Posts by Ben Austin
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If Hone's comments help keep the spotlight on Howard and this issue for one more day then its been worth it.
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I had a similarly weird experience discussing socialised medicine with an American the other day. His key objection seemed to be that some hidden group of people would become crazily rich if the US instituted such a system. He wasn't able to explain who these people would be, except to say that wherever government intervenes someone becomes rich. Perhaps the corporate socialism practiced in the US has made him crazy?
I don't find it surprising that many Nazis were doctors or highly educated - I believe Germany was an early world leader in training university graduates, Nazis targetted students early on, eugenics was popular (and acceptable) back then, there was political/economic instability (hitting salaried professionals hard) and a lot of these people had served in a terrible, long war. I am reading Vikram Seth's biography (Two Lives) of his (Indian) uncle and his (German Jewish) aunt who met in the 30s while the uncle was training at medical school in Berlin. There was plenty of reference to Nazi doctors and medical students, and I believe this was before and during Hitler's assumption of power.
Besides, I've met plenty of people with really stange views and beliefs who are university educated. Having a degree doesn't always make you less crazy, it just gives you a wider range of arguments or examples to defend your particular nutty theory. I learnt this truth when a Biology major tried to convince me of the soundness of Young Earth creationism.
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FTA is still big. I went to a pub quiz the other night and a full 25% of the questions seemed to refer to people or events one would only know if they were a regular TV watcher.
There are moments when I regret my puritan "no TV" lifestyle.
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What weirded me out about that was the lack of a hip, contemporary sound track
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Worst job - dairy worker - horrible hours, horrible pay, being crapped/urinated on by cows etc
It had it's upsides though - when not in the shed I was outside in the sun.
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Keith, this isn't quite what you are looking for, but a friend just posted
me a link about a new series of Transformer for Japan. Now I am not sure entirely if there are women transformers in this new group, but I do know that regardless, the transformers require the kiss of a girl to transformI am not sure how legitimate this is, but it seems to have a wiki page and multiple refernece sites, so it could be true
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James,
I do understand your point of view, but again, we all know about these other situations you talk of, but if we were going to be fair to every major ill caused in the world we would never stop talking here. So we focus on things we know more about, or at least encounter often enough to form a strong opinion on. To an english speaking nation, and indeed the chattering classes of any state where one is able to speak freely Bush and his actions are a major part of discussion. I wish it were not the case, but it is. We here his speeches, see his actions, and they dominate the news.
We should be thinking about the other bad things that happen but we can't always relate them back to the current issue at hand. Besides, we all expect better from the US, it being the home of constitutional human rights and all.
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This topic is about American politics James, hence the focus on American issues. We could explore the examples you said, but that is outside the remit of this thread. It doesn't make us hypocrites, signal approval for the aforementioned actions nor remove our ability to speak about crimes (whether legal or moral) committed by the current US administration.
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Prime Ministers don't usually seek to alienate large groups of voters in their first week of government. Especially not when they want to win elections.
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*is anything to go by