6 - # of Straya threads or # of times we've changed Prime Minister in a decade?

[cobl04]

^well he's pretty important, ain't he? He played a huge role in the double dissolution.

Sussan Ley, what a fucking dope of a woman. :eyeroll:

 

[Axver]

^well he's pretty important, ain't he? He played a huge role in the double dissolution.

Sussan Ley, what a fucking dope of a woman. :eyeroll:

Leyonhjelm? What do you mean?

And haha no kidding. About par for the course for this ridiculous government.

 

[Kieran McConville]

I still can't figure out how much of what got Leyonhjelm in and/or kept him there was the 'pure classical liberal' crank base - which undoubtedly exists, see also Helen Darville - and how much is voter confusion over a guy whose moniker sounds like he ought to maybe be in The Democrats. At this point, I would imagine the confusion is lessening, he does get himself in the news an awful lot.

As for Ley, the optics as they say, are poor.

 

[Kieran McConville]

PS the spelling of his name is likely to devolve into chinese whispers on my part, since I couldn't spell it to save my life and am just checking what you guys type instead.

 

[Axver]

I still can't figure out how much of what got Leyonhjelm in and/or kept him there was the 'pure classical liberal' crank base - which undoubtedly exists, see also Helen Darville - and how much is voter confusion over a guy whose moniker sounds like he ought to maybe be in The Democrats. At this point, I would imagine the confusion is lessening, he does get himself in the news an awful lot.

As for Ley, the optics as they say, are poor.

2013 was definitely the misleading party name and drawing the first spot on the NSW Senate ballot. I think it then helped his profile among that right-libertarian nutter community to get enough vote to fall over the double dissolution line, again with the help of the misleading party name and some helpful preference deals. I find it very funny how cosy Leyonhjelm is with the religious right, given that in theory they should be quite hostile. It tells you a lot about what actually lies at the heart of his politics, and it sure as shit isn't the maintenance of the greatest freedom/happiness for the greatest number.

PS the spelling of his name is likely to devolve into chinese whispers on my part, since I couldn't spell it to save my life and am just checking what you guys type instead.

My phone now autocompletes his name, which is a rather depressing indication of how often I must mention him.

 

[Kieran McConville]

2013 was definitely the misleading party name and drawing the first spot on the NSW Senate ballot. I think it then helped his profile among that right-libertarian nutter community to get enough vote to fall over the double dissolution line, again with the help of the misleading party name and some helpful preference deals. I find it very funny how cosy Leyonhjelm is with the religious right, given that in theory they should be quite hostile. It tells you a lot about what actually lies at the heart of his politics, and it sure as shit isn't the maintenance of the greatest freedom/happiness for the greatest number.

Yeah, that sounds about right. And indeed, I'd say most of his liberal/libertarian tilts are pretty transparently in the service of retrograde elements. As is so often the case with libertarians.

 

[Axver]

Leyonhjelm's most natural allies are the Turnbull wing of the Libs, feeble as it may be. Yet he buddied up with Bob Day for nebulous economic reasons that made piss-all sense and overlooked the whole social disagreement. Yet he went for the jugular with Greens all the time despite a fair amount of common ground on social issues; that's not enough to make him look the other way on disagreements. He really is just a "you can't tell me whatta do! DUN WANNA!" right-wing ideologue.

 

[Vlad n U 2]

He's such an irredeemable personality too, it's difficult to believe he legitimately has any friends - or people willing to spend any time with him at all.

 

[Kieran McConville]

Well, in fairness, that could be said of me also.


So I see they've wheeled out Nick Cohen and Natalie Nougayrede again to bang the drums for (cold) war. According to Nick, Russia's treachery is everywhere. Everywhere!

 

[Vlad n U 2]

Nick Cohen is in your house.

 

[Axver]

So Ley has fallen on her sword for buying that Gold Coast apartment, and I have my answer of what is required for a minister to walk the plank.

If anything, though, it raises more questions than answers. Ley's judgement was unquestionably poor, but if she has to go for this, why on earth do Alan Tudge and Centrelink get to defend a shake-down racket? The behaviour there is criminal, actually criminal, and the government has decided to stand by it resolutely.

 

[Kieran McConville]

Nick Cohen is in your house.

I just assume they keep both of them on a small stipend, in a bedsit in London somewhere, until it's time to write another column about the decline and fall of grey liberal centrist values.

 

[Kieran McConville]

So Ley has fallen on her sword for buying that Gold Coast apartment, and I have my answer of what is required for a minister to walk the plank.

If anything, though, it raises more questions than answers. Ley's judgement was unquestionably poor, but if she has to go for this, why on earth do Alan Tudge and Centrelink get to defend a shake-down racket? The behaviour there is criminal, actually criminal, and the government has decided to stand by it resolutely.

Yeah, it really does make you scratch your head, doesn't it.

So many possibilities; maybe Ley's personal position in the party isn't strong enough for something like this to be brushed off; presumably the Centrelink minister is associated with the dominant ultra-rightists and so Turnbull couldn't push him even if he wanted to (which I doubt), because Turnbull is a cipher now.

 

[Axver]

Yep, no doubt in part it's because Ley is more moderate than some. I'm not sure exactly which faction she's aligned with, but I remember her denouncing the Islamophobes in the Australian Liberty Alliance.

