#641
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It's a bit difficult to say since the count isn't finalised yet but a few things are becoming clear. Labor are pointing to Palmer and One Nation preferences in Queensland, and that was a factor, but it doesn't fully account for the slaughter in that state, nor does it account for the swing to Labor in Victoria being far less than expected, and so on. I think it was a combination of factors. The LNP campaign projected boring stability under Morrison's leadership and as much as possible made about him vs Shorten as preferred PM rather than focus on policy. Big dollop of fear campaigning against Labor's "retirement tax". They also seemed to be quite strategic about focusing their resources in marginal and winnable seats. Meanwhile Labor was putting forward a multifaceted policy agenda with some bold features that were a hard sell, headed by the least personable leader imaginable. For all the human connection he made with voters, Shorten might as well have travelling the country demanding tungsten.
#642
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The polling has been so unreliable the past few years that I was kind of expecting Labor to lose, or that there'd be a hung parliament. The fact that Bill Shorten was made leader (and that Rudd was replaced by Julia Gulia) shows you that Labor aren't interested in winning elections.
#643
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Seriously, has there ever been an explanation for the coup against Rudd?
#644
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If by explanation you mean something that makes Labor look smart then no, obviously. But the Rudd government really lacked any coherent vision, policy was all over the place, good ideas (like the home insulation scheme) were poorly implemented and bad ideas (like the internet filter) abounded, so after the honeymoon period was over and everyone spent their 'rudd bucks' the opinion polls were in the toilet and rudd's own right wing faction felt it was better to dump him and have a chance of winning the next election, which they did under Gillard, barely. It had a lot to do with leadership style too I'm sure. Once the polls took a nosedive the party was less willing to tolerate rudd's apparently nasty attitude and outbursts. Gillard was at least able to pursue a sometimes bold legislative agenda (royal commission into child abuse, NDIS) with a minority government. Not saying she was amazing or anything but if she hadn't been installed by and beholden to the party's right faction she might have been able to achieve much more in the way of actually decent policy objectives than rudd ever would have come up with. The real madness was knifing her so close to an election and reinstalling rudd only to implement hard-right refugee policy as a gift to the incoming coalition government for no discernible reason. Let's not forget that shorten was instrumental in all of this behind the scenes and then the labor caucus was dumb and arrogant enough to install him as the next party leader in 2013 over the the wishes of the rank and file who overwhelmingly wanted Albo who, while hardly perfect, actually has the human touch and would have given them a strong chance of winning even in 2016 let alone now. So yeah maybe they don't want to win elections. My fear is that even if they make a fresh start now and manage to make themselves appealing to voters they are likely to abandon their more progressive economic and social policies as if they were tainted by this latest loss. Typing all this has given me a headache
#645
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
Were there any incredibly nerdy process reasons why these results were such a surprise.

That mainly interests me because I'm thinking lately that the Republicans in the U.S. exploiting its elections process to control national policy is maybe the biggest reason the CIA/FBI/etc. now has the opportunity to seize control of the Democrats at the national level by controlling the Democrat-friendly news cycle on Trump and running spooks for office. It's an open secret that "news junkie" Democrats never more than half-believed the Russian conspiracy stuff & were instead so frustrated by their Idiocracy-style POV on the way federal elections worked that they became sexually aroused thinking about an attempted coup by the Washington cops. For the same reason, you had all those 2000s-era Obama bloggers posting sadistic stories after 2016 about people in "red states" dying from disease and how it serves them right, sort of a mutation of the "let them secede" joking-not-joking thing a lot of Democrats like to say about the U.S. South, where everyone who lives there is imagined to be a poor, dumb, white KKK member.

