Lamentations Over a Carbon Tax

Atheistextremist
atheist
Atheistextremist's picture
Posts: 5134
Joined: 2009-09-17
User is offlineOffline
Lamentations Over a Carbon Tax

 

 


By Ben Pobje 

My fellow Australians, it gives me no pleasure to be saying the things that I am saying at this time. It tugs my heartstrings. It eats me up inside. But I can no longer remain silent in the face of the outrages being visited upon us by the enemies of freedom and humanity.

There comes a time in every man’s life when he must stand up for what he believes in. There comes a time when every man must say enough is enough, and not enough is not enough, and I say to you now, my fellow Australians, I’ve had enough lies and tyranny, and I’ve had not enough democracy and telling-the-truthness.

Yesterday I watched as the Prime Minister of this country placed a tender kiss upon the other prime minister of this country, and I very nearly retched at the hypocrisy.

When Jason Donovan brought his words to the people — "Yes it’s going to be a cold, lonely summer/But I’ll fill the emptiness/I’ll send you all my dreams everyday in a letter/Sealed with a kiss" — could he ever have imagined his simple message of hope and decency would end up representing something so perverted and oppressive? Could he have imagined that this day, a kiss would not seal our dreams, but shatter them; that a kiss would sound the death knell for our way of life and send us hurtling toward a Third World future where the best we can hope for is that we will be able to smuggle our children to Texas so that they may get jobs at hardware stores and perhaps aspire to a better life. For us it is too late. The best we have to look forward to is a slow and painful botched suicide attempt.

Until now I had hoped we still might avoid this fate. I had hoped the Government would see sense. I had hoped that perhaps Julia Gillard would wake up the morning of the vote and decide she’d rather be a decent person who didn’t hate her own country. I thought we might get a white knight, someone who would ride up at the last possible moment, in the manner of Captain Francis de Groot, and force Greg Combet at gunpoint to read one of the many thousands of articles by Andrew Bolt proving beyond doubt that global warming is a hoax and Tim Flannery a hairy-backed half-goblin bandit.

I held out a mad, romantic fantasy that, just in the nick of time, truth would defeat lies, democracy would defeat totalitarianism, and honest hard-working battlers would defeat lazy child-porn-loving elites. It was a futile hope, of course. These days evil holds sway in our once-great country, and anyone who believes in happy endings is a damn fool.

And so now we have a carbon tax. That’s right, the woman who promised to never, ever, over her dead body cross her heart and hope to die nevereverever introduce a carbon tax has gone right ahead and introduced a carbon tax. Her sly Machiavellian plan has almost come to fruition. Stage 1: Lie to the Australian people while snidely giggling on the inside. Stage 2: Reveal that you are a liar. Stage 3: Become incredibly unpopular. Stage 4: Kill everyone.

Let’s look at just what got passed yesterday. It is a "carbon pricing mechanism". This means that for every ton of carbon emitted by big business (the people who BUILT THIS COUNTRY), the company must pay $5 into Julia Gillard’s Sovereign Stalinist Anthrax Stockpile Fund.

After three years, the fixed price transitions to a bona fide emissions trading scheme, which means the Greens have won and the coal industry will be shut down entirely and all coal workers forced to become gay prostitutes. Will you be so smug then, you bleeding-heart vegan saps, as you toil in the fields under the harsh lash of Tsar Brown and his anarcho-Menshevik death squads? Will you keep on bleating your airy-fairy namby-pamby homo-erotic psychobabble about "investing in the future" when you’re carrying your engineless Flintstones car to work and cooking your potato wedges with a candle while Sarah Hanson-Young creeps into your bedroom at night to insert refugees under your bed and sacrifice your babies to the UN?

Will you?

I ask you to imagine the Australia that will be ushered in by this tax, citizens. An Australia with no mines. An Australia with no steel industry. An Australia with no cars. An Australia with no economy. An Australia with no FREEDOM.

Prepare to lose your jobs, my fellow Australians. Prepare to see your hometown die. Prepare to learn to speak Chinese.

Fellow Australians, it is time to act. We did not start this war, but we’re damn sure going to fix it. If the government wants to kill democracy, so be it. The time for talk is over. The time for peaceful protest is over. The time for correct spelling and punctuation is over. It is time for all good-hearted Australians from all walks of life — the elderly, the pensioners, the retirees, the grey nomads, the aged, the seniors, all of them — to band together and fall in behind the one man who is willing to stand up for the values of ordinary Australians and miners and rescue this country from annihilation.

Yes, we need to follow Tony Abbott to war. He’s already shown his commitment, slashing open his veins and scrawling "I WILL REPEAL THIS TAX SWEAR TO GOD" across a nearby bathroom wall.

