Open Thread – Weekend 25 March 2023
2,134 responses to “Open Thread – Weekend 25 March 2023”
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Zulu at 9:28 pm
The Greens have upheld the need for the Voice to provide advice on policies such as the safeguard mechanism in a rebuke to Anthony Albanese, arguing the climate policy – and the coal and gas projects it could affect – directly impacts upon Indigenous Australians.
Leaving aside (for the moment) Albanese/Bowen’s dishonest and deluded commentary on the safeguard mechanism, anyone reading the presser would have noticed Uncle Luigi’s insouciant minimising of the scope of the Voice:
JOURNALIST: Is this something you can imagine a Voice providing advice on and would a Voice provide advice to the Greens as they would the Government or is it purely for legislation like this? How would that work?
PRIME MINISTER: Of all the very strange questions I have been asked about the Voice, that’s up there. You know, the Voice is about matters that directly affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. That’s what it’s about. And people shouldn’t look for, on the Voice, distractions. They can if they want, they can ask all sorts of things about whether it will, you know, give advice on who should play five-eight for Souths this week, but that is not what it is about.
JOURNALIST: But isn’t emissions something that Indigenous people care about?
PRIME MINISTER: That is not what it is about. The Voice is not about defence policy. It’s not about foreign affairs policy. It’s not about these issues. The Voice is about issues that directly affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Nasty little humbugger.
At least it will be his government discovering the pleasures of the procedural pineapple, as 307 voices – empowered by the High Court and leveraged through the cross benches – demand that their opinions on anything and everything are translated into munni.
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Monty will be pleased!
Read More: Woman who ‘married’ a rag doll claims their relationship is ‘hanging on a thread’ after he ‘cheated’
A man who claims to be engaged to a rag doll has announced the ‘birth’ of their third child together.
Cristian Montenegro, from Colombia, has previously described his fiancé Natalia as the ‘love of his life’.
The couple – who already share a son and a daughter together – revealed that they have called their newborn Sammy.
Photos from the ‘birth’ show Natalia dressed in a hospital gown while lying down on a bed.
As her fiancé stands by her side, a rag doll doctor – dressed in a white lab coat, hair net and face mask – is seen attending to the expectant mother.
During the labour, Cristian is pictured covering his face with his hands as his fights back tears.
Moments after Sammy’s arrival, the proud father posed for a selfie with his new son laying on his mother’s stomach in the background.
Earlier this week, Cristian shared the happy news with his TikTok followers in a now-deleted video.
He captioned the clip: ‘Welcome Sammy Montenegro.’
Viewers rushed to congratulate the proud parents in the comments.
One replied: ‘Congratulations to you and your family.’
‘He is so beautiful,’ another added. ‘He looks like a little baby doll.’
‘Welcome Sammy,’ a third gushed.
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Well that won’t be good news for Cris Bowen and co,
Net Zero Watch has welcomed yesterday’s EU agreement not to ban the sale of cars with internal combustion engines (ICE) after 2035.
According to the agreement conventional cars can continue to be sold and registered after 2035 if they only use fuels that are CO2-neutral. This will allow car makers to continue producing and selling conventional models indefinitely.
Net Zero Watch is calling on Rishi Sunak to follow suit and abandon its 2030 ban of the sale of ICE cars.
Now that the European ban of the sale of combustion engine cars has been overturned, the government will come under growing pressure to follow suit if it wants to avoid destroying the British car industry for good,” said Dr Benny Peiser, director of Net Zero Watch.
The EU agreed in February to set the 2035 date for ending the sale of ICE cars, but Germany and a coalition of seven EU countries lodged last-minute objections and called for the use of e-fuelled ICE cars beyond 2035.
As a result, the EU has come to what appears to be a sensible decision to allow the sale and use of conventional cars that are fulled by synthetic and other CO2-neutral fuels.
For millions of Britons electric vehicles will not be a viable solution as they are much more expensive than cars with combustion engines. And electric cars will probably still be more expensive than conventional cars in seven years.
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Is America’s Patriot air defense system really any good?
23 minutes. Detailed.
I love the comment by a US fighter pilot that the patriot missile system is designed to hit the front of the aircraft so maximizing pilot kill probability. He also states that if you are targeted you should bail out because it is very hard to avoid. The claim by a former patriot operator that it has a 95% hit rate is too good to be true. Russia claims a 100% success rate with the s400.
What I don’t understand is why all these whiz bang technologies are being provided in such small amounts that don’t provide that much advantage. It can take weeks if not months to optimize training outcomes. They must be expecting this war to continue well into this year. I thought it would be over in the next few months.
