Apart from a few Indigenous Voice snippets, which I’m holding back for a dedicated post, the only polling action this week has been the regular Roy Morgan result, which has Labor leading 54-46, unchanged on last week, from primary votes of Labor 32.5% (up half), Coalition 35% (up half) and Greens 14% (down one-and-a-half). On the preselection front, there is the following to relate:
• Victorian Greens Senator Janet Rice has announced she will retire from parliament in the first half of next year. James Massola of The Age reports her successor will be chosen by a vote of 2000 to 3000 party members in November. The front-runner is Steph Hodgins-May, who has run three times for the party in Macnamara (known as Melbourne Ports up to 2016) and came within an ace of winning the seat in 2022. Other potential nominees are Monash councillor Josh Fergeus, academic and unionist Apsara Sabaratnam and lawyer Sarah Jefford.
• With Warren Mundine’s withdrawal last week from the preselection race to fill Marise Payne’s New South Wales Liberal Senate vacancy, the position is now thought likely to go to Andrew Constance, former state government minister and unsuccessful candidate for Gilmore at last year’s federal election. However, the Sydney Morning Herald reports he may face competition from one of a number of factional conservatives: “Mina Zaki, an Afghanistan-born, anti-Taliban activist and cyber expert at consulting firm KPMG; barrister Ishita Sethi; lawyer Pallavi Sinha; Monica Tudehope, who has previously worked as Dominic Perrottet’s policy director; and former NSW Liberal MP Lou Amato”. Mundine has opted to remain in the business sector, but the Sydney Morning Herald further noted he had “caused angst” among hitherto supportive conservatives by defying the no campaign line on the desirability of a treaty or a changed date for Australia Day. The Sydney Morning Herald earlier reported the preselection was not likely to be determined until November.
• Josh Frydenberg announced last week he will not seek to win Kooyong back from teal independent Monique Ryan at the next election. Rachel Baxendale of The Australian says this has left Liberals questioning who might take over as leader if circumstances demand it after the next election, with Andrew Hastie “described by several as the party’s best hope, despite his relative inexperience”. Amelia Hamer, director of strategy at tech start-up Airwallex, has been mentioned as a likely contender for the Liberal preselection in Frydenberg’s absence, while a report in The Age put forward a number of familiar names as potential starters: “Lucas Moon, an anti-pokies campaigner at Hawthorn RSL, Melbourne councillor Roshena Campbell, former candidate Georgina Downer, Caroline Elliot, or past Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chair Karyn Sobels”.
• Alexi Diemetriadi of The Australian reports Hunters Hill mayor Zac Miles has resigned from the Liberal state executive ahead of a run for Liberal preselection in Bennelong, and that Shoalhaven councillor and former deputy mayor Paul Ell is “understood” to be considering running in Gilmore, where he stood aside in favour of Andrew Constance before the last election.
• The Australian’s Feeding the Chooks round-up of Queensland politics relates that long-serving Labor members Graham Perrett and Shayne Neumann are under pressure to make way for female candidates in their seats of Moreton and Blair, with former state secretary Julie-Ann Campbell favoured by the Left in Moreton and state Ipswich MP Jennifer Howard “weighing up her options for a tilt at Blair”.
• Poll Bludger contributor Adrian Beaumont has a new post at The Conversation on developments in the campaign for the October 14 election in New Zealand.
The Republicans aren’t trying to wipe out all living creatures.
Sure, their rampant climate denialism and environmental vandalism – if allowed to progress unabated – could potentially pave the way for the end of human civilization as we know it, but that’s not from any actual desire on their part to annihilate the human race, it’s just the result of a potent combination of stupidity, greed, corruption, and just not giving a fuck. Which certainly isn’t any kind of defense – those in control of the modern-day Republican Party are absolutely anti-science, bigoted, fundamentalist, fascist piles of festering shit who shouldn’t be allowed near any kind of elected office – but on a measure of “horrible vs. really horrible”, they are still rather less objectionable than the Nazis circa WWII, who were outright trying to exterminate large swathes of the human population.
Someone more knowledgeable on these matters can correct me on this, but I’m pretty sure even the most pessimistic predictions on the effects of AGW don’t suggest the destruction of all living things as any likely possibility. Even humans are likely to survive mass global heating. Human society might not be so lucky, but at least some human beings should be able to endure and pass on their genes. Especially since such a breakdown of modern society should do a pretty solid job of curbing future emissions and allow the Earth to gradually heal itself and return to regular climate cycles over the following centuries and millenia.
