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Is political discourse in this country broken? (2 Viewers)

cosmo kramer

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nah let them come but stipulate that all arrivals who come here to seek asylum will be enslaved until it is safe for them to return home

100% serious
 

Jimmy Recard

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let them come but if they dont get jobs then they will starve

same with people born here
 

Chemical Ali

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stop the boats would be fine if people wouldnt always qualify it with "yeah im fine with refugees coming here just do it the proper way" no shut the fuck up its not how they get here that matters its the fact that they are coming here
haha, nice. We have the opposite view about letting in refugees in general but totally agree on this talking point, lol.

"Boats" is used to dehumanize refugees, it's fairly obvious I mean saying "Stop the victims of war and persecution from exercising their legal right to seek asylum" it wouldn't make a great slogan really

iuno sometimes I think the 'discourse' in general is getting more polarized with extremes on both sides and more apathetic in the middle... but I have nothing to back this up with, lol
 

Jimmy Recard

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but only the strong and productive ones iwll be competitive enough to get jobs and that will be net beneficial overall y/n?

slavery i dunno what if they enslave us?
 

Lentern

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I find it curious that people still recycle the same, regular arguments you might see on Qanda or Insiders when Cosmo says, whatever he says. It's kind of like debating the most efficient way to reduce carbon on Bolt's blog.
 

abbeyroad

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people are fucking stupid how about we all leave the herd behind and go form our own society?
 

writer'sblock

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Good political discourse basically requires a few things:
1. a literate population - we have that
2. a reading population - we have lost that

Of the 17 million voters in this country most do not read a broadsheet newspaper daily, or watch objective news, i.e. the ABC or SBS which have mandated codes of conduct in their journalism.

that the basis to all discussion; advance this by having political ideas, and discussing the merits of such ideas in the press.
Say Socialism is the idea of the end of worker exploitation - is that as an idea in an of itself a bad idea? I'd tend to think ending exploitation to be a good thing, however the very moment such ideas enter the political debate we have for example mining companies campaign their ideologies which are their ideal conditions to making as much monies as possible. So there are impediments to such furthering of debate.

The question is how can we facilitate this debate? not is it broken.
 

writer'sblock

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Take for example the Hungry Beast on the ABC, it present information that is confronting and sparks debate.
The public broadcaster's role is to introduce important information that would not otherwise circulate in it naturally.
 

writer'sblock

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Jurgen Habermas a German Philosopher and theorist of the public space argues that through 'communicative action' experts in physics, economics, ethics, aesthetics, etc speak to the people. explain why things are they are.
thus by starting a discourse between the people with specific specialised knowledge and the masses, knowledge, greater accountability, and a greater awareness of the truth emerges.

It's a complicated theory; in a nut shell it's: experts speak to masses, masses speak to experts, through a conversations the problems are addressed by experts and thus the public sphere develops. It is self critiquing, with experts disagreeing in some parts and the masses' ethics and concerns being by both philosophers and economists thus both sides of experts speak to a matter and a greater morality emerges.

It's complicated.... don't try reading him, it's best reading a primer.
 

writer'sblock

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you heard writers block

you rubes

dont even try reading him
Well don't even try reading his work until ender of undergraduate level reading, and only if you've done the background in philosophy and political theory.
The man wrote in the most impossible elitist style of writing to prevent plebs from reading him, and it's been translated from German where most of the concepts loose their meanings with remarkable ease.
My disclaimer is it is merely a theory, not my own opinion, frankly I find him to have some good arguments however I sit more with post-modernists. He thinks we're not modern, as not all of us have modern thought and knowledge and once that is universal the project of modernity shall be complete.
Also over the 50 years he's been writing, his opinions on everything has changed, have became more nuanced; and the body of literature he has written is huge, unless you've doing a course at uni the question of where to start, and what ought you reading, and what you must and should read to understand him before his own writing is huge.
You need to do the theories of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Weber, Freud, then the Frankfurt school of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock, Erich Fromm, and Walter Benjamin before you start of Jurgen Habermas. Along with ideas of the culture industry...
it's painful people!
And it's called Critical theory, and it's the basis of all other critical theories, be it feminist theory, queer theory, postmodern theory, literary theory, film theory and it can be applied into other social science such as International Relations, so there's Critical International Relations Theory. etc etc etc
 
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SylviaB

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I have a theory:

fuck off you stupid fucking socialist cunt

freedom works, government doesn't, I don't care how much you want to jack off your ego by reading a bunch of books that are 'too hard' for us average folk
the fact that you think marx is somehow relevant or valid is all the proof needed to conclude you don't know what the fuck you're talking about

no one gives a fuck about ur retarded shit
 

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