Champas Socialist

Reply to It Is My Fault in Misc JoeUser Forums

What's so strange about the letigious society we're starting to copy from the USA is that both the Left and Right are extremely critical of it. So whose fault is it? Can this be the first thing the Department of Blame takes the blame for: too much blaming. It's depressing how people want the entire world to be kiddie-safed. There are dangerous things in the world: deal with it. God or whoever didn't make trees with safety mats underneath, It d

Reply to Update in Blogging JoeUser Forums

If you're doing Philo, I highly reccommend doing Foucault and Judith Butler: they have an incredible way of viewing the world and have some incredible thoughts on how we all (and society as a whole) influence each other. If you agree with them, you will love sociology. If you disagree with them, you will love psych. I was a big psych fan, until I read Foucault and decided that it was silly to put things in boxes. Sociology is also a very valuable tool

Reply to Democrats? Not in my Church!!! in Current Events JoeUser Forums

How utterly ridiculous. Next thing you'll have politicians giving speeches about religion!

Reply to Understanding the Universe Part 6: Develop a Mental Illness in Humor JoeUser Forums

Quite funny?! QUITE funny?!?! Is that the best you can do Icon? That was f**king hilarious! I hope you smite this disrespectful peasant Tobl..I mean Your DivineNess.

My Friend the Illegal Immigrant in Life Journals JoeUser Forums

The other week I spent several hours chatting with 4 refugees. 3 are Afghanistani, 1 is from Eritrea. This is the story of the third person. Before I start though, I just want to say, I have not written this series of articles as political articles (I know I put them in the politics category, but that was because I couldn't find another one that fitted).

Reply to Voluntary Student Unionism in Politics JoeUser Forums

Para, quite frankly I don't think you know what you're talking about. This is one article that isn't for the Americans, it's a quintessentially Australian issue. Teegs, thanks, interesting insight. Funnily enough, this is possibly the left wing issue I'm least passionate/worried about. Particularly union-wise. I find the proposed changes to workplace legislation far more worrying. You only have to look as far as our Northern neighbours to see

Reply to Big Brother: The Twist Revealed in Humor JoeUser Forums

PB, Tobler, Teegs, Floozie thankyou. I'm glad to know this amused you. Funnily enouigh this is one of very few articles I've written that has been published!! (About a year ago when I wrote it! Good to know my comedy is eternal). By the way I ohpe you all spotted the Chuck Berry reference. RK, I look forward to it.

Big Brother: The Twist Revealed in Humor JoeUser Forums

Assume Nothing. Expect Anything. Because this year.....There’s a Twist. Again. Like they had last summer. It will change the face of Big Brother. Not even the new housemates will be told about the secret. But my sources have revealed what Big Brother has up his sleeve to me. Here it is. The Twist. At the end of each week, instead of someone just being evicted

Reply to Our Multicultural Nation: Love it or Leave It! in Politics JoeUser Forums

Firstly thankyou all for returning to topic. LW is right, the rest was getting very tedious. I'd like to explain why I felt a need to write this article. Since about 1972, Australia has been very concerned with trying to establish its own identity as distinct from the mother country. What does it mean to be Australian? And for a period of about 13 years, we defined ourselves as proud multiculturalists. For the past 9 years we haven't explicitl

Reply to Our Multicultural Nation: Love it or Leave It! in Politics JoeUser Forums

Now to return to the original topic, I will restate this in the hope that some AUSTRALIANS might have some thoughts on OUR NATION! If you don’t want to believe that we are diverse, I don’t care. We are. PB? Muggaz? Maso? Mig? You accuse me of not practising what I preach.Well in a fairly short time on Earth (much of which I have spent being extremely shy), I have been good friends with all of the following types of Australians: •

Reply to Our Multicultural Nation: Love it or Leave It! in Politics JoeUser Forums

I’ve never deleted a comment on my forum before, but there has been so much horrible, lowbrow insult-throwing that I felt a need to clean it up a bit. I have left some of it because it is unfortunately contained in the same post as some sort of an argument (and because there seems to be a limit on how many you can delete). I have also deleted as much off-topic stuff as possible. I suppose at least you didn’t turn this into another communism Vs capitali

Reply to Mankind's Culture in Current Events JoeUser Forums

Good article Doc. I of course disagree with you about the USA being the best. Australia is, and that is partly because of our diversity. I think that both Australia and the USA have unfortunately overlooked many of the greatest things we could borrow from other nations as we have both expected immigrants to become Anglo-American or Anglo-Australian to too great a degree, and still do. "Your little island might be a paradise on earth

Reply to Our Multicultural Nation: Love it or Leave It! in Politics JoeUser Forums