But, um, let’s maybe do what we can now to avoid things getting to such a point.
“threatening execution against anyone who retreated”
Every major power had desertion as a capital offence during the two world wars.
The United States military still has the death penalty as a punishment for desertion, compelling surrender and failing to defend or attack when given orders to do so.
Ron De Santis banned Fracking in Florida. Let that sink in.
He also banned Wind Farms, but he banned Fracking too.
Snap, Sir Henry Parkes.
Now I think of it, maybe Watermelon’s perspective leads to an interesting set of questions about other governments around the world. ‘Climate Action Tracker’ has this assessment of the Russian Federation’s commitment to tackling climate change:
“Russia’s efforts to tackle climate change remain very low. Its few relevant policies are unambitious or have an unclear expected effect on emissions. Russia’s existing policies indicate no real commitment to curb emissions. The CAT estimates that Russia can easily reach its updated NDC target from November 2020 with adopted policies and should therefore submit a stronger 2030 target.
In September 2022, the Russian government provided more detail on its net zero GHG emissions target for 2060. The government assumes that by 2050 forests would take up twice as much carbon as they do today, which means that all other emissions do not really have to reach zero, but only need to be cut by in half to reach the overall net zero target. No information substantiates such an enormous increase of carbon take-up. It also doesn’t appear to address the impact of enormous wildfires in its Siberian forests in recent years.
In 2021, Russia adopted its law aimed at limiting greenhouse gas emissions, having gutted it of all measures that would have resulted in substantive emissions reductions. The Energy Strategy to 2035, adopted in 2021, focuses almost exclusively on promoting fossil fuel extraction, consumption, and exports to the rest of the world. Such a strong focus on increasing reliance on fossil fuel revenues poses a considerable economic risk in a future compatible with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C temperature limit.
Russia’s lack of any substantial contribution to international climate finance goals, together with its highly insufficient domestic target and climate policies result in the CAT giving Russia an overall rating of “Critically Insufficient”.”
https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/russian-federation/
Watermelon, do you think the government of the Russian Federation is ‘worse than the Nazis’ based upon the same reasoning you employ to draw this conclusion about the GOP?
Retreat and desertion aren’t the same thing. So that false equivalence can go straight in the bin.
C-O-L-L-I-N-G-W-O-O-D
SIXTEEN BABY. SIXTEEN!
https://www.bigfooty.com/forum/media/pies-cup-2023-jpg.111540/full
For comparison, here is the ‘Climate Action Tracker’s’ assessment of some other countries:
https://climateactiontracker.org/
From the above, , by Watermelon’s measure the Russian Federation’s government is the worst, followed by China’s, India’s and Indonesia’s, with those of the USA and Australia not as bad. So, I look forward to Watermelon switching his attacks in this blog onto Putin’s regime in Moscow, as the regime which is ‘most worse than the Nazis’ in his view.
The US is the main contributor to climate change with per-capita emissions far in excess of Russia’s, China’s, India’s etc. Preventing catastrophic climate change is impossible without the cooperation of the US.
The Republican Party is not just against action to prevent climate change, they support accelerating climate change as rapidly as possible. They deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change, which is not true of any other major party in any major country.
The consequences of Republican Party policy will kill far, far, far more people than the Nazis ever even dreamed of killing. Their policies will result, quite literally, in the deaths of Billions with a B.
Whether or not these deaths are an end in themselves, or incidental to the higher objective of extracting and burning every last ton of fossil fuel, is really irrelevant to the question of how dangerous it is to humanity. I am not saying that the Republicans are more “evil” than the Nazis. But from the perspective of the billions of humans who will die, the human civilisation that will collapse, and the innumerable species that will be rendered extinct, they are far more dangerous.
It’s not even a close contest. The Nazis never threatened to turn the entire planet into a literally uninhabitable hell. The Republicans are absolutely dedicated to this outcome.
So well done to Collingwood beating Brisbane by 4 points in the most biased rigged competition in Australia. This year, Collingwood played 14 games at the MCG in front of huge crowds. Brisbane played 2 games at the MCG, which was probably half empty.
