What's what?

Oh and I wouldn't worry about Milo. He has had his 15 minutes and is rapidly disappearing after making a fool of himself in court and losing his action.

So hilary wasn't facilitating the continuation of those oil dollars at all? 150 mil saudi $ to clinton foundation buys no favour? Sanders openly calling her out for not calling out saudi's spreading wahabi terrorism.

Clean as a whistle

Milo is a talentless wanker....but he's still cooler than katy perry

Especially in this dark cornered internet world

I think that was actually $25 million from the Saudis to the Clinton Foundation, compared to the $400 million the Koch brothers alone are budgeting to support the Republicans in the 2018 mid-terms. Do you smoke, or have you only been sold bullshit? Milo cool? Nah just a showboating know nothing who is in the process of getting what he deserves.

BB, what are you thoughts on Ben Shapiro?

Not much zen. I haven't read a lot of his material but he seems to fall somewhere on the alt right spectrum with the usual array of poorly considered ideas and self serving opinions. The problem with that whole position is that it collapses completely under serious analysis. If you trace the origins of the movement it is in the deliberate manipulation of public opinion by wealthy corporations and individuals for their own benefit. They accuse the left of being biased in the media and educational institutions while they have been spending billions to confuse and delude the public on matters of great seriousness such as climate change and economic policy. So you are an intellectual lightweight if you fall for it, or a manipulative arsehole if you participate in the misinformation business.

Hmmm, so the open boarders / one united world internationalist ideal of the left doesn’t collapse under the most meagre scrutiny?

If you’re spouting that garbage then you’re as flummoxed by the headlines you’re fed as any alt right fan boi.

When the only thing that cannot move freely across borders is people, there is something seriously wrong with the system. That said, the most appropriate action at the moment is to more effectively regulate the mass movements of capital that are used to avoid tax, manipulate exchange rates and prop up toxic governments. I have not heard anyone advocate totally open borders but given the horrific global refugee situation it is appropriate for developed nations to take a lot more than they do now. After all it was our support for the US that helped totally destabilise the Middle East resulting in the catastrophic series of wars that have continued since the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and are currently destroying Syria. But no, our immigration program concentrates on cherry picking the wealthy and educated.

Good call , BB.

About time someone put their hand up.

Rightio, so it’ll be 100,000,000 poverty stricken Africans directed straight to Dee Why then. I’m sure you’ll welcome them with open arms.

It’s the right thing to do !

Yes, that’s over the top. But has anyone stopped to consider that maybe capital under the guise of a legal persona grata maybe shouldn’t be able to straddle borders ?

Maybe it should be determined an unwelcome foreign intrusion until they provide a cost / benefit analysis to the host country ?

Oops ...I’m forgetting Australia’s burgeoning level of acceptable corruption which would undermine any such determinations forthwith. My mistake.

Dee Why has always been a pretty diverse community Blowin you can hear ten different languages walking from the pool to the surf club, so a reasonable share of an increased refugee intake would probably fit in pretty well. The rest of your post sounds like you are agreeing with me about capital movements.

BB, you must take the long way from the pool to the surf club.

“The three largest ancestries in the Northern Beaches Council area in 2016 were English, Australian and Irish.”
https://profile.id.com.au/northern-beaches/ancestry

“A data visualisation mapping Sydney’s race and ethnicity distribution shows the northern beaches has ­little cultural diversity ­compared with the rest of urban Sydney.” And
“At a glance, the map shows the northern beaches has one of the city’s highest concentrations of Anglo-Saxon residents, with some households identifying as East Asian and Indigenous in Dee Why.”
https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/northern-beaches/sydneys-eth...

By all means rubbish the second one, but the first one stands up.

Fully agree , Coaster.

BB is experiencing the Inner city greens version of diversity - a 5 percent variety of skin tones and languages and he’s imagining he’s in the cantina scene from Star Wars. Too bad that the cultural divide doesn’t extend beyond the pronunciation of vowels , let alone tax divisions.

The Northern beaches is basically a homogeneous mass of yuppies. The great divide being between the “ right on , arty / professional “and the “ right on , but with a trade “ .

Let’s see how welcoming they are with a few hundred thousand people that view their flesh exposing extravagance as an abomination and who consider female equality an affront to their god.

The Celibate Rifles - ironically enough - said it best -
“I liked the mini series best
Althought
It was kind of depressing
It was good
How they all spoke English”

Dee Why is very different to the rest of the NB. Try, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Russian, Japanese, Indonesian, Mandarin, German, Dutch, Nepalese and so on. But hey you guys are right. What would I know I have only lived here or nearby for over 50 years. Sadly, with house prices the way they are, the largest buyers these days are young Anglo families....but it will take a long time to erase its multi-cultural character. Coaster, using data from the whole NB and inferring that Dee Why is typical is ridiculous. Have you ever actually been there?

