Grr-owl

5 hours ago, Wrecker45 said:

I've always argued that the Murdoch press should be free to argue whatever they want and the ABC should follow their charter. People pay to read the Murdoch press by choice but all tax payers fund the ABC like it or not

It would be hypocritical of me to say big tech shouldn't get to publish what they like as private companies. I don't agree with them censoring Trump and Eric Coomer but that is there right 

There's a difference between censorship and warnings re lack of facts. Trump simply lies; that deserves to be flagged. 

9 minutes ago, Wrecker45 said:

I'm not paying that one

Why not? Let me know where it fails; it is a work in progress...

6 hours ago, Wrecker45 said:

AF and Grr-owl make a lovely couple. Same poster?

Whichever one (does it matter) said Trump represents the 1% must have missed the 70 million votes he got in the election.

I've been dying to write this somewhere, so I think here may as well do:

Imagine you're on a packed plane at 35,000 feet. The captain comes on the PA and says, "Well, folks, there's a bomb on the plane. We don't know if it's in the baggage compartments or under someone's seat or maybe in an engine, but we know it's somewhere and we're going to find it."

What would the reaction be?

After a few minutes of panic, the captain comes back on and says, "Well, we're looking hard for the bomb, and if you'd like to contribute to the bomb-finding fund, get your credits cards out and the stewards will help you donate."

Of course, many people give funds to this cause, about which they care passionately. 

There's one thing about it, however, that isn't right. The Captain is lying. He knows there is no bomb. What kind of man would do that? 

That's a good analogy for Trump's behavior since the election. He can't drain the swamp; he IS the swamp. That's his con. He can't give his supporters what they think he can, and he knows it. 

HIs supporters are good people with legitimate grievances. But Trump is taking advantage of them, not helping them. What they need is a govt that supports their greatest need: jobs. Neo-liberals aren't going to do that.... so its time for that to go....

43 minutes ago, Wrecker45 said:

AF - you have put alot of thought into your post which I appreciate. Not many do.

I think history will look kindly on the Hawke / Keating and Howard / Costello governments. They went outwords at the appropriate time and embraced globalisation.

Like footy game plans, things change over time. Globalisation is no longer the best game plan. Despite his obvious faults Trump recognised this.

Where we disagree is I think the media has had a massive shift to the left where you think the democrats have moved to the right.

Neo liberalism isn't a concern of mine. I think we have greater things to worry about.

 

 

 

That the media, in general, has moved is not in question, but I think it's mischaracterized to say it has moved to the left. Where it has moved is toward emotion, away from rationality. I don't mean fringe press, but stalwarts like the NY Times and the BBC. 

5 hours ago, Wrecker45 said:

AF and Grr-owl make a lovely couple. Same poster?

Whichever one (does it matter) said Trump represents the 1% must have missed the 70 million votes he got in the election.

Well, I didn't say it. But he doesn't represent the 70 million who voted for him, either. That's his con.

I get why people support him. It can be easily divined in this piece in from the BBC today: https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-55081852

Take a look at the responses by Republicans toward the bottom of the page. Trump supporters, white working people in the main, are simply sick of having the finger pointed at them and told that they are racists, and that the disparities suffered by people who aren't white are down to their bigotry. And here, even though the evidence is plain, in article about Hispanics voting for Trump, that race really doesn't have much to do with it, even a man as intelligent and accomplished as Barack Obama doesn't get that.

So who is going to step forward and bring the sides together? If Biden wants to do that, he'll simply need to find a way to give jobs to people, many of whom will be white.

I think it can be done with investment in de-centralised energy production, de-centralised manufacturing (3D printing), distributed work practices and policies that drive up the cost of transportation.  But there's the rub: the neo-liberals don't want to invest in anything.

On 11/20/2020 at 9:42 AM, A F said:

Neoliberalism just allows undemocratic decision making being outsourced to unelected technocrats.