There's the fatalist feeling that the Democrats are supposed to win but the Republicans cheat by using the system to fool their dupes, and the system is sound, the system is eternal, etc. so Democrats have to get good at the accepted ways of cheating within it, which the horse-race types among them imagine will make them successful and popular. College-educated Democrats think they're being savvy by trying to outdo the Republicans at paranoid xenophobia, Nixon-style dirty tricks, wishing death on the poor, and so on. And their main problem is going to be how their allies, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, all those folks, are an undying & unbroken line of practical experts at all those things and also at turning political parties full of embittered petit-bourgeois nerds into puppets that serve the agencies' agendas.

I know there's some mirroring between the two countries sometimes, so I'm curious if anything like that turn is happening in United States South Hemisphere, where one party is using the process to smash the other and maybe opening the "left" opposition up to even more publicly reactionary positions in the name of strategy.
#646
Post rating: ~
the only thing i really know about kevin rudd is that he's being called a chinese sleeper agent by a bunch of dc lanyard dipshits. but that's what they call everyone who doesn't want to ride a nuclear bomb into beijing so i don't take that to mean he's cool.
#647
Post rating: ~

cars posted:

Were there any incredibly nerdy process reasons why these results were such a surprise...

I know there's some mirroring between the two countries sometimes, so I'm curious if anything like that turn is happening in United States South Hemisphere, where one party is using the process to smash the other and maybe opening the "left" opposition up to even more publicly reactionary positions in the name of strategy.


Not really. The surprise was more just a result of everyone taking (clearly fatally flawed) opinion polls for granted. There is some mirroring going on lately in the spooky sense but not in terms of the major parties fighting each other - there is an overenthusiastic toeing of the seppo line on china, the anti-huawei campaign for example and some real nonsense about chinese attempts to influence australian politics, as if they give that much of a fuck about us.

Guyovich posted:

the only thing i really know about kevin rudd is that he's being called a chinese sleeper agent by a bunch of dc lanyard dipshits. but that's what they call everyone who doesn't want to ride a nuclear bomb into beijing so i don't take that to mean he's cool.


yeah there have been similar nudge nudge wink wink sort of aspersions cast about him here too, mostly because he occasionally makes posts on weibo in chinese that are mildly critical of australia's stance towards china, or indeed that he is posting there at all. at this rate i think in about 5 years time speaking mandarin will disqualify people from public service.

#648
UNUSUALY COOL
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Public service? I’m speaking Mandarin fam but go off
#649
lies half the time
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most counterintuitive disqualification for public service yet
#650
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https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/389735/manus-island-suicide-attempts-spike-after-australian-election
#651
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
I’m reading this China secretly runs Australia stuff now and in context, I’m shocked that the U.S. got to it first with Russia (and China, I guess, when it was the Clintons getting accused).

Like, there’s a big cultural bias against Russia in the white U.S., but it’s still half-in, half-out as to whether Russians are just particularly bad fellow white people, and since the end of the Cold War, both the Russians and the Chinese are seen by most people in the U.S. as a million miles away and no real threat. That includes almost all of the people pushing the foreign-conspiracy line, they know or half-know they don’t seriously see the chosen scapegoat as an immediate, existential threat to U.S. global hegemony any more than anyone else in the country.

But then you have white Australia where the anti-Asian sentiment is extreme and practically genocidal, and the paranoia is spurred by the perceived proximity of the Asian horde (even though the distance between Beijing and Melbourne is Over 9000 km, 4/5ths the distance between Beijing and New York City). I’m surprised the U.S. wasn’t following Australia’s lead there instead of the other way around, I guess.
#652
Post rating: +
The anti-China panic here is very much a function of our relationship with Australia and our active pursuit of US strategic goals in the region. We are after all an important military outpost for the amerikkkan empire, and so it is naturally deemed vital that our loyal and dependent relationship be maintained in the face of the emerging regional superpower. So a witchhunt is launched by the intelligence community against MPs engaging too cosily with Chinese-Australian interests, using the media as a proxy. It should be noted that although both major parties were implicated in similar activities, only one scalp was claimed, from the Labor opposition, and used as an example to push through new anti-'foreign influence' laws. And we became an early staging ground for the anti-Huawei campaign of the Five Eyes, going back to their banning from development and rollout of the NBN back in 2012 (a nationwide fibre telecommunications infrastructure project), and more recently from the coming 5G mobile networks. I have always assumed there is a considerable amount of economic concern behind the ongoing anti-Huawei campaign but I think there's also some genuine paranoia from the spooks about a Chinese hand in the country's communications backbone when we are a generator and conduit of vital US intelligence. Anyway, the perceived threat of the Asian horde on white australia's doorstep is certainly a factor in the hysteria gaining public purchase, but it's hardly the source.