What was that? The sounds of silence?

Sorry , BB.

I’m not in that headspace right now. Too much sunshine , warm water and big blue bowls of fun.

I’ll get back to you.

Half your luck, sloppy SE swell with following winds over grey polluted water here!

No, BB, that's the sound of someone working who doesn't get on the Swellnet forum during the day. But surely you're joking. Dee Why is different to the rest of NB? What makes this little pocket so unusual and why don't the statisticians at the ABS treat it as a special case?

It's all very well to list a number of different languages but you could go to almost any postcode in Sydney and find people with that ancestry, and statistically, you'd find a lot more than in downtown Dee Why. And why do all these people in Dee Why not speak English? Are you sure those people between the pool and surf club weren't from other suburbs down for a picnic or swim?

I was last in Dee Why two years ago. Well, I was passing through on my way to Mona Vale. I didn't stop the car because there are so many damned opinionated Anglo Saxons there.

But now that you ask, if you say it is necessary to visit a place in order to form an opinion, have you ever travelled to Siberia to count the number of nuclear missiles in Soviet silos or sat in on a Trump campaign meeting to confirm they were colluding with the Russians?

What is so unusual? Well it has had the lowest rents and unit prices of the whole area for roughly 50 years and so has attracted a lot of low paid workers many of whom were recent migrants. Oh and there has been a Mosque here for about 35 years but it isn't on the main road so you wouldn't have noticed. It might be a bit of a cliche but have a look at the variety of shops and restaurants. Half a dozen Asian grocers, a large Indian emporium. Every variety of Asian restaurant. Where do you think those people live? Where do you think their customers live? But hey, you drive through on the main road now and then while I have been around here for 50 odd years. What would I know?

Running a shop doesn’t imply that the owner lives in the suburb. It’s a bit of a NB-centric view; “the lowest rents in the area...”. Why wouldn’t they move to a suburb outside the NB where the rents are lower again? Well, they usually do, and that’s why, statistically, the NB has the lowest representation of those ethnicities in the greater Sydney area. It may appear to be a lot to someone who hasn’t lived anywhere else for 50 years but comparatively it’s tiny. Maybe living there so long has led to some chronic myopia? I’ll take the ABS census data over a sweep of the main street and the presence of a mosque out the back.

As you like Coaster, really couldn't give a rats about what you think.

To quote Sharkman -

“Are we tripping yet ?”

https://theconversation.com/xi-jinpings-chilling-grab-for-absolute-power...

Theres nothing to worry about here ,Trumps got em covered........just have to spread those nukes out now ......

Why hasn't this got more coverage?????

https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/trumps-infrastructure-plan-g...

Make it stop...

On Politics next Indo election is early next year i read yesterday Prabowo is going to run again for president.

This is seriously scary the guy makes Trump look sane.

If he ever got in, Indo could go back to the dark ages.

Indo is battling a turn towards the dark ages even with jokowi at the wheel. Which makes your concerns of a prabowo election all the more valid

And this won't help...

Globalisation failing (not just for the plebs)...or it's winning....

depends on your perspective I guess

Either way all that peace loving liberal economic entanglement hasn't really gone to plan...

"...The beauty of the post-Cold War emerging market story was that it was apolitical

But this apolitical approach was premised on the assumption, inherited from the Cold War, that democracy and capitalism go hand in hand, and that the extension of free markets would bring global convergence to the Western economic model, as the Washington Consensus predicted."

....capitalism has expanded since the end of the Cold War in spite of democracy, not alongside it."

"...And nowhere is this more evident than in China. It’s now abundantly clear that despite the pious neoliberal belief in the transformative power of free markets to encourage “reform,” China is headed toward more, not less autocracy. Indeed, it might not be an exaggeration to say that China has broken a path toward a new form of totalitarianism in which one man will sit atop a police state with access to ubiquitous data gathered about citizens by social media and online shopping platforms and a vast human and electronic surveillance apparatus to track their every move. Look no further than the ghastly “social credit score” system that Beijing wants to roll out by 2020 to get a sense of how wrong the idea has proven to be that free markets will bring about democratic change, or even minor liberalizing reform in China. A billion people may have been lifted out of poverty, but only to find themselves living under under cyber-totalitarianism.

".... But the more important point is that Western states and their citizens are becoming increasingly alert to the need fundamentally to reappraise the value of the integrated global capitalism they have more or less promoted since the early 1990s. I am not talking about a reappraisal in light of the inequality that economic growth has produced, or the massive outsourcing of manufacturing jobs that created rust belts on both sides of the Atlantic, which is a separate discussion. Rather, this reappraisal concerns the inconvenient truth, which surely now is undeniable, that the West’s own economic policy has encouraged, if unwittingly, the rise of deeply illiberal regimes in much of the former communist world."

http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/02/26/globalization-has-created-a-chinese-...

