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Cory
Feb 3, 2013 8:21:41 GMT 10
Post by angra on Feb 3, 2013 8:21:41 GMT 10
Well I can understand the cousins getting a bit upset about foreigners interfering with their legislative processes, but isn't this what they (the US) do in other countries all the time? Take copyright and anti-piracy laws for one, or 'counter-terrorism' measures for another. And how many lobbyists are there pushing the interests of their multi-national corporate backers in dozens of countries? And News' various tentacles?
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Cory
Feb 4, 2013 19:34:04 GMT 10
Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Feb 4, 2013 19:34:04 GMT 10
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Cory
Feb 4, 2013 20:14:49 GMT 10
Post by angra on Feb 4, 2013 20:14:49 GMT 10
MoC. You are right. This is one scary paranoid rightie. ABC/Universities/Journalists - all engaged in some evil far-reaching leftists conspiracy. We've gotta smash them as soon as Abbott gets into power!.
He needs a therapist.
I'm just gonna relax and watch some old episodes of The Lone Gunmen.
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Cory
Feb 6, 2013 9:35:55 GMT 10
Post by jack on Feb 6, 2013 9:35:55 GMT 10
"It must be done but it won’t be pretty. ... The time is approaching when concerted and coordinated action can finally be taken."
Thanks Merv, finally a solution!
Seriously, you have to wonder whether Merv is even aware that Antonio Gramsci (whose writings he grossly over simplifies) was gaoled by the Italian fascists.
And that he's essentially talking about "concerted and coordinated action" by government over a nation's intellectual life.
Get a grip, Merv.
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Cory
Feb 6, 2013 10:21:39 GMT 10
Post by angra on Feb 6, 2013 10:21:39 GMT 10
Merv Bendle? You gotta be joking. I know we shouldn't mock other's names but this a beaut. Much as I hesitate to link to the Oz, you may find this interesting... www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/academic-vilified-for-islam-scrutiny/story-e6frgcjx-1226476863630Yep. He attacks academia left right and centre, was hounded out of James Cook Uni and is apparently Australia's leading expert on terrorism. And his take on Breivik mass murders in Norway? "Maybe the attacks in Oslo an on the island of Utoeya were part of "a covert, ‘false-flag’ operation," he wondered. Maybe the attack was "carried out to give just this impression that it was conducted by anti-Muslim, right-wing extremists, but actually conceived and directed by other forces". The ABC actually gave him space on The Drum. God help us.
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Cory
Feb 6, 2013 12:06:31 GMT 10
Post by jack on Feb 6, 2013 12:06:31 GMT 10
Merv is pure gold. After his piece was published on The Drum, he complained of "the complete lack of balance in the comments, the viciousness of the attacks, and the danger that the publication of such comments may be defamatory." www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2011/07/australia-s-media-crisisCertainly, the comments were mostly dismissive but there's little that could seriously be described as "vicious" - unless you consider sarcasm to be an instrument of torture. www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2810818.htmlGiven Merv was seriously suggesting - without a skerrick of evidence - that mass-murderer Anders Breivik may be a false-flag patsy for the Teh Evil Left in league with World Islamofascism, I'm not sure what else he could have expected. Seriously Merv, if you don't want to be subject to robust free-speech, then don't agree to have your stuff published where sane people might see it. Quadrant is obviously a far more suitable 'forum' for your quaint thoughts. Relatedly, I wonder if Andy's perception of Merv may have modified since he wrote: "Bendle is just the latest evidence that James Cook University has, strangley [sic], become a rare hotbed of good sense." blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/acadamic_says_academics_soft_on_fascism/
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Cory
Feb 6, 2013 20:49:22 GMT 10
Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Feb 6, 2013 20:49:22 GMT 10
