We are after all Constitutionally a Secular Democracy
Trioli’s conclusion,
And then I realised I had been wondering a similar thing all week – something that had been bothering me really ever since the marriage equality debate: why do churches like Thorburn’s City on the Hill care so much about what’s going on in the bedrooms and GP consulting rooms of people they have absolutely nothing to do with?
Why do some people – overzealous ex-students and overanxious parishioners – have such a powerful need to control others?
Private Education divides a Nation Systemically and Culturally. Secularism promotes Unity and accepts Diversity
The US education system is being desecularized as public money floods into private religious schools. This mix of religious conservatism and free-market fundamentalism threatens to unravel public education.
The United States and Russia are powers with self-serving ambitions, but their covert actions have produced more failures than successes. Even so-called short-term “successes” such as the coup in Iran have become long-term failures or liabilities. Clandestine Soviet activities in East Europe in the Cold War have created an East European membership for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation that is passionately anti-Russian. U.S. covert action in Central America merely increased the violence in that region, bringing great embarrassment and substantial emigration to the United States.
“Whatsoever a man sowed, that shall he also reap.”
The minute Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison brought their Christian beliefs to their roles as Australia’s PM they began diminishing Australia’s Democracy.
Conservative Christianity was once able to discriminate against LGBTQ people, but now it isn’t. As more people realize the rights that are due them by virtue of being human, the sphere of religious imposition shrinks, and the crusade is seeking to reclaim that lost ground. Really, when you get down to it, this is about a dominant caste that is waning in cultural status and is desperately trying to cling to that privilege and supremacy.
Our American democracy, even when we were happy with it and thought it was doing really well, it already had a whole series of undemocratic natures that no other healthy liberal democracy has.
Our electoral college, nobody has that. That was a compromise to rural states. We have the fact that our elections are run by partisan agents. No other healthy liberal democracy has that. Canada, this enormous country, has an independent electoral commission that runs all of the elections. Every ballot is the same no matter if you vote in Prince Edward Island or the Yukon. Or that we allow so much money to be injected into our system. Nobody else has this.
The British monarchy is a vestige of tyranny, a grand monument to hierarchy and plunder. As Irish socialist James Connolly wrote in 1911, the royals are for the other despots of society, the capitalists and landlords — not for the working class.
Clearer is that the Murdoch’s were always front and center of this globally. They fled to America where the laws and market were much more lax after Rupert’s almost jailing in the UK.
It’s clear the misinformation tactics so readily employed by conservatives for the last decade or so are found to be wanting when held up to scrutiny. Over the years, numerous trends in the USA make their way over to this side of the Pacific relatively quickly – let’s hope holding peddlers of misinformation to account ‘flies across the Pacific’ quickly.
It has been almost two years since Kevin Rudd uploaded a video to his social media channels calling Rupert Murdoch an “arrogant cancer on our democracy” and invited Australians to sign his petition for a royal commission into media dive
rsity.It gathered half a million signatures, including that of former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, and triggered a year-long Senate committee inquiry that concentrated its focus on the influence of Murdoch’s News Corp empire.
People like Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones, who write and comment outrageously based on payment for controversy, will eventually pass on as Gough Whitlam did. They will be quickly forgotten, but he will go down in the annals of Australian history as a decent, optimistic, passionate and sagacious Prime Minister who made an enormous contribution to Australian society. Something they could never aspire to do.(John Lord)
Never in the history of this nation have the rich and the privileged been so openly brazen.The rise of narcissism and inequality and the demise of compassion illustrate the state of the world.( John Lord )
there is a grotesque orange cloud hovering over the GOP in the person of Donald J. Trump who is planning to announce his candidacy any time now and remind everyone in the country that the Republican Party has been remade in his image and still dances to his tune. When asked what he thought about Trump entering the 2024 race, Joe Biden said he welcomes it. No doubt. Biden may be unpopular but in head-to-head polls, he still beats Trump.
If this didn’t tell you what Morrison and the Pentecostalists were intent on doing then nothing will. They wanted the end to the separation of powers, go the way of Israel and turn Australia into an Apartheid White Christian State. More so they were intent on doing it by stealth. It’s why the religious discrimination bill was their priority if they had won the election.
