Politics The Hangar Politics Thread

Remove this Banner Ad

Log in to remove this ad.

quotemokc said:
Get rid of? Like stage a coup?

Thats great for democracy.
Click to expand...

If Morrison got rid of him it would be nothing remotely like a coup.
 
quotemokc said:
Stealthily making a great case for us being a Republic so that we are not beholden to a foreign power.
Click to expand...

I'm also happy with the message that is front and centre.
 
quotemokc said:
Stealthily making a great case for us being a Republic so that we are not beholden to a foreign power.
Click to expand...
Not sure that localising that kind of power would be an improvement, not least because our present batch of politicians couldn't help themselves from politicising the office.
 
Lore said:
Not sure that localising that kind of power would be an improvement, not least because our present batch of politicians couldn't help themselves from politicising the office.
Click to expand...
Thats the chance I would rather take as a sovereign nation
 

(Log in to remove this ad.)

quotemokc said:
Thats the chance I would rather take as a sovereign nation
Click to expand...
I can't see the republic issue being resolved before the Queen abdicates, and when she does there will be a wave of nostalgic support for King Charles because shiny new things. The dust will have to settle on the new crown before swinging voters on the issue can be convinced to abandon the crown. Not happening in my lifetime, as much as I'd like it to.
 
Iranian state TV says Tehran has launched "tens" of surface-to-surface missiles at an air base inside Iraq in response to America's killing of a top Iranian general.

An American official confirmed rockets had been fired at the Al-Asad airbase in Iraq, which houses US forces.

It comes after Iran's top military commander Qassem Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad on Friday.

US forces could not be immediately reached for comment. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said the White House was aware of the reports.



https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01...-at-iraqi-air-base-housing-us-troops/11851500

I think Trump said 52 targets?
 
ghostdog said:
Iranian state TV says Tehran has launched "tens" of surface-to-surface missiles at an air base inside Iraq in response to America's killing of a top Iranian general.

An American official confirmed rockets had been fired at the Al-Asad airbase in Iraq, which houses US forces.

It comes after Iran's top military commander Qassem Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad on Friday.

US forces could not be immediately reached for comment. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said the White House was aware of the reports.



https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01...-at-iraqi-air-base-housing-us-troops/11851500

I think Trump said 52 targets?
Click to expand...

"the war is not meant to be won, its meant to be continuous" Orwell at his best
 
ghostdog said:
Craig Kelly on Good Morning Britain.


If Morrison is ever going to reset after this, surely he gets rid of this guy.
Click to expand...


craig kelly's a bit of an idiot and all that but that was a ******* ambush and a half....

when kelly presented his argument piers just talked over him and told him hes running out of time.
 
HirdsTheWord said:
craig kelly's a bit of an idiot and all that but that was a ******* ambush and a half....

when kelly presented his argument piers just talked over him and told him hes running out of time.
Click to expand...
I agree. Their agenda was clear. They needed to be prepared for him to blame fuel loads but they didn't even go there when he did. Treating their audience like chumps as much as they did Kelly.
 
Doss said:
Kelly is a genuine complete chump, so my sympathy is non-existent. Lowest common denominator pork chop.
Click to expand...
angry-pig.jpg


The pig is insulted. :cool:
 
Lore said:
In the same quadrant as me but you're more akin to Noam Chomsky whereas I'm apparently mates with Jeremy Corbyn. This is the "certificate" version, I'm the red dot in the green section;
1581769443752.png

And this is where they put the parties based on their 2019 election promises;
1581769585048.png

Along with this commentary on the election:

https://www.politicalcompass.org/aus2019

Obviously, and as with anything, take it with a truckload of salt. But I find it interesting. For what it's worth most major parties in most countries fall in the blue corner in recent elections.
Click to expand...


I ended up on this page for some reason and these graphics caught my eye.

I can't settle on what I think is really going on here, whether it's conspiracy or incompetence that is at the heart of either the structure of the criteria or the input of data required to produce the graphics.

On one hand, the positions of most of the parties and politicians (i.e. not the totalitarian dictators) at the "authoritarian" end of the Y axis are inverse to reality. To understand what is happening you need to believe in the equivalence of totalitarian dictatorship with the expression of nationalism and opposition to open borders in a democracy.