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Gray Connolly
@GrayConnolly
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6h
Replying to
@NicolleFlint@LiberalAus
and
@CaroDiRusso
Kos is, again, being an arsonist in a field of straw men. The issue that Trans presents is not being “kind” etc but the Trans collision with the rights of women & girls – the right of females (without qualification) to their own spaces, sports, bathrooms & esp prisons. Not hard. -
The Reserve Bank is saying that the housing crisis will continue for *years* – with rents to continue skyrocketing, and places still difficult to find.
We need to freeze rents for two years, and build a million new homes.
Adam Bandt, sadly, putting people before the planet.
Does he have any idea how much building a million homes will contribute to global warming? -
callisays:
March 27, 2023 at 9:13 pm
M0nty, can I add to that description?“Trans people” are, like so many, oppressed and troubled. They are fragile and easily swayed by cruel opportunists. They deserve kindness and pity. They also deserve time, especially if they are very young.
And, hiding within the maelstrom that is “trans” are the wicked. I’ve worked it out, why can’t you?
He failed Economics 1.
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“And there it is. The worst thing about trans rights for people like Kneel is that they can’t join in a good old fashioned community lynching. Creepy.”
No M0nty – as I said, if they have the appropriate plastic surgery and are not exposing male genitalia to females, then I have no issue with it. In any way. Not to my taste certainly, but you do you.
There is a line though – and some of these are creeps and cross that line. They need to know it is unacceptable. I have no desire to punch anyone to a pulp because they offend my sensibilities, but when they cross the line they need to be shown that some things will simply not to be tolerated – and men exposing their dangly bits to women and girls in a change room is crossing the line, pure and simple. It makes me genuinely angry, and that’s not an easy thing to do. I don’t imagine there are too many people – men or women – who disagree about that. And yet there are people – and you appear to be one – who simply do not understand or recognise that line. Perhaps you should speak to some of your female relatives, both young and old, and find out what they feel about it and where they think the line is – might give you some perspective on reality, instead of the “holier than thou” attitude you appear to be espousing with the above comment.
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Dot:
This whole DU argument has resurfaced from the ’90’s when it promised to decimate Russia’s tank forces and in the 80’s when the neutron bomb designed to kill crews through their tank armour.
It was never an issue with the ‘Leftist Peace Corps’ that the Soviet Union had developed its own neutron bombs or has very large stockpiles of DU tipped weapons.
Putin has just called his allies in the West to do his bidding, and like the fools they are, are rushing to support an agenda that will see them ostracised or worse from the community they want to support. -
John H:
I love the comment by a US fighter pilot that the patriot missile system is designed to hit the front of the aircraft so maximizing pilot kill probability.
If that’s the purpose of these multi million dollar systems, it’d be cheaper to just put Sarin in the air conditioning during the Regimental Dinner.
Do these idiots ever think about what they’re saying, or has it been taken so far out of context to be ridiculous? -
“…it seems to me just another symptom of a decaying value system in the West.”
I think Tim Pool nails it – it is the result of psychosis brought about by social media algorithms.
Eg, unarmed black people killed by police in the USA:
The real number in less than 30 p.a., out of literally millions of police interactions.
Yet an 18 year old in the USA with a social media fixation will have seen viral video after viral video of such events, and surveys suggest many believe the real number is in the thousands.
It’s not reality, but it is what they believe based on what they have been exposed to growing up.As to trans people – well, there are a LOT of “groomers” out there who will pick on pubescent teens and say “just dress differently” and when they convince the target to do so, say “Wow! You look amazing!”. For a teen this can be the sort of recognition and acceptance they are craving, and the groomer will slowly jack up the moves until the teen is convinced they are really trans, when they are really just a “normally” confused and depressed teen craving acceptance. When their entire social media experience is that doing what they are being told to do results in being called “brave” and other epithets that elevate their social status, what do you think they will do?
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“Conservatives here are upset because the Liberal party doesn’t have guiding prici0ples. Of course it doesn’t…”
Well, perhaps the party itself does not, but I can suggest some.
We should not fear change, but we need to review changes to ensure that they benefit society.
This requires a “go slow” approach, which is what you complain of.It is the results of policies that matter, therefore we should think carefully before we change them, considering many and varied points of view. We should ask those proposing changes to give us a number of scenarios of the actual change – best case (full fund funding etc), worst case (no change) and most likely case (what they believe is “do-able” under the current environment, including funding), then for each of those cases, document their expectations, again as 3 scenarios – best case (everything goes right), worst case (everything goes wrong), and most likely case (what they expect).
So all up, 9 scenarios.