I’d never thought about this quite as clearly as you put it, and it has crystalised some thoughts re Trump for me. No wonder so many of his supporters feel alienated; they really have lost their political power. Course, the greater problem is that Trump is a conman: he can’t deliver what his supporters think he can. But that’s another point.

On 11/20/2020 at 9:42 AM, A F said:

The Powell Manifesto is the root of all of this.

Interesting read. I was struck initially by the timing, 1971. I might as well take the opportunity to briefly lay out my version of recent economic history and see if it chimes with yours:

The postwar boom ended in the late sixties. The US went off the gold standard in response, but what followed was the stagnation of the 70’s.

Reagan and Thatcher couldn’t accept that the post-war boom had ended, and so deregulated the banks and busted the unions and ushered in the era of debt-as-the-answer-to-every-problem and Hawke, Keating and Jeff and most of the rest of the West and some others followed along with their ‘service-based economies.’ Then, despite it proving itself to be a fatally flawed idea, the western democracies have just kept delaying the inevitable by responding to every debt-induced criss with yet more debt.

In other words, we’ve just kept on borrowing from a future that never arrives. Can’t say it hasn’t been good; as Pinker notes, things have never been better. Certainly, if you like your coffee fancy (as I do), there are no shortage of places to get one, and the world is awash with supercars and other luxury goods. Problem is, the debt-driven model isn’t sustainable, and all there’s no way around that fact.

But back to Powell. I sense a kind of paranoia there. Were these enemies of capitalism really enemies, or merely educated folk who acknowledged capitalism’s faults? The difference in perception is pivotal.

Surely, he identifies some real enemies in Marxists. Brutally ironic that the West is the only place where Marxism still has credence. I think of Marxism loosely as an ideology which defines society in terms of groups pitted against each other in a struggle for domination, which I think is bollocks to begin with, and which history has proven is very dangerous. Turned out that tens of millions in USSR and China turned out to have belonged to the wrong group, and in Kampuchea, it included anyone with soft hands or glasses.

In fact, as the Gulag Archipelgo makes plain, anyone could belong to the doomed group. All it took was someone who knew your name have their testicles stood on by a GRU man. Everyone spoke up then. It wasn’t difficult to fill the quotas. One of the few to escape that hell, Nadezdha Mandelstam summed up it up best:

“We all belonged to the same category marked down for absolute destruction. The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some of us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you.” —Hope Abandoned

Chilling.

Interesting how Powell’s ideas about the universities have just backfired spectacularly. Rather than neutering opposition to capitalism, privatisation has empowered it by lowering standards that have allowed mediocre intellects to thrive. There were good reasons that universities were for intellectual elites. Now they’re staffed by people who can’t see past race and gender and financial resources to see the human.

I, of course, belong to the worst group of all: middle-class, white, educated males. Me and my brethren of the Patriarchy. We’ve been dominant, though apparently the positives of modern western society have come about not because of the efforts of dead white men, but in spite of it. Couldn’t have been very dominant then, I would have thought, but then rationality has been one of the major casualties of the identity wars.

My reading of history lays the responsibility for the prosperity of the last 200 years largely at the feet of humanists who emerged from Protestantism eschewing the metaphysical claptrap of Christianity, but with the work ethic and concern for people intact. They harnessed rationality to achieve objectivity (science) and used it to better people’s lives the best way they could. If you’re interested, Tom Holland’s Dominion, and Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower and Civilisation: The West and the Rest give good accounts of how it worked.

But then, if the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution and Classical Liberalism were driven by ideas that were essentially Christian, why is it that so many neo-liberals are Evangelicals? Why has christian thought turned so hard to the right? Why is the left the harbour of orthordoxy and dogma in the name of caring for the oppressed, formerly the place of Christianity? Why do both sides think that massive debt is the way forward?

Why are the rationalist humanists centrists classical liberals so powerless to attract widespread support? How can they change this?

Oh…. just noted that Biden wants Janet Yellen as Sec of Treasury. Seems the debt ceiling will be raised any day now….

