[Non-US] News That Makes You laugh/cry/neither...

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Wed Aug 03, 2016 9:44 pm

http://www.timesofisrael.com/chief-rabb ... in-israel/

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu Aug 04, 2016 12:19 am

So anyway, the results of our election (sort of) finally finalized just a couple of days ago.

The evil coalition is in power by a one seat majority having lost the last seat in contention by 37 votes on the (automatically triggered) recount.

They now want to take that result to court hoping for a by-election, though why the fuck they think that would go well for them I have no idea.

Especially since in the time since the election, despite having gotten nothing productive done they HAVE managed to fuck things up for themselves even more already.

Information has apparently come out linking the leader of the national party to mining and coal seam gas investments when he fought really hard to keep his seat (as in he starved his ENTIRE PARTY of campaign funds and sunk them ALL into retaining his own seat) because of a strong fracking based revolt and his entire pretense was "no guys I'm TOTALLY against fracking, It's just as the leader of one of the two parties in power in both your state and federal government I CAN DO NOTHING TO STOP IT, but I totally hate it too, AND that big coal mine you don't want!".

The moderate PM and his "moderate" conservative allies wanted to nominate a former labor PM for a chance at UN secretary general. The hard right fuckers said "no, nominate Tony Abbot instead, haha, no the Tony Abbot bit is a joke, nominate no one, we would rather put party loyalty ahead of the national interest and our own potential post MP diplomatic careers, and by the way fucking Joe Hockey is still ambassador to the USA!!!". Now that former labor PM... is not the most popular guy, but he is popular A)in Queensland, where the seat with the potential by-election is and B)with his (somehow apparently?) personal friend that crazy conservative QLD independent the government is now fucking relying big time to get anything done.

And then there was the whole little Australian Abu Ghraib with the abuse and torture of aboriginal children in stupidly needless detention thing. So bad the PM immediately called a Royal Commission to try and quash the public outrage... a Royal Commission to be run in co-operation... with the state government being investigated... with no mandate into actually looking more broadly into anything other than "yep this specific thing did happen which we already new from THREE OTHER DAMNING OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT INQUIRIES WITH PUBLIC FINDINGS DATING BACK A YEAR THAT WE JUST IGNORED UNTIL THE PICTURES AND VIDEOS WENT PUBLIC"... that will itself then be ignored like the other inquiries into this stuff including a TWENTY YEAR OLD ROYAL COMMISSION into the mistreatment of aboriginals in custody the findings and recommendations of which have been ignored all this time... and which already attempted (and failed) to appoint a judge from the state AND cases in question to impartially run it (he rather professional refused due to "perceived conflict of interest").

Anyway, point is, they won't win that by-election. Also there are various parliamentary deadlines and the whole "barely governing majority" thing that make it a bad idea if not outright impossible to appeal in court anyway but RULES won't stop them and it's unclear if even the inevitability of a worse defeat will either.

In other news. The ABC, our public broadcaster that TOTALLY is crazy left wing biased according to the right wing people (who fucking flat out literally run it now) SAT ON THIS SHIT for up to a YEAR then only released it weeks after the election.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Thu Aug 04, 2016 4:00 am

Rudd is also pretty good at making friends overseas. Now I don't think Australia deserves a seat at the UN, other than perhaps in the docks, but if we're going to nominate anyone for it, I'd say Big Kev* at least has some qualifications there and, well, our favourite parts about his first stint as PM were when he was overseas getting along really well with Asian governments and apparently being so good at it that the people in those countries knew who he was. We're not America or Russia: we don't expect other people to know who our PM is. So that was pretty good.

But hey, fuck working for the betterment of the country - LibNat haven't been doing that for the last ??? years, why would they start now?

Meanwhile, some Australians are justifying and defending the torture of teenagers in custody, and I have to ask "which fucking case?" Do they mean the stuff happening in the NT (and only the NT, guys, honest, that's why we're only investigating that part of Australia, you don't have to worry about it happening anywhere else for reals! People don't have pictures or footage of those places.) prisons? Or do they mean the stuff happening in Nauru, for people who haven't even committed a crime (if we pretend for a moment that "having committed a crime" is justification for state-sanctioned human rights violations)? Australia is becoming really good at torturing kids and teenagers, they should add that to the Olympics and see how we do against America, Mexico and Russia.

On the plus side, Amnesty has defied our government's best efforts at hiding the abuses and has gone and published a report on it, explicitly stating that "causing suffering" is the chief goal, not just a horrible unacceptable side-effect, and how much they are trying to hide and silence every aspect. I really want to believe that there's some chunk of the population who would feel that crosses a line. That any future by-elections or flat-out "we didn't get the results we wanted in the last DD, let's throw another one!" tantrums are affected by people not being okay with deliberate torture and cover-ups.

