(Part 3) Top products from r/australia

> Since they clearly want to stay allies with us due to our strategic positioning?

Our strategic positioning which does them precisely no good at all, you mean?

They are only there because of Indonesia, and we have shown that we are more than capable of handling them ourselves.

> Where condemnation means condemnation? Hell did any nation even use the word 'condemn' once?

You're fucking kidding me. YES!

> Oh yes your vague, possible future 'realities'.

Which are a hell of a lot more reliable than your 'but… but… but… this is the way it's always been so this is the way it will stay!'

> And what exactly leads you to think that?

Oh I don't know - how about actually being familiar with what the ICC has done?

> So you agree that it's basically powerless then and dictators can committ all the crimes they want in their borders until it becomes something the UNSC cares enough about, usually becoming an international conflict, (since China basically has a policy to veto anything that allows action in internal matters as much as it can).

No, it is not basically powerless. It has power. You are deliberately being an idiot. I was simply agreeing that the ICC does not have any kind of direct control over UN security council forces. It is not basically powerless.

> Ahahaha, 1990? No wonder I couldn't find it, I was looking for something actually relevant. Oh yeah Israel is clearly on the verge of losing US support since they let that one whole wording issue through a quarter-century ago, nevermind all the times up to the present it's stopped any resolution that would actually hurt it.

Oh, yeah, it's not like even stuff from years ago can still have effects, can it?

Do you even think before you post?

Oh and er, nice job dodging all the more recent and serious resolutions against it too.

> Both are powerful, but ideology remains a strong force. And the only countries in the mid-East that genuinely care about Israel (it's direct neighbours and Iran basically) are of little importance to the US.

And the ones that don't care about Israel are even more important to the US - like Saudi Arabia.

> Because we, the citizenry, didn't know about it. Our government however doubtlessly knew all along. We've been in this for a while.

I'm sorry but your links prove absolutely nothing. There is no proof to support your claim that they were aware of it. They probably suspected, but there is nothing to suggest that they knew about it. Like I say, we share information, and work together. That is it.

> The entire case history of the court whose job it is to interpret the Constitution is irrelevant.

Yes it is - because it only deals with our constitution.

> Generally accepted where exactly? In every Australian case or legal text it's consistently capitalised.

Patently BS because the sources I showed you before demonstrate that it is not.

> The dick are you on about? The point is in not a single part of the excerpts is it ever used in the lower case. And you've still provided no evidence for even a single usage of it in the lower case in its noun form in that textbook, or any other Australian legal text or case.

Yes it is. Look inside the book.

> Also nice try dodging the point about how it's not even an Australian text.

Which is irrelevant to the initial point I was making.

> But hell I'll give you credit if you can provide a photo of a single usage of it in that book, I mean surely you didn't just cite it randomly and you have a physical or digital copy of it, right?

Well, you could have tried Amazon…

> I can only assume you're going for these completely non-sensical arguments now in attempt to confuse and hope no one else notices you have no idea what talking about.

It's not my fault you can't follow basic logic. It's also not my fault you don't know the difference between a codified Constitution (capitalisation intentional) and a non codified constitution and how that affects the convention of how the word is written.

> But hey don't let that stop you from linking to another quality source like Ask.com, go for Yahoo Answers next time maybe.

It's better than having a source irrelevant to the point.

> Ahaha, even assuming that was a thing, watering down a far more basic human right like that to free speech to protect one from 'emotional injury' is insanity.

What's more insane? Infringing on several other basic human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights just so one political right can be upheld, or maximising everybody's personal freedom and rights by limiting that one right?

FYI - freedom of speech only ever referred to the right in government to get up and say what you wanted. What you are referring to in terms of rights is the right to freedom of expression, which is already more than amply allowed for in our current legislation.

> Except 18C prohibits it anywhere in public, the legal definition of which is extremely very wide. For example it could easily catch a situation where someone overhears two friends making 'offensive' and 'hurtful' jokes between themselves on the bus or a street corner.