Grog lays it bare in a special report published today in The Guardian. Kinda long, but he cuts out all the ideological bullshit and puts matters in simple terms. Also predicts (correctly, I presume) what the terms of engagement will be for the next election.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/01/whatever-happened-to-wage-rises-in-australia

Ms Cash performance yesterday and today's defence from the likes of Dutton is clear demonstration just how far to the right the conservative side of politics has gone. Sure Labor has followed that trend too, resembling the Liberals of old, but Senator Cash is one nasty piece of work - crass, tricky, cunning and totally unbelievable.

We have also had Turnbull attacking Labor on their Adani stance. The party that says let the market decide these things is still wanting to back that coal mine to the tune of $billion of taxpayer's money, a mine that does not stack up financially or environmentally.

The election cannot come quick enough in my books.

It's scary how the prices of things like electricity, food, property etc has gone up while wage growth has been low, imagine if or when wage growth does increase and the effect it will have on these things not to mention make manufacturing/ producing anything in Australia even more unaffordable as the gap between wages in SE and Australia widens even more.

It's scary how the prices of things like electricity, food, property etc has gone up while wage growth has been low, imagine if or when wage growth does increase and the effect it will have on these things not to mention make manufacturing/ producing anything in Australia even more unaffordable as the gap between wages in SE and Australia widens even more.

indo, the price of commodities and services in australia is not a function of worker's pay.

the high prices are a function of industry manipulation and abuse of monopolies. but you alredy know this, don't know? you're just trying for a disengenuous attack on paying working people their fair wages. why?

for instance, take the price of gas...companies are selling it at a domestic price so high (higher than the price they sell it overseas) as a way of promoting the mining of coal seam gas as a remedy for these high prices.
"We are told high gas prices on the east coast of Australia are caused by a lack of supply, and that the solution to that is to allow more coal seam gas projects such as that in Narrabri to go ahead in New South Wales and Victoria.
But on both counts, nothing could be further from the truth.
Firstly, Australia is awash with gas. It is even producing more than the giant gas exporters in Gladstone need to fulfil their export contracts.
Rather, high local prices appear to be the result of so-far inexplicable behaviour by those exporters, selling gas at lower prices on the export spot market than they could achieve by selling the gas locally."
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/sep/29/the-high-price-of...

absolutely nothing to do with the wages of workers in the gas industry. but you're not an idiot, you already know this. so why, indo, do post such obvioulsy false drivel? why?

Wow!

Lots of growth at the guardian this week, they're almost living in reality...

post post modernism?

Or, finally, an admission that the development of all those 'do gooder' university departments has done not much good... about 25 years of not much good...

"A lost generarion..." as John Pilger put it

"...For the Left, identity politics has long been a means to “confront rather than obscure the uglier aspects of American history and society.”

But in recent years, whether because of growing strength or growing frustration with the lack of progress, the Left has upped the ante. A shift in tone, rhetoric, and logic has moved identity politics away from inclusion – which had always been the Left’s watchword – toward exclusion and division...."

"....For much of the Left today, anyone who speaks in favor of group blindness is on the other side, indifferent to or even guilty of oppression. For some, especially on college campuses, anyone who doesn’t swallow the anti-oppression orthodoxy hook, line, and sinker – anyone who doesn’t acknowledge “white supremacy” in America – is a racist.

When liberal icon Bernie Sanders told supporters, “It’s not good enough for somebody to say, ‘Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me,’ ” Quentin James, a leader of Hillary Clinton’s outreach efforts to people of color, retorted that Sanders’s “comments regarding identity politics suggest he may be a white supremacist, too.”

•••

Once identity politics gains momentum, it inevitably subdivides, giving rise to ever-proliferating group identities demanding recognition.

Today, there is an ever-expanding vocabulary of identity on the left. Facebook now lists more than fifty gender designations from which users can choose, from genderqueer to intersex to pangender.

Or take the acronym LGBTQ. Originally LGB, variants over the years have ranged from GLBT to LGBTI to LGBTQQIAAP as preferred terminology shifted and identity groups quarreled about who should be included and who come first.

Because the Left is always trying to outleft the last Left, the result can be a zero-sum competition over which group is the least privileged, an “Oppression Olympics” often fragmenting progressives and setting them against each other.

Although inclusivity is presumably still the ultimate goal, the contemporary Left is pointedly exclusionary."

"...Just after the 2016 election, a former Never Trumper explained his change of heart in the Atlantic: “My college- age daughter constantly hears talk of white privilege and racial identity, of separate dorms for separate races (somewhere in heaven Martin Luther King Jr. is hanging his head and crying). . . . I hate identity politics, [but] when everything is about identity politics, is the left really surprised that on Tuesday millions of white Americans . . . voted as ‘white’? If you want identity politics, identity politics is what you will get.”"

