Australian News (non Trump, for a change)

[Forty Two]

From last year, but it's a crime against humanity, so it's probably worth a mention, and some news anchor tears -- http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-14/o ... cc/8270028

Australia's network of offshore immigration detention centres could constitute a crime against humanity, according to a submission before the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Key points:
Submission before ICC calls for investigation into Australian Government and other organisations involved
Argues federal governments have avoided responsibility by contracting-out detention centres
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie made submission to ICC in 2014 over detention centres
The 115-page submission from the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) argues Australia's immigration policy constitutes an attack against the civilian population — something which could be classified as a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute.

My God, it's like Nazi Germany there. They're keeping immigrants captive on offshore islands for indefinite detention in squalid, prison like environments! But, they keep the families together, so....

[Joe]

You seem to be onto evidence of something bigger than the scandal de jour, but haven't tried moving the conversation beyond it to make a larger point. It might be an interesting exercise, don't you think?

[Forty Two]

Feel free. I figured an Ozzie news thread would open up some discussion. There are some Ozzies here, and they can be, I'm sure, quite helpful in understanding the news and happenings in the Land of Oz.

Maybe it's Nazi Germany and the Boer Concentration camps all over the western, industrialized, civilized world these days....who knows? But, this thread is about Australia, and we must be careful not to "tu quoque" the issues here - nothing that happens anywhere else is relevant. This is about Australia.

[Joe]

"Tu quoque?" What's that?

[Hermit]

From last year, but it's a crime against humanity, so it's probably worth a mention, and some news anchor tears -- http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-14/o ... cc/8270028

A year? This crime against humanity has been perpetrated for a lot longer than that, and in case it has slipped your mind, here are some posts indicating that the issue has been mentioned many times starting almost as long ago as this forum has started.

good luck with meeting migration criteria. The last vestiges of the White Australia policy were finally abolished in 1973. Now you need to be either rich or have highly sought-after skills. Killing things or lighting fireworks are not among them.

I don't kill things. Any more, anyway. And as winning the lottery would be part of the plan, I'd be rich.

OK, so you don't meet the wealth criterion. What skills do you have that could make you eligible for an Australian permanent residency visa?

P.S. Oh, wait! When the Republican president gets elected, you could apply for political asylum here, or simply make your way to Christmas Island via a people-smuggler's leaky boat. If you finish up in an internment camp in Nauru for a few years as a result. you'll have warm weather, live on a small island and be reliably fed. Perfect, don't you think?

Celebrate what?

Our first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, speaking about the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which was one of the first pieces of legislation enacted by the Australian Federal Parliament, said: "The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman." The last formal vestiges of the White Australia Policy (yes, that was what the policy amounted to, implemented by the use of the notorious "language dictation test") finally disappeared in 1978, but have we progressed a lot as a people in regard to racism?

I think not. We lock up a couple of thousand non-Caucasians asylum seekers in offshore prisons (Nauru, for example), while nobody seems to have a problem with the approximately 50,000 visa overstayers, (meaning those who have exceeded their visa permit by two years, or more,) because they are mostly Caucasian.

Of course, most Australians go into denial mode when you mention that, or accuse you of being unpatriotic. This country is the one I want to live in the most, but I refuse to look at ourselves through rose-coloured glasses. Not even on Australia Day.

Feel free to slap each other on the shoulder over a barbie and 12 beers, though, while remarking what a grite nition orstraia is, if that makes you feel good.

Indeed. Hatred of other ethnicities and racism are the two most virulent diseases on that list.

All about disease spread prevention. Compartmentalism.

Here in Australia we are way ahead of you. Asylum seekers are relabelled as "illegals" and simply towed back out to sea to drown or to return to what war, genocide, honour killings or whatever other little life's inconveniences they were stupid enough to be born in. For those few thousand who have managed to slip through we have constructed concentration camps where they can rot away from public view. Lately, those camps have been outsourced and relocated to tropical paradises like Nauru and Burma, and at a cost of a billion dollars a year it would be cheap at twice the price. The cost is well worth it to keep this nation squeaky clean and sparkling white.

Festung Australia is a raging success. We have certainly learnt not to repeat the mistakes of previous inhabitants of this lucky country.

5000 refugees swamping the UK every year? Fucking hell. I don't know how your nation will ever manage the deluge. Cameron should follow our example. Our navy simply tows intercepted boats filled with asylum seekers back out to see. Anyone who slips through gets sent to outsourced concentration camps in New Guinea and Nauru. It's not as tough as it may appear. Our concentration camps don't have any gas chambers. Yet.