Then do it as part of an artistic presentation, or as part of a political speech, or do it as part of academia, or as part of the public interest. You can do all of that in my state.

Failing that, if it is that important to you, you can go to a different country and have your free speech there. Like I say - 18C effectively does not limit your free speech - just where you can do it.

>Oh now there's the name of the crime you can prosecute at your Aus Nuremberg!

No - the crimes I would try this government for at any trial would be crimes against humanity.

> Yes, and they're covered by s18D, which I assumed (and was correct) you are already aware of.

Exactly. 18D removes a lot of the teeth of 18C and provides ample space for people to express racist views.

> Yes, and? I never said the law was wrongly applied. It's just that it is, in my opinion and the current government's, a terrible one whose only solution is repeal.

Well thank God it seems the majority of Australians are against you and them.

> One shouldn't need to meet any standards to make their speech legal outside of where it may cause imminent actual damage/lawlessness similar to the US standard.

But racist speech does, in every instance, cause imminent actual damage. That's what you don't understand.

Emotional damage is actual damage. End of discussion.

> Oh no, not calls.
This has never ever happened before and truly Israel will collapse within the month!

Yeah - nice job ignoring the staggeringly long list of genuine sanctions against them.

> Except it is. Again:

No it is not. Three words: stop the boats. They can only ever mean stop the boats. They cannot mean 'stopping the boats from leaving' or 'stopping the boats from arriving'. The phrase 'stop the boats' can only ever mean 'stop the boats'.

Even if you could take your interpretation as true (which you can't) his claim still does not come true. It's not true because the boats are still 'leaving' and they are still 'arriving'.

Even if AQ does not exist in the manner you think it does, the ideology behind it is a driver for actions that people have undertaken. That means that it does exist and has had an effect on the world. You can deny that a main organization exists, or that they undertook certain actions, but you cannot deny that the idea of them has driven people to actions. That in itself means it exists in some way. I take it on step further and believe this idea was created by an organization in a way to propagate itself (Edit: Their ideology). My real world evidence comes from trusting of real world accounts presented to me second hand, but I do trust the sources that have encountered them in real life.

Further edit: Read this book and tell me this man has written several items on a related topic including a group that doesn't exist.

> The Maoris were left alone for decades as they gradually had extended contact with Europeans, and were eventually approached by the British when that contact turned abusive in the 1840s to accept British sovereignty in exchange for British protection.

Its not really that simple

Maori is a strongly tribal culture (tribes are called Iwi), and in response to British fears of French settlement, the United tribes of NZ were set up, and declared their independence as an entity to have formal contact with the crown. This lead to the writing and signing of the Treaty of Waitangi - which was written in two versions Maori and English. The two versions are vastly different, (and many maori cheifs did not have written communication skills as Maori is originally a spoken language). Many signed the treaty on the understanding of what was explained to them, and signed with the shape of their Iwi moko (tattoo) The two versions are arguably very different. Anyway, the treaty initially led the way to willing sale of land by maori, but eventually maori became less willing to sell - but the demand for land was increasing as more settlers arrived (in some cases buying their land before they left England) the government engaged in some less than ethical land transfer, in some cases "buying" from people who did not own the land they sold (maori are a tribal culture, arguably they assume "guardianship" (Kaitiatitanga) rather than property, land is collectively "owned" if you will. This was the benining of the Maori Land Wars, (which apparently is where the brittish got the idea of "trench warfare used in WWI) but also included the Parihaka maori Peace resistance..

For anyone interested, could I recommend The penguin history of New Zealand by NZ historian Michael King
, it should be required reading for every Kiwi.

> Meanwhile Norway's whaling operations eclipse those of Japan but no one cares about that.

To be fair, we do, just to a dramatically lesser extent because it doesn't happen in "our" patch. Japan's north atlantic operations similarly fly under the radar.

Edit: Also while I appreciate your nuance, it is in fact even more nuanced than you present here (and I think you're being a little too fair on Japan). Check out this, this and this

You most definitely can. Ants are great, grind them up and add them to any soup to thicken it up.