And oh my god some digging around led me to this amazing moment of hilarity, which explains why she is "Sussan" not "Susan": Nocookies | The Australian

Around this time Ley changed the spelling of her first name. “I read about this numerology theory that if you add the numbers that match the letters in your name you can change your personality. I worked out that if you added an “s” I would have an incredibly exciting, interesting life and nothing would ever be boring. It’s that simple,” she says, chuckling. “And once I’d added the “s” it was really hard to take it away.”

And this person is/was a federal minister?!

 

[Kieran McConville]

I feel strongly tempted to ask if her new name should be pronounced as it appears. 'Suss-an', because that would definitely be new and fresh and never boring.

She named her kid Seven, you know.

 

[Kieran McConville]

No, no you see, my name is spelt 'Raymond Luxury Yacht', but is in fact pronounced 'Throat Wobbler Mangrove'.

 

[Kieran McConville]

Let's start a petition for Tasmania's dominant rightist senator to change his name to 'Erica Betz'.

 

[Axver]

Let's also start a petition to make Tasmania a shire of Victoria so that Erica Betz has no senate seat to hold.

 

[Vlad n U 2]

I just assume they keep both of them on a small stipend, in a bedsit in London somewhere, until it's time to write another column about the decline and fall of grey liberal centrist values.

I don't remember if I've shared this with you, but here it is again.

https://samkriss.com/2016/05/23/nick-cohen-is-in-your-house/

 

[Kieran McConville]

I don't remember if I've shared this with you, but here it is again.

https://samkriss.com/2016/05/23/nick-cohen-is-in-your-house/

Heh, no you had not actually (you might be under the misapprehension that we're currently connected on Facebook, and while I'd have no problem with that at all if you shared your account name, I must add I barely use the medium at all). Good stuff. Now I'm picturing Nick in my closet, possibly hiding like Kyle Maclaughlan in Blue Velvet while I huff on my oxygen mask and tell the girl to stop fucking looking at me.

Yes, that Nick Cohen, the Orwell Prize-shortlisted writer, journalist and commentator, the author of five books, frequently published in the Observer and the Spectator, the one who looks like a kind of malignant egg, with his pervert’s dent of a top lip, his strange remnant of a haircut, and those eerily mild eyes, the faint twirling eyes of a man who likes more than anything to observe, to spectate: he is in your house.

Nick Cohen is in the political left. It’s not that he’s part of it, exactly; he doesn’t fight in the left’s struggles, he doesn’t seem to care about leftist causes, but he’s there, within, watching. This has been, for some years now, his journalistic gimmick. He’s on the left, yes, but he’s also possibly the last journalist in Britain to still defend the 2003 attack on Iraq, he endlessly whinges about student no-platforming of fascists or the censure of Charlie Hebdo‘s state-sponsored racism as a threat to freedom of speech, and he’s never met a socialist government or a popular resistance movement that he didn’t loathe. But because he’s on the left, his global hostility to actual socialism must therefore be an authentic leftist position.

 

[Kieran McConville]

Let's also start a petition to make Tasmania a shire of Victoria so that Erica Betz has no senate seat to hold.

Can we make South Australia a shire of Victoria while we're at it, so that Cory Bernadi (the Cory you're never happy to remember) has no seat either?

 

[Axver]

Can we make South Australia a shire of Victoria while we're at it, so that Cory Bernadi (the Cory you're never happy to remember) has no seat either?

Done.

In fact, let's make the rest of Australia a shire of Victoria. All hail Dandrews I, King of Victoria, Lord of Tasmania, Emperor of the Lands Beyond the Murray, Defender of the Chicken Parmigiana and the One True Australian Football Code, etc.

 

[Kieran McConville]

You forgot Last King of Scotland, another of Andrews' myriad titles and one he may or may not have purchased from a shady Ugandan intermediary.

 

[Vlad n U 2]

Heh, no you had not actually (you might be under the misapprehension that we're currently connected on Facebook, and while I'd have no problem with that at all if you shared your account name, I must add I barely use the medium at all). Good stuff. Now I'm picturing Nick in my closet, possibly hiding like Kyle Maclaughlan in Blue Velvet while I huff on my oxygen mask and tell the girl to stop fucking looking at me.

I was such a fan of Kriss' description that I feel compelled to bring it up every time Nick Cohen becomes a topic of conversation - it's too apt.

 

[Kieran McConville]

It is, rather. You could have reconstructed that entire piece based merely on Cohen's byline photo.

 

[Axver]

Sorry guys but I'm not sure I'm cool with that paragraph on his Jewishness.

 

[Kieran McConville]

Well, what about it, specifically?

 

[Axver]

Honestly, my second read of the Jewishness paragraph is worse than the first. You could cut that from any anti-Semitic tract and it wouldn't seem weird. His Judaism is cast as a front for self-gain and greed, an insincere trick to fool the unwary, right down to the "oily indignity" line echoing centuries of "greasy Jew" rhetoric. It's a classic depiction of Judaism not as a faith but as a conniving get-rich-quick scheme.

It's funny how the end of the paragraph calls out that sort of shit while perpetuating it. The article would have been a fine takedown without it. It's completely unnecessary.

 

[Kieran McConville]

Eh, I don't know that I read it like that. All I really took from all that, in the author's reckoning, was that the way he may use his (putative) Jewishness for political purposes echoes (or reinforces) those hoary old stereotypes.

 

[Vlad n U 2]

Sam Kriss is Jewish himself, which changes things somewhat.