Every time any interstate team gets to a grand final they have to put up with shit. And let’s not mention having to put up with cheating umpires.
By the way, I polled my wife about the climate change/ice age debate. She said she’d rather freeze to death because it’s supposed to be quite peaceful. So I’m going with her.
Snap you too, Asha.
Watermelon, you rightly condemn the USA’s GOP for being committed to policies which will increase CO2 emissions. If that is the basis for your adverse judgement upon them compared to the Nazi government, then that also applies to the United Russia government of Vladimir Putin in Russia.
I might add, I do agree that a GOP government in the USA post Jan 2025 will be a disaster for the world.
“Retreat and desertion aren’t the same thing. So that false equivalence can go straight in the bin.”
Retreating when you’re not authorised to do so, or have been ordered not to retreat is equivalent to desertion.
You’re reaching now.
If the Nazis had won World War II, they could have conceivably wiped out almost every Jew on the face of the earth. They would certainly have done so for Europe, as well as large parts of Africa and the Middle East they occupied. Other minorities were also in their sights.
Having done that, would they have taken more care of the environment than the present-day US Republican Party?
If the Nazis had continued in power close to our modern times, I see little evidence that they would have adopted environmentally-friendly policies. Although they often celebrated getting back to nature and the great outdoors, they did so mainly in terms of manly Teutonic types braving nature.
The Nazis enjoyed close ties with German industry, including the large coal companies.
We can’t know how a Nazi-dominated world would have confronted climate change, but there is little in their record to indicate they would have been less of a threat to earth’s future than the fossil fuel-dominated conservative parties of today.
I am not going to dispute that Putin sucks, but he is not an outright GOP-style climate-denier. He at least pays lip service to the need to combat climate change and has committed to carbon neutrality by 2060. Russia’s contribution to global heating is also nowhere near the United States as it is simply a much smaller economy.
The Republicans, on the other hand, in the largest economy with the highest per-capita emissions, not only assert that climate science is completely fake, their policy is to maximise greenhouse gas emissions as rapidly as possible, and to destroy any international agreement that seeks to control them.
I think this makes for a material distinction.
The thing about geological timescales is that “soon” typically means “at some point in the next tens of thousands of years.” So, yes, we are probably due an ice age relatively “soon”, and sometime after that – possibly also “soon” – there will be a natural heating cycle again, and so on and on.
Man-made climate change isn’t happening on geological timescales. It’s happening much, much more quickly than that. Many of us will witness its catastrophic effects in our own lifetimes (in some respects, we already are), and said effects will look mild compared to what our direct descendants will experience if emissions are allowed to continue unabated.
I am comparing the menace posed by the Republicans in the 2020s to the menace posed by the Nazis in the 1940s, not to some hypothetical Nazi Party in an alternative universe where they won the war.
When the Nazis were defeated, it was a project for global domination and mass genocide and slavery that was defeated. The Republican project, by contrast, is a project for turning Earth into Venus and making it entirely unfit for human survival.
Asha @ #568 Saturday, September 30th, 2023 – 9:49 pm
Exactly. The effects are being felt in our lifetimes. The solutions – assuming it is not already too late – must be applied in our lifetimes. Talking about what might happen in geological timescales is just absurd. We don’t have geological timescales left.
Putin isn’t a climate denier, he thinks climate change is to Russia’s advantage because its too cold
Watermelonsays:
Saturday, September 30, 2023 at 9:46 pm
I am not going to dispute that Putin sucks, but he is not an outright GOP-style climate-denier. He at least pays lip service to the need to combat climate change and has committed to carbon neutrality by 2060.
—————–
… while enacting policies which will in no way achieve that goal. Anyway, at least now we’re down to quibbling over the moral worth of a pointless fig leaf of scarcely-uttered rhetoric on Moscow’s part, all while doing its utmost to pump as much fossil fuels into as many other economies as possible for as long as they last. This latter bit, of course, is what you rightly condemn the (still not in government) GOP for.
So, it looks like we have TWO global climate catastrophe villains to oppose:
1. The Putin regime in Moscow; and
2. The GOP opposition in Washington.
Let’s work together in the West to defeat both, I say! The latter can be achieved with a Democrat win in the Nov 2024 US elections, while the former only on the battlefields of Ukraine, I fear, given the ‘managed democracy’ Russia suffers under.
