Posts by Matthew Poole
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honestly, what is so heroic about being shot down and captured?
It's not the capture, it's the behaviour while in captivity. Wikipedia has a pretty balanced section on it, but the short version was that the Viet Cong treated him like shit on capture, until they discovered that he was the son of an Admiral. Then they tried to use him as a propaganda tool, and trade him back, but he wouldn't have it unless all the other PoWs went with him. The VC said no dice, so so did he.
Whatever his faults, he displayed amazing strength of character and real courage. He could've taken the easy way out, and given the way the VC treated their prisoners I doubt anyone would've given him all that much grief for it. But he didn't. Criticise his voting record, his age, whatever, but don't try and say that he's not a war hero.
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Also on the free-market thing, I asked in another thread but I'll ask it here, too, since the discussion seems to be heading the same way:
Can anyone explain to me why people get so incensed about us signing an FTA with China, but desperately want us to get one with the US? I know all the human rights issues, but, really, is the US that much better? I guess it doesn't help that most people here have no idea just what went down with the AUS-FTA. Ignorance is bliss, huh?
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Free market trip to lower wage future
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. National ensured that we would remain a low-wage economy when they busted the unions and vested all the power with employers. I don't think it's healthy for the unions to be overly powerful, and Australia certainly has problems, but unions that are too weak is no healthier.
For a very small number of uniquely-talented, highly-skilled individual, the power to negotiate is equal. For the rest of us, it's a distinctly asymmetric relationship.
We will also remain a low-producing economy for as long as we're cheap labour. Where's the incentive to invest in technology to improve production when you can just hire more people to do the work?
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On the free-trade bit - we could actually see some movement from an Obama-stration on this. Our canny trade operators like Clark and Goff could quite easily go to him and say "we're a small country, not going to have any real impact on you guys, but we are a symbolic nation when it comes to trade and creating an FTA with us would be a good look for you internationally on free trade without hurting that base you're pandering to".
Two problems with this.
1) It's unlikely (though looking less and less unlikely with every utterance that passes the lips of senior National politicians) that it'll be Helen and Phil sitting in those seats when the time comes.
2) As bad as an FTA under Bush would be, one under an anti-free trader like Obama would be worse. To keep "that base you're pandering to" happy, he'd have to fuck our agricultural lobby even worse than what was done to Aussie. And that was a rogering of epic proportions. Seriously, don't even dream about an FTA with the US, please, because the consequences are scary.Can anyone explain to me why people get so incensed about us signing an FTA with China, but desperately want us to get one with the US? I know all the human rights issues, but, really, is the US that much better? I guess it doesn't help that most people here have no idea just what went down with the AUS-FTA. Ignorance is bliss, huh?
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Ps, I'm an arts student too, and the 9am history lectures are killing me.
Try 8am economics 101 lectures when you've got no desire to be an economist! I swear, the core BCom courses are designed to weed out those who just don't have drive. I am so hanging out to graduate. My brain has finally had enough.
Sympathies to the sleepless. My body's a bit weird, if I'm not asleep by 11 it's often closer to 1 before I actually nod off and it'll then have me wide awake between 6 and 7 even though I don't have to be up until 8. Can be right annoying, so I vaguely understand your pain.
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free trade
Yup, I'll grant you that. This is one area where McCain has acted and voted consistently.In NZ, we're actually not losing anything if Obama comes in and takes them away from free trade. We've already dragged the US before the WTO more than once, and won. They're hypocritical isolationists at heart, and it shows.
Plus, if they turn their backs on free trade, we're not at risk of getting fucked with an FTA like the one used to roger the Aussies. No FTA at all is better than an FTA that is projected to have final economic benefits to the value of 0.5% of GDP, when it is fully implemented 20 years after signing, and comes with requirements to gut (the Aussie equivalent of) Pharmac, rewrite copyright law in the model of the DMCA, and distinctly unbalanced trade provisions for agricultural products. Our FTA with China will be in full force before the AUS-FTA completes, and they started several years earlier.
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Plus I do find this 'make your Christianity paramount in the election' thing so disturbing. Church. State. Separation. Work on it, USA!
Yeah, it is funny. They have technical separation, in that there's no official religion (which is, after all, what separation is all about), but with POTUS being expected to be a "rah rah rah" Christian it's pretty notional. For such a "progressive" country they're stupidly conservative. We've got a woman who's at least agnostic, and nobody really pays that much attention except for the raving fundies. It's certainly not of importance to a major portion of the electorate. But Helen would be pretty much unelectable in the US for her religious views alone, even if the US was finally able to reach a point of sufficient enlightenment that a woman could make it to the top.
The Political Compass view of the US presidential primaries candidates for this election is quite amusing, not least for the little blurb at the top.
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Now tell me what you love about McCain's policies.
Quite probably they want another hawk. That or they want him because of his fervent Christianity. Or both.
Whilst having enormous respect for how he acted while a PoW, I just don't want to imagine how much worse the world will get if there's another hawkish POTUS. Dubbyah's administration has done a stellar job of making the US global enemy number one, and McCain doesn't seem to have all that much in the way of his own thoughts on interventionist policies. Dialogue? What's that? What do you mean we can't just go invading other countries because they've pissed us off?Obama's not perfect, by any stretch, but I can live more easily with an isolationist than an interventionist. Ideally US politicians would tell their domestic lobbies to STFU and walk the free-market talk that they insist everyone else follow, but until that happens it's better that the US not try and force their own broken ideals onto others.
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if it were some more amenable political party said request might have been seen more favourably.
That last bit didn't strike me as a very clever thing to say.
No, it's not especially clever, but it's also not terribly relevant. He didn't ask, he just suddenly got announced as an Act candidate. So what may or may not have transpired if he had asked is beside the point.
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And a counter question to the EPMU -- do they think it's unreasonable to expect a trade union to be, well, at least as scrupulous about its employment practices as the companies that employ its members. I guess we will see how it all washes out in the Employment Court, but the irony is rather delicious.
He's been suspended, not sacked. And it's for what many would consider to be a serious breach of his employment contract. The EPMU would rightly be in the firing line if they'd just said "This looks like serious misconduct because you're standing for Parliament without asking permission, and to boot it's for Act, so don't let the door hit you on the way out." But they haven't, which is all that they ever ask of their members' employers - you're welcome to sack people who breach the terms of their contracts, but you're not allowed to do it out-of-hand and without due process.