Or everyone can forget about it as we watch the Olympics and listen to barely-relevant TV personalities spouting crazy bullshit. That could also happen. PL, what are your betting odds on that being the case?

*I'm trying (unsuccessfully) to make him seem more interesting than he ever was.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu Aug 04, 2016 5:36 am

I'm pretty sure the population has largely forgotten the aboriginal child torture thing already. A week or two is about the longest amount of time any majority of Australians can bring themselves to care about black people.

Australia is SUPER fast with forgetting about aboriginal people in general.

It's totally not a racist thing because Australians aren't racist, don't even know the word, hell it's not like there even are Australians that aren't just white Australians anyway right?

In a side thing. Remember when pictures broke and "this is a surprise, no one could have known!" was a thing. Despite all the reports. All the evidence. All the previous statements to press on the exact same matters, all the NGOs and press stating that they'd flat out shone these images to seniour figures in the coalition at state and federal level who were now denying all prior knowledge.

Yeah. Well I hadn't seen the pictures but I knew about that torture prison and what was going on there a fucking year ago. Just from reading online news articles. What the fuck is the state minister for corrections and the federal minister for indigenous affairs excuses? Oh right "no one could have known", even apparently when documented written and video evidence is waved under their noses for 12 months.

Next thing you know we'll (somehow despite crazy draconian secrecy laws) get video of a rape in detention on Nauru and they will pretend the frequent incidents haven't been common public knowledge for how many years now?

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Thu Aug 04, 2016 3:03 pm

Rodrigo Duterte's policy of killing drug dealers seems to be working. Though at the moment it's more just a policy of threatening to kill drug dealers, there have been relatively few actual killings, and a lot of people surrendering.

And he's not hesitating to go after government officials, either.

http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2016/ ... urrendered

His policy on enforcing mining regulations is rather similar.

http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2016/ ... ve-or-else...

“If you refuse to obey, I will place you inside the mining pit and cover it. You want to try it, fine. Let’s do it,” the President told a press briefing at Malacañang.

Hmm. Threatening to kill a lot of people is an effective way to run a progressive lberal environmentalist anti-corruption campaign. Who knew?

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Thu Aug 04, 2016 10:55 pm

We work with about a dozen people from the Philippines, and some of them are really huge fans of Duterte because he's cleaning up some really big messes.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Aug 05, 2016 8:31 am

OK, so why are people okay with that kind of dictator but not with others?
I mean . . freedom of choice, freedom of market yadda yadda . .
Isn't that what's usually stated as the most important things ever?
And instituting killing laws and threatening to kill even more people?

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Fri Aug 05, 2016 8:49 am

What I've seen cropping up online is more "terror in the streets as police gun down suspects in public places" than "bounties have been collected on criminals and everything is getting better".

I approve of the bit where he's telling mining companies to clean up and follow the rules or GTFO, mind you.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Wed Aug 10, 2016 8:03 am

Meanwhile in Australia.

Conservative wanker Government tried to census.

Failed.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Aug 10, 2016 8:45 am

Yes, a lot of people boycotted it over security concerns. Including the Bureau of Statistics, who took the site down.

Oh wait, no, they just said "Everyone go to our site on X date and fill in the form" and assumed it'd be fine as 24million people (okay, one per household, probably around 5 million?) did precisely that. And the whole thing collapsed and some sources are saying "We fucked up" while others are still blaming "foreign hackers doing a DDoS" because there is no internal communication on this.

(Most foreign IPs hitting the server are probably Australians who, having concerns with government handling of data, use a VPN).

"Over here they normally do it bit by bit - if your postcode ends in 1, your turn is today, if it ends in 2, you do it tomorrow and so on."
"Our government isn't very smart."
"Wait is this the standard thing about where you live and all? I thought the government would already know all that."
"Our government isn't very smart."

You could pretty much make a drinking game based on how often you say that in a discussion of Australian politics.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 12:39 am

I'm probably just really slow, but what are the issues around a census?

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 1:31 am

A census involves polling all 24 million Australians. The census website cannot handle 24 million Australians filling out the census form all at once.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 1:44 am

Ah. That is silly.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 2:37 am

There are several issues surrounding the census before, during and after.

1) Fuck anonymous neutrality, the conservatives want this to be ANOTHER individual tracking database for no reason and be damned with what it does to public confidence and the reliability of gathered data (or the ability to even gather any).