An aside,although anecdotal and therefore probably meaningless: in personal conversations with friends, family and acquaintances from across the political spectrum, I have never met anyone who disagreed with the idea that the yanks are an untrustworthy and unstable ally, and we would do well to foster closer relations with China, at the very least by keeping our noses out of US disputes with them which do not concern us. So there's that.
#653
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#654
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a large hullabaloo in the press over the past couple of days about an opinion piece by andrew hastie in the smh/age about the supposed china threat. it was characterised sensationally by the abc as comparing china to nazi germany but overall the tone was rightly criticised by the chinese embassy as good old fashioned cold war redbaiting and racism. a thousand thinkpieces bloom about how right and brave this former army captain and current chair of the parliamentary intelligence committee is to speak out about chinese sneakiness and aggression. meanwhile the head of nato happens to be in town to sign the latest australia-nato agreement on cooperation in the region, which i am sure is just a funny coincidence. death to america.
#655
Post rating: +
in more 'death to america' news, this just came to my attention

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/aug/10/cpac-kristina-keneally-triggers-the-right-as-abbott-tries-to-keep-low-profile

there is much i could say about this, especially the behind the scenes links to cory bernardi, a man who not infrequently complains about foreign political interference on the left but funnily enough has been trying to facilitate greater direct interference in strayan politics by the seppo right for at least a decade now. but for now all i can say is
#656
Post rating: +
like, it's a scandal if a z-tier politician attends an event vaguely affiliated with the confucius institute, but it's apparently totally normal to publish "analysis" by kiwi academics about how We Austrayans must be vigilant against the yellow peril, and it's also extremely good that an american political conference be held in sydney featuring a bunch of poms, and senior government figures are involved. im loving it.
#657
Post rating: ~

Petrol posted:

like, it's a scandal if a z-tier politician attends an event vaguely affiliated with the confucius institute, but it's apparently totally normal to publish "analysis" by kiwi academics about how We Austrayans must be vigilant against the yellow peril, and it's also extremely good that an american political conference be held in sydney featuring a bunch of poms, and senior government figures are involved. im loving it.


who's the kiwi academic doing yellow peril stuff?

#658
Post rating: +
Anne-Marie Brady. This is the piece I was referring to: https://www.smh.com.au/national/we-need-to-talk-about-china-why-hastie-was-right-to-sound-the-alarm-20190808-p52f8u.html