What have they done again?

Isn't the new guy somewhat better than abboott?

Malcolm Turnbull does not suffer from Tony Abbott's foot in mouth disease, but the conservative coalition policies remain unchanged. Unfortunately, we have no opposition at the moment. Hardly any Australian can even name its leader, and of those who can, nobody seems to ever remember the drivel he says beyond the moment he's finished saying whatever it was.

Our policy regarding asylum seekers is particularly egregious. It consists of paying the same smugglers who try to get past the navy to take them back to where they set out from. Those few who do get through are immediately bundled off to concentration camps on Manus, an island belonging to New Guinea and the Republic of Nauru, a 31 square kilometre dot in the Pacific Ocean. Manus is over 1000 kilometres from Australian soil and Nauru almost 3000. Australia has spent 55 million dollars on another concentration camp in Thailand, but so far only five asylum seekers have been sent there, and I think the project has been abandoned now. Most depressingly, except for the Greens, the opposition is totally silent on the matter, mostly because the Labor Party agrees with our policy. In fact, a good many of its inhumane aspects have been initiated by it when it was in government.

The Australian government calls refugees 'illegals' and puts them into concentration camps in New Guinea, Nauru and tried to contract one out to Thailand. Even the refugees that the government itself acknowledges to be genuine asylum seekers (about 90% of the total) are not set free on Australian soil. 48% of Australians agree with this policy. Yes, we are a xenophobic and racist nation - have been since before we even became a nation. One of the two big motivations for our only armed rebellion, the Eureka Stockade of 1854, was our opposition to all those Chinese miners stealing gold before we could. I don't know if CES is jealous about that.

Australians are among the luckiest people on Earth. What are we so angry about?

Better question: Why are we so angry? Because the majority of us consists of petty-minded, self-entitled retards, totally oblivious to the fact that at this stage almost all things that get us worked up are at worst first world problems.



In other news, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who works for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, meekly pointed out our smugness on ANZAC Day, when she posted this on her facebook page: "Lest. We. Forget. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine.)" Manus and Nauru are two offshore concentration camps for asylum seekers. The government has decided that it is better top spend somewhere around $2000 per day to imprison each asylum seeker than the $38 a day it costs to let them live freely.

For that she received thousands of posts consisting overwhelmingly of abuse, insults, death threats and the usual garbage the plebs come up with, but things got worse. Today Senator Abetz announced that he asked foreign minister, Julie Bishop to sack her. It puzzles me how Abetz could possibly be unaware that Bishop is not the minister for communications, and that even if we were, she could make no such decision. Although the ABC is taxpayer funded, it is independently run. Politicians of any stripe are expressly forbidden to interfere with its management.

The kicker is the Senator's reasoning: Yassmin Abdel-Magied is denigrating Australian values. Does he really think Australian values resulting in the outsourcing of concentration camps are to be held in high esteem? And they definitely are Australian values. They have bipartisan support in parliament because the "honourable" members of both houses fear they will lose their seats at the next election if they oppose them.

The values, as expressed in four of our national anthem's stanzas, are a myth:

For those who've come across the seas
We've boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To Advance Australia Fair.

Do you think Australia will look favourably on refugees from the motherland and offer us asylum, or will we be detained at the border and packed off to some barren island until half of us have perished as usual?

Don't listen to Jim. He is Victorian. The truth is that our government is preparing for your arrival by clearing out our offshore prisons in Papua New Guinea and Nauru.

He probably got the idea from us Aussies.

Is your government actually separating children from their parents though?

No. We don't discriminate that way. Man, woman or child, we just let them die equally in the offshore prisons of Papua New Guinea and Nauru. It's a bi-partisan policy too. The Liberal/National coalition as well as Labor support it. Only the Greens are opposed, but they only have 1/150 seats in the House of representatives and 9/76 in the Senate.

Also, note that we are not too busy slagging your godforsaken abortion of a nation to neglect doing the same to ours.

[Svartalf]

"Tu quoque?" What's that?

