[Non-US] News That Makes You laugh/cry/neither...

angelfromanotherpin · Tue Sep 30, 2014 11:29 pm

edit:oops,wrong thread.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Wed Oct 01, 2014 10:13 am

So. Australians. In your opinion, is the Coalition long-term politically ascendant or is their current electoral strength just an aberration? Looking at electoral maps, it seems that they got their mandate this election by targeting rural areas and exurbs. This is usually bad fucking news for leftists, since conservative strongholds in those areas are really hard to uproots.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Oct 01, 2014 10:31 am

Well, they've probably killed the actual Lib-Nat Coalition for all future elections. Their own voter base realise just how much they've been fucked and are nearly as pissed off as the rest of us.

But for us Lefties, and for people who like human rights and all that, there is a problem: they shifted the window to the right. This happens every fucking time, but this time they picked it up and ran with it. Labor forgot what it means to be "the opposition" and are just going "Yes, master!" to anything Tony actually says regarding the SECURITY AND TERRISM thing. In the last few elections, they have been doing the whole "LOCK IMMIGRANTS UP IN OFFSHORE CAMPS!" thing.

More and more, the force behind the Coalition is getting its way just by moving dialogue such that the debate is "Unemployed people: should we lock them in cages where they fight spiders for our amusement, or just shoot them and use them as building materials?" and not "How do we provide jobs such that unemployed people have the opportunity to work?"

Though to some extent, Greens have been getting more support lately, as people are figuring out "This is the only group that isn't drifting along into Hitlerism".

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Wed Oct 01, 2014 1:00 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:This is usually bad fucking news for leftists, since conservative strongholds in those areas are really hard to uproots.

In that respect there is some hope however. The mining boom and the corruption of our local politics by mining money means that rural areas are getting screwed over with various destructive mines that the traditionally conservative voting farmers hate with a vengeance.

And when they turned to their conservative National party representatives for help? They laughed them out of the room. Again. The result is a growing alliance of traditionally conservative rural voters with the Greens party which are basically the only representatives who will even give so much as lip service to some of the greatest concerns currently in rural areas, which are increasingly for the most part "Will fucking miners frack and/or coal dust my fertile farming land into shit and can someone fucking stop them?"

Aside from that the conservatives here lack a long term strategy but their focus on the short term electoral strategy is that of the white hot blazing kamikaze. There is nothing they won't risk, sell, betray or burn for just one more term to loot the place. That has resulted in some seriously fucked up politics locally, and some pretty bad long term polling trends for the coalition, but just one more term at ANY cost has been going on successfully for them for like 20 years now with barely any interruption...

Blasted · Post by **Blasted** » Thu Oct 02, 2014 2:10 am

Your information is a year out of date. At the moment we'd have another hung parliment if the election was held today, but the LNP is on a downward slide.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/ ... -june-2014

The winning formula for opposition parties in Australia for the last 3 changes of government has been to sit down, shut up and make as small a target as possible. Then when the electorate gets upset at the current government, ride the disillusionment into power.

The current LNP has really stuffed the budget, by targetting lower earners. The problem being that these lower earners had previously voted for them based on "economic credentials". Then they went and screwed up foreign policy and pissed everyone off. They've managed a light bump in the polls due to "Arrgh! Terrorists! Over there!", but the coming budget update is not going to be pretty. They've already tried blaming the previous government, so it's an indication of a coming bloodbath.

Just on that, the Australian economy is looking shakey. The collapse in the iron ore price has decimated the WA and QLD state budgets and it's having flow on effects into the federal budget. The sustained high dollar and lack of government response has killed our manufacturing industry, so things are not good. We've got tourism and education left, both of which should benefit from a lower dollar, but education takes a while to really get going. On top of that we have a housing bubble that's been heavily fueled by highly leveraged investors. So the banks are very much sweating on a slow melt rather than a pop, so that when the investors cash out it won't be done via a bunch of defaults. The banking sector won't be looking happy if there's a crash.

PL is very wrong on a split between Nationals and Liberals (The L and N respectively in LNP). Both parties need the coalition to continue in power. Neither pulls enough votes on its own to gain power, so they're in it for good. While there's tension due to the Liberal's fraking interests colliding with National's farmers (in certain parts of the country), the seduction of power is sufficient to keep everyone on board.
They are losing votes to both Palmer United and the Greens for differing reasons, but it doesn't look like it's going to be an election changing issue any time soon.

