At this time of year, I tend to look back and try to think what historical turning points have happened. The one that comes to mind is dated 08/08/08 - the Georgian conflict. To me it marks the end of the relatively short historical period which I would characterise as "Unipolar", with the US as the only global police with teeth and some level of morality. It is back to a relative free-for-all in warfare, and in trade.
As far as domestic politics goes, I am not too impressed with the changes to the baby bonus system, even though personally I still get the same amount of money albeit at a considerably later date. My preference was for family payments to start *When a pregnancy is registered* both for the practical reason that you need to buy stuff for the baby before it is born, and that it moves more towards vision X by considering the unborn baby as a person, at the time that the mother considers it to be at the least. This is one of the most win-win of the steps towards vision X, and a new years resolution is to put it to the public somehow in 2009.
4 comments:
Well, obviously I expect I was waiting for today, when there were these two starkly half-empty and half-full takes on the portents of the recent Imperial Progress for the unipolar world. They are both on the 'right' edge of their respective newspapers, and they both survey a whole slew of recent events, one seeing unmistakable signs that the rest of the free world is now on its own, the other than under a cloak of rhetoric Windrip is continuing the same policies as Bush the Greater.
I've commented on 'vision X' a fair bit elsewhere, I think. Sadly, I bags the baby bonus as one of many bits of middle-class welfare to fall by the wayside as we enter leaner and hungrier times.
PS: Sorry to overreact before. You are entitled to use capital letters and multiple exclamation points against me. Everyone else does, after all. *sniff*
PPS: I still think representative 'democracy' makes it easier to make bad laws, since you only have to fool a few stupid people, while with real democracy you have to fool a *lot* of stupid people. You can fool all of the people some of the time, etc. etc.
Working backwards, this took Clam years of thought and went through countless revisions. Unsurprising that it had no comments though, since probably none of his readers were interested in that sort of thing at all.
while with real democracy you have to fool a *lot* of stupid people
Stupid people only have to fool themselves.
I was interested enough to read the whole thing through, with thought!
I learnt some things about the Bahai, too, but never could think of anything to add, yet.
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