You accuse me of not practising what I preach.Well in a fairly short time on Earth (much of which I have spent being extremely shy), I have been good friends with all of the following types of Australians: • 2 Indians • 2 Aborigines (One of whom could speak Aboriginal English) • 1 Trinidadian-Australian • 1 Muslim Malaysian • 2 Indonesians • 7 or so French • 2 Czechs • 1 Vietnamese • 2 Belgians • 1 German<BR

Reply to Our Multicultural Nation: Love it or Leave It! in Politics JoeUser Forums

MW, I agree with you but I think it a pity that you couldn't se the point I was making in using that phrase. (That is why I included the subtitle. It's a subtle, ironic reference to Doc Miller who titles his blog "America: Love It or Leave It" (And yes the 2nd half is a refernce to LW, but I wrote this article long before our clashes over this)). This blog is an attempt to point out that I feel just as proud to be an Aussie as any bloody racist does an

Reply to Our Multicultural Nation: Love it or Leave It! in Politics JoeUser Forums

dabe, I've heard a lot of things said about you lately, mostly derogatory. All I can say is I see little evidence of what you are often accused of in this well-thought out response. Equally, LW has controlled herself quite well on my blog. Actually, whenever she makes it over to my blog, I've felt she's done quite a nice job of coming across as a calm person. "immigrants from the UK and New Zealand when quoting diversity figures" I w

Reply to Our Multicultural Nation: Love it or Leave It! in Politics JoeUser Forums

Eloquently put Tobler1 Kanobe. And while some of Draginol's comments are not undermined by these stats and Toblerone's point, his credibility on the issue is a bit. As I've said before, we still have plenty of people in this country having a whinge about enclaves of certain races.

Reply to Our Multicultural Nation: Love it or Leave It! in Politics JoeUser Forums

Oh and just checked the Australian Bureau of Stats site for a sec and found: To arrive at an estimate of the size of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population using the Census count (on a usual residence basis), allowance is made for net undercount, and for instances in which Indigenous status is unknown. While each Census aims to count every person in Australia once, some people are inevitably missed and some are counted more than

Reply to Our Multicultural Nation: Love it or Leave It! in Politics JoeUser Forums

To quote our Government's website: http://www.immi.gov.au/facts/04fifty.htm People from around 200 countries have migrated to Australia. Today, about 23% of our population was born overseas and more than 200 languages are spoken here. At least 17 per cent of Australians come from a non-English speaking background and speak another language at home. In Australia, over 200 languages are spoken including 45 Indigenous languages.

Reply to Our Multicultural Nation: Love it or Leave It! in Politics JoeUser Forums

I'd like to know where he got those stats because the Aborigines actually represent 2% of the population. Without adding in the Africans etc. But yes I will say that part of my impressions of Australia are based on having grown up in canberra. In Brisbane I find it a little uncomfortably monocultural.

Reply to You stupid vegans! in Health & Medicine JoeUser Forums

"My reaction to evangelical vegans is because they get in my face. If you get in my face about the evils of meat" Which nobody has on this forum, yet you persist anyway in going on about your perceptions of the naturalness of meateating. "I have been on the receiving end of countless lectures as to how my eating a pork chop is wrong and evil." And I have been on the end of countless lectues about how God made us to eat meat,

Reply to Thanks Mum, but No Thanks in Sex & Romance JoeUser Forums

Hmm, I think you're reading way too much SPM Muggaz. If that's possible. "Masculinity seems to be a dying trait. " This statement comes across pretty misinformed. Masculinity is going through one of hundreds of changes it's been through. Not that long ago it was normal for men to wear make up (not in Australia, whose white culture is too young to have been through much transition). Throughout the world, masculinity is very different e

Reply to What the Bleep do we know? in Blogging JoeUser Forums

OOOoooh Yipppeee A chance to get back into philosophy! And Toblerone will love the quantum physics aspect. A movie that wants to engage us intellectually in thinking about the world: what a breath of fresh air!

Our Multicultural Nation: Love it or Leave It! in Politics JoeUser Forums

I grew up a very proud Australian. I learned Aussie slang terms that are becoming obsolete, I deliberately developed a broad Aussie accent and I became one of the very few who knows the 2nd verse to the national anthem. I grew up under the Hawke-Keating Government. Although I’m old enough now to recognise the emptiness of some of their words, it was largely t

Reply to Everything happens in Home & Family JoeUser Forums

At the risk of doing a shameless plug, in the past few articles I have written "Everything Happens for a Reason" and an article about suicide which you may find interesting.

Voluntary Student Unionism in Politics JoeUser Forums

I just attended a forum on student unionism. I asked the people there to respond to some criticism I had of compulsory student unionism and I felt they responded rather well. Here, I have tried to summarise some of their points. Why should I pay fees for political protests I don’t agree with? 3% of student union fees are put towards political