Straylan and Kiwi politics

calodo2003 said:
So, ending one’s life is fine, but smoking a bowl isn’t? What if the bowl was the way to end one’s life?

Like you said, weird. Don’t see how any rational or logical person would vote no for either of these.
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I know people talk about weed as if there isn’t any consequences to it, but I’ve seen people get hooked on the stuff and change as a person, and when they tried to give it up they became a highly aggressive person.

I’d personally vote to legalise but it isn’t all fun and games in my opinion, I admit though I don’t know a lot about the subject and am receptive to both sides.
 
Berbasbullet said:
I know people talk about weed as if there isn’t any consequences to it, but I’ve seen people get hooked on the stuff and change as a person, and when they tried to give it up they became a highly aggressive person.

I’d personally vote to legalise but it isn’t all fun and games in my opinion, I admit though I don’t know a lot about the subject and am receptive to both sides.
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It’s interesting to me to envision how much less stigma pot would have worldwide nowadays without movies like ‘Reefer Madness’ back in the day, a movie made without any apparent connection to reality. It’s classified as a gateway drug, but that is somewhat fallacious. It’s been typically the drug most youths try first due to its saturation in countries for generations.

I feel that if the stigma wasn’t so harsh against pot, those who try it wouldn’t be so willing to shift into harder drugs. It’s not the easiest drug to which to get addicted, but some certainly do. If the stigma wasn’t there, young people could try it & be underwhelmed by it. Classifying it in the same breath as harder drugs does offer the gateway to the virgin user if the novice doesn’t understand the substantial differences in their effects.
 
calodo2003 said:
It’s interesting to me to envision how much less stigma pot would have worldwide nowadays without movies like ‘Reefer Madness’ back in the day, a movie made without any apparent connection to reality. It’s classified as a gateway drug, but that is somewhat fallacious. It’s been typically the drug most youths try first due to its saturation in countries for generations.

I feel that if the stigma wasn’t so harsh against pot, those who try it wouldn’t be so willing to shift into harder drugs. It’s not the easiest drug to which to get addicted, but some certainly do. If the stigma wasn’t there, young people could try it & be underwhelmed by it. Classifying it in the same breath as harder drugs does offer the gateway to the virgin user if the novice doesn’t understand the substantial differences in their effects.
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That’s fair! Like I said I wouldn’t get into a debate about this as I feel utterly unequipped all I have is my anecdotal experiences from friends of mine and received wisdom/stereotypes.
 
Stack said:
Yes, very strange considering all the arguments involved. At the heart of it in some ways we are still a quite conservative by nature people. I do think too many of my generation arent considering the impact on our voting habits on the futures of the younger generations. The cannabis referendum being passed would have had a wider positive impact than the euthanasia one.
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Seems to be the case in many countries.at the moment.
 
Berbasbullet said:
I know people talk about weed as if there isn’t any consequences to it, but I’ve seen people get hooked on the stuff and change as a person, and when they tried to give it up they became a highly aggressive person.

I’d personally vote to legalise but it isn’t all fun and games in my opinion, I admit though I don’t know a lot about the subject and am receptive to both sides.
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Nobody is touting weed as salubrious. The point is it should be treated similar to alcohol or cigarettes. To place it in the same category as MDMA and cocaine is absurd.
Furthermore, calling weed a gateway drug is a very facile argument. The fact that its illegal and people have to procure it from dealers, who tend to hawk other drugs as well is what leads to drug use.
 
Berbasbullet said:
I know people talk about weed as if there isn’t any consequences to it, but I’ve seen people get hooked on the stuff and change as a person, and when they tried to give it up they became a highly aggressive person.

I’d personally vote to legalise but it isn’t all fun and games in my opinion, I admit though I don’t know a lot about the subject and am receptive to both sides.
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Fair enough - although I'd comment that pot use is not higher in place where it has been legalized. Legalization is not about making access easier while allowing use to go up, it's about moving a large business (that anyway can't be eradicated) into the legal and regular economy and thus dismantling a criminal sector and being able to better control access (similar to access restrictions for tobacco and alcohol).
 
Never mind the politics, Australia getting rekt in the Bledisloe
 
Multiple news outlets have called victory for labor. However our national broadcaster has held back because early voting in Queensland has been huge.
 
ABC calls it for the Labor Party. LETS GO!!!!!!!!!!!! ALP reelected in Queensland and the Racist One Nation party has been decimated.
 
There’s this weird dynamic here where people are happy enough to vote labor at state level yet keep returning Liberals to power at federal level.

With that being said, get fecked Pauline Hanson.
 
Berbasbullet said:
I know people talk about weed as if there isn’t any consequences to it, but I’ve seen people get hooked on the stuff and change as a person, and when they tried to give it up they became a highly aggressive person.

I’d personally vote to legalise but it isn’t all fun and games in my opinion, I admit though I don’t know a lot about the subject and am receptive to both sides.
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Ironically, the bold is a vote for legalisation.

Regulate. Control. Mitigate.
 
One Nation Meltdown:

Ashby:

Again it comes down to the fact that you in the media don’t have the resources. The ABC whinges all the time it doesn’t have enough funding to go and do crosses from regional parts of this state.

You have all the money down there in the south-east corner.

Well, it’s the same for all the commercial networks.

They haven’t got the resources. So I think that’s part of the problem.