There was also a prominent report earlier this year about how she reckons Chinese spies broke into her office to steal papers related to her research or something like that - don't have a link handy but a quick google of her name should bring something up. Interestingly I think the kiwi PM dismissed those claims when the story first came out
#659
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i thought it might be her but i wasn't sure.. she wrote a book about rewi alley called 'friend of china' which i read most of a little while ago. ostensibly the purpose of the book was to clear up some of the myths surrounding him, because he was such a larger than life sort of figure that both his supporters and his detractors said things about him that probably weren't true, and there are some problems with both the biographies written about him. now, the book does do this, but my impression was that it's being done with a specifically anticommunist slant. some of the conclusions she reaches are strange and she doesn't really seem to take communism seriously as an ideology at all. like, she talks about how alley ended up in this position where he would have to support the current Chinese government line even if it wasn't what he privately agreed with, because he was dependent on the Chinese government for his being able to live in china. but her conclusion based on that is that he wasn't a communist at all, rather a generic 'humanitarian' who had to support communism publically. she doesn't seem to consider that he might have been a communist who continued to support the cpc even when it went with a line he didn't agree with. there's a particularly bizarre part where she says that he only had 'the obligatory' marx, lenin, and stalin on the bookshelf in his house, as though he had them there to show his loyalty, but surely if he didn't actually have an interest in marxist theory he would have just had a mao collected works or something. there's another strange part where she says that he resigned from the nz communist party when they rejected revisionist china and became hoxhaists, and that meant he can't have been a real communist, because i guess real communists have never split from a party before. i don't think she mentions his numerous writings on theoretical issues either. anyway i think the overall purpose of the book was to build up this narrative she seems to have developed about chinese propaganda and aggressive foreign policy using alley as a sort of example. i've noticed that she seems to treat different eras of china as being basically identical, even when there's big differences between them - you can see her doing that in that piece you linked, where she says that the cpc under xi is using 'Maoist' tactics like united front work, with no consideration of how this term might have changed since mao's time.
#660
Post rating: ~

lo posted:

i've noticed that she seems to treat different eras of china as being basically identical, even when there's big differences between them - you can see her doing that in that piece you linked, where she says that the cpc under xi is using 'Maoist' tactics like united front work, with no consideration of how this term might have changed since mao's time.


i think it is one of the greatest and most obvious weaknesses of the orientalist mind that it can only conceive of the 'oriental' nation/culture/people as little more than a monolith, regardless of distance in time or space

#661
Post rating: +
A pleasant surprise as child rapist Cardinal George Pell AO had his appeal denied by the Victorian Court of Appeals. That court has a poor record on upholding child rape convictions so many observers expected he would win the day and then almost certainly have his conviction reinstated by the High Court (the last court of appeal in he nation). As it stands he will now be taking it to the High Court himself with the backing, of course, of the church, as he's had to date. He has roughly zero chance with that. Can't wait to see what all his powerful right wing supporters have to say now.
#662
Post rating: +

Petrol posted:

Can't wait to see what all his powerful right wing supporters have to say now.



the same as they always have been saying - if anything they'll start agitating that the Bar has been infiltrated by cUlTuRaL MaRxIsTs - expect a renewed assault from their culture warriors

#663
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Indeed, andrew bolt is apparently "appalled" and losing faith in the justice system. Not sure he's had much of that since his conviction for racial vilification anyway, mind you!
#664
Post rating: +
there's a lot going on here

#665
UNUSUALY COOL
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WOW! 🤔
#666
UNUSUALY COOL
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DEBT DEBT
DEBT
$$$$
LOaNS
#667
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the apotheosis of ethnic petty boog taste (disclaimer: i am of maco descent)

#668
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Has MK fucked up Versace yet
#669
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I bet that house burns real good.
#670
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marlax78 posted:

Has MK fucked up Versace yet



MK is in that weird liminal space between greco-roman envy (versace) and pan-slavic activewear fetishism (adidas)

cf. former prez/skopje's bizarre obsession with shitty 19th century kitsch

#671
chickeon
Post rating: ~
is there something besides racism responsible for grouping chhicken shops with the murder stuff ... are they catching on fire constnatly or something, is it thhe charcoal smoke that's the 'problem' ? just racism yea??
#672
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i put in the offer for the versace house
#673
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
charcoal chicken on bandcamp,
#674
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how about those australian fires
#675
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Very carefully.
#676
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tears posted:

how about those australian fires
#677
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if only it was 1/10th of a degree warmer in australia
#678
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The Road
#679
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where i am, it got down to 37.6C overnight, and now at about 7am it's already 40. it will get to 46 today. i don't like it very much!!
#680
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*thinking long and hard* have you tried grabbing another vb from the esky which you obviously have in the back of your ute?