Book URL

' Just ranting a bit further, because the reasons behind some this stuff are actually rather interesting (at least to me):

The notion that states all have prideful and unique language rules is bonkers.

Regional spoken dialects and accents slowly morph over huge swaths of land that don't know state boundaries. The only place you see a strong local difference are in very large cities, and even then, they're just more exaggerated versions of what are already regional ways of speaking. They're also never drastic enough to be unintelligible to anyone. Again, all of this is moot in the sense that written American English is completely standardized. Textbooks are usually written by staff writers from a few international publishers who have a virtual monopoly on the market, not by individual states. Though some states do sometimes by law make certain requirements to the publishers, they're not making their own rules about English, but rather much more awful things, like whether or not the Bible is science.

We say "healthy" instead of "healthful", but not because some state made-up their own rules and confused the textbooks nor because we're ignorant or lazy regarding the differences in usage or meaning in other places.

This can be traced back to the creation of the Webster's Dictionary.

Up until the mid 19th Century, there really was no notion of "proper" or definitive spelling of English in any country. The Oxford English Dictionary, in competition with several others, was created in an attempt to finally make a standard. Others made their own, with different spellings and definitions. This is a great book about its creation. Over here in America, Noah Webster also thought this was something needed. However, the problem was that people simply no longer spoke the way they did in England. Suddenly asking everyone to standardize on contemporary British English would be like asking people (who didn't travel as much or have television or radio back then) to speak a language they'd never spoken and likely never heard. Such standards would be both dishonest and nonfunctional. So he set about making his own spellings and definitions that he felt accurately reflected the American usage. Now Americans could also benefit from having a standard, though an accurate one, rather than one that would have been foreign and artificially imposed. For the lands of the British Empire though, British English followed them.

In the end, there are incredibly few grammatical differences between American English and British English. The real differences are in vocabulary and spelling, which was changed to reflect pronunciation, at a time when England itself didn't have official or proper spellings quite worked-out yet. The only reason Australia's isn't more unique from England's is that when people first started standardizing these things they pretty much were England (and its prisoners). If Australia had been an independent commonwealth with several hundred years of unique colonial culture at the time people got down to standardizing, I imagine you also would have made some local spellings and usages.

Agreed again! Although not all are terrible. I actually got into it after reading 10% Happier. Written by a skeptical drug taking news reporter with anxiety disorder. https://www.amazon.com/10-Happier-Self-Help-Actually-Works/dp/0062265431. Great read, and that's coming from someone who hates these kinds of books. The book also spawned a website with a getting started guide with guided meditation, which I didn't pay a cent for, but it definitely got the ball rolling. Once the basics are down you can kind of take it from there.

There is a book around (albeit dated now) about neo-Nazism in Australia by David Harcourt which is an interesting read (Everyone wants to be Fuhrer). In the same way that german Nazism built on existing concepts of Volk and race and pre-existing anti-Semitic sentiment and thought, the far right in Australia goes back a long way in terms of its connections to both Labor as a party and labour as a force and conceptions of the racial other, especially the "Yellow peril".

I recommend reading the 2004 book "We Did Nothing", which gives a whole lot of accounts about UN peacekeeping actions, including the last one in Somalia.

They all seem a little ineffective.

Just sayin... I suspect the wholesale adoption of neoliberal economic policy from the mid 70s onwards might be somewhat more responsible for the erosion of the western middle class than television.

A couple of books give pretty compelling evidence of this:

https://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harvey/dp/0199283273

https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499813570&sr=1-1&keywords=capital

Just came across something weird today myself.

Aussie store $31.98+$10.77

or US store $20.78 (not available to be shipped from).

Dunno if there's a way to get around it or I just have to bite it and pay ~$40. To be fair, it's normally ~$60 on the US store, but being cut down to $20 made it super appealing.

Feral future is a really eye opening book on this topic. I was amazed about how many critters Australia imported.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0226494195?pc_redir=1410499618&robot_redir=1

I was well aware of the history; I was reading the history back when it was news rather than history. I started with the collected speeches of Nikita Khrushchev in 1963. On Trotsky, I am aware of how they purged him as well as how they killed him in Mexico. If you're ever interested in the true nature of Soviet society read Conquest.

