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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ That'll be the same Germany that a few weeks ago was deeply racist according to your analysis of the Greek crisis. If you keep developing moving generalisations at that rate, you'll be able to run them through a projector and show a feature film.
Though the Left are prone to considering democratic consent as "trivial", as you put it, fortunately the people do not.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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Wokko 
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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| Is Merkel trying to kickstart the 4th Reich? She'd look a bit too dominatrix in black military garb. |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Mugwump wrote: | ^ That'll be the same Germany that a few weeks ago was deeply racist according to your analysis of the Greek crisis. If you keep developing moving generalisations at that rate, you'll be able to run them through a projector and show a feature film.
Though the Left are prone to considering democratic consent as "trivial", as you put it, fortunately the people do not. |
The conventional actions you obsess over—the holding of elections, taking of polls, and boundaries of the nation-state—are among the most perfunctory and superficial elements of democracy. The heavy lifting lies in the decentralisation of power and access to productive opportunity which drive the normalisation of universal human rights.
In a healthy democracy, there is no redneck mob or elite sect which gets to start wars wherever they like and let people drown whenever they like; such behaviour shows a fundamental contempt for democracy, and is nothing but garden-variety tyranny.
And to pull the covers up over your eyes hoping it will all just go away is juvenile and irresponsible. It won't, and it's only going to get worse and happen more often until it's owned and managed reasonably and with a sense of human fealty and solidarity.
Now, more on the failures of the UK and France to cope with the changing world:
| pietillidie wrote: | Germany has the only sane stance because it now has the broadest, least paranoid view among Old Europe due to its modern history. It has a better world education generally; a more agile economy; and much better social stability measures due to its more broad-based economy. It has the ability to absorb and make good of change because it is geared towards the future, rather than wasting time pining in self-entitled pity for the past.
Germany failed with Greece on camera, but even then it is gradually moving to a more sane position now the spotlight is off the negotiations. It certainly has its share of inward, racist rednecks and self-serving landed wealth, but its greater cultural agility affords it more choices.
The UK and France are slaves to a trite left-right dichotomy which is rooted in a backward-looking imperialist self-entitlement. We are France! We are England/GB/the UK! We.... We....
Germany doesn't suffer under the brain-crippling "wewe" disorder the other two have, and can therefore more easily deal with the world as it is.
The UK and France need prostate checks, and fast, otherwise their "wewe" disorders will only get worse. |
Technically, the modern history of Germany gives it a broader footing in this instance. It is pushed by its history to counter claims against its reputation when it comes to the treatment of the powerless. And it can absorb migrants because it has a more comprehensive and functional production system to bring them into.
France dumps newcomers in suburban ghettos, forgets to help them become productive citizens, and then hates them two decades later, pining for the imaginary purity of the Old Empire. The UK has apparently left its poor to rot in morbid conditions since the time of Thatcher if not Dickens, leaving them angry, defensive and yearning for the imaginary purity of the Old Empire.
Left or right it doesn't matter; the present mix of perceived self-interest is wrongheaded and destructive. Unfortunately, ignorant misconceptions have been fostered by too many Tony Abbotts around the world, stripping people of the agility and open-mindedness needed to make good of the changes the world is throwing at them. If cutting one's nose to spite one's face were an Olympic event, France and England, and perhaps Japan, would be fighting for gold. But the only Olympic event in human survival is adaptation.
Germany just has a better ability to cope at this time. This is purely an accident of modern history, but such racist, bitter and backward ideologies have too much of an official footing in France and the UK because there are not enough effective economic pathways through which solutions can be constructed. Everyone knows poor newcomers are likely to be dumped somewhere, rather than brought on-stream as productive contributors.
Yes, the landed German elites stirred up racism and resentment to help bludgeon Greece into paying for the poor financial due diligence of their investment vehicles, and may the bastards rot in hell for every Greek child and individual who has suffered because of them.
