What's what?

Ah, public education. Reminds me of a quote from some geezer called Milton:

"They who put out the people's eyes
Reproach them of their blindness."

(Applies to those who support the 'they' too)

As for political education, how is this information disseminated? Who is the great disseminator (especially to the politically disengaged)?

Any linkage between the US, UK, and Australia there?

that's a little piece of gold from pilger. good quotes from timfoilat but I particularly like this bit

"A 19th century contempt for countries and peoples, depending on their degree of colonial usefulness, remains a centre-piece of modern “globalisation”, with its perverse socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor; its freedom for capital and denial of freedom to labour; its perfidious politicians and politicised civil servants."

I know the right must carry a lot of the blame but I'd love to hear the left's political class response to some of his criticisms

good to see the media cop it too, you'd think the internet would have made media more accountable but somehow bewilderingly it's had the exact opposite effect

the guardian is shameful, yeh there's worse examples but the guadian sells itself as the good guys, and has a history of credibility. to sell it as journalism is an insult, they should just drop all those sub headings and keep the one 3/4 of the way down- opinion - because that's all they push. and any contrary position is written off as trolling

so detached

What, like Corbyn and Sturgeon and Sanders , and yes even Di Natale and, gasp, Shorten?! I'd like to ask Pilger what he thinks is going to happen to the 'people' in England now?

'Realpolitik' is a kunt of a sport.

Vote LNP. Bring the pain. Viva the revolution!

"I think it was freeride who nailed it back there about people having nothing to lose."

Like the Welsh village that was showered with EU cash but still voted Leave.

Like Nigel Farage just now saying the UK will go into recession....but it has nothing to do with Brexit.

Like how large swathes of the de-industrialised north voted the Conservatives into power not 12 months ago.

This whole episode is gonna make the contradictions of the Dismissal - GG sacks the Labor PM, Aussies get outraged and call election, where they overwhelmingly vote in Libs - appear supremely logical.

Anyway fcuk the EU : they destroyed jardim do mar.

This might explain the attitudes in Wales Stu.http://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/thoughts-on-the-sociology-of-brexit/

@Tones says " ... why did so many millions of Brits not register and vote ..."

Yeah, same problem here with many young people not registered and therefore disenfranchised from the political process at this election.

...... I seem to remember a couple of years ago the IPA and the Liberals discussing moving Australia from a compulsory to voluntary voting system .......... now why would they want that?

Degrees of intrigue supplied by the Guardian's comment section:

If Boris Johnson looked downbeat yesterday, that is because he realises that he has lost.

Perhaps many Brexiters do not realise it yet, but they have actually lost, and it is all down to one man: David Cameron.

With one fell swoop yesterday at 9:15 am, Cameron effectively annulled the referendum result, and simultaneously destroyed the political careers of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and leading Brexiters who cost him so much anguish, not to mention his premiership.

How?

Throughout the campaign, Cameron had repeatedly said that a vote for leave would lead to triggering Article 50 straight away. Whether implicitly or explicitly, the image was clear: he would be giving that notice under Article 50 the morning after a vote to leave. Whether that was scaremongering or not is a bit moot now but, in the midst of the sentimental nautical references of his speech yesterday, he quietly abandoned that position and handed the responsibility over to his successor.

And as the day wore on, the enormity of that step started to sink in: the markets, Sterling, Scotland, the Irish border, the Gibraltar border, the frontier at Calais, the need to continue compliance with all EU regulations for a free market, re-issuing passports, Brits abroad, EU citizens in Britain, the mountain of legistlation to be torn up and rewritten ... the list grew and grew.

The referendum result is not binding. It is advisory. Parliament is not bound to commit itself in that same direction.

The Conservative party election that Cameron triggered will now have one question looming over it: will you, if elected as party leader, trigger the notice under Article 50?

Who will want to have the responsibility of all those ramifications and consequences on his/her head and shoulders?

Boris Johnson knew this yesterday, when he emerged subdued from his home and was even more subdued at the press conference. He has been out-maneouvered and check-mated.

