(Part 4) Top products from r/australia

Hi there. This post has a little reading but please feel free to skip to the recommendations closer to the bottom. While I do waffle a bit, it's just because I get ridiculously excited about bringing peopleinto politics because democracy is a passion of mine. Don't be intimidated by politics. Everyone, even experienced professors like Waleed Aly wander in the dark a lot when it comes to some issues.

I have a degree in politics and international relations and have been active in the Liberals before.

Having declared by colours let me tell you straight up that you are on the right track by both committing to learn and rejecting whaty ou are fed offhand. If you wanna really get into the meat of politics it's really handy to have an understanding of ideology -that's the groupings of belief systems in politics.

In short; politics is the study of power and how to justly manage it. Understanding the basic ideas behind liberalism, conservatism, and socialism which are the three really dominant ideas in the modern era will really help you understand the news in a whole new light.

So I would suggest you invest in a text book that first year politics students might end up studying and reading it. These kinds of books usually spend a fair bit of time explaining how the system works, and also what ideologies are what, their sub-groups (and there are many) and try and really make the whole thing less confusing.

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Reccomendations If you want to learn more about politics I highly recommend Andrew Heywoods "Political Ideologies" -this is a first year book that was given to me at the beginning of my degree and is a fantastic, easy to understand book all about how the world works. Here is its amazon page.

Now it is a text book, it can seem a bit bland, but you don't have to read it cover to cover. It's more like a little bible you can refer to when you want to understand something. If you hear words you don't get, or have an inclination to look into something specific, you can check it for more information.

I'll add, in terms of learning about current issues and opinions specifically you need to 'equip' yourself. What does that mean? It means that you are a very vulnerable person at first. You are vulnerable to pre-packaged soundbytes, to partisan tribalism, to deceptive or disingenuous or misleading arguments and to being lead to an opinion without experiencing the alternative points of view. You don't need to avoid the media but do keep your distrust healthy. Read or listen to high quality news sources, and from a few sources instead of one.

I can recommend several that I use that I don't think will try and lure you into any kind of agenda or ideology and let you approach it for yourself. Grattan Institute is a public policy think tank and you can always trust them to be very in depth. Monocle is an International publication and if you read them you will learn a lot about more than just Australia, and they also have a 24/7 radio station which churns out some awesome programs. I listen to their Asia podcast at least once or twice a week, it's fantastic but region focused not Australia, so depends on what you want. Lastly, watch ABC24 or SBS News programs. ABC is a little bit pro-labor, unfortunately, but if you stay aware of that it's not a problem. Their news is higher quality, is less plastic and sold-out, and very much in depth.

> 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.

> 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

' 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.

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 bought this edition of The Man From Snowy River for my son when he was too young to read or even understand it. I would tell him to close his eyes and listen to the rhythm of it. He'd fall asleep. We still read it, and he loves the pictures in this version, they're very emotive and really get a sense of the excitement and speed of the chase.

When he's a bit older we can discuss the historical context of things like mustering, brumbies, etc but it really is something suitable for all ages and very traditional Aussie reading to boot. At some point in school he will study it.

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

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

The solution which might satisfy you depends on what exactly you believe the problem is.

I believe that Australia's treatment of, lets call them "unauthorized migrants" is a national shame, and a bigger problem than anything that might happen if you accept these migrants and try and integrate them into the society. In fact, I would like Australia to welcome migrants, and be seen as a symbol of hope by people who got a real bad deal in the birth lottery.

I know a lot of people think that allowing migrants into Australia is bad for this reason and that. Every wave of migrants have faced this to a certain degree. I came to Australia about 40 years ago - in high school one of the texts we studied was about the struggles of Italian migrants ("The Knife" by Judah Waten). Since then I have seen waves of Vietnamese, Yugoslav, Indian, Middle Eastern and most recently African migrants go through various stages that start with distrust (and hopefully end with full integration, though this might take a generation or so). Do you think letting Italians migrate here was a good idea?

Eh, I doubt I can convince anybody to change their mind. Better people than me have tried. Here is what John F.Kennedy had to say on the subject, maybe this will sway someone:

https://www.amazon.com/Nation-Immigrants-John-F-Kennedy/dp/0061447544/ref=sr_1_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.

They're dinosaurs. I don't know how evolved Emus are, but they're dinosaurs.

I went to a talk the other month by a guy who wrote a book called "Flying Dinosaurs". At one point he put up a slide with this picture, and asked what was scientifically incorrect about the image.

The answer, of course, is that the velociratopor is depicted without feathers.

http://www.amazon.com/Bare-Branches-Implications-Population-International/dp/0262083256

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.

No Japan didn't change their flag after WW2. And by "revolution", did you mean the very revolution that massacred and terrorised its own people (the Vendée)? Obviously the French don't reject their glorious revolutionary heritage in order to denounce their colonial past. Shame to Australia self-denial.

While I haven't read much about Australian Aboriginal history (still educate myself on that topic), I am more educated about the history of Asia, colonial and pre-colonial. What I am sure is that the natives didn't fare better under non-European tyrannical monarchs than under foreign colonial regimes.

And while dying by smallpox or by guns is no different to the natives, it is very different when judged by the intent of the colonial power. Equating germs with genocide, therefore, is dishonest. The colonisation of Australia is far from genocide.

About the devastation of tribal wars, I suggest you read War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage.

I agree. Despise the perpetrators all you want, I certainly do, but don't fall into the trap of believing they're somehow different. Christopher Browning wrote an excellent book on the Ordinary Men who helped in the attempted genocide of WWII:

>Browning reconstructs how a German reserve police battalion composed of "ordinary men," middle-aged, working class people, killed tens of thousands of Jews during WW II.

The study of "The banality of evil" warns us that blaming extremist actions on some type of "evil other" blinds us to the role we play in supporting those individuals:

>Normalizing the Unthinkable

>Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on "normalization." This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as "the way things are done." There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death (sanitation, food supply) in order; still others producing the implements of killing, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public.