My point was meant to be sarcastic. Obviously I worded it badly. My point is that the SEP and its ridiculous proposal is a faded anachronism that has no relevance in modern Australia.

I just got off the phone to a best mate of many years who works for Bluescope in Westernport. He is one of the 1000, so I can fully relate to the personal side of it. But this is only the start. That is one of the few things I concur with in the article, more jobs in heavy manufacturing will go. Possibly not the gloomy prediction of "100,000 set to lose their jobs in the next few months" but that will certainly happen over the longer period. But it is not some evil conspiracy. It is simple economics.

The industrial base of this country has inexorably changed; failure to recognise that inevitable fact is to be crushed by the change. We saw it start long before Newcastle closed, and there is no end in sight.

I don't have a solution apart from the obvious simplistic one of finding our market niches and filling those, but then it's not my job to find the solution. That is up to our corporate and political leaders.

The SEPs solution:

>bringing the steel industry, mining sector, banks and other multi-billion dollar corporations under public ownership and the democratic control of the working class, as the first step toward the establishment of a rationally planned world economy based on satisfying the social needs of the majority, not generating profit and personal wealth for a small minority.

Is simply riduiculous. Anyone who thinks that might work should do what I did in 2006 and drive through Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech and Eastern Germany to see the ruined derelict factories from the glorious Soviet era; or visit Russia, Bosnia and Croatia as I did this year to see the same. In Russia, those I saw that aren't derelict are belching out indescribable pollution that has to be killing the workforce of entire cities.

This mob should not be given any credibility at all.

You know what's better: change their mindset.

A lot of them do not understand why 'westerner' reacts the way we did to HK protests. If you talk to them they don't even know there was a '89 Tananmen Square massacre. (https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-Republic-Amnesia-Tiananmen-Revisited/dp/0190227915)

Overseas students have been traditionally a force for change in Chinese history (The first Chinese Republic, one can argue, was inspired by what Chinese students saw in Japan in 1900-1920s). It is important to make them understand the value of human rights.

And to do so, we need to hold our government responsible on this front. What Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison did to asylum seekers on Manus Island is a disgrace. It weakens our argument against, for example, Xinjiang re-education camps.

Those who hurry through life reach the end quickly.
Life. The journey is the destination.

https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Making-Living-Practical/dp/014311459X

Read this book. A lot of the issues with white/aboriginal relations that we place in the past are actually products of post WWII actions.
http://www.amazon.com/Jacksons-Track-Memoir-Dreamtime-Place/dp/0140276602

English in Australia and New Zealand

Alternatively, the Wikipedia pages on Australian English are quite good.

When you want info on a language, the worst thing to do is ask speakers of that language. They tend to be very biased and not have any idea what they are talking about.

You might need this book

95% confidence with a margin of error of ±5% for a population of 25,000,000 you would need about 385 people. The real problem here is how biased is that sample. By that I mean, do they have a statistically representative collection of people?

Pinker, Steven. 2003. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344. New York etc.: Penguin Books, 2003-08-26.

As quoted at https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/703159-i-believe-that-the-rape-is-not-about-sex-doctrine-will-go-down-in

> I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out. ...

The burden of proof is on you, and defenders of the theory, to show why "rape is about power, not sex" is not also total bullshit.

Note to /u/must_not_forget_pwd and /u/Echospite.

> everyone knows america is basically a gun-crazy failed state at this point

Tell me, where have you visited in the US, specifically?

The media has done a fantastic job terrifying everyone. You're something like 100,000 times more likely to witness violence in the media than in real life, according to Dr. Steven Pinker. With a population of 325,000,000 people and news being disseminated at light speed, things are bound to look worse that they are. You know what doesn't make the news - nothing. Nothing, as in mundane life. Violence will make the news, however.

The media has got everyone living in fear and clutching their rosaries, so to speak.

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M