If he runs for leadership of the party, and then fails to follow through on triggering Article 50, then he is finished. If he does not run and effectively abandons the field, then he is finished. If he runs, wins and pulls the UK out of the EU, then it will all be over - Scotland will break away, there will be upheaval in Ireland, a recession ... broken trade agreements. Then he is also finished. Boris Johnson knows all of this. When he acts like the dumb blond it is just that: an act.

The Brexit leaders now have a result that they cannot use. For them, leadership of the Tory party has become a poison chalice.

When Boris Johnson said there was no need to trigger Article 50 straight away, what he really meant to say was "never". When Michael Gove went on and on about "informal negotiations" ... why? why not the formal ones straight away? ... he also meant not triggering the formal departure. They both know what a formal demarche would mean: an irreversible step that neither of them is prepared to take.

All that remains is for someone to have the guts to stand up and say that Brexit is unachievable in reality without an enormous amount of pain and destruction, that cannot be borne. And David Cameron has put the onus of making that statement on the heads of the people who led the Brexit campaign.

thats one way of looking at it.

the other way is that triggering article 50 immediately hands a loaded dice to the EU so it makes sense for the UK to delay and stall.
The other side of the coin is that Europe can ill afford to lose access to the UK. It's a major importer of EU products.

@stu, what you say all makes sense to me but is the sequence of events currently ... new PM, general election then Brexit or is Brexit meant to happen before a general election? The EU are saying get with it and the Scots and Irish are seeking urgent meetings with the EU to ensure they stay while simultaneously saying they want new referendums to leave the UK.

Therefore in the end whoever is prepared to lead the UK out of the EU is also signing off the collapse of the UK with Scotland and Nth Ireland leaving .... I'm with you Stu, not going to happen as that's lot of history flushed away ..... perhaps only the lunatic wannabe across the Atlantic would be mad enough to touch it.

Stoked any comment I make is being completely ignored. After decades though, yes fucken decades, it's getting tiresome for all involved to trot out the old " I told you so..."
AGAIN.

NAFTA... Big Lebowski...S11 Melbourne 2000... just to stay relatively relevant and make people feel kinda better.

Neo-feudalism, Beyond the Valley of the Gift Police, circa 19 fucking 94.

Jello spoken word uber alles.

Apologies to Shatnerd for the Jello usurpation.

how the left was lost

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/why-this-radical-activist-is-disillu...

it's not just neo-liberalism and globalisation , it's been a long long, decades long, road of disenfranchisement for the left's traditional supporters, as the gulf of lived experiences and associated priorities have gotten wider and wider

if we're honest most working class are too thick or uneducated to look at the big picture. they're pretty reactionary, weighing stuff up election to election. and when your side is offering you the same as the other side but with a double helping of belittlement because your usefulness to the bigger agenda is marginal and your opinion deemed unworthy. .. well eventually enough is enough.

those with interests and power clearly cannot begin to understand the real sentiment of 'nothing to lose'. academics referring to aboriginals talk about oppositional resistance. I think this is a suitable term for the current mood

it doesn't really matter which side is marginally best for you when people want to send a message, and that's what they did, and are doing in america

as many have said we're in a post facts world now, but both sides are in on it, as political professionalism has eroded any space for telling of the whole story, or acting with conviction. conviction has no place with the new system and it's obsession of 'research"' and 'evidence based' solutions. as was said on insiders this morning "you can find research to back any position"

about a month ago a jounalist intro'd his question at the press club with "there's new research that found that more than 50% of research cannot be replicated" the 'club' laughed heartily, probably missing the irony

and the experts wonder why people don't trust the experts

the whole thing is beyond laughable

and there it is, I just read exactly what I'm talking about in blindboy's article