Then you see our Liberal party, the UK Conservatives, Churchill and Trump are more "authoritarian" than a murderous dictator like Fidel Castro or Chairman Mao (who clocked up a body count in the 10s of millions - it may be as high as 100 million). Teresa May and Hillary Clinton may be slightly more authoritarian than the others I've mentioned (because of their anti-democratic practices) but its negligable compared to Castro or Mao? It seems like a stitch-up...

... but then you see the positions of Bernie Sanders and the Greens, relative to their competition, and it's pretty clear that incompetence (i.e. a misunderstanding of history and misunderstanding of ideology) is at least as strong an influence.

If you're going to have "libertarians" and "authoritarians" at extreme ends of a scale what you are really talking about is freedom and that necessarily incorporates consideration of the size government and the significance/influence of government in a citizen's life. There is no bigger government than the totalitarian dictatorship which is about the only thing correct on the graphics. In this regard there is no meaningful difference between the fascist-socialists (that the NAZI party was a racists party of the not-quite-so-extreme left is a forgotten fact of history) and the communists.

The libertarian end of the scale cannot be represented by parties and politicians who would expand the state and use the apparatus of the state to enforce political concepts of equality, diversity, tolerance or anything other than respect for the rule of law (which is not an endless change of the law to meet progressive standards). The libertarian, and even the classical liberal position, is that you are free to live you life but that does not mean that you can use the state to encroach on the freedom of others to normalise your existence, for example. The argument that "health care puts everyone on a level playing field" or that a government should act in response to climate change is not a libertarian or right wing position, it's purely an argument of the left (which is not me trying to invalidate the argument).

The Greens and Sanders are not free love hippies, which is the only way I could see them near the libertarian end of a scale, relative to the competition, even if that is how they may have started (although Sanders was more likely to have been interested in equalising the means of spreading love). They are big government advocates who advance agendas that would necessitate expansion of government, bureaucracy, regulation and influence over the decision making of individuals. That is inherently authoritarian. The corruption of academia has a lot to do with the complete confusion about what it actually means to be free and the consequences of big government for that freedom.

It's also apparent that the term "authoritarian" has been expanded as an attack on strong or authoritative leadership which you would only really do to tell the story you want to tell (i.e. to say that Trump is the same as murderous dictators). It's ridiculous to say advocates of low government regulation like Trump and Churchill are authoritarians just because they are strong personalities and strong leaders. Churchill lost power twice, from memory, and Trump allowed a witch-hunt to progress for 2.5 years that he essentially had the power to shut down via the replacement of his AG Jeff Sessions.

Even the Australian "right" is a joke. The Liberal Party would be to the left of the establishment Democrats in the States. The Liberals advocate direction action climate change policy, instead of letting the market set trends, and their current champion of conservatism introduced a paid maternity leave scheme. They introduced gay marriage by ceding the decision to a plebiscite knowing that "yes" would win and struggle to hold up an end of the free speech debate.

No Australian party, except maybe the Liberal Democrats, is much more than a box or 2 to the right of the Y axis. About the only thing Australian political parties do that looks like "right wing" economic policy is enthusiastically jump into so-called "free trade" deals, slowly eroding Australian economic strength in the process.
 
Last edited:
The Speaker said:
The two-axis, four quadrant model is generally promoted by libertarians to try and justify themselves as a 'real' third ideological group. The fact that the red quadrant is basically non-existent in reality doesn't seem to bother them.
Click to expand...


Sanders belongs in the red as do The Greens and possibly even Aus and UK Labor - which is not to say they are as bad/immoral/evil as murderous dictators (obviously).

However, you cannot expand the size and influence of the state as they would seek to do without being genuinely authoritarian. Think about it from the perspective of the half of the country that wouldn't vote for them - their autonomy shrinks against their will. Whether it's a dictator at the top of the pile or an elected rep doesn't make that much difference unless you are being killed.

It is not an equivalent position to be subjected to the tyranny of freedom from government.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Remove this Banner Ad

Back
Top