Paul:
+1
You can say the same about the ALP
Watermelon
I am not going to dispute that Putin sucks, but he is not an outright GOP-style climate-denier. He at least pays lip service to the need to combat climate change and has committed to carbon neutrality by 2060.
Do you know what the phrase “lip service” actually means? No. Okay I will tell you. It means saying you will do something but actually doing FUCK ALL.
What is Putin doing to combat climate change? FUCK ALL. So maybe you do know what it means.
the Premierhsip is a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.
Carn the F#cken Pies!
Watermelon
You can say the same about the ALP
Oh no! Is the ALP also worse than the Nazis? Or is the ALP merely in the same league as the Khmer Rouge?
Congratulations to the Sportsland Sportsbeetles for their Sports win over the Sportsville Sportshawks. A well deserved Grand Sports Title that will go down in the annals of Sports history. Display the Sports Trophy with pride!
Just kidding. Congratulations to Collingwood. While I am not really an Australian Rules Football fan (and I care even less about Rugby), I still tip my hat and I am not going to be one of those annoying “Sportsball” people because other people are entitled to like things.
Watermelonsays:
Saturday, September 30, 2023 at 10:21 pm
————-
Watermelon, I suggest that the most important election we will face over this next cycle will be the 2024 US Presidential, House of Reps and Senate elections. I think you would agree with this, because you condemn the US GOP as a malign force which would cause unprecedented harm to the world’s population should it gain power. I further submit that, although we are Australians and have no vote in those US elections, we nevertheless have much at stake in their outcome, along with the rest of the world’s population. I think you also would agree with this.
Therefore, I think it is a most appropriate use of our resources to contribute what we can to the electoral defeat of the Republican Party in those 2024 US elections, all the way up and down the ticket. I think it is a wise investment for each of us to financially contribute what we legally can, to the limits of our individual capacity to pay, to assist the Democratic Party in that objective of globally existential importance.
What say you?
I have been re-watching the James Bond movies in order and recently got through The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. My question is: Where do Karl Stromberg and Hugo Drax fall respectively against the Nazis, Chinese Communist Party and US Republican Party in terms of how bad they are?
It was a long and emotional day and yes I’ve had a few. 2 Crownies, a margarita, a Peroni and some whiskey. Plus about 4 joints.
Well, where do we start. It was an arm wrestle all day, but only because we were inaccurate. we should have been 5 goals up at half time. I couldn’t watch part of the second quarter, I was just too nervous and went for a little walk to compose myself. I spend the morning swimming in the pool, just trying to relax the muscles and ease my way into the day. I think it helped, because at half time I became more composed and faced the second half head on. Oh what a glorious Premiership for the most glorious Club in the Land. Our beautiful and superb 16th of hallowed memory.
The Nazi party is easily the worst political movement anywhere in the past 100 years. Only the Khmer Rouge comes close, but given the relative small population of Cambodia doesn’t really match the Nazis.
The modern GOP is a devolution of a once great political tradition and is the worst example of a political party in a developed liberal democracy that I can think of. Frankly, unlike the conditions faced by post WW1 Germany for example, America lacked the destitution that has seen other democracies throw up ugly right wing populist movements. In 2016 America was far from recession, let alone depression and most of the social problems and nearly all of its economic wealth distribution problems were directly caused by the deliberate policies of the GOP since Reagan. … and yet, despite a lack of a justifiable excuse, here we are. …
The CCP has all the hallmarks of a despotic autocracy and has a historical legacy – due to Mao’s long walk, Great Leap Forward and cultural revolution that elevates it into the big leagues of 20th century terribleness; and yet for all of that Boer is quite wrong. The CCP lifted a quarter of the world’s population out of poverty in a generation. That is an unprecedented positive achievement.
Furthermore, its record regarding climate change is not straight forward one of straight forward villainy. Yes, it keeps building most of the world’s new coal fired power plants, but it also produces a majority of the world’s green tech and is the world leader in renewables. It has a firm net zero/2060 policy and has met or beat every single target it has set itself along the way.
Hitler with nuclear weapons might not have ended well.
So in the dying seconds Lachie Neale is robbed of a chance to goal and give Brisbane the Premiership because advantage was called by a cheating umpire when there was clearly no advantage and the ball should have been called back.
