Oodnadatta, South Australia Superthread

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This timothius seems like a cool guy, would be cool if he still existed on this forum.
 
Looking good so far, but as time goes on you'll need to be intoxicated in order to tolerate it.
 
I don't see how that's relevant. I'm pretty sure my mother would've been happy to keep mothering me at home for years, but I was an adult so I moved out. Staying home into your twenties is a bit sad if you ask me.

Eh, it depends. In Sydney the prices for even shared accomodation are exorbitant; to get something within three suburbs of my unit is $200 for a bed (with a shared room etc.) If you're like me, you need your personal space, so ideally, a single flat, which starts at $275 a week, but quickly rises to $400 a week beyond the first two results on domain.com. I work 20+ hours a week as it is, and to work anymore would be to jeopardise my university results (because that would mean skipping classes regularly etc, because I work during the day). Assuming $21 an hour, makes $420 a week, which leaves $150 after rent. Transport is then $30 a week minimum (assuming student fares and weekly tickets), then assume your food bill is $50 a week (eating every meal at home, eating hearty portions say), then you haven't really got much left over per week; and that doesn't account for books and educational expenses, let alone entertainment, drinking, socialising or anything non-essential.

I mean, I pay board to my dad, I pay all of my bills, I essentially only rely on him for the roof over my head. It's a case where it would be fiscally irresponsible for me to be living away from home (as much as it would be beneficial in other respects); $350 a week in rent is $18,000 a year, say (and that's going to be the cheapest you'll get in Sydney without spending an hour+ in transport each way.) Last financial year (where I took a month off, yes, but also worked probably 30hrs/week for five months to make up for it) I didn't make a fantastic amount more than that. The next two years I have a scholarship, yeah, which means I will be making more money (combined with working 3-4 days a week maybe $30,000? $8,000 scholarship?) which is livable, but certainly more comfortable when you're not blowing $20,000 on rent.

Me personally, I'd like to exit my Masters degree, be debt-free and have a bit of dosh saved up (maybe $20,000? maybe more?) so that when I do move out I'm not sitting around starving for a year, and that I can be...maybe not comfortable, but not breadline.

tl;dr Sydney property is REALLY expensive, it's sometimes not fiscally responsible to move out when you don't need to, sometimes being financially safe is better.
 
I see your point Liam, but I left home when I began uni, I bled money for a bit there, but I got through it and I have a pretty light HECS debt. My first year I was lucky to share an apartment with a great guy and get a great deal in Brisbane (where property's cheaper anyway); Melbourne's ridiculous for rent, very similar to Sydney in that respect, and I was sometimes dependent on some parental help to afford all my groceries. Didn't have much of a social life at all.

Part of it was that I had to move out - with my mother on the Gold Coast, I would've faced a ninety minute commute each way (at best) to UQ in Brisbane, and then obviously moving to Melbourne meant going it alone. But I would've gone nuts not having my own place, and it sure taught me a lot of real-life experience I wouldn't have got any other way. I stand by what I've said, especially given Australian welfare and university scholarships/financial aid. University is a fairly safe environment, so it's a good time for people to learn what independent living means, rather than throwing themselves both into the workforce and into independent living at the same time. I think it's very sad that it has become acceptable in the last decade to graduate while still living in your parents' home.
 
We had the pleasure of seeing him playing with Jack Ladder a while ago, and he was weird enough then. After reading that, I want to see him solo just for the experience!

He has "quesadilla" tattooed on his hip.
 
I was never going to Sugar Mountain but I kind of wish I had now. Sounds like the type of thing you'd never forget. Apparently Action Bronson did most of his set on the Forum floor, bought a drink during his set, smoked a blunt and got arrested afterwards.
 
Yeah, it would have been a story to tell.

From the Everguide review

Before the set there's whispers that it's going to be unmissable, and it's confirmed when early in the night I see Kirin J Callinan in the crowd at Brothers Hand Mirror, whispering in the ear of a huge, tanned partybro. Not exactly the type I imagine him to pal around with, so automatically I assume he's a setpiece. The set itself begins with an explanation from Kris Moyes: the organisers had censored their planned performance, so they're just going to explain it to us. The crowd start booing the organisers. Moyes shows us a diagram of how the next part was supposed to go, involving a member of the audience called Billy. More a crude drawing, actually. Looks like it's been done in MS Paint over a photo of the empty amphitheatre. The crowd start laughing at the drawing. Billy comes up on stage. The crowd start cheering for Billy. Then they roll the video of Billy staring into the camera as a hand holding an iPhone comes out of the corner of the frame and holds the screen up to his face. The screen begins flashing. Billy's eyes glaze over, his body starts spasming and he slumps to the floor. Turns out Billy suffers from epilepsy. The crowd start booing Callinan and Moyes. Suddenly it seems like everyone's shouting "fuck you!" or "you're a dickhead!" and one woman starts in on an angry tirade decrying their act. "That's nice, but it's not really relevant," says the artist. She storms out. The music starts.
 
