Anyone who has a pet knows who the slave is. 
They called them “furbabies” and pretend they are actual members of the family…sometimes even closer than actual members of their own family.
Said another way …
Having not even the common sense of an animal is hereditary. You get it from your furbabies.
Our sloppy meat-based friend is sounding more and more familiar as his string of “I’m a leftie, honest, but here’s another post about how much Biden and the Democrats suck” posts continue.
Are we sure he’s in Australia and not one of our many departed disingenuous friends?
Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck. I don’t care if it’s really a duck; I’ll treat it like a duck.
You mean like this?
thedudescar
He just appeared on my radar for expressing his esteem for the leadership of the Confederacy (yes, it’s a Civil War thread, but still…). It was enough to take a quick look at his profile and see he has started the following topics:
- His first thread started on the forum (which he apparently joined to make), “About the south’s glorious past,” he goes on from acknowledging Confederate monuments to lamenting how people associate this “southern pride” with racism.
- He starts another thread to ask about life in the free French zone during WWII, with vibes of “Hey, let’s talk about the German occupation and how it probably wasn’t all that bad!”
- He starts a thread, ostensibly to ask about political summer camps, but feels the need to drop a mention about the mass shooting at a similar camp in Norway.
And of course that first thread went on for 200 replies. Troll.
That sloppy Joe guy really doesn’t like the poem read by Amanda Gorman. Man, I think she must have turned him down for prom or something.
He appears to be going through a manic phase. I wish he’d shut the fuck up already.
He doesn’t like anything to do with the Biden administration. Seems to be a bit of an obsession for a self-proclaimed Australian liberal.
Interesting fact: in Australia, the Liberals are the conservative party.
Well, duh - it’s because they are upside down
I’m assuming that nothing a person of color does will ever impress him.
Depressing fact: in the US, the liberals (Democrats) would be the conservative party, if it weren’t for those pesky Republicans taking up almost all the seats on that side of the stadium. It’s just that most people don’t realize how far right the country has shifted. We don’t really have a viable left, only an appendage to the Democrats (the much vilified “progressive” wing).
Actually, the Liberals are, along with the National Party, part of the conservative coalition. If you want a run-down of the way this coalition reflects different political positions, click the Summary arrow.
Summary
The “Liberal” part of the Liberal-National coalition is a predominantly urban and suburban party that tends to support a somewhat laissez-faire attitude (in modern-day terms, at least) to economics and social policy. That is, it tends to be push for lower taxes, reduced public services, smaller government, and other economic policies that are sometimes associated with the Republican Party in the United States but, like the right-wing many other western democracies, its policies are considerably to the left of the Republican Party of most economic issues.
Liberals from the cities and suburbs also tend, for the most part, not to be too invested in the culture wars. There’s not the same level of antipathy to homosexuality or abortion that you find here in the US among large swaths of the right. There has always been an element of social conservatism in the Liberal Party, and it seems to me that it escalated when John Howard was Prime Minister in the 1990s and then extended into the 2000s, but it’s not as pronounced as the social conservatism of the United States, and the Liberal Party was, in its earlier days, responsible for many policies that would be considered socially liberal today.
The Nationals are, in many ways, a more complicated bunch.
The party used to be called the Country Party, and the name change resulted, at least partly, out of a concern that the old name hurt the party with urban and suburban voters who, in a highly urbanized country like Australia, make up the large majority of the population.
As the old name suggests, the National (nee Country) Party has been the party most concerned with representing rural interests in Australia. Some of the peculiarities of Australian history and geography make this, at times, a rather difficult thing to do with any consistency.
In many cases, the National Party shares with the Liberal Party a sort of economic conservatism that pushes for smaller government and lower taxation. The problem is that, in a very large country with a small population, there are some services that would never make it to rural areas at all if things were left to the free market, so the National Party and its supporters have often found themselves in the position of defending government programs that help rural and regional Australia. Things like phone service, and local radio and television, would never have been extended to remote areas during much of the twentieth century without government intervention, and so rural voters who often make general criticisms of government spending are also, for example, often strong supporters of the publicly-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation, because some of the best rural radio and TV programming comes from the ABC.
While the Liberal-National Party is a coalition of the two parties, and unites against the center-left Labor Party, the Liberals and Nationals have often not seen eye-to-eye on economic issues that affect (or are thought to affect) rural dwellers differently. Some of their biggest disputes involved the privatization or semi-privatization of public utilities like Australian Telecom (now Telstra).
The National Party and its supporters also tend to be considerably more socially conservative than their Liberal Party coalition partners.
The good news about manic phases is they usually end in a banning. He’s gonna keep screwing himself into an ever-bigger lather until he goes over the edge of the Mod’s tolerance.
It’s often said that Australia is the Texas of the Commonwealth.
I think this guy’s from the outback near Lubbock, not near Adelaide. You just know he owns a bunch of MAGA hats and has big flags on his pickup.
I’m not a fan of political universalism. Every country has its own issues, priorities and history; to say that one country is to the “left” or “right” of another is so vague that it’s almost nonsensical.
Indeed. The idea that they’d be socially conservative anywhere is silly, and even moderate Democrats might be wild progressives outside of the wealthy nations. That is, if it were useful to make the comparison.
Said by whom? I lived much of my life in Australia, as well as a number of years in two other prominent Commonwealth countries, Canada and the United Kingdom. I’ve also visited a number of other Commonwealth nations. I have never, not even once, heard this term.
Meh, not really, if we’re talking about broad issues like social safety nets, progressive taxation, environmental regulation, freedom of expression, basic human rights for women and minorities, etc.
Yes, there’s probably no such thing as a country that’s significantly to the “left” or “right” of any other country on absolutely every issue, but it’s possible to draw meaningful distinctions in the aggregate between many countries, at least within broad categories like “modern developed democracies”.
Not really.
There are some universal issues that can (and have) be easily quantified.
- Freedom of the press
- Freedom of religion
- Discrimination against sexual orientation, ethnicity
Those issues can al be simplified to a left-right scale. Where left represents the democratic, liberal ideal.
You then end up with China, Saudi-Arabia on one end of the spectrum and Scandinavian countries on the other.
This isn’t perfect, but far from useless.
You can argue a bit about weighing some factors more than others but essentially you will always end up with roughly the same list.