Lord Herbert wrote on Aug 16^th, 2013 at 4:28pm:


Ah. You've raised an interesting point.

The only people I have ever met who are NOT paranoid about their nationality are people from the English-speaking countries.

It's only You Ethnics who tense up with paranoid suspicion if someone should ask where you come from. The reason: you have your traditional enemies, going back centuries.

Lord Herbert wrote on Aug 15^th, 2013 at 8:49am:


Mnemonic wrote on Aug 16^th, 2013 at 1:55pm:


Good lord, no.

Each summer when India and Pakistan's national cricket teams arrive in the UK to play the 'British' ~ they are swamped by hysterical crowds of fifth generation immigrant Indians and Pakistanis carrying them triumphantly on their shoulders in various parts of England.

Same when the West Indian cricketing team arrives. People born in Britain in the 1950's greet them as visiting heroes, and barrack for them all the way through the summer months.

If a war came, half of Britain's population would have to be shipped off to the Canadian wilderness for internment until the cessation of hostilities.

Mnemonic wrote on Aug 16^th, 2013 at 1:55pm:


Ah-HUH! Now I know where you come from, Grasshopper!

Anybody else would have assumed I had lived in Hong Kong, and had learned to speak a little Cantonese. But you nominated north China ~ an odd choice for a Gweilo to have spent as a child.

I lived in both Shanghai and Hong Kong, but as for more information... well, first you have to snatch these 5 fresh testicles from my hand, Grasshopper...

(Sorry, I'm reading a book about Hannibal Lecter at the moment, and ... ) 

Torpedo wrote on Aug 15^th, 2013 at 2:22pm:


I can see how your experience shapes your views. Maybe I could share my own and tell you how I got my views.

I had a midlife crisis at around the same time that the 2008 global financial crisis hit. What I saw around me was a competition between people on how much wealth they could accumulate. If you've read about the story of the sub-prime mortgage crisis in America, you'd know what I mean. Some people were buying maybe 3 or 4 houses and getting home loans and mortgages for them, even though some of them didn't have a job. You'd think the Americans had gone mad.

These people were borrowing huge amounts of money and overspending, pretending they were rich when they weren't. They didn't want their friends to think less of them. Eventually after accumulating huge mountains of debt, the economy collapsed because the banks weren't making any money from all this debt. People weren't paying them back. It wasn't just the USA, however. Europe was doing it too. I wouldn't be surprised if it happened here.

Ok, I mentioned debt, but that wasn't what I thought was the main problem. For me the problem was people overspending. The more you want, the bigger the lifestyle, the more you spend. It wasn't just a case of people living beyond their means. They just wanted too much.

At the time this was going on and I was having my "midlife crisis," I had been having a "competition" and "rivalry" with my high school "friend." We eventually stopped being friends as a result. I got sick of the competition, of working so hard and comparing myself with another person and that's what caused my "midlife crisis." My academic performance had fallen to a low. When Lehman Brother's collapsed and the financial crisis hit, there seemed to be a similarity. The USA and Europe seemed like they had driven themselves to exhaustion, just hoping to beat the competition, just like me with my studies. I had no energy left, just like the USA and Europe.

Getting to the 98th percentile in high school didn't matter anymore. I was just a bum like everyone else. I was a failure and I felt humiliated. I started dissociating myself from my "yuppie" high school peers and people who didn't have a university degree. I got my degree and finished my course, but the marks at the end weren't good and I pretended it wasn't worth anything anymore.

I felt like I was sinking into the deepest "hell," I would ever know. But I knew that if there was hell on earth, there was always something deeper, always someone less fortunate than myself. Well, of course there was ............. we all know that ............. but if I truly loved myself, truly cared about myself, I would care about these people too. Every time I saw them, I was looking in the mirror.

I got on a bus one day and two teenagers came up to me telling me they were homeless and asked for money. I handed it over. It was my first experience of how life must have been like for homeless people. Some 30 minutes later, the two boys needed to get off and the door didn't open properly. One of the boys got angry and kicked the door. He got into an altercation the bus driver and hit the bus from the outside. It wasn't casual swearing, the boy who kicked the door and hit the bus was obviously in distress and quite emotional. He was really angry. The other boy kept apologising for him.

In the months that followed, I got more requests for money from people on public transport, and it seemed like they weren't asking anyone else first. It seemed like a coincidence. How would they know I was going to say yes? If there was a God and he knew what I was thinking and knew I had had a midlife crisis and getting in touch with my "inner hell," it probably wasn't a coincidence.

I did meet another angry homeless person recently in the city's CBD. He got angry because my friend told me not to give him money and it started a fight. When my friend and I talked about it afterwards, he had a similar view to what you have. There are some differences, though: he was never homeless, but he isn't keen on the idea of people getting money for free.

I think that will be all for now ..... There was a bit more that I wanted to say, but I need to go somewhere.

Mnemonic wrote on Aug 16^th, 2013 at 4:46pm:

no, it's just your assumption. I was not homeless, I worked for my "shelter", but only if you could call it that and old stinky couch was my bed for number of years. All at my expense.
Many people go through it for a while, it's ok.
Some people also don't have family, it's also ok, I am not whining, just frustrated how so many swindlers get what they don't really need.
And no, I am not against dole, just against corruption

Torpedo wrote on Aug 16^th, 2013 at 7:37pm:


Me too.

Lisa Jones wrote on Aug 16^th, 2013 at 1:59pm:


well lisa if it is a stop gap measure it should stop and employment should be provide to the unemployed person. they have served their time unemployed, now its time for a job. after all what is a unemployed person. A unemployed person is a trained and skilled worker not let work by a society that doesn't care about its people.

the fight for our rights continues.

the point lisa is there are jobs out there, there are employers screaming for workers in all industrys, why do we have unemployment.

because the jobs aren't being made available to the unemployed job seekers, and the unemployed job seekers are not being considered for them.

Mnemonic wrote on Aug 17^th, 2013 at 1:54am:

No no, it was about abolishing support for private schooling altogether, not just about the "rich", as much as I remember. And just because the conversation ended, doesn't mean I agreed.
I clearly remember your views on it - ban it, and give it to public schools, and if anyone chooses private it's their problem.
You also emphatically inculcated where I should be better off, such is being better off at public school.
But I may have mixed things up, who knows

One of the best posts I've seen so far on this subject.

Thats not even australian

Thing is there could be other reasons - pplmay know about her firm and know better than to go there or maybe they got other jobs or maybe its the jobseek place sending the wrong ppl. Who knows. Who cares. Its not australia.

SOB