Then we implement what we can, and after a suitable period of time, assess the results based on which of the “implementation” scenarios is closest to what was done, and see if the actual results are closest to best-, worst-, or most likely case.
If the changes are unsuccessful, then we can “undo” the changes, and suggest the proposers find another set of policies to achieve their “goals”.
“Rinse and repeat”.Such an over-arching policy (to seek what works best and to measure what we are doing to make sure it does as we intend!) would see us asymptotically approach the “ideal” set of rules, even as technology and societal values change. By undoing what doesn’t work, we recognise that we are all human and we all make mistakes – our society, like most of the “west”, has reached the point, IMO, where we have solved most of our major problems such as food, housing and so on, and are now facing issues that are either brand new (“digital rights”, “internet privacy” etc) or are as old as society itself. In both cases, we have no guidance on what works – for the former, none is available, for the latter, nothing that has been tried has actually worked.
I do think that currently we have largely “hit a wall” in terms of technological progress – not that it isn’t happening, but rather that the changes are now so rapid that it is societal acceptance of the changes that are the limit to how fast we change. Think of your mobile phone – at one point, a new smart phone offered considerable advantages over the old one, but now the changes appear to be more incremental. For example, my “new” phone (Samsung Galaxy S20) doesn’t do much more than the old one, but the camera has a 30 times digital zoom, compared to the old ones 5 times or so. Incremental, not the paradigm change of the new phone having a camera while the old one did not.
So overall, I do not see the “slow down” response as inherently wrong – we just need to add the “we need systems in place to ensure it works as intended” part.
YMMV.
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“…I was comforted by the fact that many women came with their husbands and boyfriends.”
That is because they are the sensible, not the radical, as you point out.
We may be the “silent majority”, but if we want this to change, we need to drop the “silent” part and speak up.Alas, this usually only happens when things have already gone way too far… as now.
If I am reading this right, we are likely to see things get worse on the same course, then the pendulum will swing the other way, and we will see things going too far the other way. That is what usually happens. I have no idea how to stop it – I am of the opinion that we cannot stop it from happening, as that is human nature, and what we repeatedly see in history. It is our lot as humans, and those who manage to succeed in reaching an appropriate compromise never last long enough to ensure it lasts in perpetuity. Indeed, those who do so succeed are such outstanding persons that we almost never have someone of similar stature to replace them when required. Still, hope springs eternal…
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“Either montypox is a really idiotic useful idiot or is not arguing in good faith. Maybe doing a st ruth.”
I don’t believe so.
As I have shown, if you engage without name calling, he will at least attempt an argument without resorting to name calling himself – usually.Sure, it is somewhat an, errr…, extreme devil’s advocate position, but that is what I believe it to be.
And we need it, regardless of what you may think of the man or his posted writings (I don’t say “beliefs” because I am not convinced they ARE his beliefs…)
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Ridiculing, mocking and justifying violence towards anyone is NOT an argument. Defending a frenzied and very hysterical mob in Auckland, a mob that broke through barricades to try and lynch a woman, is NOT an argument. Laughing about a woman being daubed with tomato sauce whilst trying to walk through a mob, is NOT an argument. He should be rightly ridiculed and condemned for diminishing and trivialising such violence. The plain truth is that the violence we see today is almost ALWAYS coming from the left, be it Antifa, the trans lobby and so on. Even Andrew Bolt, who back in 2017, when casually walking to a book launch, was attacked from behind the back by two masked males, has had enough, calling out the hypocrisy. Twitter leftists think such violence is a hoot. Ask Andrew Bolt, ask Tony Abbott, ask Nicolle Flint, ask Fraser Anning, ask Kellie-Jay Keen, ask Andy Ngo, ask hundreds of others, who’ve ALL been physically threatened and attacked by the left.
He doesn’t argue here in good faith. As he once admitted, he’s all for punching Nazis, so now, according to the left, anyone on the right is a Nazi or “Nazi adjacent” so we’re all prime targets and he’d happily see us punched…and probably worse.
I saw the scum close up at Pell’s funeral. They aren’t pretty, I was standing shaking because the violence is real. Oh and who “protests” a funeral? I attended Keen’s first Let Women Speak rally here in Sydney with my sister. It was orderly ONLY because the NSW police did their job and kept the baying far-left scum about 80 metres away….and I can guarantee you that if the police had not been there, what you saw in Auckland would have happened here in Sydney. They were screaming “Nazis” and “kill TERFS” at us.
Anyone who justifies, who ridicules, who trivialises such intimidation, threats and violence is not arguing in good faith.
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TV screenshots from Saturday night, contrasting the stark difference in ethnic makeup between supporters of the Greens & of One Nation.
It’s Earth Hour every night on the Korean peninsula.