That said, it's still a matter of degrees: Germany has been much more steadfast in dealing with the people movement problem, and prior to that in opposing the carnage unleashed by Bush, Blair and Howard. Thus, I still have the recent moral score at 2-1 in Germany's favour, Frankfurt elites and bottle-throwing Dresden hooligans notwithstanding.
Edit: Expanded.
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Waleed Aly gives Labor a well-earned serve over their hypocrisy on asylum seekers:
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-monstrous-failure-of-our-bipartisan-asylum-seeker-policy-20160427-gogrhn.html
| Quote: | The monstrous failure of our bipartisan asylum seeker policy
Waleed Aly
Perhaps the most stupefying aspect of our asylum seeker debate is that we call it a debate in the first place. It's not. It's a complete political consensus. Our current policies are a bipartisan concoction; the result of years of mutual posturing, outflanking and then outbidding. "You're banishing asylum seekers to detention centres in the Australian desert? Fine, we'll send them to Nauru for processing!" "You're still resettling them here? We'll banish them forever!" "Oh yeah? We'll get an army general to do it!" And so on.
It's hugely disingenuous. The Coalition claims sole credit for stopping the boats, never acknowledging that the most important part of its policy – the mandatory shunting of people to Nauru and Papua New Guinea, never to return to Australia – was Kevin Rudd's.
The Coalition added some turnbacks and maybe some other things they've decided are top secret, but the truth is that boat arrivals slowed significant before Tony Abbott was even elected.
Labor, meanwhile, is happy to blame the Coalition for whatever aspect of the policy disintegrates, never acknowledging its role in the catastrophe.
That's what is particularly nauseating about watching Labor trying to make political mileage out of asylum seeker policy. And on that score, what a nauseating week it has been.
"They have botched this from day one," puffed Labor's immigration spokesman Richard Marles when Papua New Guinea's Supreme Court ruled our detention centre there to be illegal.
But here's the problem: that centre was always illegal. It didn't suddenly become illegal when Abbott took power. Marles is right it was botched from day one, but that was Labor's day. It takes some special level of gall to establish an illegal detention centre, then insist it's the Coalition's mess.
There's no great surprise here. This was such an obvious violation of the PNG constitution that the PNG government tried frantically in 2014 to change the constitution to make it legal. When the moment of truth arrived, neither the PNG nor Australian governments mounted a meaningful defence. This die was long cast.
Marles' only real defence is to say this whole centre should be empty by now; that we might have got away with it if only the getaway car had turned up on time. Hence: "PNG never imagined people would be on Manus for so long – we didn't either."
Well, that's a monstrous failure of imagination, then. Because while it's true Labor said its Manus centre would be empty in a year, it's also true there was no plan to make that happen. It was an entirely unaccountable dream: a declaration utterly devoid of meaning.
Labor never knew where these people would be resettled, once found to be refugees. It never handed the Coalition a stack of agreements with other countries guaranteeing these people would have a home. It passed on a detention regime made of matchsticks. Now it stands ready to tut, the moment things collapse.
No, the real feat of imagination here would have been to pretend this could end any other way. Because the PNG Supreme Court this week did nothing more than reveal the obvious: that our policy was only ever to sweep asylum seekers under someone else's rug. It was designed to stop boats coming to us, but solve no greater problem than that. We've not brokered an agreement with our regional neighbours to share the load, because we've preferred instead to bribe the poorest nations into removing the problem from our sight.
Occasionally, as in Cambodia's case, we've paid them dozens of millions of dollars for almost exactly nothing.
Pursue that kind of non-policy and eventually it catches up with you. Manus is full of people already found to be refugees, stuck in a country that says it simply cannot afford to take them, and right next to one that very easily could.
They're there because "stop the boats" – in truth a bipartisan slogan – only ever masked a question we could never answer: what happens to these people? What happens to the ones who don't die at sea, or the ones we convince to return home? Do they die elsewhere? We don't really know because the minute they aren't on boats headed for us, they cease to exist. And as far as we're concerned, their misery doesn't exist either.