The letter quoted within the text is very telling.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/mar/01/how-americas-identity-po...

@Chook

The reality is big business is greedy, they charge pretty much the highest prices they can and will find any excuse to do so, the problem is even with little wage growth they lift their prices while with higher wage growth they will lift their prices even more..it's just how it is because they are run by greed.

It's naive to think with decent wage growth they will sit back and just leave their prices as is.

The whole scenario is all a damned if you do dammed if you don't scenario, with no perfect answers or solution with pros and cons each way.

Lift low wages and more jobs go offshore especially those who give lower wages jobs, prices of everything goes up including real-estate those at the higher level see lower level wages are going up so demand even more money further widening the gap between the haves and have nots. (or if you are a tradie like me see others making more so put our prices up)

Or have things as they currently are, which is also not perfect because even when those in the lower income bracket wages are not rising, those towards the higher end always demand more and tradies like me always lift our rates.

I guess it's just a matter of balance.

ha ha...i loved this line Sypkan made me giggle as so so true.

"Because the Left is always trying to outleft the last Left"

BTW. No it's not also true for the right, because we started far far right, rights actually in time move ever so slightly towards the left as their views generally get less radical.

"BTW. No it's not also true for the right, because we started far far right,"

Who started far, far right?

And more...

"rights actually in time move ever so slightly towards the left"

Completley and utterly incorrect. Conservatism increases with age.

left/right ---two sides of the same coin. easy to skate from one to the other.

Yeah, nah...it's possible to swing between but the dichotomy still defines an action, still explains a worldview.

yeah, that was just a flippant anarchist view.

Society and historically speaking we started more right in our ways

Racial intolerance, traditional gender roles, not environmentally conscious, often views based on some religion etc

As society has moved on we have moved more towards the left in these things (not at all a bad thing)

In past eras like say the 70-80's those on the left side socially would now actually be more similar to the current right (not extreme right) while what now is considered left in the past would have been considered extreme left and the right views of the past are now considered fairly extreme right.

I am talking socially, i don't really think politically.

Obviously it's all about balance leaning to far either way is not good.

Ohhhhhh Barnaby, you crazy guy...... Bahahahahahahaha

Here's one for the dog of sheep. We're up there with brazil.

Farking queensland!!....again....

Farking australia!...again...

Big on preaching. Small on doing

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/05/global-deforestation...

And. Barnaby's just being a good bloke, saving a damsal in distress. A bit of good ol chivalry.

Or he just mesmerised by some young pussy

Yep same part of the world where taxpayers money is being spent to stop agricultural practices that cause unnatural flows of sediment into the ocean and the reef causing further damage.

Of course slapper what needs to also be said was it was the previous Newman government that relaxed the laws restricting this sort of clear felling and the good farmers of Qld have escalated their tree clearing in recent time because the current government will reintroduce restrictions very soon.

And these farmers and their peak bodies or the Nationals wonder why us city slickers vote green and say enough is enough when they want more taxpayers money to build a dam or to fund improvements in highways or irrigation etc etc.

Its been a truism in Australia for along time .... if the cockie is doing great its good farming if they are doing bad its the government's fault!

The fact that the disgraced Beet-rooter supported this clear felling says volumes has to how fucking stupid he is.

Go DT with the trade wars.

Loving it . Sink the boot into China and their duplicitous ways !

blowin...the tariffs don't have anything to do with china. china isn't even in the top 10 of steel importers to the US.
the tariffs are all about blackmailing canada (#1 source of US steel imports) and mexico (#4 source of US steel imports) to renogiate the NAFTA trade agreement that trump does not like.

if canada and mexico renogiate NAFTA then they will be exempt from the tariffs. if they don't renogiate NAFTA, then trump will damage their steel industries.

God approves of trump's foriegn policy....it can't be all bad..

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/09/former-australian...

PK approving DT's foreign policy, not his tariff raising, which would be deeply ironic.

Jeez , Chook.

You’ve taken the wind out of my sails. I thought someone was going to try to get them to take their fingers off the scales.

Are you opposed to tariff raising stunet?

Not in principle. I think the three-decade long movement towards free trade has passed the point where the benefits outweigh the harm, however disassembling it - even winding it back in minor ways - will be a delicate operation. Therefore it should be approached with grave caution, not some hot damn reason to holler.

Understand that if things go wrong, the order that's been created, not to mention the stability, employment, and prosperity we expect, will evaporate in an instant. 

If that scenario were to happen, well, perhaps we could work past that point, try to rebuild a manufacturing base, take a hit on household wealth, suffer for a while. But experience tells me that kinda stoicism won't be countenanced. The first party in power during a downturn will be tossed and the other party will reset the course toward business as usual (i.e cheap imports, offshore manufacturing etc.)