Things that make you go.......WTF?

[pietillidie]

[David]

[Tannin]

Now now, David, stop being reasonable. Is that any way to behave?

[Tannin]

[stui magpie]

[pietillidie]

David, part of the problem you're fighting is that no matter how much money certain people have, they still feel miserable and insecure. They'll still have a sort of empty hole in their gut that can't be satisfied. They then fall back on money as a sort of "compensation for misery", trapping themselves in a mental construct where they're miserable because they work hard, and everyone else is wondrously happy because they're "leaners" living off their hard work and holding them back from finding satisfaction.

But, as we know, angst is part of the human predicament which can be resolved in multiple ways. Conservative propaganda understands this and excites it to great effect, providing the "it's their [leaners, Muslims, students, etc.] fault" easy out for people. This is why I say it's fundamentally a kind of avoidance-type immaturity.

[Wokko]

Liberal Democrat Taxation policy:

Limit the federal government to defence, immigration, basic public services (eg passport services, regulation of hazardous materials, air and sea transport regulation), and assistance to the least well off.

Stop all transfers from the federal government to other levels of government, including grants from the pool of GST revenues.

With the associated savings, cut federal taxes by more than half, through:

lifting the tax free threshold to $40,000, cutting personal tax rates to a flat 20%, and cutting the company tax rate to 20%; and

abolishing tobacco, alcohol and fuel taxes, import tariffs, carbon pricing and mineral resource rent taxation.

http://www.ldp.org.au/index.php/policies/1164-taxation

[stui magpie]

[Wokko]

[stui magpie]

[Wokko]

My take on it is that the LDPs agenda will in all likelyhood never be instituted in full, but their philosophy of smaller government and greater individual choice and freedom is admirable. I think a move back in that direction would be a good thing as socialist policies and people voting themselves money from the public purse for the last 40 years isn't going to end well.

[stui magpie]

Good call. Both Labor and Liberal have drifted into the centre so much there's bugger all genuine difference between them anymore, the Greens take the vacant left space with zero chance of ever being more than a glorified lobby group.

The LDP have an opportunity to carve themselves a genuine niche.

[Tannin]

Centre? The Liberals? What are you smokin? The Liberal Party has long since expelled or otherwise got rid of all its centrists and has lurched dramatically to the far right, Tea Party style, especially at federal level but at state level too. But the Labor Party has indeed drifted into the centre - it did this under Hawke and Keating - but failed to arrest its continued drift and now occupies the centre-right position which was once the preserve of the Liberal Party under leaders like Fraser, Peacock, Hewson and the late Dick Hamer. This is why Labor is in existential crisis: they don't stand for anything in particular anymore and their core supporters have lost interest in them.

On the left there is a massive vacuum. Some say the Greens have moved into that space, but no real left-winger takes the Greens as serious lefties: the Greens have carved out their own space in the socially "progressive" sphere but don't take their mildly leftish-tinged economic policies half so seriously as they take their core value policies, which don't sit in any particular place on the left-right spectrum. Things like humane treatment of refugees and preserving what's left of the environment and building livable cities have nothing to do with left and right, they are just human values which can be and are both supported and opposed by many individuals of many different political persuasions.

[pietillidie]

The LDP platform is a sort of communism for today. Many of its policies seem reasonable, but its central logic is based not on an arm wrestle of forces, which is what reality is based on, but rather a full rational and emotional acceptance of its core assumptions.

The most central of these, the "god the father" policy, is that capital accumulation reflects human worth. But in reality no one agrees with this, from those who grossly overrate themselves to those who grossly underrate themselves, to the fact that we all value other humans differently.

So, not only would you have to start locking people up for their instincts on these things, but you'd soon be overrun by cadres of people disagreeing with the given "marked to market" valuation of a human being.

In fact, this starts happening the moment you begin taking this stuff seriously, so, as with communism it would mostly rise and fall under violent force.

The misunderstanding here, and what makes both communism and libertarianism so extreme in nature, is that they both lack doubt and complexity, and thus can only ever be held and imposed by zealots. Society is a balance of forces; here more compassionate, there more selfish, here more familial or communitarian, there more individually ambitious.

In other words, communism demands an impossible suppression of the individual self (hence the emotional mob anger), while libertarianism demands an impossible suppression of the communal self (hence the ostracised teenage male autism). Both will attract personality types accordingly.

Most of us deep down don't really believe our own claims enough to kill people for them on the basis of their "wrong ideas"; that's just an excuse under extreme conditions of conflict. We all know that if we enforce a snapshot of our current thinking at any time, we'd crush people today only to change our minds tomorrow. Thus, we argue and wrestle, but we don't seriously think the world would be better off if everyone submitted to our half-baked, current theories of the world.

Oh, but not communism and libertarianism. They know they've got the processes and thus valuations right. The only problem is they can only get others to agree and maintain agreement by mob force or a sort of sociopathic intellectual autism that ignores the complexity of the human experience going on around them.

Chances are, though, like the far left they will always attract a cult following, but will never be a serious political force except perhaps under conditions of social disruption.

[think positive]

WTF

5 pages of political bullshit. We need a seperate political WTF thread. Let this one get back to the fun of wierd sex acts with a fork and brill cream.