If he really got a kid from the Royal Children's and induced a seizure, that is downright fucked up. Sickening.

If it's an adult guy who knows what he's getting into, I don't see the controversy.

Holy shit I wish I had been there, rather than dismissing the line-up as looking boring and wanky.
 
Do you wish you were there cos you could have seen a guy have a fit...?


And I know the conversation has moved on, but I don't have a problem with people living at home while they study/save up/whatever, provided they're not total leeches who are taking advantages of their parents' tolerance/parental instincts. I moved out of home to study, but only because my family didn't live in Melbourne. My parents still paid for my rent and basically everything, which I suppose makes me no better than someone who stayed at home all through their degree. At least I learned to do my laundry and buy my own meals and use a microwave and manage a budget, even if I didn't earn the money myself.

Conversely, I know someone who's my age and currently living at home. She moved back there after her fiancé of ten years dumped her and she had to sell the house they'd bought - she went around Europe on some of the proceeds and moved home to save up so she could move out again. I think she's stayed there longer than she anticipated, but she was on the same shit wage I was until fairly recently. She's certainly not staying there out of convenience, since she has to drive for 45 mins to get to work, she pays board, and her family seems to expect her to cook them dinner more often than not on top of everything else.

So yeah, there are lots of reasons for staying with your family. If my mother lived in Melbourne there's a fair chance I'd be living with her now, if only cos it's damn sight cheaper to share than get a place on your own. I just ran out of single friends who live on this side of town. *L*

(And yes, I know staying at home and never moving out is different from moving out and going back again, so I guess that renders most of the above moot, but I'm very tired and can't be arsed deleting it.)

:twocents:
 
So if anyone wants to explain to me (in a "___ for Dummies" kind of way) the whole Israel-Palestine conflict that would be great. It's one of those world issues that I'm not really across and I realised that the other day when someone said "Jews hate The Age because it has traditionally been pro-Palestine". Am I mistaken in saying that it's about Palestine's fight to become a country in its own right? And how does it involve Arabs?
 
Do you wish you were there cos you could have seen a guy have a fit...?

Since there was no fit, no! I wish I was there for the insanity, for the hostile crowd, for my own take on the conflicting reports, and for Callinan's sheer weirdness. You don't get a gig like that every day.

(You also don't get a gig featuring a projection "screen" made out of inflated bubblewrap every day, which is what I happened to catch at Northcote tonight. Yeah, that was a thing.)

(And yes, I know staying at home and never moving out is different from moving out and going back again, so I guess that renders most of the above moot, but I'm very tired and can't be arsed deleting it.)

Haha, yeah, I was going to say that's quite a bit different to what I was talking about, which is people being too lazy to be independent (and, as a consequence, ruining their chances with the opposite sex - "hey, wanna come back to my mum's place?" doesn't quite have the same ring to it as "hey, wanna come back to my place?").

So if anyone wants to explain to me (in a "___ for Dummies" kind of way) the whole Israel-Palestine conflict that would be great. It's one of those world issues that I'm not really across and I realised that the other day when someone said "Jews hate The Age because it has traditionally been pro-Palestine". Am I mistaken in saying that it's about Palestine's fight to become a country in its own right? And how does it involve Arabs?

I'll get to this properly tomorrow, but it involves Arabs because Palestinians are Arabs, in the same way Germans are Europeans.

And although The Age has traditionally had something of a pro-Palestinian slant, or at least been sympathetic to their plight, these days it's more mixed, especially with their willingness to publish Dvir Abramovich's material, which ranges from mediocre to kneejerk humourlessness to outright drivel.
 
I'll get to this properly tomorrow, but it involves Arabs because Palestinians are Arabs, in the same way Germans are Europeans.

And although The Age has traditionally had something of a pro-Palestinian slant, or at least been sympathetic to their plight, these days it's more mixed, especially with their willingness to publish Dvir Abramovich's material, which ranges from mediocre to kneejerk humourlessness to outright drivel.

Cool, thanks, I'd appreciate it! I knew Palestinians were from that area of the world but a little less sure about the make-up of the Arab world.
 
Danny, how simple a potted history do you want? You can delve well into ancient history to get to the roots of this thing.

But basically, in the late nineteenth century, some Jews began harbouring an ambition to return to their homeland in Palestine. The rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century left Jews in an awkward position - they had previously suffered discrimination on religious terms, but now the nature of the world had changed. There was the popular belief that every nation should have its own state; the French should have France, the Serbs should have Serbia, etc. You had empires disintegrating as nations within them asserted their independence. Jews had no homeland, so in Europe and Russia they were a stateless people, living in other peoples' countries. The Jewish diaspora was scattered far and wide.

