Thanks to new employment I have less time than usual to kick around solutions so to bide you over here is the best (genuine) comment I’ve seen for yonks, thanks to the inimitable* Speak Your Branes:

It high time the UK people woke up and got rid of this Labour Goverment. There policy is spend spend , as they did in 1970. I really feel sorry for you UK people , because there will be no day light from this mess for ever. The UK will end up a third world country and will now have main problems to face from letting so main people arrive . I left the UK 3 years ago, what i once called my home and moved to Spain. I now have Spanish passport and given my Uk passport . I wish you all the best
Mark Gayden, palma

The punchline you can read for yourself by clicking through the link, and subscribing in your feed reader, if you have not already, to this magnificent institution.

It is time for the ALP to tell the pair this will be their last term, and to find polite, civilised, well-adjusted people to fill Mr Della Bosca’s Legislative Council vacancy and Ms Neal’s Central Coast seat at the next state and federal polls.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaahahahaha!

Haaah! Haaaaaaa! Hah.

God help us if the future political figures of Labor’s progressive wing carry on only the dour puritanism of the Daily Telegraph’s staff, as shown by such notorious wowsers as Joe Hildebrandt and Col Allan, who wouldn’t know what to do in a party full of drunken young people but cry, leave early and arrive sober at work in the morning, and the Young Labor Right, whose strong tea and iced vo-vos have made the Labour movement a by-word for moral righteousness.

I know there are stoush.net readers who’ll have stories. If you’re not too hung over, spill ‘em below.

They’re against cluster bombs and in favour of the international treaty eliminating their use. Fair enough, so am I, so are lots of people. The premise of their campaign, however, is that the Australian Government is stalling on the treaty because wants to protect their own “cluster bombs”, despite the UK having “reversed” their position to protect their “own weapons”. To put it mildly, this is not the situation.

The Cluster Munition Coalition, a group dedicated to demining and prohibition of cluster weapons, define the weapons they oppose this way:

Cluster munitions are large weapons which are deployed from the air and from the ground and release dozens or hundreds of smaller submunitions. Submunitions released by air-dropped cluster bombs are most often called “bomblets,” while those delivered from the ground by artillery or rockets are usually referred to as “grenades.”

The United Kingdom has indeed removed its objection to the elimination of its stocks of indiscriminate cluster weapons, and good for them. The Australian Defence Force, and this is the point, has nothing like them.

The ADF munitions to which GetUp object are SMArt 155 artillery rounds. A cursory search of the internet shows that they’re a project similar to the Excalibur shell, a an excruciatingly expensive but very precise artillery round, designed to guide one relatively small bit of explosive to a specific target, and damage as few as possible of the things around that target. Yes, it’s designed to kill people, and I wouldn’t like one dropped on me, but it’s not a cluster bomb, by any reasonable standard. It’s designed specifically to do the opposite of clusterbombing or blind artillery bombardment: it’s designed to discriminate, and is, to be cynical, the perfect weapon for such a limited-imperialist war justified on liberal humanitarian grounds as the ADF is fighting in Afghanistan.

Objection to weapons of war, whatever their nature, is a coherent political position, and I would have more respect for Getup were they to take this pacifist line. To make the implicit campaigning compromise of trying to ban only some weapons, and then muddy the waters about which weapons fit into which category, is simply stupid, dishonest politics.

The worst thing is that it would have been so easy not to have mentioned the shell at all, and simply to have encouraged people to urge the Government to sign the anti-cluster munitions treaty. That’s it. Getup should do themselves a favour and campaign for the right causes with correct information.

Our comrades must understand that ideological remolding involves long-term, patient and painstaking work, and they must not attempt to change people’s ideology, which has been shaped over decades of life, by giving a few lectures or by holding a few meetings. Persuasion, not compulsion, is the only way to convince them. Compulsion will never result in convincing them. To try to convince them by force simply won’t work.

I don’t know why “ideological” has to be an epithet in these post-normative days of universal middle-class entitlement mentality. I was brought up on my parents’ knees to understand ideology as an identifiable system of beliefs or a worldview which prompted measurable behaviour in a society, nothing more and nothing less. The question is how to get your ideology accepted as commonsense, isn’t it?

So how to change the behaviours of the people who rule us, and how is the Government to expect any change from their thoroughly-bribed electorate, without citizens’ re-education camps, and without without communards ripping the cobbles out of Bent Street and throwing them at the donkeys quaffing red wine in fashionable eateries? Is Deliberative Democracy the wishy-washy hands-holding-around-the-fire answer, or a bit of healthy workers’ ownership?

How could a Government, for instance, convinced that its programme of electricity privatisation was necessary, convince its Party and supporters of the scheme? How would an electorate go about the same task in reverse, and persuade a recalcitrant and morbidly fixated Cabinet of the futility and non-democracy of their task?

Mao?

all people in the revolutionary ranks must care for each other, must love and help each other.

Well if we can’t be socialists, we can at least all share a chardonnay.