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The Artificial Kid posted:The thing that does my head in is trying to work out how much better America has actually become (relative to the rise of figures like Putin) vs how much the wool has just been pulled over my ageing eyes. On the contrary to the wool being pulled over your ageing eyes, you have grown up and come to the correct understanding that the world is a more complex place than it appeared when you were in your late teens or early twenties and were taking your political lessons from tankies.
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Mar 10, 2024 02:36
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The Artificial Kid posted:We didn't have proper tankies back in the early oughts, just fringe communists who manned hopeful booths at other people's protests trying to get a few more washed up weirdos to join their cliques. You named John Pilger, for example, who is my go-to example of a 21st century tankie as defined by e.g. what someone thinks about Russia's invasion of Ukraine or Assad using chemical weapons on his own people. quote:To be clear: I don't think my views of that time were substantially wrong, although they were probably more youthfully exuberant and unchallenged. The most salient thing for me is that I used to have right wingers, racists and hawks calling me a liberal as a slur because I believed in peace, international order, healthcare free at the point of care and a generous social safety net. Now I have self-proclaimed leftists calling me a liberal, also as a slur, for essentially unchanged beliefs. What seems to have happened is a bunch of people went so nuts, between America's crimes and the Russian propaganda firehose, that they can no longer really deal with nuanced reality at all. But I can't help acknowledging the possibility that if I suddenly find America under Biden more palatable maybe the problem is I'm not seeing as clearly as I used to. I think about this a lot too; for those of us who were in our late teens and early twenties and therefore became politically aware in the 2000s atmosphere of unquestioned American hegemony and GWOT overreach it is, even on a long timescale, a bit whiplash-inducing to adjust to a world where Russia and China are serious authoritarian powers in a multipolar world, and also the right-wing of American politics is cruising into nascent fascism. I guess for me it happened so gradually that I never doubted I was still seeing clearly; it was more of a realisation that the Pilgers of the world, or the red triangle watermelon set on Twitter, or the people who post in this particular thread, are in fact fringe viewpoints; which does not necessarily make them always wrong but did make me evaluate their claims more critically. Just because people are saying something contrary to what the Herald Sun is saying doesn't automatically make them right, in the same way that the United States doing bad things does not mean Russia is actually good.
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Mar 10, 2024 09:42
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Yeah it originates from Hungary in '56 but in contemporary usage, to me, it's now divorced from communism/capitalism; I just think it means somebody who considers the US to be evil and all their other opinions flow from and are subjugate to that starting point. It's the extreme point of the tribalism that you can see in a less deranged form in e.g. Australian Twitter drips.
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Mar 10, 2024 12:26
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JBP posted:I read yesterday that 60% of people in Aus don't have a thousand bucks in their bank account. Absolutely dire. I dunno, it's a time-honoured tradition in this country to live paycheque to paycheque while pouring almost everything into the mortgage, and in the long run those people are the ones who end up the most financially secure
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Mar 30, 2024 09:22
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JBP posted:This doesn't really compute compared to the number of home owners imo How so? It's a lower figure than the number who are homeowners (67%). I'd want to know exactly what that survey means when they ask "in your bank account," though.
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Mar 31, 2024 09:52
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gay picnic defence posted:There’s a couple of ‘safe’ ones with a high Muslim population that the greens are having a crack at while Muslims are pissed off that it took Israel killing a white person to get the ALP to change their rhetoric on the war. lih posted:macnamara, wills, richmond and moreton should be the main targets. macnamara and richmond only need a small labor-to-greens swing each on current boundaries - for macnamara it's 0.32%, for richmond it's 1.27%. wills is a bit of a longer shot but they've come somewhat close to winning it in the past and the current political climate around israel/palestine does provide a serious opportunity there - the south of the seat is already very good for the greens (typical inner city leftie demographics) but there's a significant muslim population in the north of the seat that has previously been very loyal to labor, and it's the one seat that combines those two demographics. current vic greens state leader samantha ratnam is expected to be the candidate there. moreton is also a longer shot but it's the most favourable brisbane seat they haven't won yet and isn't totally out of reach. the incumbent there is also expected to be retiring. Any assumption that Israel/Palestine is a seat-deciding issue, resulting in Wills becoming a lock for the Greens, presumably has to lead to the opposite conclusion for Macnamara
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Apr 10, 2024 21:36
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I would blow Dane Cook posted:Has anyone read this book? Is it still relevant today? Heh... mate... it's the lucky country... but you might say... that it's run by second rate people... WHO SHARE ITS LUCK!
