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| Teal and red numbers respectively indicate booths with two-party majorities for the LNP and Labor. Click for larger image. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room. |
Leichhardt consists of the northernmost part of Queensland, including Cairns at its southern extremity along with Cape York Peninsula and the Torres Strait Islands. Naturally marginal Cairns provides it with about two-thirds of its voters, the remainder coming from conservative-leaning rural areas along the coast immediately to the north, and Labor-voting indigenous communities beyond. The electorate ranks sixth out of the nation’s 150 electorates for the highest proportion of indigenous persons, behind the two Northern Territory electorates, neighbouring Kennedy, Durack in northern Western Australia, and Parkes in interior New South Wales. Another distinguishing features is a large number of voters over 55, reflecting the popularity of Cairns as a retirement haven.
The electorate was created with the expansion of parliament in 1949, prior to which its area was mostly accommodated by Herbert until 1934 and Kennedy thereafter. Herbert and then Kennedy were in Labor hands from 1928 to 1949, but Leichhardt was narrowly won by the Country Party at its inaugural election, which saw the Menzies government come to power. However, Labor won the seat at the subsequent election in 1951, and it remained in the party fold until David Thomson gained it for the National Country Party amid Labor’s statewide debacle of 1975. Warren Entsch became the seat’s first Liberal member when he unseated Labor’s Peter Dodd with the defeat of the Keating government in 1996, polling 31.8% to the Nationals candidate’s 20.4%. Entsch suffered only a 0.5% swing at the 1998 election, compared with a statewide swing of 7.2%, and subsequently built his margin up to double figures with swings of 2.3% in 2001 and 3.6% in 2004.
Entsch’s local popularity was further illustrated when he bowed out temporarily at the 2007 election, Labor gaining the seat in his absence with a towering swing of 14.3%, the second biggest of that election after Forde in Brisbane’s outer south. The result also underscored the local eclipse of the Nationals, whose candidate polled only 4.0%. Incoming Labor member Jim Turnour managed only a single term before falling victim at the 2010 election to the combined impact of a statewide Labor rout, which cost them seven out of their existing 15 Queensland seats, and the return from retirement of Warren Entsch. Labor’s margin of 4.1% was easily accounted for by a swing of 8.6%, to which Entsch added a further 1.2% at the 2013 election.
Warren Entsch came to politics after serving in the Royal Australian Air Force from 1969 to 1978, then working as a maintenance fitter and welder, real estate agent, farmer and grazier and company director. After winning election in 1996 and re-election in 1998, he was promoted to parliamentary secretary but thereafter rose no higher, and went to the back bench upon announcing his retirement citing family reasons in 2006. During his subsequent three-year interregnum he was director of Cairns construction company CEC Group and the Australian Rainforest Foundation, but talk soon emerged of a political comeback, first in relation to the 2009 state election and then for his old seat. With this accomplished he served for a term as the Coalition’s chief whip, before relinquishing the position to Philip Ruddock after the 2013 election victory.
Reality is the evidence it exists – stuff happens every day.
That stuff happens because of what appears to be an observable chain of causality.
If there is evidence of causality there is evidence of karma because they are the same thing. Karma is a sanskrit word that means causality.
My source for this is my father, who was a Hindu priest as a young man and read sanscritt and several other languages and was an internationally respected translator.
According to this site –
http://www.tricycle.com/p/176
– there is no verifiable quote on Buddhism which can be traced back to Einstein.
The closest one gets (according to the site cited) is a quote about Buddha —
[What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses, and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the enquiring and constructive mind.]
Wikipedia (I know, but I’m giving it as another source…) says..
[As a Buddhist and physicist myself, I’d be delighted if this very widely-cited quote really could be attributed to Einstein, but regrettably there is no evidence that it can. It sometimes appears with a reference to Albert Einstein: The Human Side (Princeton University Press, 1954), but there is never a page reference – for the simple reason that the quote does not appear anywhere in that book.]
New thread.
jules
If your argument is that karma is simple causality then it reinforces my argument that karma as a religious tenet is superfluous. Why not just be a Causalityist instead of a Buddhist?
By taking away a cause, the result will also disappear. From this follows the Buddhist path to end suffering and existence in samsara.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theravada
Herein lies a remedy for easing our present misfortunes…removing the Abbott Government…I may become an adherent the guy with the enigmatic smile and a splendid pot belly…
Pressed submit too early.
…
So in effect saying there is no scientific evidence for karma is just stupid.
Its like those fundy Christians who say Islam worships a false God called Allah cos they don’t call God God.
You may as well say there is no evidence for Yīnguǒ guānxì.
Well, I said “apparently” because I have heard Einstein said it, but I haven’t read it.
I heard it was in his “Autobiographical notes”. Whether or not he said it doesn’t really matter all that much so I have never tracked down the book to read it myself!
http://www.buddhism-and-the-american-dream.com/?p=519
“If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.”
(no direct quote reference though!)
OMG the Young Ones is on Gem!
[However, you should understand that the Buddha use almost the identical set of sentences to describe the operations of karma that Newton used to describe the operations of physics (i.e. cause and effect). It is completely consistent with a unified theory of how the Universe operates, but it cannot be proven as such, just observed.]
What an appalling load of piffle!
Buddhism has contributed about as much to our understanding of the physical world as the study of physics has contributed to the self delusion that is the concept of Karma.
