Quick Quips: No Conscience

10/09/2019

There are many things in the world that one just hears and can’t help but think that there is no compassion, no conscience behind some of the acts carried out. Whether it’s something local or one an international stage, every day someone – including our so-called ‘leaders’ – does or says something depraved. It just keeps rising and rising. Also might need to find a new title other than ‘quick’…

• Zali Steggall, who toppled Tony Abbott in the election earlier this year, has made a call to have a conscience vote on climate change. Why? What need is there for a conscience vote? If Parliament had any ounce of environmental conscience beyond the Greens we would have action already. This vote would do absolutely nothing of substance, especially since Labor has sided with the Coalition and dropped all opposition to the violent destruction of our natural world.
• In the Senate, Jacquie Lambie has said she would only agree to drug testing welfare recipients if similar drug tests were carried out on politicians. At face value, this sounds fair – you want to subject people to drug tests, then submit to them yourself – a breathalyser outside Parliament would be interesting, so I hear. But there’s only one problem with that – that still brings a position where drug testing welfare recipients is considered acceptable when it blatantly is not.
• No one wants to be on welfare, and if anyone does, they would be a minority. Hundreds of thousands of people are on welfare – few want to be, and few would be spending that money on drugs. Drug testing them also continues to treat drug use as a criminal issue, not a health one, and something to be demonised rather than approached with care.
• Here is my article on cashless welfare cards from earlier this year, similarly used to stigmatise and dehumanise welfare recipients by taking away their autonomy and allowing private companies to profit off of it.
• A recent study also found that Newstart recipients are much more likely to face various health problems, both physical and mental, than others. Stories of people who are unable to work but have been denied disability payments, or who are simply unable to find a job due to there either being few jobs around or too old, etc. are incredibly common, and those people suffer for it.
• It has everything to do with formulating a distaste towards the ‘poor’ – this is a class struggle just as much as it is a health and social welfare one.
• The Greens finally had a victory, passing their anticorruption Bill through the Senate. Now the Government is faced with a tough choice – either let the Bill pass through the House, opening the doors to a myriad of corruption charges flooding their ranks, or blatantly defying the Bill and acknowledging, openly, that they are pro-corruption.
• Who would have guessed – One Nation’s best contributions are when they do not contribute at all.
• I still chuckle when I think about that Marxist that approached me to sell me a newspaper.
• Some of the fires in Queensland are being investigated for cases of arson. Some have decided that this means climate change isn’t the cause – just more scaremongering. According to that article, apparently 8 fires are being looked into, while over 80 are currently burning. Care to account for the 90% that aren’t arson, as well as the fires around the world that climate change has exacerbated?
• A lot of the mainstream news appears to be all over the carnage of Hurricane Dorian, which blasted the Bahamas and made landfall in Florida (no, not Alabama), but some outlets have been accused of not reporting on the causes. Any discussion about environmental catastrophes that does not include discussion on climate change is a discussion not even worth having.
• San Francisco has moved to call the NRA a domestic terrorist organisation. Good.
• Irradiated seafood, anyone?
• Joe Biden “not knowing” that Andrew Goldman was a co-founder of Western LNG and had investments in fossil fuels, along with his insistence that Goldman was not a fossil fuel executive in title, is concerning. Either he knew full well what he was doing – extorting a loophole to raise money from fossil fuel companies indirectly – or he just repeats what his staff and handlers tell him to without actually doing the digging himself.
• Kamala Harris is not a socialist. Elizabeth Warren is not a socialist. Bernie Sanders is not a socialist.
• I would argue that a remake of a game that gives women an advantage over men does not exactly contribute anything at all to the actual empowerment of women, particulary when the premise of said game is unbridled capitalism. Monopoly never was a fun game to play, the games always ended early or in disaster… wait.