The Gora

"Stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe." - Thomas Sowell

@Rickersam3 Q: What do you call 100 lawyers at the bottom of Sydney Harbour? A: A good start.

How would a tax on lawyers poll?

@themetresgained @parnellpalme Ahem

@parnellpalme no libertarians left to apologise to; they've mostly become MAGA PHON populists.

I’m starting to feel the same way….

@db_econ Fact Check: TRUE

@gorakaunhai the fact so few people move from Sydney to Melbourne given how much cheaper it is, is very strong evidence of Sydney's enormous superiority

It's really pretty remarkable that none of the many planning researchers in the country have thought to quantify how planning controls vary across Australia's cities. That changed this morning. The zoning atlas is an immense public service, have a look.

So many ways to reply, so few characters. Let's go with:

Damn. Was a huge fan and - just like Russell Crowe - an honorary Australian. RIP Sam Neill

Mrs Gora sent me this link last night (and was nagging me to watch it this morning). I'm starting to think she is an Australian nationalist 😂 youtu.be/5zOOYNGptnI?si…

@parnellpalme 🤣

I’d recommend this column by Paul Sakkal, but the truth is, I’m jealous he had this insight before I did. So what I’m saying is, definitely don’t read this piece about how Chalmer set out to make us richer and then gave up, because redistribution is much easier. 👇

If @EliLake’s account is accurate, Angela Davis’s selective solidarity—and the hypocrisy beneath it—reminded me immediately of my own experience in American academia. When I returned to the United States in 2016 after years as a political prisoner in Iran—the longest-held American citizen there, including nearly a year in solitary confinement in Evin Prison under the IRGC, for peacefully promoting human rights, democracy, and an open society—I ended up at a prestigious Ivy League university, where I was unfortunate to find myself among a cluster of faculty concentrated largely in the humanities, Middle East studies, and parts of the softer social sciences. (NOTE: I am NOT generalizing about every faculty member or department across the university.) What struck me most was not simply that I disagreed with their politics, though I often did. Nor was it only how little many of them seemed to understand about the real political world beyond the sloganeering vocabulary of their own disciplines. I can tolerate ideological disagreement. I can even tolerate foolishness. And there was plenty of it: puerile ideas about socialism, romantic fantasies about revolutionary politics, and astonishing—sometimes dangerous—ignorance about organizations such as Hamas. What I found much harder to tolerate was the hypocrisy. These were people who spoke endlessly about oppression, colonialism, indigenous land, migrants, racial injustice, capitalism, the “Global South,” and the suffering of distant peoples. But their solidarity was highly selective. It was most intense when directed toward people they would never have to know personally: migrants thousands of miles away at the southern border, or faceless “dark” populations somewhere in the so-called Global South, itself an increasingly useless abstraction. The farther away the victims, the easier the solidarity. The closer the sacrifice came to home, the thinner it became. I remember the reaction when a migrant shelter housing project was proposed inside the Brooklyn progressive bubble in Clinton Hill. Middle-class radicals, some living in multimillion-dollar brownstones, suddenly discovered the politics of “not in my backyard.” The housing crisis was urgent until the housing was to be built near them. And then there was me. An actual political prisoner from Iran—one of the few scholars in American academia with both academic expertise and firsthand experience of imprisonment by the Islamic Republic—interested almost no one. No one wanted to hear my story. Few showed much curiosity about Iranian political prisoners more broadly. And once it became clear that I would not vilify Israel, denounce the United States, or describe every Western institution as part of a neocolonial, white-supremacist, capitalist conspiracy, I was quietly marginalized. That was the overriding impression left on me: hypocrisy. An actual housing shortage mattered until someone proposed building housing next door. An actual political prisoner mattered only if he repeated the approved slogans. I did not.

My #Indian origin wife reiterated 3 things to me last night - she: 1. considers herself Australian & allegiance is to Aus 2. thinks there are too many Indians in the country now 3. thinks immigration levels are too high Bonus: She ♥️ @JNampijinpa Albo may get a surprise.

Forget Nolan's "The Diversity". If you want to see a genuinely good movie then watch en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satluj_(f…. It's *not* Bollywood, it's a serious work based on a real, tragic story. But you'll have to download it cos, well ... Modi (he recruited "Bitta" aka KPS Gill).

Never particularly liked Amnesty Int. however they used to pursue some genuine causes like that of Jaswant Singh Khalra (movie👇is 💯). But clearly in the last 15+ yrs they've become like virtually every other NGO - a rabid, idealogical project. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satluj_(f…

Climate change: the Swiss Army Knife of woke propaganda mongering.

@FSUofAustralia SMH 🤦‍♂️

The one person who thinks the Australian social media law is off to a good start! Of course, he is wrong. Now he's assuming children do what they are told. They'll be on those platforms (and worse), just without parental knowledge. That is certainly one way to 'change norms', but not for the better.

@parnellpalme @GrayConnolly @clairlemon Er, OK

@gorakaunhai @GrayConnolly @clairlemon The generation where the women get to be people and not be named after horses? 😜

This with @clairlemon and @parnellpalme should be excellent youtu.be/ZLVHR4y8Fts?si…

@parnellpalme I'm not the smartest guy, but I detect a smidgen of sarcasm, Ja genau?

Alison Pennington is, of course, completely correct. When goods are publicly owned they become much cheaper. In fact, so cheap they often don't exist at all, or in such shortage they're impossible to obtain for everyone but the apparachiks. But don't take it from me with my East German heritage. What would I know. Why not find out from the UK's NHS, or the states in Germany where childcare is free.

@MarkoMatvikov Fair enough. FYI you are preaching to the converted in this account 😉

@gorakaunhai I generally know who I can influence and who I can't - and I'm talking here to the portion of his audience that has some capacity to think rationally.

The Greens have zero credibility on this issue. They relentlessly defend high immigration - which drives up demand for housing. They relentlessly push for higher property taxes - which increases costs for housing. They do deals with Labor for changes that'll deliver less rentals and less housing overall. If you freeze rents, people will stop putting money into rental properties. Landlords will sell, less will get built and renting will become even harder. You cannot fix a shortage by fueling demand while deterring supply.

I hate the quality of most tech posts on Medium. The clickbait titles are often turned up to 11, and the content is mostly regurgitated and/or obvious slop. But the worst part is the daily, epic deluge of them - there is simply no way to keep up.