It's worth noting the Green party hasn't managed to grow its vote significantly over the last 3 elections. Unless they change their strategy and actually start advertising policies which have broad appeal they're still stuck where they are. There's a significant policy debate internal to the Greens over how far they go in having sensible policy, too often it slides into "Let's just not insist that everyone go vegan, k?"

Palmer United is just a right wing populist party bankrolled by a billionaire miner. We've seen how this goes. If they can keep the crazy down and nobody actually asks what their real policies are, they can hang around for decades.

Now to the actual opposition: The Labour party are trying very hard to stick to the "Sit down, shut up" strategy. They know if they engage on the subject of terrorism, or security, it's just going to be giving life to a subject that can keep the LNP's vote up. So they let the bills pass and hope nobody calls them on the actual contents. It's worked so far. Where this strategy is failing, is when they don't go hard on issues they could win, such as internet policy. Where their stated policy "NBN", is far more popular than that of the LNP "Anything Else". It must be said that it's working for them. the LNP is digging its own grave very slowly and all they need to do is shut up.

So we're currently in a phase of "Just hope the LNP manages not to go troppo while we wait for the next election." If they do go troppo, it could get interesting with the centre right and really, really, right factions of the LNP having a dust up.

The next election will be decided on the economy. So in that sense, it's probably a Labour win, with small gains by Greens and Palmer. Some of the smaller parties such as "Motorists" and DLP and imploding and the move to "Top of the line preferential voting" in the senate will mean fewer totally insane parties (see Motorists and Family First) will get in.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu Oct 02, 2014 7:18 am

Blasted wrote:Now to the actual opposition: The Labour party are trying very hard to stick to the "Sit down, shut up" strategy.

I'm just going to note this strategy is not the strategy Tony Abbot used to gain power at a federal level. And that for labor, in federal politics this strategy, or the "Me Too!" collaborating center right lap dog strategy has lost labor the majority of federal elections ever since Keating.

Just ask Kim Beazley how well it works. Though, odds are, he will probably tell you how awesome and important that strategy is, but it sure as hell was one of the main reasons he never became Prime Minister. The ass.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Thu Oct 02, 2014 7:39 am

And now one of the old advisers/powerbrokers of Labor* did a big conference where he explained to them that "Me Too" and the "Sit Down and Shut Up" strategy just won't work - which is interesting, given if you look at the people he's advised, he's basically done a complete 180.

He also went on to say that we can't look back at the "golden age" of Labor and try to move forward to something that happened long ago. That's a valid point there. Mark that spot, if he had shut up with "We need to look ahead for a new actual image and not be a weird conservative-and-nostalgic party" then that would have been grand.

But he went on to say that Labor need to carve a niche, and that niche needs to be as a Centrist party. They can't "swing dangerously to the Left and advocate socialism", but have to be the New Centre. Which you will notice is so far Right these days that you have to indicate before changing lanes to it. He's really saying that Labor needs to define itself as being "Mussolini but not Hitler". Oh what an insightful man.

*It's actually called the Labor party, not Labour. Because America, or something.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Oct 02, 2014 9:07 am

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom. The Tories were given a right scare by the fact that their incredible unpopularity and gross mismanagement of the economy nearly destroyed the country. So their new strategy is to make a series of massive promises that are mathematically impossible to fill.

First, they promise that if elected next year they will increase the number of required general practitioners by 16% by requiring GP offices (called "surgeries" in this country) to be open an extra day each week. This in the face of the United Kingdom already having a shortage of GPs.

Second, they promise to reduce the deficit and lower taxes on every single person in the country. That's already mathematically impossible, but recall the previous promise where they claim that they will increase spending substantially on healthcare (and also on security and such, because Tories). So they intend to reduce the deficit by spending more and taking in less, which a normal person would describe as increasing the deficit, but whatever.

Third, they promise to increase the amount of clout that the UK has in Europe and also to withdraw from a number of European agreements, which only the most Mirror-reading idiot wouldn't immediately realize were irreconcilable.

Cameron's leadership has gone so badly that they feel that the only way they can hold on to power is by offering everything to everybody, including things that are literally opposite things because fuck it. I assume their plan is to lose the next election and blame the fact that all of their moon shooting promises that didn't make a lick of sense didn't come through is that they were out of power.

-Username17

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Thu Oct 02, 2014 9:53 am

...wait, they're taking the Mike Mearls approach? Has Cameron not seen the kind of failure that marketing produces?

MisterDee · Post by **MisterDee** » Thu Oct 02, 2014 12:57 pm

In politics, it works.