On the Northern half of it, that is.
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“Many Cats in this thread have stated that it is really about denying that trans people exist. They want to classify it as a mental illness and/or crime, to purge trans people from society.”
Some have said something like that, yes.
To say they don’t exist is like saying gay people do not exist – clearly they do, but not in the numbers we are seeing in the US at this time. That seems clearly to be a social “mind virus” in may cases.
I suspect that the “real” trans people are few and far between – well less than 1% of the population.
But that there are many (especially younger) people who simply crave acceptance and praise, and “coming out” as trans provides them that. We should definitely prevent such people from making life-altering and irrevocable changes to their person, especially ones that that make them infertile or at serious medical risk of complications such as osteoporosis at an early age and so on.
That is why I think that such irrevocable changes should only be allowed for those who have reached their majority, and even then only after careful and extended consultation. Allowing minors as young as 13 to make such choices is child abuse. -
Ridiculing, mocking and justifying violence towards anyone is NOT an argument. Defending a frenzied and very hysterical mob in Auckland, a mob that broke through barricades to try and lynch a woman, is NOT an argument. Laughing about a woman being daubed with tomato sauce whilst trying to walk through a mob, is NOT an argument
Well said, Cassie.
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What next, exorcisms and witch burning?
Conservatives and Christians today leave that to your far-left side of politics, Black Shirt.
From trying to impeach and/or imprison President Trump to physically attacking a diminutive woman speaking for women at a rally, the far-left and its useful idiots like you are already doing fine with the burnings, both real in the riots of BLM, and metaphorical in the extensive deplatforming of dissent.
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What makes a superior warrior? An individual willing to rise every day and push his body and mind to the limits. Someone who is capable of taking an absolute beating yet unafraid to get back up and continue the fight. A person who is constantly working to get stronger, be tougher, think more clearly, and achieve tomorrow what could not be achieved today. A warrior works all the time because when he is not working, someone else is, and when those two meet on a battlefield, only one will walk away.
That’s why I enjoy Bernard Cornwall’s books and the bringing them to life that is The Last Kingdom TV series. The historical context makes the warrior characters more believable. It sets the life conditions that produce a true warrior such as Uhtred – a thinking man, with an unfailingly lethal sword in hand, a leader of men with a dedicated band of brothers.
The final Last Kingdom show is not a TV series, as the series has ended, but a movie, following on and completing the tale of the rise and success of Athelstan, schooled as a warrior by Uhtred. We went to Uhtred’s fortress of Bamburgh (Bebbingburgh) again in January, in the north east, just to soak up this atmospheric place once more; it is still very wild and you can easily imagine the Danish longships coming to shore to wreak havoc. Holy Island (Lindisfarne) is almost adjacent to Bamburgh.
And the latest from Uhtred is coming to Netflix next month. Along with Succession, we now have a drip feed of good stuff to watch. If you’re new to either show though, watch through from the beginning; it all makes much more sense then. A good way to also shrug off the cares of each day.
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Victoria ‘can’t be without Chinese influence’: Daniel Andrews
By Heidi Han
Reporter
12:30PM March 28, 2023
No CommentsA modern Victoria cannot be “without a Chinese influence,” Daniel Andrews has claimed in an interview before his departure to the state’s largest trading partner.
The Victorian Premier told Chinese media: “The Chinese story is absolutely essential to the Victorian story for more than 150 years.”
“You cannot imagine a modern Victoria without a Chinese influence,” he added in a video interview with Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV.
Read NextThe secretive nature of Mr Andrews’ four day visit has been criticised, as has his decision not to take university vice-chancellors or education industry leaders with him despite nominating the tertiary education sector as a focus of the trip.
Mr Andrews told Phoenix TV there could be disagreement between the countries as long as there was respect.
“Good friends can disagree, true friends do not disrespect though. And that’s always the approach that I’ve taken,” Mr Andrews said. “You can have an honest dialogue, but it needs to be a respectful dialogue.
“We think the relationship and partnership with China is very important to Victoria, very important to Australia as well.”
Opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan on Monday called on the Premier to outline the purpose of his trip.
“I think he’s been to China more times than he’s visited Warrnambool … I’m concerned that the only reports we’ll get out of it will be by state-run media in China and I’d really like to know the purpose of this visit,” Mr Tehan told Sky News.
China’s state media, the Global Times, reported his trip announcement with the headline “For the Chinese students, he’s visiting China for the 7th time.”
Last year, Victoria attracted more international students from India than China, with 53,189 Indian students and over 42,000 Chinese students studying in the state, according to data from the state’s education department.
Your slave, kneeling, begs to obey…….
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