That's why all the stories simply wash over us. Reza Berati is killed under our care. The ABC's Four Corners program reveals that Hamid Khazaei died because the Immigration Department pointlessly delayed vital medical treatment. This week we learnt an Iranian man set himself on fire in Nauru.
None of this fundamentally moves us because we've constructed an elaborate world that makes this simply the cost of doing business, rather than anything that registers as a series of tragedies we've helped create. Nothing gets in the way, except when a court uses brute force.
That's when you'll find Richard Marles, not questioning how his own party's scheme could be so hopelessly conceived, but demanding Peter Dutton fly to PNG to keep this thing alive. Somehow. Anyhow.
It's also when you'll find Peter Dutton responding by saying refugees from Manus "will not be settled in Australia".
That's not even remotely an answer to the question of what we'll do now that our main policy has been quashed. But it is the only thing anyone since Rudd has ever needed to say.
Except now we're being asked a different question. It's telling that PNG Prime Minister Peter O'Neill has "welcomed this outcome" from the Supreme Court. It's telling that he so quickly confirmed he would shut the centre. It's telling that he said the centre "has done a lot more damage than probably anything else". Seems even the bribery isn't enough any more. Our servants are turning and their courts are catching up with us.
The design flaws of our policy are slowly being exposed. Labor can try to revel if it likes, but let's be abundantly clear: it's revelling in its own failure. |
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Culprit 
Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Port Melbourne
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| David, turning back the boats is a vote winner. |
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Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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| Culprit wrote: | | David, turning back the boats is a vote winner. |
And a life saver. I've long ago come down on the side of the greater good here. Sure there are improvements to make in the system once people are being processed, it seems an overly slow and mismanaged system but the policy itself is widely accepted and morally good.
The unseen victims of the open door Labor policy of the past were the 100s or even 1000s of people drowning at sea. They're the ones who truly ceased to exist, not just in the hyperbole of a leftist media darling like Walid but in the dark, cold depths of the Indian Ocean. |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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I'm not going to bother repeating everything I've said about why I agree with stopping boats, it's all been said and is on the record.
It is good to see Ali call out Labor on the blatant hypocrisy though although, who's surprised?
Hypocrisy and lying are compulsory criteria for being a politician.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Woods Of Ypres
Joined: 27 May 2003
Location: Yugoslavia
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| Waleed is a rude little grub who does not allow others to speak if their opinions differ to his. typical lefty. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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That may be his TV manner (he's never struck me as rude or someone with a habit of talking over guests, but then I don't watch his show much), but that's hardly relevant here. Did you actually read the article, or just glance at the name and skip over it?
Frankly, I think our treatment of refugees is a much more concerning issue than whether some guy is impolite on TV.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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^
Our treatment of refugees is fine.
Our treatment of people trying to come here by boat claiming to be refugees is deliberately harsh to stop people choosing that means to get here.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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You're wrong.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-07/png-deems-under-half-of-manus-island-detainees-refugees/7308322
Around half of these people being locked up in shitty conditions are refugees. They are not merely "claiming to be refugees". They are refugees (and I was listening to an academic on the ABC the other night who thought that the proportion of genuine refugees was probably much higher than that).
So, unless you think it's "fine" to be locked up on an island prison camp indefinitely, you have no basis to claim that "our treatment of refugees is fine". You could instead be honest and say that "our treatment of refugees is atrocious, but the ends justify the means", but even that argument is looking pretty threadbare by now.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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I'm not wrong, you just disagree with me. So be it, I'm not going through this argument again.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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This isn't about opinions. You clearly implied that there was a substantial difference between the way we treat genuine refugees and people who merely "claim to be refugees". That hasn't been the case since 2013. Your post suggested you either weren't aware of that or else that you think that the conditions in these camps are "fine". Two refugees – yes, refugees – setting themselves on fire in the last couple of days suggests that the latter might not be the case.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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Conversation has been had.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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Let's have a beer; there's nothing to gain in these exchanges. The consequences are often vital, to be sure, but our endless iterations of the same points to the same people aren't.
[Did I just say that? Must be getting old and washed up!]
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In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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