It's been the Liberal strategy at the provincial level for most of two decades here, and barring a year and a half of PQ minority government they've had a deadlock on power (and will probably keep it for one or two decades more, until the baby boomers start to die off or go senile.)

Fwib · Post by **Fwib** » Thu Oct 02, 2014 3:20 pm

In reference to the UK government and one good thing they did do: Legalised certain parody stuff.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-29408193
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YBumQHPAeU

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Oct 02, 2014 5:04 pm

Koumei wrote:...wait, they're taking the Mike Mearls approach? Has Cameron not seen the kind of failure that marketing produces?

Cameron is caught between a rock and a hard place. He can't run on his achievements, because his government has been such a disaster that he is in the running with Chamberlain and Lord North for worst Prime Minister. And he has this other problem, which is the United Kingdom Independence Party. They are trying to take over as the Conservative party in parliament, and putting up a good showing of it.

Now, with a name like UKIP, you know it's going to be awesome. The United Kingdom is already independent. In fact, it's the oldest independent country in the world today. Other countries getting independence from it is something people have been fighting and dying over for nearly a quarter of a millennium. The idea that independence for the United Kingdom over what they already have had for longer than any other nation on Earth could be a thing that could even happen, let alone be an issue worth discussing to the point of naming your political party after it is absurd. And yet: here we are.

UKIP gets their raison d'etre from being "Eurosceptics" (that's spelled with a "c" because British people). Basically, the European Parliament is by several measures the most corrupt and unresponsive legislature in the history of mankind. And that includes the classical Roman Senate which is appointed by the Senate, and the Soviet Duma, where people were only offered one candidate to vote for by the Communist Party. So you can get a lot of traction with voters yelling about how the European Parliament is shitty and unresponsive. And here's the best part: once they get voted into the European Parliament they don't have to do anything! They get their voters riled up with stories of European Parliamentarians not showing up for work and taking huge bribes, meaning that they can slack off all day and rake in enormous graft and this makes them more popular. As long as they aren't an actual majority in parliament, they can just shit all over the legislative process and engage in comically ludicrous kickback schemes and get rewarded for it.

So the UKIP has been doing very well in European Parliament elections in the UK. Last election, they got the most votes of any party contesting that election, which means suddenly everyone has to take them seriously. So they now have the clout to contest the regular parliament elections and they are doing that. And here's the thing: they don't have a shitty record while being in charge the way the actual Tories do. They can make all the feel-good Conservative promises they want, and don't have to talk around their own legacy of failure. They've never been in charge of anything, so they can take everything they want from the Conservatives' platform and can also simply ignore any uncomfortable questions they don't feel like fielding.

It's kind of like the Tea Party in the US. Or in Czech Republic, kind of like TOP09, Public Affairs, New Dawn, ANO11, ProPrahu, Heads Up!, and all the others I can't recall off the top of my head. Right wing policies don't work, but right wing slogans do. So if your conservative parties are flagging under the weight of having repeatedly failed to deliver the economic boomtimes they repeatedly assure us will come from slashing the tax bills of rich people and paying for it by slashing the funding of programmes for poor people, you can always just create a new party from scratch. Repackage the same tired playbook only you claim it's brand new scrappy underdog ideas and deny that it has ever failed - let alone that it's pretty much exactly the deal that conservatives have been offering since the 1920s with no successes to speak of anywhere in the world during that entire near century of repetition.

Anyway, the UK's conservatives are running scared, and that's reasonable for them to do because they have lunatic fringe teabaggers saying everything they want to say plus a bunch of insane and impossible promises that don't even make sense and no one calls them on it because they are new. And their reaction to this is to make promises that are even more outlandish and insane.

-Username17

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Oct 03, 2014 1:01 am

So . . the UK is planning preventive censoring . .
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... olice.html

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Fri Oct 03, 2014 10:38 am

FrankTrollman wrote:the Soviet Duma, where people were only offered one candidate to vote for by the Communist Party.

The Supreme Council. "Duma" is an archaic word that had no place in the USSR.

(To clarify, the Soviet Union had no division of power by design. Before 1937, ballots were cast openly for parties (hur hur); since 1937, secretly and for individual SC candidates, who could theoretically be nominated by any social organization from the Communist and Unaffiliated* Bloc to the high school anime club, but somehow, only the Communist and Unaffiliated Bloc ever exercized that right.)

(*Stalin's original 1936 design encouraged nominating (and voting, hur hur) across affiliation lines. Because democracy.)

