Not really pertinent to the video, but am I the only one uncomfortable with the headline terminology ‘watch tear a new one’? It seems unpleasantly close to 'watch totally rape '.
The Bush-Cheney-Rove clique are what are, outside of America, called neo-liberals. The Koch Brothers are also a good example.
1 Like
Actually, I do believe that there are a few things the government probably shouldn’t have an exclusive right to. So I can’t completely agree with your statement that all privatization is bad for consumers and taxpayers.
Case in point: I agreed with and voted for liquor distribution privatization in Washington state. I agreed because liquor producers make up a highly competitive industry, and, while they can’t be trusted to “self regulate” I think they can be trusted to know what’s good for their respective businesses without going monopolistic/oligopolistic. There’s a lot of variety in the industry, and everyone is desperately trying to distinguish themselves from their competitors. I think they should have a right to sell their product out of the distillery directly to bars and other distributors and even the public. Which isn’t to say that they shouldn’t be regulated for safety, purity of product, and taxed appropriately in a progressive manner.
I’m not sure I can think of other examples right n though. Not everyone needs alcohol, the same way everyone needs clean water, reliable electricity and high bandwidth Internet connections.
I know that liquor got more expensive across the board, but that doesn’t concern me as much as the state monopoly squelching small liquor producers in favor of the large, corporate producers who are the only ones who have the initial capital to establish themselves in the state-run system.
I don’t think higher prices are necessarily a bad thing out of hand. Especially for goods that aren’t exactly necessary to people’s day-to-day lives (excluding alcoholics in this case, of course. Although I’d be delighted to see some of the taxes spent on finding detox/alcohol dependence treatment programs as long as they’re secular, unlike AA.)
I have numerous pot smoking friends who were adamantly against cannabis legalization as well. Their issue was that legitimate channels of procurement would be more expensive than the illicit channels they typically used, which meant that once anyone could buy a dub’s worth of weed at the legal pot store for $31.50, the illicit distributors could afford to raised their prices to $30.00 for a dub of weed themselves.
This argument doesn’t concern me either. I’m just happy to be allowed to carry around a dub of weed and if the police do a stop and frisk, I get to keep it, and don’t get in trouble, the same way I’m allowed to walk home with a bottle of kickass, locally distilled scotch in my backpack.
Its a bit tricky, but down here in Aus our political labels are basically backwards to how they are in America.
Our “Australian Liberal Party” (ALP) is the right leaning, friend of big business equivalent of the Republican Party.
Our “Labor Party” is the slightly less right leaning, friend of big business equivalent of the Democrats
1 Like
Seems like they are using liberal in the classical liberal sense, not in the socially liberal sense.
I spent about a year in Australia back in '98, which was about the time Pauline Hanson peaked and subsequently went down in flames. Your friends weren’t kidding—she was like a combination of the worst parts of Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin.
Oh don’t think this particular speech is the norm. Those “boring three word slogans” that Ludlum told Tony to leave behind are by far the norm in Australian politics. Our political system is perhaps a little less screwed than the US system, but it still essentially a product of lies, corporate pandering, and racing to the lowest-common-denominator on most matters.
The Greens are the most decent and honest party of the lot, but they still jump at easy vote-grabbing-opportunities that show little real promise under scrutiny. Still, they’re a good mile above either of the major parties in turns of being intelligent and ethical. It is just a pity that pits them almost directly against the Murdoch Press, and remember, this is the country where that evil-fucking-empire began.
1 Like
Well they claim that, but they also enjoy things like:
- Limiting powers to protest
- Attacking freedoms of association (Funnily enough, freedom of association is specifically listed in the third paragraph of the Liberal Party "Our Beliefs" page.
- Making swearing a fineable offence!!
I’m in the process of moving, and because of this I’m having to weed my house of old/outdated things such as old issues of Vanity Fair. They did some reporting on the phone hacking scandal in England, and somewhere in there it was mentioned that Murdoch and/or his people had met with people in the highest echelons of UK government something like 130 times in a 6 month period (which is what caught my eye). And I doubt they were chatting about how pretty the Thames is at twilight. I’m all for newspapers and keeping the balkanization of journalism to a minimum, but your man Murdoch is quite the bastard.
As for your antiswearing laws (wtf indeed), at least your newspapers have the stones to speak in an adult manner about this (take note of American media’s issues about the Russian band Pussy Riot)
Police officers are often both the victims of, and witnesses to, such [swearing] crimes. And in NSW, police tend to target the use of the words fuck (and its derivatives), cunt, or a combination of the two. Of course, these words are not inherently offensive. The meanings attached to swear words are arbitrary, and change throughout time. Society gives swear words their power — their ability to shock, offend or embarrass, and also takes it away. For example, the taboo attached to the word cunt has shifted dramatically from the thirteenth century, when a street name in London’s red-light district was called Gropecuntlane (pictured right — the name has since been changed to Magpie Lane).
Maybe that just shows how unstable these words actually are… they don’t mean anything, except what people want them to mean. And of course, if we accept that the Gilded age was a period of classical liberalism in the US, at least, we see similar issues–the rise of Jim Crow, crack downs on immigrants and labor protesters… etc. Plus language can change, and we have different usages from place to place too.
Maybe this obvious disconnect between language and meaning in the political realm stems from the fact that this is really still all about those with the power are creating structures which only reinforce their own power and status. They, much like the communist power structure during the days of the USSR, say one thing and do another. Or maybe it’s just that hard and fast ideologies sort of crash and burn when they meet with the messiness of reality?
That’s not what I said.
I said privatising bits of fundamental public infrastructure is always bad.
Then it would appear we agree here 
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