2) Fuck being careful the conservatives want to go full digital right now on a budget package that probably couldn't handle the traffic on any given major internet forum. Lets not even test it properly and boast about how it was an unsinkable titan capable of "processing 1 MILLION! forms per hour". That should help.

3) Lets cut the fuck out of the government services including the branch responsible for the census and then expect them to do the same job on a fraction of the budget with a fraction of the staff. Lets help that out by not appointing a head of that department for like a year and a half during preparation for the big digital census and while we are at it lets change which minister is holding the hot potato every couple of months for an entire term of government too.

4) Lets tell everyone everything is running fine without any issues on the night, even when it's already nearly failed three times due to "attacks". That way we will totally instill deep faith and confidence in the already dodgey census when we suddenly turn it off without telling anyone for ages then say "er... WE chose to shut it down because of a FOURTH DDoS attack, er, no we weren't crashed in anyway we chose to to preserve data integrity, er, no we don't mean people were stealing your data we mean the OTHER data integrity, er, no we don't mean the data was being stuffed up and we need to do this all again, fuck dealing with PR is HARD!"

5) Then it turns out there were no DDoS attacks at all. Indeed the whole issue may have been that a single router burnt out under the load. Because that's how shoe string bullshit the whole thing was. So the government statements from various individuals have ranged from playing down the attack because they know that they can't really maintain the DDoS story, or alternatively just sticking to that lie and running with it because if it wasn't a DDoS it was flat out incompetence and budget cuts and THAT can't be allowed to be the story (but it is).

6) Fuck it the conservatives don't really LIKE census data and other stuff like that, they've almost certainly been trying to kill off the whole department that does that stuff because they would prefer to continue to develop their policy (or lack thereof) in a pleasant void bereft of real world statistics that keep fucking contradicting them. I mean it was supposed to be a slow quiet death of gradually worsening data from a hollow zombie department, not a single flashy embarrassing grand scale fuck up parade event during an inconvenient moment for the coalition... but conservatives are even shit at vandalizing national institutions so... yeah giant public fuck up ahoy.

However it all boils down to one single greater point.

1) The conservatives are bullshit crazy incompetents who can't even get the most basic tasks of governments accomplished even when they desperately need a freebee success story in the face of ongoing bad press due to their other constant fuck ups.

Seriously. The Romans could census better than this. The fucking Romans.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 2:17 pm

What was the process of filling out a census form for people who didn't have an internet connection? Just out of interest.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 2:39 pm

You could get a paper form ahead of time, fill that in and post it. That is still an option, and apparently is turning out to be the more reliable one.

As an aside, various "totally not Christian (or racist), honest" groups were scaremongering about how every Muslim in Australia will be filling in their religion as Muslim, all "voting as one bloc" (it's not a vote, that was a few months ago when you put the conservatives back in power you stupid wank pheasants), and it is important that everyone else write down the religion you were in some way born or baptised into - if you later became an atheist (many Australians fit that profile), don't tick "no religion", tick the most relevant (Christian) box that would describe your household when you were born. OTHERWISE THE MUSLIMS WILL OUTNUMBER EVERYONE ELSE AND SOMETHING SOMETHING SHARIA LAW.

This couldn't possibly be to just stir up more anti-brown-person fear, and to artificially inflate the numbers of Christians in areas (thus affecting funding for those organisations and also taking the "vastly Christian majority" values in mind when planning things for districts), right?

Meanwhile my correspondent in Sweden was amazed the government would dare to ask your religion, because if they ask you that over there in lovely secular Scandiwegia, you'd answer "None of your fucking business, cockface" and they'd be the ones breaking the law.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 9:11 pm

The actual process?

Well yeah you could make a "special request" for a paper form for various reasons including "want to fill out something other than male/female for gender", which along with ANY "other" type entries or notes the web site apparently could not support, for no reason.

But the "standard" process in my area required you to first receive your paperwork anyway, which was basically just a notification that you needed to do the census and an ID number or whatever. Now my area doesn't get to have mail to the door, you have to go down the post office. You might think that means the notice/ID number would arrive at the post office in the weeks leading up to the event.

But no instead you would, maybe, find it pinned to a random fence post somewhere within approximately 500 meters of your home on the day of the census itself.

So that was the process here. "Scavenger hunt the general area for your unique ID before anyone else can find it at the last minute, if it's even out there, which in some cases it isn't (or isn't any longer".

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 11:02 pm

PhoneLobster wrote: So that was the process here. "Scavenger hunt the general area for your unique ID before anyone else can find it at the last minute, if it's even out there, which in some cases it isn't (or isn't any longer".

Well that sounds like fun. What sort of prizes do you win if you find it?