Blasted · Post by **Blasted** » Fri Oct 03, 2014 11:49 am

PhoneLobster wrote:
Blasted wrote:Now to the actual opposition: The Labour party are trying very hard to stick to the "Sit down, shut up" strategy.
I'm just going to note this strategy is not the strategy Tony Abbot used to gain power at a federal level. And that for labor, in federal politics this strategy, or the "Me Too!" collaborating center right lap dog strategy has lost labor the majority of federal elections ever since Keating.

Just ask Kim Beazley how well it works. Though, odds are, he will probably tell you how awesome and important that strategy is, but it sure as hell was one of the main reasons he never became Prime Minister. The ass.

You're wrong on both counts. Beazley was ahead in every poll going into the 2001 election. He screwed it up when Tampa turned up and he had to take a stance. Which he vacillated over and got wedged good and proper. Even so, he still managed to take the majority of votes, but lost on a seats basis.

Both Rudd and Abbott were very light on any policy going to their respective election wins, except to say that they weren't going to rock the boat. The best you can say is that they made promises to look into things. The most memorable of Abbott's promises were explicitly to not change education or health!

Post-2001 Beazley and Latham meanwhile took a very strong stance on a number of issues and were pilloried over them time and again.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Oct 03, 2014 1:18 pm

Could you guys elaborate on this Beazley person some more? It sounds like there are a few hilarious stories of centrist fuckery waiting to be told.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Fri Oct 03, 2014 11:52 pm

Blasted wrote:You're wrong on both counts.

...no, I'm pretty sure this has been Labour's federal opposition strategy for that entire period, and I am also fairly sure they lost the majority of federal elections on it. If you want to wank on about polls and near things and bullshit go ahead, but the basic facts are, "Me Too" has been their strategy, and whatever the fuck their strategy has been it has fucking failed.

He screwed it up when Tampa turned up and he had to take a stance. Which he vacillated over and got wedged good and proper.

... me too strategy in action there.

Even so, he still managed to take the majority of votes, but lost on a seats basis.

And it lost him the election there.

Both Rudd and Abbott were very light on any policy going to their respective election wins

That is very different to the invisible opposition or me too strategy. Abbot may have been light on policy but he was strong on differentiation and attack and was EXCESSIVELY visible.

Post-2001 Beazley and Latham meanwhile took a very strong stance on a number of issues

Bullshit. The ALP first of all didn't take a strong enough stance on anything in that period that I can even name it off the top of my head, and secondly the ALP is always "pilloried" regardless because A) Murdoch and B) The ALP Right is just bad at media management in general. I mean fuck, remember that the ALP lead the Australian economy through the GFC with arguably one of the best outcomes for any western nation. They were "pilloried" for their "economic mismanagement".

The "Me Too" strategy is one obsessed with avoiding criticism and political attacks which will and do occur anyway. It is the very nature of politics that their opposing party WILL attack them, opposing media will attack, them, and yeah opponents in general will attack them. They MUST attack them, that is how they gain or keep power, that is how the system works, you cannot stop the attacks. The "brilliant" strategy of trying to agree with those opponents in advance HAS NOT FUCKING STOPPED THAT. All it does is completely disconnect the labor party grass roots and leave us with a situation where Tony Abbot and the Coalition are MASSIVELY unpopular, but no one in particular actually wants to elect the guy that the ALP has put forward.

As for Beasley being interesting, not really. He was one of those typical weirdo labor party assholes with a strange obsession with America. He was terrible at his job, he never amounted to anything, he defined the "Me Too" right wing strategy of the labor party and if you remember some of the stories of the Howard era bullshit like the Tampa he was the idiot at the helm of the opposition at the time failing to exploit the opportunities and oppose the creep towards well, what eventually became Tony Abbot.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu Oct 09, 2014 7:02 am

OK, so here is the latest fun thing out of crazy fascist state Australia.

So the government has been pushing this thing where they want 2 years of every piece of data on all your mobile phone and internet communications data to be stored. This data will also include personal details like passwords, credit card details, passport details etc...

Now aside from the bit where the government refuses to say who is going to pay for it (hint, it ends up being the people being spied on) or precisely who the hell even gets access when (hint, it ends up being anyone who asks as long as they are a government or corporation), they ALSO have not yet thought that MAYBE this stored data should have ANY actual, oh, I don't know SECURITY REQUIREMENTS.

So yes. Tony Abbot and Malcolm Turnbull ACTUALLY currently have a mastermind plan to put all the personal identity information of ALL OF AUSTRALIA into a giant database on the internet with NO FUCKING SECURITY.

No really.

No no. REALLY.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Thu Oct 09, 2014 7:22 am

Meanwhile, literally every person in Australia will use a VPN, tor, or "come at me bro, eleven proxies!"