Excellent article on US neocons, a must read for anying interetsed in US matters
[One reason neoconservatism survives is that its members don’t care how wrong they’ve been, or even about right and wrong itself. True to their Trotskyite and Straussian roots, neoconservatives have always been willing to play fast and loose with the truth in order to advance political goals. We know that they were willing to cook the books on intelligence and make outrageously false claims in order to sell the Iraq war, for example, and today they construct equally false narratives that deny their own responsibility for the current mess in Iraq and portray their war as a great success that was squandered by Obama. And the entire movement seems congenitally incapable of admitting error, or apologizing to the thousands of people whose lives they have squandered or damaged irreparably.]
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/06/20/being_a_neocon_means_never_having_to_say_you_re_sorry_dick_cheney_william_kristol
Pastafarians also have benevolent bent too, so add them to the ‘exceptions’ list in terms of pleasant non-nasty religions.
If Karma is just a synonym for causality then it is a useful concept. But why noy just call it causality and have done with it.
If Karma is used to attribute suffering and inequality to misdeeds in a past life it is bollocks.
[Why not just be a Causalityist instead of a Buddhist?]
Because Buddhists did it first.
BTW I’m not a Buddhist (well not consciously anyway). I do have some philosophical disagreement with the idea of stepping off the wheel of karma. I’m not a hindu or any particular religion. I’m not particularly atheist either or even that rational. But it seems to me following Buddhism properly has more in common with atheism than any religion.
If you wanted you could interpret that bit of Theravada briefly posted @ 655 in the last thread as a great reason to wipe out all life on earth tomorrow.
Anyway science, and scientific knowledge isn’t enough on its own as a basis of how to live life. Its not even the most accurate way to describe reality. Thats what poetry is for.
Its incredibly useful for building stuff tho.
[What do you base this claim on?]
It’s my evaluation of the positioning of religion in human affairs, and I would have thought a rather uncontroversial one. It’s a rare religion indeed that stops at merely describing the construction of the world around us; the point of knowing the nature of things is invariably to use that knowledge to influence that way in which you live life.
[That just doesn’t make any sense at all unless the religion in question says something like ‘believe in X and you will never fail in any way ever again.’ ]
I wasn’t suggesting that criticism along the lines of “this one individual is a moral failure, therefore the entire religion is clearly bunk” – clearly not fair. On the other hand pointing to a widespread pattern of failures by individuals does tend to fairly bring into question whether the religion is succeeding in guiding the lives of its adherents in a positive way.
[And if you are not a believer in a religion why would you be judging it at all?]
I consider myself an interested stakeholder where any system of philosophy or religion is guiding the ethics and morals of those sharing a planet with me.
There’a bit missing from my post @ 664. Between Buddhism having stuff in common with atheism and the reference to world destruction was a spiel about context I accidentally deleted.
I hope I didn’t imply that atheists want to destroy the world or something else just as silly.
post 661…sprocket…re neo-cons
——————–
The worst of the neo-cons,as your post says, have a view that lauds the American Empire ,and the whole military machine
They have no real views or interests in domestic affairs
There is also a large zionist component…men like Woolfowitz,and others who in the Bush admin exercised great power and thought they could mould the M East to their wishes.. any lie would do to cause a war .. as with Iraq….and they served the wishes of Israel too..but.all turned to dust now I suspect
JW @ 663
Because karma is more than just causality, it is used with the idea, or perhaps in the context that the individual is an agent of causality. That all your actions have consequences, many of which you won’t foresee, some that you won’t ever know about. People often refer to causality as an impersonal thing, but the idea of karma is associated with you as a person. Its your actions that will have consequences for yourself and others in the same way you suffer or benefit from the consequences of other peoples actions, or your own.
There are all sorts of mystical add ons, and cultural baggage, but thats the bare bones of what the word karma means. Its impossible to translate philosophical concepts word for word, words have subtext and context – saying that karma is just mystical bollocks is a complete misunderstanding of what it actually means. But then so is thinking that sins in a past life are revisited by illness or disability in this one. Karma is not a scientific concept. But it sits well with a scientific understanding of the world.
If some rationalist wants to develop some practical philosophy of life and how to deal with grief and suffering in the process they’ll develop some idea that recognises our actions have consequences and the choices we make do matter. What they call it is irrelevant but it won’t be mystical bollocks* either.
You guys must be bored out of your wits to be philosophising about matters religious ….
Anyway, this may have been raised before or not. I’ve not been able to visit here much today.
On AM(WA)today Abbott, speaking about that poor wretch in the Egyptian jail said the most incredibly stupid thing I’ve ever heard from an Australian politician (OK, you may possibly have heard something more stupid, but I doubt it).
He said words to the effect that he had spoken to the current Egyptian despot, and that he believed it would all turn out all right because he (the despot) had attended university in the UK and the USA and therefore should understand about the Rule Of Law.
What an insulting thing to say, whether accurate or not. I suspect, anyway, that the despot is twice as intelligent, three times as well educated, and ten times as urbane as our current cretin.
The implication is that Egyptians are inferior to Westerners, that the Egyptian head of state controls the judiciary, that he would decree that they would act capriciously and vengefully, and, except for our cretin’s intervention,in a manner which would otherwise breach principles of the rule of law.
All perfectly possible, but why insult someone when you are seeking his mercy? Does he think the Egyptian embassy will not report his idiocies to Cairo?
Perhaps not …
Now he will have to crawl over broken glass to achieve something that any back bencher could have accomplished simply by keeping a civil tongue in his head.
The family of the guy facing seven years of misery must be fuming.