"This game has probably been up for some time. As soon as media outlets start making a big deal about the FACTS of a situation, for instance with ‘Fact check’ bulletins, it is clear that numbers have already become politicised. ‘Facts’ (such as statistics) survived as an authoritative basis for public and democratic deliberation for most of the 200 years following the French Revolution. But the politicisation of social sciences, metrics and policy administration mean that the ‘facts’ produced by official statistical agencies must now compete with other conflicting ‘facts’. The deconstruction of ‘facts’ has been partly pushed by varieties of postmodern theory since the 1960s, but it is also an inevitable effect of the attempt (beloved by New Labour) to turn policy into a purely scientific exercise.
The attempt to reduce politics to a utilitarian science (most often, to neo-classical economics) eventually backfires, once the science in question then starts to become politicised. ‘Evidence-based policy’ is now far too long in the tooth to be treated entirely credulously, and people tacitly understand that it often involves a lot of ‘policy-based evidence’. When the Remain camp appealed to their ‘facts’, forecasts, and models, they hoped that these would be judged as outside of the fray of politics. More absurdly, they seemed to imagine that the opinions of bodies such as the IMF might be viewed as ‘independent’. Unfortunately, economics has been such a crucial prop for political authority over the past 35 years that it is now anything but outside of the fray of politics.
In place of facts, we now live in a world of data. Instead of trusted measures and methodologies being used to produce numbers, a dizzying array of numbers is produced by default, to be mined, visualised, analysed and interpreted however we wish. If risk modelling (using notions of statistical normality) was the defining research technique of the 19th and 20th centuries, sentiment analysis is the defining one of the emerging digital era. We no longer have stable, ‘factual’ representations of the world, but unprecedented new capacities to sense and monitor what is bubbling up where, who’s feeling what, what’s the general vibe."

http://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/thoughts-on-the-sociology-of-brexit/

AND THERE IT IS! IT'S ALL THE FAULT OF 'THE LEFT' AND THOSE DUMB-ARSE 'WORKING CLASS' TYPES!

I'll remember that after July 2nd. Cheers.

Right...just waiting on my Close Encounters of the Third Kind lift any minute now.

Bye bye.

(Last numpty left please turn out the lights)

Burp.

Parp.

not blaming em turkey, just can't believe most in the media didn't see all this coming

this sentiment has been brewing for decades

it's the hypocrisy, name calling and lies of recent times that is the camel breaking straw

if you care to know I'll be voting greens or labor and hoping this topsy turvy sentiment will vote Turnball and his contrived, gaming the system, DD election out

Well, summarised Stu. Agree. Maybe as FR has stated, EU can't afford the Brexit and hence will delay it to see if who ever takes over from Cameron, will work some magic. No sure about all this class war though, possibly apathy.

hey Indo and others that spend hours on these forums defending the current "stop the boats" mantra ..........

here it is ... proof that the real problem in our boarder security is corruption (within the department) and crime syndicates routing our 457 and student visa programs .......... 1,000s and 1,000s of illegal immigrates each year coming to the country via our airports!!

I mentioned the other day there are now 1,000,000 foreign workers in this country ..... not a whimper Indo, well here's your proof Peter Dutton needs to stop the planes ............

http://www.theage.com.au/national/corruption-and-crime-syndicates-threat...

The take home message from Brexit is this: clamp down on boat people, or at least give the appearance you're clamping down on them.

Floyd, it doesn't matter if they're still coming in via planes, we've seen above how facts like this are irrelevant. Perception is reality, and the simplest lever - the easiest one for people to understand, the one with least chance of people fighting back - is the one that will always get pulled. People will then feel 'empowered'.

There's no way a major party will ever risk themselves on a platform of onshore detention. Boat people are the great bogeyman and all the other 'facts' are immaterial.

no class war tonybarber, just different perspectives, and a failure to value other people's opinions.

which unfortunately is what we have to do in democracy.

Agreed perceptions are everything Stu, but why not a "regional solution" and some humanity in the debate and policy as it impacts on these people ... this demonisation of people is barbaric.

A mate of mine is English and his immediate and extended family still live in the UK. They live in a 70% leave Brexit area. His family's big issue is work and foreign workers taking all the jobs (for less coin), lesson for us here in the Lucky Country I would have thought.

