Federal Budget 2015

[partypie]

Haven't noticed anything regarding nursing homes. My family have noticed staff more overworked than usual lately, more falls etc.

[think positive]

Butch Cassidy had the right idea, he just did it too soon!

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/evo-morales-reelected-socialism-doesnt-damage-economies-bolivia

[David]

Solid gold:

http://www.theshovel.com.au/2015/05/13/hockey-postpones-budget-emergency-until-next-labor-government/

[pietillidie]

^LOL. Indeed.

One expects nonsense and shenanigans from politics, but these folks are not even bothering to play the game anymore. And the less face they care to keep, the more they expose the nihilistic, grim underbelly of Old Darwinian Conservatism, which at least used to try to gloss over its misanthropy.

Here's a broader story for you.

The lashing out against worldy progressives for not jumping around like rabid maniacs over ISIS and/or Islam is obviously histrionic, but this new obsession with borders, purity, good and evil, and so on, is also quite revealing.

One by one the sacred cows of the Old Darwinian Order are collapsing, from ordained world dominion, to rational markets, moral world oversight, institutional superiority, science and technology leadership, and economic and "job creation" responsibilities. This has got to be hard for folks to adjust to.

The problem is not that people can't calculate that all H. sapiens are much of a muchness, it's that Old Darwinian psychologies don't find contentment in simply doing well themselves; they need to crush others to maintain a sense of dominion, much like the self-destructive buffer-zone logic of the Israeli right. This is of course a widespread psychiatry in the population, but the most neurotic of these folk, driven like bats out of hell as they are, amplify the more normal levels of such drives in the population, and indeed between populations with their tit-for-tat arms race with the "evil enemy".

However, because these primitive desires are being constrained by global competition with, say, 2B Islamic folk, 1.5B Chinese folk, 4.5B Asians, a 15%+ Hispanic voting block locally in the US, or what have you, such folk are fixating on the likes of ISIS, much like Ted Haggard fixated on homosexuality from the pulpit as a way of dealing with his desire to root blokes in public toilets on meth.

This would be old news except for one new factor: We all now rightly assume public toilet rooting is going on behind the scenes when it comes to every Ted Haggard or Dick Cheney or Malcolm Turnbull or Bill Shorten out there—conservative blogger, Harvard economist, morality-talking socialist utopian, left or right shock jock and CEO alike. We simply know too much due to such factors as the storage of information and evidence in our culture, and how much facility and free time we have to access that information and evidence.

That is, we can easily remember or confirm, for instance, the failures and frauds of Vietnam or Iraq, or the Hill and Knowlton Nayirah testimony of the Gulf War, or Clinton and later Blair's infamous manufactured TV "sincerity", or Bush's "Mission Accomplished", or the lies before and after the GFC, or Abbott's promises and past career views, or the farcical fictions of Reagan/Thatcher "greatness" which look increasingly comedic when you roll the tapes and check the actual data. Propaganda campaigns just don't work like they used to for anyone, left or right.

That doesn't mean folks don't vote conservative in self interest or existential denial and defiance, it just means even if they vote conservative, they too know any explanation given for their vote is transparent nonsense, no matter how hard they try to will the old beliefs to be true. This leaves them bathing naked in Old Darwinianism without the comforts of imperial dominance and provincial ignorance. Just think for a moment: What sort of monumental crisis of faith must that imply? No wonder the Ted Haggards of the world are lashing out!

Bearing that in mind, I think many across Asia are being much more clear-eyed about our own culture when they view the present tantrums of the Anglosphere and parts of the EU as the sort of grief-based anger you get when folks are coming to terms with loss. As a case in point, it was amusing to read that some quarters of the UK Labour Party are yearning for Blair; they too just can't let go of the old order, even though Blair was the one who ushered out the old order. And, as mentioned in another post, it was telling to watch the conservatives try to prop up Miliband as a viable candidate, agreeing almost unanimously that he was a "nice" and "decent" man, meanwhile pretending he had a hope of winning. You only have to do those kinds of things if the system and order you depend on are themselves falling apart.

This also explains the passivity of many Leftist groups: Why bother getting all dirty on the streets when the conclusion is foregone? The system is changing of its own accord, no matter how much the rabid Old Order kicks and screams or the Left does or doesn't protest. And, like it or not, postmodernism has taken a sufficient hold to weave its magic (Descartes meets modern science in the absence of religious and imperial certainty: "I think with a local, embedded organ called the H. sapiens brain, therefore many of my thoughts are emotionally-driven, self-centred and very limited"—trivial science if not by now common sense), regardless of all the non-scientific scoffing and denial.

If so, thinking beyond the old order while folk throw futile votes at Old-Darwinian-sounding politicians, where might this curious state-of-affairs be heading? Beyond the histrionics and apocalypticism, what working judgments of the present and near future can be made?

[ronrat]

PTID. Given that Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia , Afghanistan and Bangladesh and a few other bits are largely muslim and also in asia you have counted them twice. Thus your arguments (whatever they were) are numerically flawed and therefore invalid.

[Dave The Man]

Budget is another Shocker and Shows that there are some real idiots in Government

[pietillidie]

[partypie]

I give the press a massive fail for not asking the obvious prior to the last election: what cuts would be made when revenues fall due to the abolition of the carbon tax ?

[Dave The Man]

[Wokko]

Well for some reason I lost a post and I'm not typing all that again. In brief, those who think the Libs are done should remember that Shorten is boring as batshit and has tried to run a "Tony" style opposition without the personality that made it work for Abbott. Labor needs some big ideas and to inspire the electorate. A risky strategy, but the way they're going they'll get snowed under by Santa Abbott come the election (Howard Style).

[stui magpie]

[pietillidie]

^Yep, the Australian Ed Miliband. The boring bloke at the pub you smile at but couldn't be bothered talking to; just another institutional position filler.

[Culprit]

I don't know why there is a budget reply speech. WTF for? I will go even further, why do we need a budget speech? Both speeches are full of dribble that mean sweet FA to the average person.

If you wasted your time listening to either of these two you must have a lot of time on your hands.

[David]

[Dave The Man]