23 hours ago, Lord Nev said:

Might be a dumb question, but given the list minimum is 36 (37 inc. rookies) and we only have to use 1 pick this year, could there also be a chance we try to bundle up 18,19 and 28 into a top 10 pick and only take 1 draftee (aside from Lockhart)?

Doesn't seem super likely, but it's another option yeah?

Curious: Is it more likely to get us the player that fills our needs? I assume the wing or speedy HBF is what we're looking for...

5 hours ago, A F said:

the biggest issue is the lack of investment in the country and its people. If you don't spend, you don't allow people to save and then service their debts. You push them towards unsustainable credit and a cycle of constantly paying of debt, rather than having true equity.

This seems to me to be the biggest con of the neo-con era. They say they're all about getting out there and developing and building things and productivity, but they don't want to invest in anything. 

But there needs to be a role for government, as you say. Education and healthcare and energy are too important to leave to the market. The universities have become degree mills (well, not quite), and the students are customers. Standards have plummeted. Unis have become harbours for mediocrity. Just on that.... I took part in the entrance examinations for the uni I work at - one that is racing to embrace the modern western fee-paying model. In the training, it was made clear that nobody - NOBODY - was to fail, and that if someone did, it would be on us. I wasn't involved in any teaching; this was simply observing the behavior of the students in the exam and picking up on any attempts to cheat, then grading two short answer questions. Every customer was to be allowed into the store...  

5 hours ago, A F said:

The more certain people become radicalised, the harder it is to change their minds in the future.

There has to be a middle ground. I think what we need is a disaster. I don't wish it upon us, but there's nothing like a disaster to unite people. Stories of the Blitz are fascinating in this regard. The joy of sharing a tomato with someone in an underground tunnel while your house is blown to bits above.... and then once the war was over, back to the same old grasping. We need to realize that we're in this together. I can't see another way to unite people other than to collectively confront a common threat.

In the 80's the banks were de-regulated. Do we need to go back on that to manage debt creation, and if so, to what extent?

23 hours ago, Pollyanna said:

A significant set of the Demonland community was dead against drafting him this time last year and now a similarly significant set are complaining that the contract extension is not long enough.

The big question is, are they the same people...???

5 hours ago, Wiseblood said:

It is now.

Dogga out, Flighty in.

He says he's always been called "Egg."

17 hours ago, nosoupforme said:

Jake Lever is a quality interceptor and not a true key position backman.  He needs to be reading the play up field  so as to get into a position to cut of the oppositions play. That is when he's in his element.  He is turning into a valuable team player. 

Jake can take his game to another level with the inclusion of a Key backman.  

TMac? Petty? Or is Tomlinson the man for the moment....?

1 hour ago, A F said:

without a shift in the fiscal rhetoric and a pivot away from big capital to working people, America is going to be at the mercy of more extreme elements. 

Absolutely. I think this is Biden's ace in the hole, though. If he can invest in American jobs rather than tax breaks for the 1% and propping up asset prices, he's on a winner. If not, that's it. Either way, the debt burden on neo-liberal era is already too much and the deleveraging will occur, but if they can invest in the meantime, there is light at the end of the tunnel. 

And there is great potential in new tech that plays into the US's hands, rather than say some Asian cultures... De-centralisaiton of energy production, de-centralisation of manufacturing, de-carbonisation ... big structural changes underway that reconfigure things in favor of independently-minded anti-govt thinking such as that so central to the Red states of America.

1 hour ago, A F said:

Our private debt burden which crossed a staggering 200% between gross household debt and after tax income in 2016, is the second highest private debt burden in the world. This will have an impact.

Aussies really need to stop thinking that the most important thing in life is a gigantic mortgage. Disaster. As an aside, my grandad refused in any way to borrow money from anyone for anything. He considered it shameful. Bought a house in Camberwell with cash way back when. Now, he has great-grandkids about to graduate form university with a mountain of debt... What would he have said?

