overloaded cars or bikes, in-proper parking, or many other things that more relaxed cultures don't worry about. People just let in the taxi/SUV that wants to drive up past 25 cars in a line and cut in, keep out of the road of guys in a hurry, not worry about the lady with seven kids on the back seat etc.

Australians love to follow rules and be told what to do, they like rules to be enforced upon others and are unhappiest when someone seems to be getting something via a method unavailable to themselves or breaking a rule that they are too afraid to break themselves. Celestial Scribe going to a park outside of his 5km bubble - who honestly gives a poo poo? It means essentially nothing in the context of Covid except for the general theme that we must all follow the rules. If he gets fined, that sucks to be him and none of us are going to give him sympathy but its not worth going all thread-rage over it.

kirbysuperstar posted:

yeah it's full of nojoes

no joe hildibrand

Comstar posted:

The corrupt head of aus post just told the Prime Minister to get stuffed she’s not standing down lol what talk to my lawyers.

Tommunist posted:

His face is very cute idgi

bell jar posted:

hacker voice: i tracked the flight and plane responsible, somehow under the belief that this will lead me to the pilot or some poo poo, and not a skywriting company paid to write whatever the customer wants for a fee

Pile Of Garbage posted:

It took me 5 minutes to find, I'm bored and it's a lazy Sunday morning. But sure feel free to gaslight me

Tommunist posted:

gently caress you dad

JBP posted:

Stop gaslighting Dan

thatbastardken posted:

perennial thread favorite Pete Evans is happily posting pro-nazi cartoons on his facebook wall.

https://twitter.com/byronkaye/status/1327926188510068738

Malcolm Turnbeug posted:

Blue QLD is hosed in the head and exactly the kind of degeneracy i'd expect from a Something Awful Moderator