Also, given we need cuts to Health, Education, Medicine, Infrastructure, Employment and basically everything else because of BUDGET EMERGENCY MONEY CRISIS, they apparently have loads of money to spend on surveillance and security and expensive planes that go "NYEEEEAAAAAW-DAKKA-DAKKA-DAKKA BOOM!"*

Oh wait, no, we'll need to scrounge up money for it after all. So Smokey Joe tried bullying Labor into passing his shitty budget full of cuts to "Stuff", saying "If you're really supporting our military action and our troops, you'll just give us the funding". I was worried Labor would fold like a wet towel there, because that sounds exactly like them. But no, they told him to stick it up his arse, and even Coalition MPs have said "Well we do have a few billion in the stupid Paid Parental Leave scheme, why not just axe that?"

*I am convinced these are actually the noises Tony makes when he's deciding what to do. Possibly playing with toy planes, possibly just miming "flying a fighter jet".

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu Oct 09, 2014 7:36 am

Koumei wrote:Meanwhile, literally every person in Australia will use a VPN, tor, or "come at me bro, eleven proxies!"

While that will make the database potentially worthless to authorities fighting TERRORIZMZ and hopefully also to the inevitable Hollywood fuckers trying to fine the entirety of Australia for our rampant attempts to bypass their over priced artificial isolation based monopoly market piracy that this entire stupid thing half exists for in the first place...

...hackers will still want access to the database because the government is literally requiring the ISPs/Telcos themselves to gather and store the payment information and identity information of all their customers in that zero security online searchable database. As in LITERALLY the list of information they must gather and keep themselves includes credit card numbers, name, date of birth, home address, passport number etc... you know as in the full and complete fucking dream wishlist of any hard core identity thief.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Thu Oct 09, 2014 9:24 am

Yeah, that's true.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Thu Oct 09, 2014 12:36 pm

I'm reading in NZ that this shit all came out of a recent meeting of the Attorney Generals of the 5eyes states (AKA, whitebread English-speaking empire). Our new head of all spy activity is the Attorney General, rather than the PM, as a result (well, that and saving the poor man a bunch of questions in parliament).

So, we're supposed to sync up all our spying and data-collection laws to help with the whole game of spying on each other for each other. Which has been spectacularly successful in finding that one plastic sword in Australia for instance. Which they're going to charge the guy with because it's still a "sword", even though it's a plastic toy. In order to further justify the gigantic police terror sweep.

The big thing here now is how the sky is falling because we have building regulations. Zoning and stuff, it's all just ruining the country. Having to notify people if you want to dig a coal mine in a national park without any safety features at all. It's holding us back.

They've seemingly paid a large number of people to post on every fucking political blog comment thread and message board in the whole country with giant unique screeds about how true that is and how our regulations are destroying the country. It's trippy, because our legislation is some of the lowest cost and quickest on the planet. For reference it costs under $2,000 with a 12 working day wait to get your average new building completely approved and checked and everything. With the price of fall-down shitholes in the middle of nowhere hovering around $200,000, and most new empty sections anywhere near a city pushing $450,000, for reference.

Apparently turning our most valuable farmland into giant fields of empty mansions is going to help poor people, and anyone who disagrees is a monster like Stalin. Despite how huge amounts of our most valuable farmland right now being turned in to giant empty mansions as we speak. Much faster than population growth would require. Which is obviously not going to end well, but people here (NZ) are batshit crazy for putting money in yet another house.

Still, it all worked out for the US when they did that a few years back now. Global financial meltdown, seemed to work out alright for everyone who matters.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Thu Oct 09, 2014 3:39 pm

Does anyone have a conjecture as to why housing prices are rising so quickly in certain OECD nations but not in others? It seems to be all over the place and not related to a particular nation's overall policies on financial regulation or economics.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Oct 09, 2014 4:16 pm

Supply and Demand maybe?
Good publicity?
Which countries are you talking about exactly?

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Thu Oct 09, 2014 4:39 pm

Well, I'd assume housing prices would be lower in countries that had housing booms before the great recession. They've got a bunch of unpurchased or foreclosed houses inflating their supply, so when demand starts rising houses go on the market and depress prices. Elsewhere, the supply is tighter so prices rise as demand does.

You might think having extra supply would have just pushed prices down further, but banks won't sell foreclosed homes too far below their break-even point.

There's also the matter of social issues relating to homeownership. I'm given to understand that in European countries it's a lot more socially acceptable for adult children to live at home when money is tight.