Rainman
True. And they played their last 8 games in Melbourne, 7 at the MCG.
They did deserve to win though. That 50m against Markov was a joke.
“Hitler with nuclear weapons might not have ended well.”
_______
Hitler had a habit of pursuing mad obsessions over strategic goals (witness as but one example his insistence in devoting most of the research and production development of the ME 262 into bomber and ground attack roles and away from its design purpose of being a point interceptor fighter. Witness also his obsession with the V1 and V2 programs as ‘vengeance’ terror weapons against the uk in contrast with his abject failure to prioritise u-boat development and production. And so on).
So, there may have been good odds that even if the German scientists ‘got there first’ Hitler would have squandered the scarce ‘first batch’ of nucs on some mad obsession of his, rather than using them as a strategic hammer blow.
Furthermore, I note that most of the ‘alternative history’ books and tv series I’m aware of that have the nazi’s winning is predicated on the Germans targeting America with a delivery system of sufficient reach to the execute such strikes; and then cutting a deal with America to end the war on terms favourable to Germany. In reality, not only were the Germans years off getting nuclear weapons, they were as equally far off possessing long range heavy bombers and / or ballistic missiles capable to hitting that far away from Western Europe.
So, even with nuclear weapons, Hitler may likely have still lost the war. London and Moscow may have been obliterated, but the Nazis still ended up defeated. It is also worth noting that the thing that really held Germany back in WW2 were the Nazis. As Malcolm Tucker would say ‘from bean to cup, they fuck up. An omnishambles’.
AE
I was more thinking if they had won by non nuclear means. And it was only after the hydrogen bomb that we really had enough firepower to change the climate.
Germany were a long way off and didn’t have good access to fission material.
Suck it up Rainman. Suck it hard.
Which drink are we on now, Nath?
IM going to bed
I would recommend John Birmingham’s World War 2.1 series for anyone who likes a bit of alternative history fiction.
It’s a little dated, but the pacing, humour and insightful moments are great!
Shogun
It’s honestly astonishing how every post you make demonstrates how totally hopeless you are at comprehending absolutely anything.
I was putting the ALP and Putin in the category of those who pay lip service to the need to battle climate change, while having targets for net zero that are too far into the future to be meaningful.
The comparison to the Nazis is reserved for the GOP, who completely reject the notion that climate change is a problem at all, who not only reject the notion of net zero emissions – ever – but are instead committed to policy platform of the absolute maximum emissions possible and the destruction of every effort to reduce them.
I say that, us being non-US-nationals, “legally” is the critical word here. Look into that bit.
nathsays:
Saturday, September 30, 2023 at 10:45 pm
“It was a long and emotional day and yes I’ve had a few. 2 Crownies, a margarita, a Peroni and some whiskey. Plus about 4 joints.”
That’s why they have the “head” bin !
The “Collingwood” breakfast of champions.
Diogenes @ #583 Saturday, September 30th, 2023 – 11:08 pm
Such was his addiction to Amphetamines that he may well have used them against an insolent insubordinate. 😉
I thought to myself, gee, it seems a bit dark for this time of the morning. And then I remembered…it’s that time of the year when Queenslanders remind us how backward they are. 1 hour, to be exact. 😀
An interesting observation by American political commentator, Josh Barro:
Of course, in the 2020 election, it wouldn’t have been good enough for Biden to barely win the popular vote; he needed to win it by several points to overcome the bias of the electoral college. But the uneven nature of Biden’s deteriorating support has a silver lining: he’s suffered especially with non-white voters and in non-competitive states, while holding up relatively well in the heavily white Rust Belt states that are likely to be decisive. As such, Democrats are likely to face little or no electoral college bias in 2024.
I think I’m the only one here bright and early this morning 😀
As the U.S. once again hurtles toward a possible government shutdown, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy turned to Democrats on Saturday and passed a 45-day funding bill through the House.
The proposal required support from two-thirds of lawmakers, a rare vote of unity in the typically dysfunctional and splintered House chamber. The bill ultimately passed 335-91. It will now move to the Senate for approval.
The bill includes aid to help states recover from natural disasters—though it does not include funding for Ukraine in its war against Russia.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-mull-suspending-rules-to-avert-government-shutdown
Ahh daylight saving. How I hate thee!