It's Latin for "You too"... the legend is that when Julius Caesar was getting assassinated he noticed Brutus (his adopted son, no less) among the killers and said "kai su Teknon", Greek for "you too my son"? since Latin versions have become a lot more popular than the original Greek, in particular because you need special fonts for Greek, the most common version of the saying is "tu quoque fili".

also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

[Forty Two]

Who said anything about you not being willing to slag your own nation? Not me. I just created a thread about Ozzie news, which is hopefully not going to descend into another round of Trump-bashing.

But if you think that those posts are anywhere close to the slagging meted out the United States, which you refer to as an "abortion of a nation" (wow) , then you're not reading it in English.

I like Australia. Nice place. As with any country, some people are ignorant dipshits and total assholes who drone on about things of which they know approximately fuck-all, and some are seriously rude in how they refer to other countries, but that's o.k., there are those types in every country.

[Joe]

"Tu quoque?" What's that?

It's Latin for "You too"... the legend is that when Julius Caesar was getting assassinated he noticed Brutus (his adopted son, no less) among the killers and said "kai su Teknon", Greek for "you too my son"? since Latin versions have become a lot more popular than the original Greek, in particular because you need special fonts for Greek, the most common version of the saying is "tu quoque fili".

also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

Interesting. I've always heard that as "Et tu, Brute?" which is from Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, if I remember correctly. I'm not sure this works in the context Forty Two used it, so I hope he will grace us with a clarification.

[Hermit]

Yeah, thanks for bringing Trump into this thread. I hoped we could have a thread without mentioning him.

Has it occurred to you that "your godforsaken abortion of a nation to neglect doing the same to ours" is an abbreviated version of "your godforsaken abortion of a nation to neglect doing the same to our godforsaken abortion of a nation"?

[Joe]

Feel free. I figured an Ozzie news thread would open up some discussion. There are some Ozzies here, and they can be, I'm sure, quite helpful in understanding the news and happenings in the Land of Oz.

Maybe it's Nazi Germany and the Boer Concentration camps all over the western, industrialized, civilized world these days....who knows? But, this thread is about Australia, and we must be careful not to "tu quoque" the issues here - nothing that happens anywhere else is relevant. This is about Australia.

Feel free?

Ah, would I had the time! I might get something going on the global migration crisis and the challenges it poses to national governments, how population growth and climate change factor in, stuff like that. Heck, I might even dig up the bones of Malthus to kick around to see if his ideas are still hopelessly quaint, or find some studies of how bureaucracies react under stress. The problem is I only have time for a few short posts a day.

You, on the other hand post epistles, mostly picayune "who wrote what" arguments with other members and dissections of the latest "news" story. Perhaps you'd like to raise the bar at little, and provoke the level of discussion you've mentioned wanting.

Of course, if that was more an idle fantasy, carry on.

[Forty Two]

Why would it occur to me? I've not raised any issue of you not criticizing your country. However, point of order, technically just asking me if I ever considered something is not the same as actually saying that thing. If you really do think Australia is an abortion (I don't think so), then by all means, come right out and say it, rather than ask me whether it's something I've considered.

I think Australia is one of the finest countries on the planet. Beautiful country. Nice people. Good beer. There is a place in my town that has hundreds of different beers, and I've been lucky enough to try a couple good pale ale varieties from there which were phenomenal.

Well organized liberal democracy with a solid respect for the rights and freedoms of individuals. And, cool turns of phrase, like g'day mate, and goodonya, and all that. Shrimp on the barbie rocks. And, you've got some solid contributions to rock-n-roll. I am a huge AC/DC fan and I have been since the late 70s - Bon Scott and all that. You can keep "Men At Work," but that's o.k. I don't really know what "Vegemite" is, but I bet if I moved to Oz, I would end up liking it.

An abortion of a nation, no. It's a nation, and a good one.

[Forty Two]

Feel free. I figured an Ozzie news thread would open up some discussion. There are some Ozzies here, and they can be, I'm sure, quite helpful in understanding the news and happenings in the Land of Oz.

Maybe it's Nazi Germany and the Boer Concentration camps all over the western, industrialized, civilized world these days....who knows? But, this thread is about Australia, and we must be careful not to "tu quoque" the issues here - nothing that happens anywhere else is relevant. This is about Australia.

Feel free?

Ah, would I had the time! I might get something going on the global migration crisis and the challenges it poses to national governments, how population growth and climate change factor in, stuff like that. Heck, I might even dig up the bones of Malthus to kick around to see if his ideas are still hopelessly quaint, or find some studies of how bureaucracies react under stress. The problem is I only have time for a few short posts a day.

