(no subject)

[madscience.livejournal.com]

This was apparently tweeted by (semi-famous?) Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle. The person who posted it on FB thought he was just some dude and felt the need to redact his name.

Comments

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Health care, even if it is a half arsed effort will be pretty important I think, it's one of the main areas the US lacks behind the rest of the developed world.

He hasn't done too bad a job on managing the economy either, at least he's shown that inflationary monetary policy can work better than austerity.

[senshifan.livejournal.com]

I don't want to be one of the people I hate on this issue, but I haven't actually seen any changes to health care. I'm not saying they aren't there, but... where are they?

I almost want to pardon the man for waling into a seat that had a huge plate in front of it and trying to handle it, but had he not flipped positions on a lot of things.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I dunno about the healthcare thing. From this distance it's impossible to tell anything from anything. I don't get to experience it, I can only read it in the news, according to which it's either the greatest thing ever or the worst thing ever (not even a spectrum, just extremes from the media these days :/). All I can tell is that it seems an overly complicated, bureaucratic and expensive to get something that's still not as good as universal or single payer...

It's a tough call, pragmatism over ideology. I guess it depends on the times. You need to ask is the much more he could have realistically done? Could he have closed Gitmo? It doesn't seem so. He could have done more for gay rights. He definitely should have refused the executive power granted to Bush (I think that's going to wind up being his biggest downfall, that even if he couldn't completely stop a lot of the Bush abuses of power, he didn't have to be complicit in them).




We had a PM back in the 70s, Gough Whitlam. He was the first progressive after 22 years of conservative rule. We had many of the same issues you did; Viet Nam and civil rights (we even had our own freedom rides) as well as the end of the White Australia policy (it let in heaps on non-white people, like Italians and Greeks :P). Anyway, Gough got elected and went fucking batshite crazy. Raised taxes, stopped the draft immediately and worked towards pulling out of Viet Nam, pushed equal pay cases through the courts, opened access to contraception, established diplomatic relations with China (before Nixon by the way), brought in massive increases in arts funding (including personally approving the purchase of a Pollock for the national gallery), increased education funding, brought in free university education, brought in universal health care, sanctioned South Africa, changed the national anthem from God Save The Queen to Advance Australia Fair and brought in the sole parent pension and no fault divorce. That's not everything, and there were some bad things go on (some exceptionally dodgy international finance deals for one), but the point is, he did fucking heaps.

He did that in three years. A little quirk of the parliamentary system means if the opposition blocks a bill twice, you can call for new elections. They had blocked 6 bills twice and were threatening to block supply (not pass the budget, essentially the same as your "fiscal cliff"). Rather than take the safety of two more years in power, he went to an election and won it. The opposition did the same thing and blocked supply again, he wouldn't cop it and eventually the Governor General (the Queen's man in Oz) sacked the government and called new elections, which he lost.

He was in charge for a little over three years. He had absolutely no interest in governing forever, he just wanted to change all the things that were wrong. He's said in retrospect they did too much, too soon, but I disagree. They got stuff done that once done, was really hard to undo. We still have universal health care, although it's not necessarily free now (not all doctors charge what the government pays back, but there are plenty who do), we don't have free university education now (we have to pay 25%, deferred on a 3% interest loan until you earn over $45k), the tax base has been gradually cut away. But the fact is without him doing crazy things with absolutely no regard for his political life, we probably still wouldn't have many of those things.



Could Obama have done something like that? I dunno, but he didn't really try.

[senshifan.livejournal.com]

That is exactly the kind of politician every country needs; one who says "Fuck everything; I'm going to fix this country whether anyone likes it or not." And if he did that in three years, there's no reason any president can't do that in 4 to 8. Yes, Congress gets in the way, but why would you run the entire country into the ground just because you can use that as an excuse?

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

You don't need it too often, it was pretty destabilising and it came at the end of decades of one party rule. I wouldn't want to see it happen now personally, I was more saying that it can happen.

[senshifan.livejournal.com]

It doesn't need to happen every other election, but no one needs two decades of waiting through bullshit to finally see change, either.

In America, I don't know if I was alive the last time we had a president radical enough to drastically change the way the system works for the better; it's been getting steadily worse since Clinton got out of office, and we're approaching 14 years.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Yes, I definitely think it's time for someone to come in and reign in executive privilege and the military industrial complex. I actually think social issues are progressing OK there by and large. Abortion is going backwards, but that's because that's what people want more so than structural inertia in the political system.

[senshifan.livejournal.com]

I'm not so sure about how social issues are progressing. The drug war is still running, and that's a big problem for a lot of minorities. Gerrymandering and redistricting is still silencing a lot of minority voters. Gay rights have taken YEARS to achieve, and haven't been set in stone, so one term of conservative rule and that will be lost easily. And, as you said, abortion is already moving backwards. Add in the two problems you stated and we're in a hell of a bind as a country.

[madscience.livejournal.com]

I don't think we've had a President who was both effective and not-evil since Eisenhower.

[senshifan.livejournal.com]

I don't any of the presidents other than Clinton (who I'm too young to remember), Bush, and Obama. If I'm not mistaken, Eisenhower was the president during WW2? I have no idea anything he did or stood for, though, sadly.

[madscience.livejournal.com]

Eisenhower was a WWII General, commander of all allied forces in Europe. He was President for most of the 1950s, when the top marginal income tax rate was above 90%. He foresaw the rise of the military-industrial complex and coined the term to warn us about it. I recommend reading his "Cross of Iron" (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9743.htm) speech. No politician in our lifetimes has been such a powerful speaker.

[madscience.livejournal.com]

They're out there. They're just unelectable because the media says so.

[madscience.livejournal.com]

The only change is that participation in the corrupt system that created the problem in the first place will become mandatory.