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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Arwon |
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Arwon Bazu                  Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Yeah, blaming Clinton for September 11.
THAT SHIT MAKES SENSE. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| First person to invoke Ronald Reagan wins.
Oh look. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| The following song contains banjo:
WHEN I WAS YOUNG I HAD A SCARY RECORD, CALLED "SOUNDS TO MAKE YOU SHIVER" IT HAD A TRACK CALLED "LADY GETTIN' TORTURED" I'D GET EXCITED WHEN I HEARD HER MOAN *music* NOW I'M GROWN AND WHEN I'M GETTIN' SEXY, WITH ANYBODY WHO'S PARTICULARLY LOUD I'M ALWAYS STOPPIN' TO ASK THEM IF I HURT 'EM I KNOW IT'S TIRESOME BUT I JUST HAVE TO ASK *music, with moaning* |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Funny, I always thought September 11 was bin Laden's fault.
Honestly, I don't think there's much to blame anyone in America for it. It was unprecedented and the way it was executed, there wasn't much chance of stopping it. |
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Arwon Bazu  Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| I think we went through the "American meritocracy is broken at the bottom end" debate a few weeks ago. Someone should go find that thread, I don't feel like repeating myself.
I'll also just add that ranting about welfare as a whole is dumb. The problem isn't welfare per se, the problem is welfare dependency and coming up with a system which minimises it. Different policies have had different degrees of success in balancing this need with the need to not implement overly harsh or unfair policies. Ay any rate, the problem of welfare dependency often gets misconstrued. It's a classic horse and cart mistake. Welfare dependency is a SYMPTOM of social problems, not a CAUSE of them. Disadvantaged communities are not in a bad way BECAUSE of welfare, but IN SPITE OF it. They'd be worse off without it, especially if you're gonna be relying on charities to foot the bill... funnily enough, there was poverty and suffering and social ills BEFORE modern welfare states. People who couldn't makte it just used to die in the streets or get abandoned in orphanages and suffer other Dickensian fates. Simple cure-alls like "hay lets get rid of welfare" ignore such realities. They ignore the fact that, in historical terms of "people getting a minimum level of social justice" and in terms of achieving a decent level of equality and social cohesion... modern redistributive welfare states have been, essentially, a success. Moreover, welfare expenditure consists of so much more than just the unemployment payments which people tend to focus on... in fact, in most decent welfare states u/e payments make up a smallish percentage of payments (6% in Australia, I believe), with things like family assistance, pensions, disability payment and veterans payments being a far larger chunk of the bill. Oh, and student welfare benefits, which, quite frankly, you can pry out of my cold dead hands, you fuckers. (edited by Arwon on 09-29-06 09:34 AM) (edited by Arwon on 09-29-06 09:40 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| But Jomb, what about Comedy Central? | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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Actually that is the definition of anecdotal evidence. At any rate, yeah, apparently that's an example of the welfare system not working very well. So the answer is to fix it. Babies and bathwater and all that. Unemployment benefits are the trickiest part of a welfare system to calibrate, because you need the right mix of benefits and incentives to actually get people into work while not screwing people who can't work--and let's just recognise that there are people who are essentially unemployable. A good welfare system actually involves requiring job-seeking as part of the qualification process, a certain numbers of applications each fortnight. The problem is, that sort of stuff is actually more expensive to set up and run--you need to train people and set up job seeking offices and install a system of verification with computers and ID numbers and so forth. It's cheaper and easier just to hand money out no questions asked. Or to just stand around criticising the whole system without offering productive solutions, because hey, who likes welfare bums? |
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Arwon Bazu  Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| I've never quite understood, why are cops extra sacrosanct? Is it just people looking out for their own?
I mean, from one angle, "I don't wanna go to jail" is a better reason for killing than most others. More justifiable if not more right... (edited by Arwon on 10-02-06 08:48 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| How do the blind use the intertnet? | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| I find my own nightmares are pretty abstract and the main thing I'm left with is a feeling of pure abject terror that has little relationship with the actual events. The scariest dreams I ever had were a period of two weeks when I was about 11, wherein I had a recurring nightmare of this pure abstract terror sort that involved very little besides a jeep or 4-wheel-drive, random numbers, a scruby desert, and the feeling of flying uncontrollably.