With all that’s going on in the world – a pointless war, a global pandemic, rampant global heating leading to increasingly severe and compounding natural disasters, superpowers competing over our region, soaring cost of living, rising inflation, unaffordable housing, poverty, social unrest – the last government spent its dying days fighting for a religious discrimination bill we didn’t need and arguing over trans women playing sport.
My thought for the day You cannot possibly believe in democracy if at the same time you think your party is the only one that should ever win. ( John Lord )
Newscorp ( Murdoch) wants Australian Media Americanised. It’s how it made it’s profit. It wants the UK media well done burnt to the ground and the BBC gone like the ABC too.
What does a democracy do when a dominant news media organisation goes rogue during an election campaign?
In 2022, News Corporation is confronting Australia with this question once again, as it did in 2019, 2016 and 2013, and as it did in the United States in 2016 and 2020.
“Going rogue” here means abandoning any attempt at fulfilling one of the media’s primary obligations to a democratic society — the provision of truthful news coverage — and instead becoming a truth-distorting propagandist for one side.
The evidence that News Corp has gone rogue during the current federal election is plentiful. It can be seen every morning in its newspapers across the country, and every evening on Sky News after dark.
A sample of its election coverage over the period April 27 to May 2 makes the case.
With over 82 million followers, Musk has been a prolific Twitter user and a sharp critic of its use of content moderation, saying that he favors temporary suspensions over permanent bans. It remains unclear what changes, technical or philosophical, Musk’s stewardship will bring to the platform. In interviews, he’s floated a series of potential ideas, including installing an edit button, allowing for longer tweets, culling bots, and making Twitter’s algorithm open source.
“Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill, a member of the Select Committee, characterized the January 6 attack on our democracy as a “dry run” – implying it could happen again – perhaps successfully. It will happen again – unless we put mechanisms in place to constrain a corrupt president from exploiting the absolute power presently conveyed by the Insurrection Act. That change needs to happen now – before yet another authoritarian – or even the same one – tries another Jan. 6 and succeeds,” he argued.
The very notion of Democracy and the Separation of Powers lead to a Godless State. However, Scott Morrison believes he was chosen to correct that. He believes he’s more than a member of an elected government but a member of God’s “elect” born to rule and that’s why he’s neither a liar nor a bully. He’s simply right!!
For much of the twentieth century, communism was a global movement, with branches in almost every nation, that sought to do away with the present state of things. It demanded and inspired unswerving loyalty from its members, who built a counterculture embracing almost every aspect of their lives. In this way, communist parties were unlike typical bourgeois parties, who extend politics only to elections and stakeholder management.
America’s new Democracy. There are now voices in the LNP who are already suggesting voting should be made voluntary and our AEC Australian Electoral Commission be privatized. Australian politicians pushing for a more American style democratic voting system.
When voters arrived at their polling place on March 1 in Azle, Texas, a small city outside of Fort Worth, they saw a framed, printed sign with standard voting instructions: no phones, printed materials allowed. Taped to it was another handwritten sign that read: “Sorry — No Democrat voting (not staffed).”
What do news reports about Grace Tame’s bong, Jenny Morrison’s 60 Minutes fluff piece and Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s China scare campaign have in common?
The obscene wealth of the world’s billionaires doesn’t just mean they get to lead lives of luxury. It also means they have almost complete control of the economy — control that is fundamentally undemocratic and unjust.
In light of last week’s devastating senate vote on voting rights, I keep hearing “voting rights are dead.” Wrong. If voting rights are dead, American democracy is dead. And if American democracy is dead, the entire project that began (imperfectly, to be sure) in 1776 and has been a beacon for the world, is dead. I will not accept that. Nor, I assume, will you.
Despotism is bad for capitalism. Despots don’t respect property rights. They don’t honor the rule of law. They are arbitrary and unpredictable. All of this harms the owners of capital. Despotism also invites civil strife and conflict, which destabilize a society and an economy. My message to every CEO in America: You need democracy, but you’re actively undermining it. It’s time for you to join the pro-democracy movement. Get solidly behind voting rights. Actively lobby for the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Use your lopsidedly large power in American democracy to protect American democracy — and do it soon. Otherwise, we may lose what’s left of it.
That workers must liberate themselves rather than rely on top-down liberation is one of the few rules for socialist organizing that Marx and Engels ever laid down. It’s nonnegotiable: socialists believe in workers freeing themselves through class struggle.
