Straya thread part 5 - scallops and slippery dips

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I wish the weather every day could be about 5 overnight and no warmer than 17 during the day, with low humidity and a nice cool breeze. So if I ever become some evil genius who can control the weather, that's what you're all in for.

The opposite extreme of living in coats, is the macho fuckers you see around here in Toowoomba in midwinter, waltzing into the grocery store in bare feet and shorts, or sometimes no shirt. Don't tell me it's not really cold, it fucking is. It's a dominance strategy. Cause I'm rugged up in three layers and still can't feel my hands.

Haha when I was a kid in New Zealand I'd make a point of going to school in shorts and t-shirt at the deepest depths of winter. I was an idiot.
 
I had a maths teacher once where, if he didn't have the obligatory shorts and knee socks even in the dead of winter, it meant he was battling a flu or maybe ebola.
 
Oh god I had one of those too.

Really stern German guy. German stereotypes are possibly based on him. We discovered, however, that if we got him talking about his childhood in Germany, he would suddenly soften and prattle on for the entire lesson and not teach us a single word (or number) of maths.
 
Ours was usually derailed into talking about politics, his younger days, pretty much anything. Most lessons (this is the upper end of high school, mind) went completely off the rails about half an hour in.
 
I can understand and, to an extent have some respect for, figures like Shorten and Gillard. I mean that their careers make sense. But how Mark Latham or Kevin Rudd made it to the top of the Australian Labor Party, is a worrying question.

We didn't dodge a bullet. We got Rudd and what should have been a three or four term government was all over in six years, the last three by the skin of their collective teeth. Probably would have been a similar story with Latham. Maybe worse.
 
I don't think there's any doubt that the cuts are about a sooky conservative government trying to get revenge rather than about the budget. I do understand some right wingers' complaints about the ABC, because it IS government-funded, but what they always conveniently forget is that ridiculous proliferation of right-wing media.

This was a satisfying read - UK Tories slam Tony Abbott on climate policy
 
I have little truck with the UK Tories, but their position on climate change and environmental matters generally does diverge a little from their Australian cousins. It's a culture-war thing, and our mob take more of their cues from the US.
 
The ABC isn't even terribly left-leaning and hasn't been for some time - as proven by their continual willingness to give airtime to the shills from the IPA, who have a constituency of almost zero and advocate policies unpalatable even to the average Liberal voter.

But this meme of the ABC as a haven of lefties has plenty of traction, and seems legit enough to people whose primary media source is the Murdoch press and who perceive anybody left of them as a dangerous Stalinist, even when the person is actually centre-right. I'm starting to think some people in this country think any form of investigative journalism is a nefarious lefty intrigue.
 
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Great, I just lost my post-in-progress.

Anyway, I guess on one hand the above looks like opposition advertising, but on the other, assuming it's correct enough, is just another symptom of the bloodyminded mutual war of attrition among Green and Labor elements.

But, I was going to go on to say that the thing about 'how to vote' cards is that nobody is obligated to take them, or follow them. Nobody.
 
It was posted by a bloke I have on FB who is an ALP member. He is insufferable. I have discovered something - I am annoyed by ALP members far more than I am Liberal members.
 
ALP members annoy me the most because they almost seem proud of their party's factionalism and infighting. They seem frequently incapable of uniting against a common foe, or recognising when it's necessary to put aside minor differences for broader benefit. No doubt this in large part stems from the party's identity crisis regarding whether it is a social progressive political party or a party of the working class.

By the way, Cobbler, if you were planning to vote above the line for Phil Cleary in Voice for the West, think again. Their preferences are dodgy as fuck. No Smart Meters (conspiracy theorists and people paranoid of change) and Family First get really high preferences, while the bottom four parties are, in order, the Sex Party, the Greens, the ALP, and the Libs. The fifth seat in Northern Metropolitan will likely be a battle between No Smart Meters, Family First, and the Sex Party, and all votes above the line for Voice for the West will go first to No Smart Meters, then if required to Family First, and will probably never reach the Sex Party, let alone the Greens or the ALP.

However, voting below the line in Victorian state elections is much easier than in federal elections. You don't need to number all candidates; as long as you number at least five, your vote is valid. So you could vote 1 for Phil Cleary, totally ignore the other Voice for the West candidate if you wish, go say 2-3 for the Sex Party, 4-9 for the Greens, and 10-14 for the ALP, and just leave it there. Or whatever. I'm just guessing what may be relevant to your interests.
 
Well I can think of one thing worse than young ALP members (or Young Liberals, who strike me, on anecdotal reading from those who would know, as infinitely worse, just real nasty pieces of work actually)...

young La Roucheites. And it's actually a thing! As a Q&A or one of those Tony Jones hosted specials a couple of years back on climate change amply showed.
 
Anybody who takes La Rouche seriously is terrible.

And Young Libs don't count because anybody who's a Young Lib is a cranky 70 year old on the inside.
 
Although 'worse' might not be the word, the constellation of irrelevant spinter socialist microparties give me the shits too. They are Labor's loss (even if many would, for various ideological hairsplittings of reasons, have probably refused to have anything to do with it as early as the 1910s. The end of the Cold War should have been the occasion for an end to that, not further spintering).

The dominance of the self-declared 'Right' within Labor is what happens when they are the only people who stay in the room. Also they were (once, and for a while) good at winning, and the left just aren't. In fact they're terrible at it.
 
Also, is it indicative of me that I misread the title of that bumped Zoo Confessionals thread as 'Euthanasia Quilt'? And thought, wow, who's making that, is it something you donate to?
 
There is little that annoys me more than the inability of the left to co-operate. I suppose the far-right has the same problem - the fact Australia has four fundie parties is testament to this - but it seems to be much more contained. There may be lots of little splinter groups, but they don't undermine the core of that side of politics, and when a splinter group becomes large enough to be a worry then it is integrated or absorbed in some capacity.
 
The middling-far right have enough discipline to stick with the Coalition... the far, far, right, they indeed seem to be either coopted or absorbed more often than not.

I really feel like they're degenerating in a lot of ways. Say what you will about the 1990s One Nation insurgency, there were real matters of economic protest buried in there, a real threat to the economic consensus. Now it's friggin anti-Halal or -burqa paranoia which couldn't be more irrelevant to what ails this country. Not much threat there to the elected Right.

I don't know if you ever lurked at the former Australian leftish blog Larvatus Prodeo (they were pretty large at one point so it's not unreasonable) but I did, and they were a mini-laboratory in what is wrong with the Left in the Australia. Petty disputes over minutiae, over and over again. Language policing (yeah ok, what we call 'PC' is not all without merit, but there are areas where it devolves into utter farce) that completely missed the wood for the trees, on all sorts of great matters... over and over again. Not to mention a frankly illiberal, punishing and straightening instinct that seemed always to lurk just beneath the surface, and is why I will likely never describe myself in terms any stronger than 'old fashioned social democrat'.
 
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