There's no logical explaination for why these terrified me so utterly and why the thought of them still chills me. On the other hand, the actual scary dreams about murders and monsters and stuff that I've had since then don't bother me, because they pale in comparison to these past dreams of pure, distilled, paralysing, fear. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| I'm basically a very socially liberal Social Democrat which cannot really be represented in this rather limited political spectrum. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| I really question how much experience any of you people have with the whole idea of life-and-death gun situations and shooting people. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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Originally posted by MathOnNapkins Actually, there's plenty of people, angry first-world males mostly, within whose heads lurkes the idea that "if Nazis weren't so mean and didn't hurt so many people they would have been perfect." They tend to say things like "if you don't love it, you're free to leave" and rant about various groups whose lifestyles they disapprove of (feminists, gays, ethnics, atheists, the sexually promiscuous, vegetarians, etc) a lot. (edited by Arwon on 10-05-06 10:37 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Get her drunk. See if anything happens.
Seriously. I'm not talking taking advantage. Not so drunk that people lose all free will and self control, but drunk enough that you could really fancy something you wouldn't otherwise actively go for... like a kebab or, indeed, hook-up. If something happens, it's not really adding something that wasn't there, but simply bringing it out. Then you go from there. YMMV. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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Originally posted by Crayola If blond-haired, blue-eyed male caucasians were an under-represented and historically improverished and disadvantaged group, then fine. But they're not, and they don't tend to, as a group, go to shittier schools, have more difficult upbringings, get lower marks even with equal intelligence to peers in other places, and so forth. There is affirmative action for all sorts of things based on percieved disadvantange, race is just the hair-trigger issue in the US because of its particular historical neurosis about the subject. Racial preference is an overrated bogeyman, but then, Americans often confuse Race issues with Class issues since there's a high correlation, and talking about Class is discouraged in America, so race usually makes a reasonable proxy. Even so, if you're going to bitch about racial preference, you had better also bitch about affirmative action for people from rural areas, or low-income backgrounds, or kids getting preferential treatment in their home states' systems, or for any number of other areas where affirmative action is used to attempt to level the playing field against percieved systemic inequalities of opportunity. It's all well and good to say everyone should be treated equally, but when you look at the VAST disparity between school standards and educational opportunities between different communities, people being held back because they've been born in the wrong town, family, state, whatever... it's simply not possible to sit back and say "judge by marks alone" because that not fair or equal either. Inequality of opportunity is everywhere. At any rate, the US education system, particularly with regards to entrance into higher education, is fucked in a much more fundamental way than just "minority scholarships" and blaming them is simply perverse. Look instead to things like legacy scholarships and so forth, the early entrance places, all the little tricks used to ensure that the privileged and wealthy stay that way by getting more places than they deserve on merit alone. Ask why the share of places at top universities going to the richest 20% has increased continuously for a couple of decades. (edited by Arwon on 10-08-06 11:42 PM) (edited by Arwon on 10-08-06 11:47 PM) (edited by Arwon on 10-09-06 03:23 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| That's not to say that they can, or should be able to, do anything, just that the constraints are less than those for the government. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| North Korea is pretty batshit insane, I'm not yet convinced they can be expected to behave in a rational manner even if there is a certain perverse logic to their actions. They're not a country you want to have nukes (and I'm someone who doesn't see a huge issue with Iran having nukes, for example). The good news, though, is that they're still technological minnows, even this bomb was kind of a fizzler (1 kiloton or so). They HAVE to realise, at least at the top level, that they cannot use nukes and survive. The worry is that the information apparatus in NK is so warped that they MIGHT not. I for one wouldn't want to be making any guarantees based on North Korea being sensible.
The main thing this does is to exacerbate things rather than fundamentally alter them. It makes the geopolitics of Northeast Asia even trickier and more dangerous. It ramps up the stakes for all the main players and renders North Korea much harder to deal with. The fears of them destabilising and collapsing are even more intense now that this is thrown into the mix, and this'll play heavily on the minds of everyone in the region. China and Korea in particular would rather a stable North Korea, which will likely put them at odds with nations who want heavy sanctions and so forth. Another nasty effect will be on Japanese domestic politics and geopolitics, most likely increasing the bellicose rhetoric and becoming more hawkish for rearmament, which of course will piss off their other neighbours greatly. Especially China. South Korea will likely be less worried, oddly enough, since NK's had the ability to do serious damage to them for a long time, the nuclear bogeyman doesn't add that much more danger for them. Nasty developments, more disappointing than anything. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Nah, sorry. That was a pretty worthless contribution geeog. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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Originally posted by Crayola So? |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| "Leave us alone or else" is practically the national motto of the Democratic People's Republic... |
| Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 |
| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Arwon |
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