As much as we may critique the democratic system in the United States for not living up to its name, or the Democratic Party for not getting enough done, what we now face is dire. Trump himself may not precisely fit the “classic” definition of a fascist leader — we can quibble about that around the edges — but he’s close enough for many experts. More to the point, he is a nonstop liar, a conman and a sociopath. He doesn’t care about his own followers, only about himself. No such person should be in a leadership position at any level.
In under nine minutes, MSNBC host Chris Hayes on Tuesday night summarized the American right wing’s transformation in recent years into a political movement that openly celebrates violence, zeroing in on America Fest 2021—a conservative gathering taking place in Phoenix this week where Kyle Rittenhouse was celebrated by influential Fox News hosts and received a standing ovation.
For my part, that 2016 legislative change will likely make the difference between a snake oil peddler like ex-Liberal-turned-UAP-leader Craig Kelly being a footnote to Australian political history instead of switching to the Senate and enjoying six years spruiking imaginary medical advice through the most powerful megaphone in the country. And that’s reason enough to give Turnbull a grateful tip of the cap.
Fox isn’t News and has no Rights of protection under the 4th Amendment
This is a mistake. Fox is something new—something for which we do not yet have a word. It provides almost no actual journalism. Instead, it gives ideological guidance to the Republican Party and millions of its supporters, attacking its opponents and keeping its supporters in line. And it does so at a hefty profit, thereby turning itself into the political equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
My thought for the day “We’ve had it now for the last dismal decade. This destruction of our Democracy. It’s damaged both sides of politics, it’s damaged our country and our reputation. It has to stop. It must stop.”( John Lord )
The presence of neo-fascist thugs in the so-called “freedom protests” marks an escalation of their recruiting efforts and a threat to democratic norms, writes Dr Martin Hirst.
As denialism becomes a growing problem around the world, one only needs to consider the Afghanistan situation as a potential warning for our future, writes Robert Niven. THE PRECIPITOUS COLLAPSE in Afghanistan compels all of us in the West to contemplate Athena, the Greek goddess of war, also the goddess of wisdom in science and the arts.
It has long been assumed that as America heads toward a future in which people of color comprise a majority of the population, it will grow increasingly difficult for the Republican Party to win elections by appealing to a shrinking base of conservative white voters.
So : Trash the notion of the REPUBLIC
As Texas becomes more diverse, conservatives have held on by shaping the electorate to their advantage.
And then the Soviet Union collapsed — and nothing changed in the U.S. military’s global posture. Or, put differently, everything changed. For with the implosion of the USSR, what turned out to remain truly uncontained was our military, along with the dreams of neoconservatives who sought to remake the world in America’s image. But which image? That of a republic empowering its citizens in a participatory democracy or of an expansionist capitalist empire, driven by the ambition and greed of a set of oligarchs?
According to an Associated Press investigation, there were only 182 ballots, out of 3.4 million cast in Arizona, that had problems clear enough for legal review. Of those, only four led to charges, split evenly between two Democrats and two Republicans. Not a single vote was found to have been counted twice.
Israel claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East. Yet its wanton, murderous bombing campaign in Gaza is slaughtering not just civilians, but scores of children.
Yes: While there is some shoring up to do, democratic institutions held, which bodes well for other advanced democracies like Australia. No: The Republican Party is the party of Trump and its frontal assault on democracy rolls on and on.
There are so many paradoxes to America’s current state of political dysfunction that no one could possibly list them all. The party that has embraced the task of trying to save democracy at the last moment, however awkwardly and incompletely — and however poisoned by its own internal contradictions — won, but very nearly lost. The party that has gone about 94 percent of the way into white nationalism and primitive fascism lost, primarily because of its contaminated figurehead — but could not possibly have come so close to winning without him. As for the massive question of whether liberal democracy can be saved, let’s put a pin in that one, as we say these days. As Pankaj Mishra points out repeatedly in his recent collection of essays, “Bland Fanatics,” Western-style liberalism had a perhaps-fatal flaw built into it from the beginning: Its expansion of human rights and representative democracy and the “free market” and whatever other noble and purportedly universal principles were always dependent on exploiting less powerful nations elsewhere in the world, first to extract raw materials and human capital, and then to serve as captive export markets.
“While it’s great that these executives and their companies oppose the Jim Crow-style laws that GOP lawmakers are pushing across the country, this kind of talk is cheap without action.”
olddogthoughts 