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Apr 11, 2024 10:04
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I think probably only the Dr Johnson quote about being tired of London is more insufferably hoary than the Horne quote about Australia
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Apr 11, 2024 10:05
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Wasn't he also "Nazis were socialists" adjacent? I know that's PVO but feel like Uhlmann was also going on about something similar
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Apr 12, 2024 07:59
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TheIllestVillain posted:The perp is definitely Anglo He doesn't look Anglo and even on a random dice roll most Sydney residents are not Anglo (white yes, Anglo no). Willing to bet now that (irrespective of race) this was motivated by paranoid schizophrenia/drug-induced/generalised tinfoil hat fixation rather than anything political or ideological. When was the last time we even had a straight-up ideologically motivated Islamic attack? The guy on Bourke St that set fire to his car and stabbed the Pellegrini's owner?
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Apr 13, 2024 10:21
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MysticalMachineGun posted:Saw a printed out A4 sign the other day saying CASH IS KING and it's like, why do these motherfuckers think anyone is going to get rid of hard currency. WHY Rampant tax avoidance in small business, plus for larger businesses dealing with cash is in itself an expense (transporting, security, etc) plus what hooman said about businesses realising at some point in the last few years they can just force customers to swallow the EFTPOS surcharge instead of copping it themselves. I don't think there's any desire for radical overnight change, but from a government perspective I cannot actually think of any reason they should stand in the way of a natural drift towards a cashless society. MysticalMachineGun posted:Our entire banking system is backed by hard currency/gold/whatever and that's not going away any time soon We haven't been on the gold standard for more than 100 years and IIRC the figure of money that actually exists as physical cash in any industrialised country is like 10%
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Apr 26, 2024 02:38
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MysticalMachineGun posted:Wow I'm really out of touch, I thought Die Hard 3 was a documentary, clearly Gold is still valuable and lots of governments still keep a gold reserve, it's just not the basis we use for valuing our currency anymore. This (fairly old) article is about bitcoin but starts with a really interesting look at what "money" is, exactly. Jezza of OZPOS posted:People panicking about cash disappearing would do well to remember that you can't get a thousand dollar escort or 8 ball of lovely coke on debit card Eventually crypto will stop being seen as a speculative asset and will return to what God intended it for: black market transactions.
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Apr 26, 2024 04:38
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We will probably get some stricter bail laws, some more mandatory minimum sentencing, a tiny bit of money for women's shelters etc and a fuckload of money to a worthless advertising campaign about Telling Your Mates To Respect Women
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Apr 29, 2024 21:47
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Solemn Sloth posted:Men’s rights activist Waleed Aly Can someone post this paywalled oped pls
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May 3, 2024 09:51
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What is the thread view on HECS and the govt changes? I'm inclined to think it's middle/upper-class welfare and it's telling that one of the loudest voices on the issue is a Teal. https://twitter.com/BenPhillips_ANU/status/1787328437461598637
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May 6, 2024 09:14
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hooman posted:If you're proper rich you don't have a HECS debt, your parents pay up front for a discount. Yeah maybe if you're like North Shore never-have-to-worry-about-money rich. But there's a much larger number of people (like me) who come from working or middle class backgrounds who are nonetheless doing just fine, in part because of their university education, and I don't think I deserve for my perfectly manageable HECS debt to be prioritised over e.g. people struggling to survive on Jobkeeper. froglet posted:There's heaps of people who either have a huge balance (e.g. junior doctors - yeah sure they might make the big bucks in 15 years, but for the time being they're not making any real inroads on their HECS) This doesn't automatically strike me as a problem that needs solving. You aren't expected to pay the debt off overnight, most people in most industries are not going to pay it off until their thirties, and a doctor is still going to be far better off than most Australians in the long run - entirely because of their university-derived occupation. quote:or their degree doesn't necessarily lead to roles with remuneration commensurate with the required educational attainment. This is definitely the case in the gutted arts/media/journalism industry and part of the reason I suspect this discourse is so prominent in the media and on Twitter.
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May 7, 2024 08:41
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gay picnic defence posted:Apparently they want to get more people through uni and into skilled professions but HECS as it currently stands I think pushes people away. I certainly regret going to uni, I'm on ok but not amazing money and will pay 6% more tax for the rest of my life If you are at the point where you're paying 6% in HECS repayments, then - aside from last year's abnormal 7.1% CPI - you're paying off it off faster than it grows. In fact you're paying off just under $6,000 a year. Unless you're very late in your working career and have only recently started earning that amount, I don't see how that debt could remain for the rest of your life. hooman posted:I don't care if some people who are fine get their debts cut, consider it an apology for a dogshit housing market I think this is what bothers me. The people I know in their early 20s, whether they're uni gradates or not, are 100% only concerned about the insane cost of housing. That single issue blots out everything else, and the notion that the government nudging HECS indexation down one percentage point is doing anything worthwhile is farcical.
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May 7, 2024 21:43
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