Meanwhile, back in the United States of Australia, "STABILITY" they cry....

"Stability"? In 9 months, The coalition has overthrown a prime minister, Has put forward a 15% gst . WHOOPS cancel that, .... Has put forward states to raise tax, WHOOPS cancel that..... Has put forward to privatize a part of Medicare, WHOOPS cancel that.... And that's just off the top of my head!
"Stability"......... Gee I'd hate to see the coalitions version of instability.......

"The take home message from Brexit is this: clamp down on boat people, or at least give the appearance you're clamping down on them."

The saddest thing I've ever seen you write......... When good people like yourself join the madding crowd, we have no hope...........

Eh? I'm not joining them. I'm voicing what their interpretation will be.

Think it might be collateral damage in the ongoing spam war.

Sorry, make that the War on Spam. I'll prepare a wikipedia stub now...

Hopefully it'll be resurrected but you never know in these troubled, uncertain times. Till then it's old skool:

Shatnerd said: "Vote LNP. VIVA THE REVOLUTION!" etc etc

Fair enough, Stu..... It came across as you were backing it

They say a week is a long time in football..... ( btw great game that saints geelong one lol)..... But a day in politics can be an eternity....... Bill is on tv as we speak...... Cutting sick on this;

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-27/immigration-corruption,-rorting-re...

Looks like the people smugglers are right here, on Australian soil, on the gov' payroll..

Silence is deafening Indo, got nothing to say on all those illegal plane people or perhaps nursing your head from being donged at the weekend rally?

Re' Brexit..... Are there any "experts" on the British political system out there? Reason i ask;
Can the Queen dissolve parliament, and call an election, therefore having a sort of "secondary vote" on the chaos, with The Tories obviously now under the power of Boris in the "leave" corner, and Labor in the "stay corner? I don't think old Lizzy would like to see Scotland and Northern ireland leave the family house

nah, sheepy she a figurehead

2 former Liberal leaders - John Hewson and John Howard.

One says Brexit is bad for Australia one say Brexit is good for Australia.

I think I will stick with John Hewson as I usually do ..... apparently he wanted to introduce a ETS 30 years ago ........ just goes to show how far to the right the Libs have gone.

Floyd, Howard actually said he would've voted "leave".... I think it would be a good question to throw to Turnbull... He'd evade..... But would Bernardi evade? Would Abbott evade?.. Wouldn't be able to help themselves........... Better get on to it at the meeting mate lol..... Not much time left...... Billy could use that...

A nice change from the guardian, "I understand the result of the Brexit vote because for all my degrees and fancy education" doesn't that just say it all.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/brexit-and-the-diseased-liberal-mind/5532998

Nassim Taleb channeling uplift...."When people vote the way of the IYI elite, it is "democracy". Otherwise it is misguided, irrational, swayed by populism & lack of education.

What's IYI?

Intellectual Yet Idiot: semi-erudite bureaucrat who thinks he is an erudite; pathologizes others for doing things he doesn't understand not realizing it is his understanding that may be limited; imparts normative ideas to others: thinks people should act according to their best interests *and* he knows their interests, particularly if they are uneducated "red necks" or English non-crisp-vowel class.

More socially: subscribes to the New Yorker; never curses on twitter; speaks of "equality of races" and "economic equality" but never went out drinking with a minority cab driver; has considered voting for Tony Blair; has attended more than 1 TEDx talks and watched more than 2 TED talks; will vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seems electable; has The Black Swan on his shelves but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence; is member of a club to get traveling privileges; if social scientist uses statistics without knowing how they are derived; when in the UK goes to literary festivals; drinks red wine with steak (never white); used to believe that fat was harmful and has now completely reversed; takes statins because his doctor told him so; fails to understand ergodicity and when explained forgets about it soon later; doesn't use Yiddish words; studies grammar before speaking a language; has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; has never read Frederic Dard, Michael Oakeshot, John Gray, or Joseph De Maistre; has never gotten drunk with Russians and went breaking glasses; doesn't know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba; doesn't know that there is no difference between "pseudointellectual" and "intellectual"; has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past 5 years; knows at any point in time what his words or actions are doing to his reputation.