"Merv is pure gold" All that glitters, Jack. All that glitters ... He's an odd one. I've just had a look through some of his previous contributions to our nation's debate, and wow - just wow. I'm curious to read that article he wrote back in the early 2000s that got him offside with everyone. That doesn't seem to be within the view of teh googlz. That's a pity. His complaint about the drum is hillarious. Somehow the ABC is accused of minimal moderating, but also of "cultivating" a very particular audience ... exactly how is left as an exercise for the reader. I'd love to hear how he thinks it's done - mind control? Something in the water? Oooh - something to do with the transmitters, like in "they live"? And somehow this authorian statist ABC is later questioned about its being "liable" for the criticism of his article. I find it curious that a campaigner for free speech would even ask ... www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2011/07/australia-s-media-crisisHe seems to think that he was defamed www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2011/07/defamed-on-the-drumFirstly, The Drum clearly published the relevant defamatory material, a massive amount of it, and this was obviously communicated to innumerable people via the Internet. Secondly, it clearly identified me as the person being held up to ridicule and infamy and virtually all of the material published was about and concerned me. Finally, the material published was clearly defamatory, insofar as it: (a) exposed me to ridicule; (b) lowered my reputation in the eyes of members of the community; and, (c) injured my professional reputation. It may also cause people (e.g., students and colleagues at my university) to shun or avoid me, providing another ground for finding the material defamatory. Well ... get a lawyer and sue, then. I notice that neither of those online articles dares to link to the material in question: www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2810818.htmlI wonder if he thought his readers might doubt his assertion that "over 90% of the content constituting venomous and vitriolic attacks on me, largely for having written an article that dared to predict that the left would take advantage of the Oslo atrocities to besmirch and discredit their ideological enemies "Coz I don't think that's what happened at all. I think people just thought that merv's suggestions were speculative, ridiculous and opportunistic ... not to mention ironic.
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Cory
Feb 6, 2013 20:57:15 GMT 10
Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Feb 6, 2013 20:57:15 GMT 10
"Hmm. I argued we should ignore trivial distinctions of “race” and got called a racist. Was even taken to court"
Was there a court case that I missed? Coz that's not what I think eatock et al alleged, and I'm pretty sure that's not what Justice Mordecai Bromberg ultimately found.
So there must be another court case. Google doesn't seem to know about it, though. Weird.
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Cory
Feb 6, 2013 23:48:11 GMT 10
Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Feb 6, 2013 23:48:11 GMT 10
Oh dear. I wonder if there's any chance that cory released his wisdom late on a wednesday night in order to minimise the chance that the wonkies will laugh at it? Dear oh dear. Preparing for Problems AheadLeaving aside the small point that most of the "problems ahead" there are actually problems already being faced, if not dealt with ... there are still a few choice pearls of something or other. Like this: Our national debt continues to rise, the boats keep coming, increases in cost of living are hurting families and people are scared of losing their jobs.Actually, costs of living are at historic lows. Inflation is down, growth isn't setting any records, but it's steady. It's possible that people in manufacturing are scared of losing their jobs, and I feel for them - but the biggest problem facing them is our high dollar and our high standard of living (also I think we face a few geographical challenges). The liberals' response to that appears to just cut pay and conditions conditions until we can compete with one of those 4$-a-day south africans that gina pines for. Now there are some new worries on the international horizon that could impact Australia. There are escalating international tensions between Japan and China. Intelligence reports suggest that Iran may be only weeks away from successfully enriching uranium.Wow. Tensions between china and japan are "new worries". I though those "new" tensions went back to at least world war II, perhaps a bit before. It's not new. China is starting to get a bit bolshie about its territorial claims, but hey - that's how japan has been acting for a while. Eventually russia will have a go as well. It'll work out. Stop panicking. I don't think it will affect is - unless somebody goes taking sides again. And Iran is only "weeks away" from enriching uranium? News flash - they're already enriching uranium to 20% u235. Ok, they'd need about 70kg of that stuff to make a workable bomb out of that, but it's still enriched. More reading required? And Iran as been allegedly a couple of years away from a bomb since about 1975. Really, it has. This "new worry" is also not new. But that's not why I dragged myself out of bed. This is: Only five years ago we had no national debt and a grand pool of savings. It has all been squandered with our nation’s credit card limit lifted to $300 billion. The