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[Wolfhunter107]

It'd make for an interesting novel premise, though.

[Loud Whispers]

Sugar tax? We have a sugar tariff in the USA and the only thing that does (as far as sodas go) is ensure that our sodas are made with corn syrup instead.

That's because you have massive corn subsidies whilst Europe actually cannot grow corn. Well, cheaper than sugar anyways. And Europe can't grow sugar really either, the amount of wars that were fought for overseas sugar growing land is pretty astounding

[Reelya]

Wow, the Australian Immigration minister just announced that all refugee children being held in detention centers have been released into the community. Unfortunately, what actually happened was that parts of the detention centers have been "reclassified" as "community detention", to be able to make this claim. No kids have actually been released from anywhere.

This is the Lib's way of buttering up their image for the upcoming election. It's also goddamn evil - pretending you did something to help some children purely to win some votes, when in fact you're the very person in charge of persecuting those kids.

[Descan]

how they managed to think that mixing "refugees" "children" "detention center" and "governmental word-play shell game" would go over well with anyone is beyond mortal ken

[Reelya]

Ironically, they did actually reduce the number of kids in detention substantially, but they were in a hurry to be able to claim "all refugee kid's released into the community" before they announce the election date, so they hastily slapped this "reclassification" thing onto some of the camps. Yeah, real clever move there. I recall when the previous PM Abbott (who used anti-refugee stuff in his election ads) promised to take 12000 Syrian refugees. I thought something was up at the time. And then 4 days later he lost the job in a party leadership challenge. So the guy spent his whole career as Prime Minister bashing refugees, and passing laws to fuck with their lives, then the very minute his back is to the wall he's all "you know what? I love me some refugees! We have plenty of room! The more the merrier!" as a last-ditch attempt to claw back some public support. Totally disgusting.

http://www.news.com.au/world/ten-myths-around-asylum-seekers-arriving-on-boats-in-australian-waters/story-fndir2ev-1226676024840

Statistics from 2008 showed at least 13 asylum seekers arrive through Australian airports daily, more than 32 times the number of boat people supposedly ''flooding'' across our maritime borders in that year. A total of 4768 ''plane people'', more than 96 per cent of applicants for refugee status, arrived in that year on legitimate tourist, business and other visas - compared with 161 who arrived by boat during the same period. While boat numbers have increased, Australian Government statistics from the first quarter of 2013 showed more than 90 per cent of asylum seekers who arrived by boat were found to be genuine refugees. In comparison, those who arrived by plane - despite being eligible for release into the community and not having to face years of detention on Nauru or Manus Island - were almost twice as likely to be rejected as refugees. The figure continued a long-term trend of high approval rates for people arriving by boat, with 93.5 per cent being found to be refugees in 2010-11 and 91 per cent in 2011-12.

So, the so-called "tough on refugees" government turn a blind eye to >96% of the refugee flow, only harassing a tiny minority who are almost all legitimate refugees. The irony is that this government has sold itself to blue collar workers as protecting their wages from immigrants, when in fact they ramped up skilled immigration at the same time they "cracked down" on 3% of the refugees, and brought in temporary work visas that often pay below minimum wage. They used the very public issue of refugees to paint themselves as anti-immigration, when in fact they brought in tons of third-world people to try and undercut the unions.

[Shadowlord]

Why exactly does anyone call them liberals?

[Reelya]

Nobody uses "liberal" the American way outside America (and possibly Canada). If you called yourself a "liberal" here you'd just confuse people.

"Liberal" is just an adjective here, which would need to be attached to different things to give it meaning. It could be argued that "liberal" in the American sense is contradictory: do you take a "liberal" view of gun ownership? Here, that would mean you want unregulated guns.

Our Liberal Party derives from classical liberalism, i.e. Adam Smith, free trade, small government, etc. They first used the "Liberal" term in the party name in 1909, which was well before the modern idea of social liberalism became exclusively associated with the word "liberal" in the USA. But like any right-wing party, appealing only to rich businessmen doesn't get you elected, so they are in an alliance with the religious right and the more racist uneducated workers.

[Loud Whispers]

So, the so-called "tough on refugees" government turn a blind eye to >96% of the refugee flow, only harassing a tiny minority who are almost all legitimate refugees. The irony is that this government has sold itself to blue collar workers as protecting their wages from immigrants, when in fact they ramped up skilled immigration at the same time they "cracked down" on 3% of the refugees, and brought in temporary work visas that often pay below minimum wage. They used the very public issue of refugees to paint themselves as anti-immigration, when in fact they brought in tons of third-world people to try and undercut the unions.

I'm willing to bet this is all according to keikaku

[Guardian G.I.]