But a much easier marker: doesn't deadlift.

The IYI, Taleb addds, look down at the great unwashed Plebes who haven't read Foucault in college and treat them like crap - as if they were inferior forms of life incapable of directing their own affairs.

But when you make them feel uncultured, lacking in intellect, and unlearned, like all bureaucrao-journalists, being all tawk, they get very queasy: hit them where it hurts.

They are arrogant down, they will be arrogantified from up."

Sure Shatner, except as fanciful as the footwork was in that link, it can't evade the reality that immigration - legal , illegal , plane , boat or submarine arrivals - is another tool , actually the most powerful tool , in the plan to lower the quality of life of Australians by flooding the market with labour.

And the Labour Party will increase immigration.

Not as bad as the LNP, doesn't make them worth a vote.

Blowie, agree with much of what you say except it has to be the Liberals unwritten "union busting" "wages lowering" holiest of holy policies to turn a blind eye to massive 457 visa abuses. Workchoices by stealth, Howard's cunning stunt.

Both parties like endless immigration because its lazy economics, don't have to worry about productivity increases nor investment in training and education when you can bring in another 250,000 people a year all wanting houses, cars, food, etc etc.

Sustainable migration is the go, that may mean lowering the numbers for the next 10-15 years to ensure required infrastructure is put in place, environment degradation is minimised, etc etc

Just my opinion Blowie but only one side of politics has any chance or desire to look after the punter.

I don't read it like that shats, I don't see that he is doing what is is accusing the iyi of doing, perhaps the pathologising comment. He doesn't come across as all knowing anymore than the guardian article, he doesn't even mention his "fancy degrees."

It resonates with me when I listen to my mum tell me what a terrible thing brexit it is and that Boris Johnson "isn't much on detail" or whatever other line the guardian or the abc has trotted out, she's an academic those channels appeal to her. I just ask her, do you even deadlift bro?

Trying to post an article..... From new matilda..... Refuses to post....

Here is the article..... From new matilda, by John Pilger;

Cleaning House: John Pilger On Why The British Said No To Europe;

The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.

This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralised by the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the “remain” campaign and the dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service, has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for its life.

A forewarning came when the Treasurer, George Osborne, the embodiment of both Britain’s ancient regime and the banking mafia in Europe, threatened to cut £30 billion from public services if people voted the wrong way; it was blackmail on a shocking scale.

Immigration was exploited in the campaign with consummate cynicism, not only by populist politicians from the lunar right, but by Labour politicians drawing on their own venerable tradition of promoting and nurturing racism, a symptom of corruption not at the bottom but at the top.

The reason millions of refugees have fled the Middle East – first Iraq, now Syria – are the invasions and imperial mayhem of Britain, the United States, France, the European Union and Nato. Before that, there was the willful destruction of Yugoslavia. Before that, there was the theft of Palestine and the imposition of Israel.

he pith helmets may have long gone, but the blood has never dried. A 19th century contempt for countries and peoples, depending on their degree of colonial usefulness, remains a centre-piece of modern “globalisation”, with its perverse socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor; its freedom for capital and denial of freedom to labour; its perfidious politicians and politicised civil servants.

All this has now come home to Europe, enriching the likes of Tony Blair and impoverishing and disempowering millions. On 23 June, the British said no more.

The most effective propagandists of the “European ideal” have not been the far right, but an insufferably patrician class for whom metropolitan London is the United Kingdom. Its leading members see themselves as liberal, enlightened, cultivated tribunes of the 21st century zeitgeist, even “cool”.

What they really are is a bourgeoisie with insatiable consumerist tastes and ancient instincts of their own superiority. In their house paper, the Guardian, they have gloated, day after day, at those who would even consider the EU profoundly undemocratic, a source of social injustice and a virulent extremism known as “neoliberalism”.