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Fri Aug 12, 2016 1:00 am

hyzmarca wrote:
PhoneLobster wrote: So that was the process here. "Scavenger hunt the general area for your unique ID before anyone else can find it at the last minute, if it's even out there, which in some cases it isn't (or isn't any longer".
Well that sounds like fun. What sort of prizes do you win if you find it?

You get a shiny Mew.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Fri Aug 12, 2016 3:23 am

If you find it the prize you get is to choose between a large fine or to line up for hours on a website attempting to assist the government in creating a resource for overly invasive spy agencies and identity theft hackers instead of a proper census.

If you don't find it the prize your get is possibly a large fine and doing nothing in a way that assists the government in destroying its annoying remaining links to reality based statistics.

Everybody wins.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Fri Aug 12, 2016 3:04 pm

Now the Bureau of Statistics is on the record saying "Don't blame us for the census failure, blame the cockface government that cut our staff and funding and then privatised the IT". Which is of course correct. The PM has said heads will roll at ABS for this, but really it should be his own, and that of his predecessor, as they're the ones who fucked it up and made sure it would fail. Along with most government-run services and basically everything else in this country.

sendaz · Post by **sendaz** » Wed Aug 31, 2016 8:56 pm

http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-rstrnt ... e=facebook

Finally a decent cruller over here in the UK.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu Sep 01, 2016 11:48 am

So the conservative government with a majority of one in Australia has just lost several votes in the lower house.

Various shenanigans were involved, but the key detail is that several conservatives buggered off early thinking things were over, and then failed to get back in time as things ran a few hours longer than they had hoped.

My favorite bit? "Which coalition members are missing, it's hard to tell in this chaos, who is that finally stalking back into the chamber after two (out of three) lost votes by the government..."

No less than the front bench minister for imprisoning foreign babies Peter "How many times will this dumb potato cock up and bring down his own government" Dutton.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Thu Sep 01, 2016 3:35 pm

For additional "top keks" as the kids say these days, this is the government that was smugly proclaiming how they won in a great landslide and have the mandate of heaven and have reduced chaos in the senate with a firm grasp... oh but it's so narrow, could Labor pretty-please agree to a pairing system?* And given that Abbott himself told Labor to go fuck themselves when they requested pairing back when they had a slim majority (in coalition with the Greens)... yeah, Labor finally did something right and told coalition to go fuck themselves.

Also, the "Replace a plebiscite with an actual binding senate vote on legalising gay marriage" thing is so close, they could get it if three coalition senators cross the floor (technically two, but I can 100% guarantee there'll be a Nay by one cross-bench senator, Bob Katter who got kicked out of the religious bigot party for being too much of a religious bigot). And this is during a time when half the coalition want to fuck the PM over, for revenge or for their own promotion prospects or just due to general incompetence. There is the (slim) possibility that we will see this happen under a coalition government put in place by Murdoch and voted in by right-wing hicks. All because they are basically failing at failing.

And Labor have still sided with the coalition against a Greens proposal to open a Royal Commission into the actual torture and murders committed on asylum seekers in our name, a thorough investigation we really need. Because of course those two parties are really keen on obstructing justice and not having their crimes revealed to the public.

*Basically, for a while there's been a tradition between Labor and Coalition, where if you have a slim majority, you request a pairing and typically they approve it because it might be their turn next. Under a pairing, if one of your senators is away sick or attending the birth of their child or sneaking off to an orgy or whatever, then one of theirs sits back and doesn't vote, thus maintaining your slim advantage. No there is nothing saying they have to do this, it's one of those etiquette things which the Coalition broke first. Never mind that any senator really should vote based on their conscience and not be bound by little deals and the "Vote this way" mandates of the party.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Thu Sep 01, 2016 9:23 pm

Notably on the pairing thing, yes the Coalition broke it first by being obstructionists vs the last two labor terms of government then demanded labor do it for them now.

But very specifically on the issue of the banking royal commission votes that labor took over the lower house and won. The Coalition had won the earlier vote on that and in the process specifically didn't give pairing to an absent labor MP. Winning that vote by mighty... 2 instead of a meager 1 (worth noting as an aside that at least 2-3 coalition MPs ran election campaigns claiming support for the banking RC that has rapidly evaporated after being elected).

It was, like a lot of things about this, the perfect set up for labor to pull procedural shenanigans like they did. Even if the coalition tries to say "nuh ah, unfair, we should look at the fair vote where everyone was present and no one exploited opposing members not being present" then interviewers can directly respond with "oh you mean the one where you didn't give labor the pairing you keep demanding they give to you?".