You, on the other hand post epistles, mostly picayune "who wrote what" arguments with other members and dissections of the latest "news" story. Perhaps you'd like to raise the bar at little, and provoke the level of discussion you've mentioned wanting.

Of course, if that was more an idle fantasy, carry on.

You act as if I have not tried to raise the bar. Please, by all means, do point out how it's bee that drones on about how awful and miserable the policy or that policy is, and how it's like Nazi Germany, and how the President or Prime Minister is such an awful, awful person that he may as well be Mussolini.

If you check out the discussion of the American issue, I've tried to post significant summaries of how the law works, which illegal immigrants are detained, which aren't, and why, and to set some perspective on the numbers we're talking about, and the actual treatment of people in the process. What I'm met with is shrieking retorts about how much of a scumbag Trump is.

I've made several posts about the challenges faced by the "national government" (of the US) in relation to the latest immigration scandal - there is precious little reasoned response thereto. The suggestion that I'm the one who is not raising the bar is hilarious, Joe. Go over to the Trump thread, and read the discussions about immigration there and the separation of families issue in the US. You tell me who is discussing that in a reasoned, fact based way, and who is shrieking about concentration camps and posting time magazine covers with one word references to it and no analysis.

Here, on the Trump thread, i posted an analysis of the law in application, and inquired as to what options people would consider viable: http://www.rationalia.com/forum/viewtop ... 0#p1775184

On this thread, perhaps an Oz person has a good understanding of the immigration system there, and can expound on the problems they seek to overcome, the causes of their immigration problems, and the nature of the possible solutions. You see, when I try to do that on the other thread, look at the responses. Are those people discussing in the constructive manner you suggest?

[Joe]

Feel free. I figured an Ozzie news thread would open up some discussion. There are some Ozzies here, and they can be, I'm sure, quite helpful in understanding the news and happenings in the Land of Oz.

Maybe it's Nazi Germany and the Boer Concentration camps all over the western, industrialized, civilized world these days....who knows? But, this thread is about Australia, and we must be careful not to "tu quoque" the issues here - nothing that happens anywhere else is relevant. This is about Australia.

Feel free?

Ah, would I had the time! I might get something going on the global migration crisis and the challenges it poses to national governments, how population growth and climate change factor in, stuff like that. Heck, I might even dig up the bones of Malthus to kick around to see if his ideas are still hopelessly quaint, or find some studies of how bureaucracies react under stress. The problem is I only have time for a few short posts a day.

You, on the other hand post epistles, mostly picayune "who wrote what" arguments with other members and dissections of the latest "news" story. Perhaps you'd like to raise the bar at little, and provoke the level of discussion you've mentioned wanting.

Of course, if that was more an idle fantasy, carry on.

You act as if I have not tried to raise the bar. Please, by all means, do point out how it's bee that drones on about how awful and miserable the policy or that policy is, and how it's like Nazi Germany, and how the President or Prime Minister is such an awful, awful person that he may as well be Mussolini.

If you check out the discussion of the American issue, I've tried to post significant summaries of how the law works, which illegal immigrants are detained, which aren't, and why, and to set some perspective on the numbers we're talking about, and the actual treatment of people in the process. What I'm met with is shrieking retorts about how much of a scumbag Trump is.

I've made several posts about the challenges faced by the "national government" (of the US) in relation to the latest immigration scandal - there is precious little reasoned response thereto. The suggestion that I'm the one who is not raising the bar is hilarious, Joe. Go over to the Trump thread, and read the discussions about immigration there and the separation of families issue in the US. You tell me who is discussing that in a reasoned, fact based way, and who is shrieking about concentration camps and posting time magazine covers with one word references to it and no analysis.

And yet, you passed up a chance to engage some reasonably interesting topics right here. Instead your tone seems a little defensive, making the discussion about me instead of concentration camps, if you like, or one of the topics I mentioned. Heck, you could at least answer my question about "tu quoque."

[pErvinalia]

The tu quoque reference is in relation to me accusing him of always trying to reduce his (or Trump's, or his country's) responsibility for dumb/inhuman/evil shit because person-A/Hillary/Obama/UK/Australia/etc does something similar. You can see it in his main response to the locking kids up in cages thing. His main retort has been Australia/UK/Obama does the same thing. It's basically his favourite debating tactic.

[Joe]

Yeah, I searched the thread and found it. I thought Forty Two was referring to the fallacy, but figured I'd ask. Thanks!