I call on you, my fellow Australians, to take out your Stanley knives and likewise draw your own blood, so you may mingle it with Abbott’s, with Bishop’s, with Hockey’s, and with all your freedom-loving compadres. Let us swear our blood oath together: that we will march as one upon this corrupt, dishonest, grasping, money-wasting, tradie-burning farce of a government, and that we will not rest until the streets run red with Labor blood and Rob Oakeshott’s head sits on a pike outside the walls of Canberra as a warning to any other barbarians who might be thinking about trying to subvert our western liberal ideals with creeping market-based Sharia.

Yes, we have reached that point in history where the answer is violence. Rise up, fellow Australians! Fight this evil! Overthrow this repellent pseudo-rapist of a government! For if a patriot will not arm himself and cry havoc when threatened with a slight rise in electricity prices entirely offset by government cash back, just what is it going to take?

 

http://www.newmatilda.com.au/2011/10/13/blood-pledge-now-or-burn-baby

 

 

 

 

"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck


Kapkao
atheistSuperfan
Kapkao's picture
Posts: 4121
Joined: 2010-01-12
User is offlineOffline
Yay, another neurotic fool

Yay, another neurotic fool typing on the internet. While I do think any unnatural financial constraints on the the consumption of power or the output of CO2 is doomed to inevitable Law(s) of Unintended Consequences (in the same way that universal vaccination against every possible virus looks good only on paper), I don't see the point of shouting about it and making a diatribe while also proclaiming that

Quite frankly, the increasing rarity of fossil fuels will do a damned fine job of regulating conventional combustion engines and fly ash-spewing foundries and power plants out of general use, without help from daddy government. A natural tapering of production is a much more effective "gas tax" than government could ever possibly hope to achieve. I'd hate to see how people will cope with 105+ heat indexes and summertime "deep south" humidity without a great deal of air conditioning, but that is rather irrelevant.

As a semi-related sidenote, I still think it's immensely funny when the National Weather Service hands out an ozone warning to my area, that they advise everyone to use less air conditioning. The main time when an ozone/air quality alert is active in various parts of the south, is when it feels like an oven outside and the North Atlantic Oscillation/Bermuda high pressure is present over the areas getting the warning. Frankly, unless you want hyperthermia, you need to use some serious AC here and elsewhere.

“A meritocratic society is one in which inequalities of wealth and social position solely reflect the unequal distribution of merit or skills amongst human beings, or are based upon factors beyond human control, for example luck or chance. Such a society is socially just because individuals are judged not by their gender, the colour of their skin or their religion, but according to their talents and willingness to work, or on what Martin Luther King called 'the content of their character'. By extension, social equality is unjust because it treats unequal individuals equally.” "Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood (2003)


RatDog
atheist
Posts: 573
Joined: 2008-11-14
User is offlineOffline
 I think getting people

 I think getting people less reliant on fossil fuels is a very good thing.  Otherwise people are going to be much to sensitive to sudden changes in the supply that will start happening as fossil fuels run out.  


Kapkao
atheistSuperfan
Kapkao's picture
Posts: 4121
Joined: 2010-01-12
User is offlineOffline
RatDog wrote:  I think

RatDog wrote:

 I think getting people less reliant on fossil fuels is a very good thing.

Problem: they have to actually want to stop using fossil fuels first. Apparently, some here believe it is acceptable to socially engineer such a preference, and at that, using international agencies. The glorious ends justify the means, and what have you.

I do not find it acceptable. At that, I don't believe foreigners should have a say in how one nation (ANY nation) should conduct its domestic policy; only people actually living in a said country should have a say. I have no intention to tell people from around the world what laws are valid and which laws are not. I'd feel a lot better if my government would bother themselves with following suit.

How Austrailia chooses to conduct its domestic affairs should be none of my fucking business. But it's relevant, because it represents how numerous other nations would like my nation to behave. I think the phrase "You don't pay my taxes; GTFO!" should be used every single time a foreign politician or internet newbie from Europe wants to nudge us "in the right direction", and has all these seemingly bright ideas of how we "should" go about it.

 

In any case, back to the subject... the best we can do to reduce our dependency won't prevent economic cataclysm should an even more severe petrochem drought strike like it did during the 70s.

“A meritocratic society is one in which inequalities of wealth and social position solely reflect the unequal distribution of merit or skills amongst human beings, or are based upon factors beyond human control, for example luck or chance. Such a society is socially just because individuals are judged not by their gender, the colour of their skin or their religion, but according to their talents and willingness to work, or on what Martin Luther King called 'the content of their character'. By extension, social equality is unjust because it treats unequal individuals equally.” "Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood (2003)


Tapey
atheist
Tapey's picture
Posts: 1478
Joined: 2009-01-23
User is offlineOffline
Kapkao wrote:RatDog wrote:

Kapkao wrote:

RatDog wrote:

 I think getting people less reliant on fossil fuels is a very good thing.