One Nation has always traditionally done very well in the regions. You’ve had no cameramen, there’s no snappers for newspapers out there, there’s bugger all journalists. They don’t even have offices any more. You have journalists working from their little corner cupboard in their house.

That’s what we’re dealing with in regional Queensland. And you guys down there, you suck it all up, the ABC is pretty sat and fat down there in Brisbane. We’ve got nothing in the regions.

Ashby talks over him:

No, radio stations that you give bugger all too, then you network it out of some studio in Brisbane. That’s what you’re doing.

The bush is dying out. That’s exactly what’s going on. The bush is missing out and I tell you what, under this Palaszczuk government they’re going to miss out even worse and it will be the farmers that will suffer and it will be you down in the south-east corner that will suffer most because your fruit and vegetable prices will go through the roof.

We will be stung significantly. The fishermen out there will absolutely be raped and pillaged and I tell you what, it will be Labor’s fault. You watch, it’s coming. You’ve got four years to suffer this.
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https://www.theguardian.com/austral...st-deb-frecklington-as-labor-seeks-third-term
 
https://www.theguardian.com/austral...ation-brings-reality-of-war-to-the-anzac-myth

We have a real problem with glorifying the military here. The Anzac story has in recent decades been built up into almost a cult with the school curriculum empasising it to the exclusion of many other things, especially any real balanced reflection on colonisation. It has peaked with us spending half a billion (yes billion) dollars expanding the war memorial in Canberra.

https://www.theguardian.com/austral...on-dollars-on-australian-war-memorial-project


And that is on top of $100 million being spent on war memorial projects in France.
 
@Wibble does it really matter though, apart from the obvious huge waste of money? I can’t say after living here for nearly 10 years that I saw any particular reverence towards the police of armed forces. Granted, I don’t often stray far out of urban areas.

Aboriginals have been absolutely shafted here and it’s no surprise, there’s a collective desire to sweep that under the rug.
 
InfiniteBoredom said:
@Wibble does it really matter though, apart from the obvious huge waste of money? I can’t say after living here for nearly 10 years that I saw any particular reverence towards the police of armed forces. Granted, I don’t often stray far out of urban areas.

Aboriginals have been absolutely shafted here and it’s no surprise, there’s a collective desire to sweep that under the rug.
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It almost gets to the stage of war porn and it has escalated massively in the 25 years I've been here. Nothing wrong at all with remembering those who sacrificed for their country but when it goes too far the myth part allows these sorts of abuses to be ignored. No way the military and government didn't know about this years ago but ignored it until good journalism forced them to investigate. In schools it is almost as if nothing else exists apart from ANZACS at Galipolli. Ironic as it was Aussies being sent in as canon fodder by the Brits.
 
I agree, it becomes a weird conversation. WWI is also a nation-building event in Canadian history: after Canadian confederation just over 150 years ago, the trenches at Vimy often seems to be the second birth of Canada. I didn't grow up and cannot fully comment, but it's odd to me to see so much value being attached to lots of people dying in a war where Canada had nothing to win or loose, and where its people went as subjects of the British Empire, not on behalf of Canada as a country.

The previous government tried to turn the war of 1812 into another such event: they made a real thing out of it in 2012. Luckily, that fell flat; it's further ago and even less meaningful today. Even worse, it does not resonate at all with French-Canadians, for whom the war of 1812 (when the US invaded Canada) was a war between their current anglophone rulers and the wannabe new anglophone rulers. Nothing was saved, won, or lost there from that perspective. But as I said, the whole thing fell flat, and so it's still just Vimy.

I guess it's what you get as a colony. There is not much history of culture to fall back on (except if the countries would finally fully embrace indigenous cultures!), so you gotta take what's available - and war is the obvious choice.
 
Wibble said:
This has been brewing for some time and that this far right government to even admit that there might be a problem means things must be very bad indeed.

https://www.theguardian.com/austral...forces-afghanistan?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
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I knew it would be bad but it is worse than I imagines :(

A national disgrace and utterly shameful.

https://www.theguardian.com/austral...39-afghan-civilians-war-crimes-report-alleges

One of the more disturbing alleged incidents canvassed in the documents released on Thursday comes from prior work by military sociologist Samantha Crompvoets, who was tasked with examining special forces culture and began to hear disturbing allegations of war crimes.

One soldier told her:

“Guys just had this blood lust,” he said. “Psychos. Absolute psychos. And we bred them.”

She heard one allegation that two 14-year-old boys were stopped by SAS, who decided they might be Taliban sympathisers. Their throats were slit.

“The rest of the troop then had to ‘clean up the mess’ by finding others to help dispose of the bodies,” Crompvoets reported. “In the end, the bodies were bagged and thrown in a nearby river.”

Her work eventually triggered the Brereton report.
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Some of the incidents described in the report are jaw-dropping. Evidence suggests junior soldiers were instructed by their superiors to execute prisoners in cold blood as part of a “blooding” process to give them their first kill.

“Typically, the patrol commander would take a person under control and the junior member... would then be directed to kill the person under control,” the report found. “‘Throwdowns’ would be placed with the body and a ‘cover story’ was created for the purposes of operational reporting and to deflect scrutiny.”

Credible information also suggests special forces planted “throwdowns” - weapons, radios, or other equipment – on the corpses of Afghans to justify the killings.
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I love this country. Triple J Hot 100 banger. For those outside Straya, it's a remix of Victorian Premier Dan Andrews COVID speeches.

 
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