| Quotes: |
| How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being. - Oscar Wilde |
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| Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. - Albert Einstein |
| Quotes: |
| Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge. - Mark Twain |
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| I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him. - Mark Twain |
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| Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence. - Albert Einstein |
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| Monday, September 18, 2006 |
| A valued discussion* |
*Caution - post is possibly incoherent & tangential
There has been a bit of discussion in the media regarding the new requirements to become a citizen of Australia and for the life of me it doesn't seem to make sense. Investigation of the Dept of Immigration website reveals significant differences between the Australian ideologies spouted and the realities of everyday politics as dispersed in the mass media.
The gap in the current potential stoush is that the current debate regarding citizenship fails to highlight the fact that in order to be considered for Australian Citizenship you must first have a Permanent Residence Visa (PRV). So the debate skirts the more important (to my mind) issue regarding how people get permanent residence visa's and the requirements for both PRV, TPV (Temporary Protection Visa) and THV (Temporary Offshore Humanitarian Visa).
The TPV and THV are the governments way of ensuring that refugees who have potentially been through hell to get to the land of the free Australia are going to damn well know their place and stay insecure (until they are returned to their now safe as determined by these stupid politicians who don't want to piss off the neighbours who are engaged in state based terrorism (but thats another post).
The current madness stems around the semantically broad term 'values'.
n : beliefs of a person or social group in which they have an emotional investment (either for or against something); "he has very conservatives values"
Everyone has values. However to state that we have national values is crap. Yes, we have some collective values some of which are enshrined in legislation; within social & religous groupings there are shared values - but whether those values are necessarily 'Strine' is another matter. In fact I'm reasonably confident that some of my values are contrary to those of the current dictatorship ruling power in Australia - but I'm safe chaps - I'm already a citizen.
Which brings me to the notion of values in a representational democracy [cough]; and a question:
If a politician is the elected representative of their electorate - should the values they purvey be those of the collective who voted them in? Their personal values? Those of their political party? Or merely some collected garble determined by some plummy mouthed politicians with their heads up the proverbial bum?
One more word:
naivety n : lack of sophistication or worldliness
OR
Thinking that terrorists won't be able to fulfill the requirements, but ordinary folks (mates in the making) will. Unless...... this is a possibly racist/religioust [sic] issue mmmmm
I think there's something in that for all of us.
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posted by Blue @ 6:48 pm  |
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