Problem: they have to actually want to stop using fossil fuels first. Apparently, some here believe it is acceptable to socially engineer such a preference, and at that, using international agencies. The glorious ends justify the means, and what have you.

I do not find it acceptable. At that, I don't believe foreigners should have a say in how one nation (ANY nation) should conduct its domestic policy; only people actually living in a said country should have a say. I have no intention to tell people from around the world what laws are valid and which laws are not. I'd feel a lot better if my government would bother themselves with following suit.

How Austrailia chooses to conduct its domestic affairs should be none of my fucking business. But it's relevant, because it represents how numerous other nations would like my nation to behave. I think the phrase "You don't pay my taxes; GTFO!" should be used every single time a foreign politician or internet newbie from Europe wants to nudge us "in the right direction", and has all these seemingly bright ideas of how we "should" go about it.

 

In any case, back to the subject... the best we can do to reduce our dependency won't prevent economic cataclysm should an even more severe petrochem drought strike like it did during the 70s.

Your view is outdated. What happens in one country effects the rest of the world. America has a depression and millions world wide lose there jobs. China has lack disease control measures and a new potentially disastrous disease spreads world wide. Iran domestically funds groups which uses those funds for international acts of terrorism. The sudan builds a dam on the nile and Egypt loses its main source of water. There are international issues which play important roles in the world. We cannot just say stay out of each others domestic politic because disaster in one place in the world can mean disaster everywhere now. The world is to interconnected for that type of thinking. Ignoring these types of things will just lead to conflict. International cooperation is necessary. I do not want my family starving because of what some nut job around the world decided was best.

 

I am not going to argue about carbon tax. But as a rule in general the view that outsiders should have no say is truely outdated, we live in a time of global problems which cannot be solved without international cooperation/coercion. We cannot just sit back and allow everyone to do what they want, what is good for one does not mean it is good for the whole..

Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
No animal shall wear clothes.
No animal shall sleep in a bed.
No animal shall drink alcohol.
No animal shall kill any other animal.
All animals are equal.


RatDog
atheist
Posts: 573
Joined: 2008-11-14
User is offlineOffline
Kapkao wrote:Problem: they

Kapkao wrote:

Problem: they have to actually want to stop using fossil fuels first. Apparently, some here believe it is acceptable to socially engineer such a preference, and at that, using international agencies. The glorious ends justify the means, and what have you.

I do not find it acceptable. At that, I don't believe foreigners should have a say in how one nation (ANY nation) should conduct its domestic policy; only people actually living in a said country should have a say. I have no intention to tell people from around the world what laws are valid and which laws are not. I'd feel a lot better if my government would bother themselves with following suit.

How Austrailia chooses to conduct its domestic affairs should be none of my fucking business. But it's relevant, because it represents how numerous other nations would like my nation to behave. I think the phrase "You don't pay my taxes; GTFO!" should be used every single time a foreign politician or internet newbie from Europe wants to nudge us "in the right direction", and has all these seemingly bright ideas of how we "should" go about it.

 

In any case, back to the subject... the best we can do to reduce our dependency won't prevent economic cataclysm should an even more severe petrochem drought strike like it did during the 70s.

 

I don't really see why people can't have opinions about how things "should" be.  It's a little annoying sometimes to listen to people you disagree with, but if annoying was the worst of the world’s problems we would be in great shape.  

Using force is a different issue, but we live in a world that is full of force and I don't see how that can change.  As long as one person is willing to use force it will continue to be an issue.     Countries “should” avoid using force against each other because war sucks, and it's expensive.  Still, in this global economy it's hard to avoid stepping on each other’s toes.  Although what’s happening seems a little less like stepping on each other’s toes, and a little more like economic warfare.  

In regards to climate change I don't really think humanity is going to stop it.  People are going to keep burning fossil fuels because fossil fuels bring wealth, and people like wealth.  Even when people put laws in place to try and slow it down it only ends up shifting the problem to someplace else and we all share one atmosphere.  

In regards to oil the supply is going to be a problem.  Some countries will prepare and it will be a little easier for them, and others are going to suffer more.  The poorest countries are going to suffer the most.   The oil production hasn't been increasing much in recent years, and demand is increasing very fast.  Especially in places like China and India.  Oil and food prices are both high, and they might stay that way for a while.  It's not looking like good times ahead, but hopefully I'm wrong.  I guess whatever will be will be.  No sense worrying too much about thing outside of my control.  

