Tim Michin on Twitter today asking how people would respond.
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A Real American Australian Hero!
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The master race after all.
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fellow aussie senator says that punching the kid was justified (and convienently ignored the posse of pugilistic poultroons that the senator sicced on the kid)
White supremacy is a hella drug, folks.
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Um, you’re not entitled to retaliate. You’re entitled to defend yourself from further harm.
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Piece of shit Senator is lucky he is not in South Africa, where they could have used an ostrich egg
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The problem isn’t preferential voting, as you mentioned the actual winner wasn’t much better. The problem is proportional representation. You basically end up with a bunch of fringe nutters as legislators.
I actually think the Canadian and British first-past-the-post systems work well for this reason, sure vote splitting means you often end up with the “wrong” MP elected and even the “wrong” party in power. But that wrong party still needs to appeal to the centre, so even when you elect the wrong person you tend to get a better version of wrong.
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Sure the kid started it, but that wasn’t self defence.
There was enough of a pause that it was clear the kid wasn’t doing anything further, and then the senator threw an undefended blow to the face, paused, and threw another.
Now I don’t know if a court would ever pursue something like that, but it was clearly retaliation and not self-defense.
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~Looks back on last few governments~
Yeah, no. Not so much. Especially if they’re a majority government running the party with an iron fist. The opposition doesn’t matter when you have all the votes. FPTP favours fewer parties which seems like a good thing until you realise it means fewer alternatives when both really are fucking trainwrecks. Which, incidentally, favours the party that offers up saviours in your hour of need. I wonder which way they lean (hint, it’s not towards the middle).
In the 80s Kim Campbell fit well into the Progressive Conservative party, even as they ignored the “Progressive” part. Now she’d be considered far too left. It only looks like an appeal to centre if you lop parts off and forget where the centre used to be.
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Except that’s not what happens. What actually happens is vast swathes of the electorate are de facto disenfranchised and so ignored. If we had PR in the UK, the politics would be pulled well to the liberal side. Extremist reactionaries should have representation so we can all see what turds they are, like this arsehole.
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Really? I was not remotely a fan of Harper, but he sure wasn’t a Trump, not even a Bush.
The only real “off the deep end” one I’ve seen is Doug Ford and I’m curious how the party is going to manage him.
But there’s actually a big advantage to this. Part of the reason the US is so screwy is there’s too many people with power to hold accountable. That’s what went wrong during the Obama years, he was the one voters held accountable, but the GOP legislators had the power to break things. So it was actually in their interest to break the country in order to win elections.
And I suspect part of the reasons Americans elected Trump is they trusted the legislative branch to stop him from going completely crazy.
There’s a big advantage to giving the ruling party absolute power. When something goes wrong they have absolutely no excuses, therefore they tend to be a lot more responsible than they would be otherwise.
In the short term sure, but you’ve also handed a megaphone to all those right wing populists and they’re going join the conversation.
The problem is there’s a decent minority of the population who like extremist reactionary arseholes.
And there’s also the math to deal with. Have a debate between a brilliant moderate with 99% of people on their side and a dumb extremist with 1% support. Well the moderate will give a way better argument but they’re going to lose every time because the extremist has 99 people they can convert while the moderate only has 1.
So if you start putting extremists in government they’ll start getting more followers just because you’ve started that debate.
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So this kid has as good case for a lawsuit? Hopefully against more goons than just Senator Fuckhead.
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Were you living here, or are you just looking at it from the outside?
Canadians tend to look less extreme, because we cloak everything in a veneer of politeness, and we don’t have the world’s biggest baddest military to make us invincible. Harper is a Trump fan and he paved the way and made space in the party for the likes of Scheer and Bernier.
But if FPTP meant aiming for the centre, we’d have gotten a few NDP governments federally by now. Neither FPTP or parliamentary systems create or protect any kind of “balance”.
ETA: You want to know one thing that does prevent some of the US-style shit-shows? Having a separate body that runs elections and sets the rules as opposed to letting the parties do it. That helps.
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I’m going to say the same about the UK. There is no aiming for the centre here either, we usually have Labour aiming for the right and the conservatives aiming for the far-right. The Conservatives haven’t aimed at the economic centre in my lifetime, and Labour have only started doing that since Corbyn became leader.
Floating voters aren’t centrist and they aren’t moderates. Any pretense of that disappeared when they started thinking that fascists have a point.
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Lived here my whole life.
Compared to the US we are a lot less extreme. And to the extent that Canadian conservatives have moved rightward they’re not following Harper, they’re following the US. As bad as Harper was he was actually keeping more extreme elements of his party in check.
Just because they haven’t been in power Federally doesn’t mean they aren’t hugely important. They have a platform to spread their ideas and they use it, they pull the liberals left, and they build support for provincial NDP governments.
I definitely agree on that point.
Mister44BBS Regular
So you all realize, this kid has a literal theme song already. First verse…
Last verse is good too!
"You made the mistake and judge a man by his race
You go through life with egg on your face
Woke up in the morning, peculiar feeling
Looked up and saw egg dripping from the ceiling
Family, punk rocks, the businessman
I’ll dog everybody with the egg in my hand
Not like the crack that you put in a pipe
But crack on your forehead, here’s a towel, now wipe
Egg Man, Egg Man, Egg Man, Egg Man, Egg Man, Egg Man
Egg Man, Egg Man, Egg Man, Egg Man, Egg Man, Egg Man
Egg Man, Egg Man, Egg Man, Egg Man, Egg Man
Egg Man"
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Those assholes who mugged the kid looked like they were getting off on trying to kill him. If there wasn’t any media present, no doubt that kid would of been killed, slowly and painfully.
Disgraceful.
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