2 hours ago, A F said:

I can see both major parties collapsing in the next decade. T

I think we've entered a bizarre in-between period where the old system doesn't work and the new one hasn't arisen. Dangerous times, but we will emerge and, possibly, stronger for the reset. If that entails a less-prosperous future, I'm not so bothered, given that any household with an income above AUD$75,000 is among the world's richest 2%. In other words, most of us could be a lot poorer and still be very well off, relatively.

It depends what we deem important. If there are less Ferrari's in the world, I won't shed a tear. If healthcare and education are poor, that's something to worry about. If government and culture is oppressive, I'm out.

Looking forward to Petty in combination with Lever and May. 

1 hour ago, PaulRB said:

Rarely disagree with you AF on footy, but on the economy I think you're wrong. The Australian economy is well placed and will improve from here through 2021, and be back where we would have been in 2-3 years (i.e. forecast GDP, unemployment, trade, etc...).

Data - https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/smp/2020/nov/economic-outlook.html

Interesting times economically. Normally, I'll predict anything except the future, but in this case I'll make an exception to my exception:

The neo-liberal era will end in with a great deleveraging, triggered by events undeniably attributable to the effects of anthropomorphic climate change. I'd take a bet that a bunch of big insurance companies, and the reinsurers, go broke from the cumulative disasters..... and take out the banks as they go.

I reckon AF might think the above was plausible, but the question of when is the really salient one: I think the neo-liberal bubble has one more great big blow to go. As we come out of Covid, the world will boom 4-5 years and then BOOM! After that it's a depression, realignment and restructuring, and a low growth future (which I'm fine with). I expect AF won't agree with that timing, but I'm interested to knock the idea around.

If he'd run hard both ways consistently, we'd be a much better team. Not alone, of course.

Loved when he moved back into the middle, and then began popping up at the tip of the 50m arch to take the centered ball. More, please.

Really had my hopes up for Harley. Good luck to him and his lovely family. Keep battling and maybe with maturity and time his inner demons will give him a break.

On 11/15/2020 at 12:18 PM, rpfc said:

I cannot believe how much crap @Hogans Demonsis getting over his crummy meme...

If you have ever called a player a ‘spud’ you have done worse.

People need to get the poles out of their [censored] right quick.

Poles or polls?

Tired players makes for a better game.

Champ. Every time he goes near the ball I shout, 'Hibb-oh-oueh!' at the telly.

On 11/13/2020 at 4:22 AM, DemonOX said:

The info wasn't that he was going, personally I think he's more likely to stay, it was more that it's not a lock just yet. The thing in our favour is that Yze is a fantastic communicator and relates really well to players from what I've heard, he's already working with a couple of them specifically, so I think his influence could make a big difference to our group.

On 11/13/2020 at 4:22 AM, DemonOX said:

And if we can perform consistently as a team for once in many many seasons that will help to. I cant remember a more important or critical season for our club.

Very happy to be reading this about Yze. Seems there's a communication problem at the team level he could potentially solve. Like a marriage, everyone's gotta buy in for it to work, coaches and players.

On 11/13/2020 at 1:37 AM, Action Jackson said:

Brown, Jackson, Weid & McDonald

We still have Mitch Brown as well.... Given the potential for confusion, I suggest we refer to Ben Brown as Brown1 and Mitch Brown as Brown2. Both could be abbreviated further for typing ease to B1 and B2.

Do stats reveal a sweet spot in the draft? Far as I can see, high picks often don't work out. Maybe there's a range in there somewhere where a lot of top players are found....??? 

On 11/12/2020 at 11:45 AM, Kent said:

what are we aiming for any body know?

As I understand it, there are two blokes with great potential as outside mids.

20 hours ago, A F said:

I'm worried about our other wing and our lack of small forwards. I hope we can sort this during the draft.

But it means youth, or ‘players who’ll need a few seasons.’ How are we going to move up the ladder in the mean time? Have Blues, Dogs and Saints plugged their holes better than us? No jokes, please...