chances of paying that off in less than a generation is somewhere between Buckley’s and none.Erm, no. 5 years ago we had (approximately) no NET federal public debt, but that was only once those savings were taken into account. Our outstanding government reserve bank securities (debt) never fell below about 60 billion in the 2000's (we need those - they're how we implement monetary policy). That was offset by savings in the future fund. In 2007, the future fund was worth about 52 billion. It's worth just under 100 billion now (it's not all growth, the ALP's been squirreling away money as well). It's only once you offset the two that we got a net debt of zero. So ... Subtract that 100 billion from the ~230 billion in debt (not 300 - that's irrelevant, and I'm not sure why cory's even mentioning it) and the net federal debt runs at around 130-140 billion. Not quite the sort of figures that have been bandied about in the press. The federal government has a revenue (in 2012-2013) of 330 billion dollars, and that's about 3% of GDP below where it would be were we not in stimulus mode. In other words, it'll grow - a lot - when the world gets itself out of its current mess, because our economy will grow and tax revenues will return to their normal fraction of GDP to boot. Back when john howard took the lodge, our whole national economy was about 330 400 billion dollars. That was only 16 years ago. Now we're running at ~1.5 trillion. Kind of staggers the mind, doesn't it? Even taking the full debt of 230 billion dollars (nobody's going to really dip into the future fund) I think this "taking a generation to pay off" thing is silly. I reckon it'll take a decade if we're really keen, or 15 years if we want to take it easy. But it will have been worth it, because we haven't seen 5+ years of school leavers unable to find work, we haven't seen the mass foreclosures of the US, we haven't seen the crashing property prices, the destruction of banking services, the social and economic costs of millions of people thrown onto welfare. Our banks haven't collapsed. I think 10-15 years of putting a bit extra away each budget is cheap, given what it bought us. And yeah, I'll be paying taxes too. Alternatively, I guess we could just invest all that money in gold ...
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Cory
Feb 24, 2013 20:09:47 GMT 10
Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Feb 24, 2013 20:09:47 GMT 10
This one goes out to the fact-checking department ... From this: www.corybernardi.com/2013/02/free-speech-double-standard.html"Mr Wilders had to cancel his speaking tour last year when the government reportedly took over two months to approve his visa. Wilders' visa approval only came through as he was in the process of cancelling his trip"According to the ABC and Paul Sheehan at fairfax, he applied for the visa at the end of august (" More than three weeks" before the 19th of september - so let's call it three weeks and a day). Bowen announced that he'd give the guy a visa on the 2nd of October - but wilders had cancelled on the 1st. I think the immigration department might have made mischief with that application, and I suspect the "movement alert list" was more an excuse than a reason. But let's at least get the facts right. Over two months? It sounds more like a bit over a month. "Over one million Dutch voters supported him at the last election"Actually, no. Less than one million voters supported his party at the last election, and its fortunes are sinking. It doesn’t matter if you agree with Wilders or not. What is important is that we are prepared to stick up for free speech even if we don’t like what we hear.That's a ripper, that is. Suppose I organise a trip down under for david irving. Could I count on Cory's political support? Can anyone find anything that any member of the liberal party (or currently-serving right-wing columnist at NEWS) ever wrote in favor of irving being granted a visa the last time he tried to get into the country in the early noughties? Good luck with that. I think that this free speech stuff is a very recent hobby indeed. Just an aside, suppose a publisher - fairfax, say - writes something critical about a senator, would that be the "free speech" that we should be sticking up for? And then there’s the outcry and vitriol from the media and the government. The ABC was happy to play along to the leftist script demonising Wilders as ‘far right’ and a ‘racist’ while promoting the emancipated freedom of the Students for Palestine and radical-left Solidarity who are campaigning against the tour.People disagreeing is not the same as you losing your free speech. Not even when you call it "demonising" or bolt calls it "vilifying". That's just a fancy way of saying "arguing". Wilders is, according to any objective mainstream understanding of the term, "right wing". I'm not saying he's hitler, he's obviously not. But