"The US military would have been within its rights to shoot down Russian aircraft that flew close to one of its warships in the Baltic Sea, Secretary of State John Kerry says"

Escalation? What's that? It surely won't lead to anything unpleasant, like a diplomatic incident or a war, right?

[Helgoland]

It looks like they really would have been, though. The escalation here is definitely coming from the Russian side - why should the US just sit by silently, not even reminding the world of how it would be allowed to counter legally?

[Reelya]

It's "reckless and provocative" for Russian planes to be flying a few meters outside their airspace when Americans are rightly patrolling in a totally non-reckless and non-provocative manner all around the borders of Russia. Makes perfect sense.

Another example was when Iranian Flight 655 recklessly and provocatively took off on a regular flight from an airport in Iran, flew a little bit over Iranian airspace and was rightly shot down by an American Aegis Cruiser which was rightfully minding it's own business shooting at Iranian patrol vessels who were recklessly and provocatively checking cargo ships for smugglers in Iranian waters.

290 reckless and provocative Iranian civilians rightfully died in the shootdown, and the captain of the US vessel was rightfully awarded the Legion of Merit for the action.

[Helgoland]

Don't forget the USA is also the only nation who's used their military to down a civilian airliner over the owning country's airspace (Iran 1988). Every other incident has been where some plane flew over a specific country, usually by accident and not responding to contact, whereas Iranian flight 655 was over Iranian airspace on an established flight path. The commanding officer who killed 290 innocent people was viciously indicted in almost all investigations, but got zero punishment. In fact, he got a Legion of Merit award for that tour of duty.

I don't see how this matters. At all.

It's "reckless and provocative" for Russian planes to be flying a few meters outside their airspace when Americans are rightly patrolling in a totally non-reckless and non-provocative manner all around the borders of Russia. Makes perfect sense.

Flying so close over a ship that you make waves in the water? Repeatedly simulating attack runs? Not responding to radio contact?

Sure, they're just 'flying a few meters outside their airspace'. Uh-huh. While of course the Americans are patrolling 'all around the borders of Russia'. (Huh, I didn't realize that the US military conducts regular patrols along the Chinese-Russian and Mongolia-Russian border...) Let's just disregard that while they were indeed right next to the Russian border, due to the small size of the Baltic Sea they were also right next to several important allies' everything.

[Reelya]

America has a history of deliberately engineering provocative events on other country's borders. There are quite a few examples.

[Helgoland]

Give me some evidence - any at all, really - of this being an American-engineered provocative event. And no, merely conducting exercises in the Baltics does not count as provocative.

[Culise]

International waters are nonetheless international waters.  There is no real comparison between this incident and Iranian Flight 665.  The Americans have every right to be sailing in international waters, just as the Russians had every right to fly bombers around the British Isles a couple years ago.  Indeed, rights aside, the Americans have even more reason to operate in these particular international waters as they were doing so in conjunction with their NATO allies who possess ports on that same body of water.  In this case, it was during international exercises with Poland; the ship had been watching a Russian spy ship from a safe distance for a while before they were buzzed.  If you fly repeated simulated attack runs on a destroyer that take you within meters of it, it wouldn't be surprising.  Indeed, the captain of the destroyer himself was highly unwilling to escalate; he didn't even activate his active radar systems or ship defenses, correctly assessing the threat as being on the level of "flyboys being flyboys" with a side of "bait for intel on active systems." 

That said, while this particular pilot took things a bit further than the norm, this has absolutely all the precedent in the world in the Cold War era.  Fighter jock on one side does something ballsy and potentially dangerous but not actually harmful to some bomber or naval ship on the other side, a few diplomatic pro forma words are exchanged, and absolutely nothing is escalated or changed.  Let me know when a Russian pilot actually does accidentally slam a SU-24 into the side of an Arleigh Burke or something.

EDIT:

Give me some evidence - any at all, really - of this being an American-engineered provocative event. And no, merely conducting exercises in the Baltics does not count as provocative.

The existence of Poland, obviously.  If they were still a part of Glorious Mother Russia, there would obviously be no reason for joint exercises between the Polish and American navies, and thus no reason for Americans to be in the Baltic.

But joking aside, there are people who argue seriously, and not entirely without merit, that the entry of Poland and the Baltic states into NATO were one such serious provocation, and that NATO should never have gone east of the Elbe.  I suppose that could be one way of looking at this, if you presuppose that the Baltic Sea is a Russian lake and thus any American presence there is necessarily in and of itself a provocation.  It's not one I agree with, but it is one with a certain logical merit insofar as Russian security is concerned.  That said, if a Russian destroyer operating in international waters off Boston were to shoot down an American F-35 playing stupid flyboy stunts with their conning tower, I wouldn't regard it as any worse than an American destroyer shooting down an SU-24 while operating in international waters in the Baltic Sea.