 


Kapkao
atheistSuperfan
Kapkao's picture
Posts: 4121
Joined: 2010-01-12
User is offlineOffline
RatDog wrote:Kapkao

RatDog wrote:

Kapkao wrote:

Problem: they have to actually want to stop using fossil fuels first. Apparently, some here believe it is acceptable to socially engineer such a preference, and at that, using international agencies. The glorious ends justify the means, and what have you.

I do not find it acceptable. At that, I don't believe foreigners should have a say in how one nation (ANY nation) should conduct its domestic policy; only people actually living in a said country should have a say. I have no intention to tell people from around the world what laws are valid and which laws are not. I'd feel a lot better if my government would bother themselves with following suit.

How Austrailia chooses to conduct its domestic affairs should be none of my fucking business. But it's relevant, because it represents how numerous other nations would like my nation to behave. I think the phrase "You don't pay my taxes; GTFO!" should be used every single time a foreign politician or internet newbie from Europe wants to nudge us "in the right direction", and has all these seemingly bright ideas of how we "should" go about it.

 

In any case, back to the subject... the best we can do to reduce our dependency won't prevent economic cataclysm should an even more severe petrochem drought strike like it did during the 70s.

 

I don't really see why people can't have opinions about how things "should" be.  It's a little annoying sometimes to listen to people you disagree with, but if annoying was the worst of the world’s problems we would be in great shape. 

Tapey and Ratdog: This isn't about disagreeing with someone who disagrees with me. This is mild irritation from reading people who, over and over, think they know everything about what I should do with my time and resources because they live in the Netherlands. Germany, Denmark, Poland. France. Switzerland usually <insert joke about WWII>. They do not know that, any more than I know what the best course of action is for them. I can't know. I can know that climate change can wreck certain portions of the world's civilization if it progresses on it's current path. I also know that we'll adapt anyways because that is what our species does best, and that the Earth has been as warm and even less glaciated than it is now, yet there was none of the five major Phanerozoic extinction events to go along with that, by itself. There have been a few extinction events from the Earth suddenly getting very cold. At least, that is what my knowledge currently tells me.

Quote:
Using force is a different issue, but we live in a world that is full of force and I don't see how that can change.

 

Again, RE: Tapey and ratdog; do either of you know what America does with bumblefuck concepts like international cooperation/coercion at present? What it has been doing since the start of the cold war? It has been pursuing aggressive realpolitik, which means it babysits everyone else as long as it believes it can get something out of it -including outright stealing from non-Americans. Sell guns to Sierra Leone, because they can put said guns to better use than we can at present. Put people like Osama and the Taliban in power, because they will fight soviets. It seemed like good idea at the time. Decades later, they become our enemies, a bunch of shit goes down that didn't need to (9/11), and boom we declare war on them.

I hate to put words in people's mouths, but is this the sort of thing you want more of? No one in the world is in a position to say "no" to us. No one; not the EU, not Amnesty International, not NATO, and certainly not the gimpy fucking UN. This is the route that internationalism has taken us down; we babysit everyone. You misbehave, and you get bombs dropped on you, whether  it is "fair" or not. You try to "coerce" us, and we put sanctions on you. You put us in a nuclear arms race, and we'll make a point of gaining "first strike" capability, then contemplate using it on you. Frankly, I do not approve of being told what to do by someone who isn't American, and I don't care for it much even when the person giving ultimatums to me is in fact American. But once again, the illusion of global law & order must be maintained, even if everyone is jerking off everyone else diplomatically. Just like with advertising, you need more internationalism to support internationalism, and then more internationalism to support that internationalism, and eventually you have something of a monster wildfire that has spun out of control (U.S government.)

Believe me, I'd rather my government not steal from and bully everyone else simply because my government has an addiction to global power that it has had since WWI, and possibly the Spanish-American war. A couple of memes like "GTFO and take your FAIL with you" come to mind when considering how much of a joke internationalism has ultimately become. I would rather other nations (bureaucrats, mostly) not attempt  to tell me what to do, because I'll give them the finger each and every time. They can't touch me anyhow, if I decide to let them have a whiff of my ass.

“A meritocratic society is one in which inequalities of wealth and social position solely reflect the unequal distribution of merit or skills amongst human beings, or are based upon factors beyond human control, for example luck or chance. Such a society is socially just because individuals are judged not by their gender, the colour of their skin or their religion, but according to their talents and willingness to work, or on what Martin Luther King called 'the content of their character'. By extension, social equality is unjust because it treats unequal individuals equally.” "Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood (2003)