Anyway, after the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of WWI, Palestine came under British control as a mandate territory. Unofficial Jewish migration to Palestine had already begun (and there had, in fact, still been some Jews living there), and this continued apace under British control. A large Jewish community developed, and Britain was sympathetic to their migration, having endorsed the Balfour declaration in 1917 to create a Jewish national homeland - though as time went on, Jewish quasi-governmental organs and paramilitary groups became increasingly hostile to British rule. The British sought, to varying degrees, to create a Jewish homeland within Palestine without disadvantaging the Arab population; some of the more hardline Jews wished to turn Palestine into a Jewish homeland at the expense of Arabs. When the British planned to pull out at the expiry of their mandate, a UN partition plan was devised, creating two states - Israel for the Jewish population, and Palestine for the Arabs. Upon the withdrawal of British control in 1948, Israel immediately invaded the Palestinian territory; here it gets murky, as some claim Israel acted out of fear that Palestine, aided by other Arab states, would invade them to seize more territory (the Palestinians were disappointed they received less land than they desired in the partition plan), while others claim Israel wished to conquer as much of Palestine as possible. Getting stuck into this aspect is a minefield and I can't really handle it here; my own perspective is that Israel was the aggressor.

The upshot of Israel's invasion of Palestine was that other Arab countries immediately intervened to defend Palestine, creating a multi-state war. In the end, the planned Palestinian state never came into existence. Israel seized much of Palestine; Jordan (then known as Transjordan) occupied some of the West Bank, and Egypt claimed the Gaza Strip. After seizing territory, Israel expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and settled the land itself. Due to the horrors of the Holocaust, Western powers typically sided with Israel and turned a blind eye to the horrors being inflicted on Palestinians.

Israel expanded its territory in the Six Day War of 1967. Ever since the Suez Crisis of 1956, tensions between Israel and its neighbours had been mounting through mutual provocation. In 1967, Israel launched a surprise attack and seized all of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (it also seized the Sinai Peninsula but later returned it to Egypt). It has subsequently established settlements in these territories, essentially to colonise them, integrate them as part of Israel proper, and make it too hard to create a Palestinian state separate from Israel. So that's what all the fuss about settlements is. Oh yeah, and let's not forget all the border tension between Israel and Lebanon, with Israel occupying parts of southern Lebanon at times.

So in recent decades there have been numerous uprisings (Intifada) by Palestinian groups, armed Israeli actions to "pacify" the West Bank/Gaza, attempts to negotiate peace, attempts to negotiate two-state solutions, all that sort of thing. It's chaotic. Whose land is it? How should it be resolved? Both sides claim their violent actions are self-defence - who's the aggressor and who's the aggrieved? They aren't easy questions to answer.

Hope that helps.
 
Thanks for the history lesson. :up:

Though I can't help but wonder what a "Jewish quasi-governmental organ" is. Is it like a spleen that's also a bureaucrat?
 
Ha ha. There was a Jewish Agency, which was an elected Jewish body that handled administrative needs of the Jewish community without being part of the British mandatory government - it worked with them, though it would go on to antagonise them (it was even raided by the Brits at one point) and formed Haganah, the paramilitary group that formed the basis for the present-day Israeli Defence Force.

Oh, and there was also this, after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War: Operation Danny - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
There was the popular belief that every nation should have its own state; the French should have France, the Serbs should have Serbia, etc.

Still exists in some form ie. 'Australia for Australians' and 'Russia for Russians.' :lol:
 
Yes, I didn't mean to suggest it was a past phenomenon, given that much of the logic and history underpinning the nation-state system relies upon a nationalistic conception of the state.
 
Also:

Both sides claim their violent actions are self-defence - who's the aggressor and who's the aggrieved? They aren't easy questions to answer.

Is there actually any legitimate argument to justify Israel as the victim? I haven't heard it.
 
I didn't want to detract from your post (which taught me more about the conflict than I've ever known), but I couldn't help but point out what I thought was a typo.
 
Thanks heaps, man. I'm still a little murky over the history before the 19th century - why were the Jews not in their homeland of Palestine? - but I've got a better grasp on it now. So what it boils down to currently is a battle over who has what land in the area - Israelites or Palestinians? Where do you stand on the issue?
 
In a sentence, the Jews were dispersed from Palestine in the earlier Middle Ages due to religious conflict in the area (the Crusades) between European Christians and Muslims; they got caught in the middle and moved to European (and African? I don't know) countries in order to avoid the violence of the Crusades.

*oversimplificationof700yearsofhistoryinasentence*
 
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