The aim of this extremism is to install a permanent, capitalist theocracy that ensures a two-thirds society, with the majority divided and indebted, managed by a corporate class, and a permanent working poor.

In Britain today, 63 per cent of poor children grow up in families where one member is working. For them, the trap has closed. More than 600,000 residents of Britain’s second city, Greater Manchester, are, reports a study, “experiencing the effects of extreme poverty” and 1.6 million are slipping into penury.

Little of this social catastrophe is acknowledged in the bourgeois controlled media, notably the Oxbridge dominated BBC. During the referendum campaign, almost no insightful analysis was allowed to intrude upon the clichéd hysteria about “leaving Europe”, as if Britain was about to be towed in hostile currents somewhere north of Iceland.

On the morning after the vote, a BBC radio reporter welcomed politicians to his studio as old chums. “Well,” he said to “Lord” Peter Mandelson, the disgraced architect of Blairism, “why do these people want it so badly?” The “these people” are the majority of Britons.

The wealthy war criminal Tony Blair remains a hero of the Mandelson “European” class, though few will say so these days. The Guardian once described Blair as “mystical” and has been true to his “project” of rapacious war. The day after the vote, the columnist Martin Kettle offered a Brechtian solution to the misuse of democracy by the masses.

“Now surely we can agree referendums are bad for Britain”, said the headline over his full-page piece. The “we” was unexplained but understood – just as “these people” is understood. “The referendum has conferred less legitimacy on politics, not more,” wrote Kettle. “…the verdict on referendums should be a ruthless one. Never again.”

The kind of ruthlessness Kettle longs for is found in Greece, a country now airbrushed. There, they had a referendum and the result was ignored. Like the Labour Party in Britain, the leaders of the Syriza government in Athens are the products of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, groomed in the fakery and political treachery of post-modernism.

The Greek people courageously used the referendum to demand their government sought “better terms” with a venal status quo in Brussels that was crushing the life out of their country. They were betrayed, as the British would have been betrayed.

On Friday, the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was asked by the BBC if he would pay tribute to the departed Cameron, his comrade in the “remain” campaign. Corbyn fulsomely praised Cameron’s “dignity” and noted his backing for gay marriage and his apology to the Irish families of the dead of Bloody Sunday. He said nothing about Cameron’s divisiveness, his brutal austerity policies, his lies about “protecting” the Health Service. Neither did he remind people of the war mongering of the Cameron government: the dispatch of British special forces to Libya and British bomb aimers to Saudi Arabia and, above all, the beckoning of world war three.

In the week of the referendum vote, no British politician and, to my knowledge, no journalist referred to Vladimir Putin’s speech in St. Petersburg commemorating the 75th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941. The Soviet victory – at a cost of 27 million Soviet lives and the majority of all German forces – won the Second World War.

Putin likened the current frenzied build up of Nato troops and war material on Russia’s western borders to the Third Reich’s Operation Barbarossa. Nato’s exercises in Poland were the biggest since the Nazi invasion; Operation Anaconda had simulated an attack on Russia, presumably with nuclear weapons.

On the eve of the referendum, the quisling secretary-general of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, warned Britons they would be endangering “peace and security” if they voted to leave the EU.

The millions who ignored him and Cameron, Osborne, Corbyn, Obama and the man who runs the Bank of England may, just may, have struck a blow for real peace and democracy in Europe.

I wouldn't describe her as a leaner but I like the joke :)

They're not assumptions about iyi shats, what you are talking about is a description of a type of person he is discussing (I assume something he's made up to illustrate his point). What he is accusing them of is another thing/s altogether. Where have you heard the plebs accusing so called iyi of popularism or not knowing what's best for them?

Looking stuff up...amazing...did you look up the author of the guardian article you posted? Don't like the message, kill the messenger ey. I'm more interested in hearing you rebuke the ideas, even in the book of his you read, sorry the review you read.

Yep I read z/h daily, it's the main economic news I read. I like that it's reached a level of being disruptive. I post a lot of articles here, I imagine you've read them.

Rationalwiki...have you got a decent review for them?