[on the USA] Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but you need to know how silly you look if you post some variation of, “Welcome to Socialism…”. You are not seeing Socialism. What you are seeing is one of the wealthiest, geographically advantaged, productive capitalist societies in the world flounder and fail at its most basic test. Taking care of its people. This crisis is not about the virus. This crisis is about the massive failure of our, “Booming economy,” to survive even modest challenges. It is about the market dissonance of shortages in stores, even as farmers/producers destroy unused crops and products. This crisis is about huge corporations needing an emergency bailout within days of the longest Bull Market in our history ending, and despite the ability to borrow with zero percent interest rates. This crisis is about corporatised healthcare systems being unable and ill equipped to provide basic healthcare, at the same time they post record profits. It is about crisis response depending on antiquated systems nobody remembers how to operate. But most of all, this crisis is a direct result of the politicisation of every aspect of our society for the benefit of a privileged few. The vilification of education, science, media, natural rights, rural lifestyles, urban lifestyles, charity, compassion, and virtually everything else for brief political gain has gutted our society.
Paul Field
August 8, 2020
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H.L. Mencken
August 3, 2020
Covid19 has exposed the lie that free markets can deliver healthcare for all, the fiction that unpaid care work isn't work, the delusion that we live in a post-racist world. We are all floating on the same sea, but some are in superyachts & others clinging to drifting debris.
António Guterres
July 19, 2020
All these doctors, nurses, virologists, immunologists and epidemiologists keep saying Covid-19 is dangerous, but all these people who barely passed science in high school keep saying it’s not. It’s so hard to know who to believe any more.
Anonymous
July 18, 2020
Victoria’s loudest champions of the culture wars have this week come out swinging against the Andrews government, for what they believe to be a lack of directions in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic. This comes just a couple weeks after the same whingeing ***** accused the Victorian premier of wildly exaggerating the risk of Covid-19 and deliberately hampering the economic recovery with a “disturbing streak of authoritarianism”.
Clancy Overell (Betoota Advocate)
July 10, 2020
The Australia of [Climate Change] denial, of special pleading, of whining for indulgence by sectoral interests; that Australia is a land of cowards and liars.
John Birmingham
July 9, 2020
For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this [20th] century he is beginning to realise that, in order to survive, he must protect it.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
July 9, 2020
The Somyurek scandal is just the latest example of how the end game of our politics has increasingly become the accumulation and exercise of power and influence rather than the delivery of good government in our national interest - politics is attracting the wrong sort of people.
John Hewson
June 15, 2020
If you are neutral is situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
Anonymous
June 6, 2020
So what motivates this swell of right-wing support for Trump? At this point, though many people on all sides still refuse to acknowledge it, the evidence is overwhelming: It was cultural backlash, against immigrants, minorities, uppity women, liberals, and all the other forces seen as dislodging traditional white men from their centrality in American culture.