neither is everyone on the left just the same as stalin. But when the ABC calls wilders "right wing", it's pretty hard to fault them on the facts. I agree that they probably shouldn't say "far right" because I think that's debatable, but there are academic and journalistic references to support either assessment regardless. The reference to "racist" was in an intro on 7:30 as one end of a range of competing views - the other being "courageous campaigner". The particular article in question was actually pretty well balanced - wilders got a fair go, Q got a fair go, some overseas supporters got a go and somebody from the left had their say. It's called "balance". I know, it sucks, right? And in no way was the ABC "promoting the emancipated freedom of" anyone. That's just sour grapes. These fundamentalists are the same people who want to kill Wilders and establish sharia law under a global Caliphate because Muhammad commanded them to back in the 7th century. I think that sort of thing is where the right really goes off the rails. You're just substituting whatever IS going on with a trivialized straw man. It's not helpful. I suspect that whatever anger exists towards wilders has way less to do with theological considerations and more to do with just really hating the guy personally. But then, I'm assuming that muslims are just people. Crazy. (no, I'm not condoning violence - I'm just saying that the animosity is probably not all that lofty in origin) "Sheikh Al-Sudais has called Jewish people the “rats of the world”"He did. He (allegedly) gave a particular sermon back in 2002 (or so) which contained some really vile (paranoid, unhinged ...) stuff. He's way overdue for explaining himself. On the other hand, since then he's (allegedly) been a bit of a campaigner for peace and reconciliation. So ... I dunno about that one. Even sinn fein eventually stopped throwing rocks. He has said that Christians are “influenced by the rottenness of their ideas and the poison of their cultures.”That's pretty tame compared with the stuff people say about islam. It's even PG compared with what wilders has said about muhammed. I say "waaahhh!" to that one. I wonder about the Taji Mustafa character, though. What I've seen boils down to "he's the UK rep for guys we don't like". Surely there's more to it than that, to be justifying all this noise? I've seen some of the nutty stuff that Hizb Ut Tahrir have published - this one, for example (from 1999). That's a ripper, that is. Sheer madness. But that isn't, IMHO, enough to say that Mustafa is a problem. I don't see the evidence that he advocates violence, for example. Just unconvincing innuendo. I'd like to see some actual evidence about the terrible things westpac and bpay did. I contributed to an online fundraiser once that was also interrupted by bpay. Apparently we tripped a red flag and they wanted more information to satisfy US money laundering tests. It took a day or two to sort out. It happens, and it's probably not at all nefarious. I doubt if BPay gives a toot about wilders' politics. And free speech doesn't mean that anyone has to rent you a pulpit, or supply the sound system - just as you don't have to post anything I submit to your blog. That's not how free speech works. Maybe some of those venues were worried about controversy, or maybe they just don't like what geert wilders stands for. Anyhow, I think I'll stop now. Believe it or not, there's more potential material, but it's bed time.
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Cory
Feb 28, 2013 11:15:24 GMT 10
Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Feb 28, 2013 11:15:24 GMT 10
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tssk
New Member
Posts: 45
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Cory
Mar 5, 2013 20:24:52 GMT 10
Post by tssk on Mar 5, 2013 20:24:52 GMT 10
Had to laugh listening to last nights Q & A when someone stated that the Libs didn't have comedians or clowns in their party and Tony Jones quipped "You have Cory Bernadi."
Brave.....I bet there were complaints about bias this morning!
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Cory
Mar 5, 2013 20:29:56 GMT 10
Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Mar 5, 2013 20:29:56 GMT 10
"I bet there were complaints about bias this morning!"
Bolta's had a moan about it. What he doesn't seem to understand is that the occasional quip about a liberal MP doesn't equal bias. As PP readers were able to point out on many occasions - the occasional ABC quip is also directed at members of the ALP.
Meanwhile four corners, foreign correspondent and lateline continue to show the media how investigative journalism is supposed to work.
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Cory
Apr 17, 2013 17:25:33 GMT 10
Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Apr 17, 2013 17:25:33 GMT 10
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