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notices and features - Date published:
5:30 pm, June 9th, 2025 - 13 comments
Categories: Daily review -
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Daily review is also your post.
This provides Standardistas the opportunity to review events of the day.
The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).
Don’t forget to be kind to each other …
I'd not heard of Blue Labour before (in the UK), but this is interesting. They challenge neoliberalism, support socialism, want to reorient around the working class as it is today, and are somewhat socially conservative. Patriotic and internationalist and anti-globalist. Their socialism is "both radical and conservative". Pro-participatory democracy, anti-oligarchy. Pro-union and working class involvement in managing society.
https://www.bluelabour.org/about-us
Obviously I would have some problems with some of their social positions, and they do seem to favour small state involvement in welfare, but possibly more from the pov of workers' empowerment?
And in the NZ context I wouldn't see them as a replacement for the left wing parties. But imagine if we had this instead of NZF.
More here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Labour
Haven't read this yet, off to cook dinner first.
https://labourlist.org/2025/06/blue-labour-jonathan-hinder-david-smith-connor-naismith/
Cool, eh?
Could be the zeitgeist intervening again to do a switcheroo. It often scales up a social trend using an innovative group catalyst as what Gladwell called the tipping point in his best-seller of '99.
I assumed it was bouncing off chaos theory from a decade earlier so took me a decade to get around to reading it, but no it was a case of a clever journo doing social science theorising apparently unaware of the scientific basis. They used imagery like a grain of sand setting off a sand-slide as trigger.
Anyway the tipping point for mass transformation has since been measured at 25% or so according to several books I've read in recent years…
And they could out NZ First NZF?
Blue Labour
@blue_labour
Blue Labour: for national sovereignty and a covenant with the British people
[…]
https://xcancel.com/blue_labour/status/1914591256925077747
Yeah, #BlueLabour seems like one of those astroturf organisations. A lot like NZF.
Remember this from Peters, when it suited him?
https://briefingpapers.co.nz/the-future-of-new-zealand-capitalism/
Now look at him. Organising and promoting imported culture wars, railing against Maori with scribble faces, denying transgender people humanity. Hardly, "more human".
Peters is a very talented grifter. Maybe the people running Blue Labour are as well, but Peters hates the left, and Blue Labour are way more left than Peters ever was.
I said,
But sure, let's continue to ignore working class people, and settle for Peters fucking up the left for as long as he lives. Maybe our luck will change after that.
One News informed us that Gavin Newsom responded to Trump's arrest threat by saying "Come and get me, tough guy!" I sought online confirmation but couldn't see any. If true, Trump ought to respond "Nah, I'll just send someone."
Could be a way for both of them to make history, huh? Since the protestors are trashing vehicles, the right will expect law & order to take control somehow, but who organises that could be in the grey area currently. I can tell you from personal experience that when I was stateside in '78 most travellers in my generation I met worked illegally since it was apparently considered normal – part of the local west coast culture.
Trump has crossed the line with this:
Gav is likely to succeed Trump as president so could be Trump is testing his mettle.
One thing I like about cultural, political, societal, environmental clashes is the imagery produced. It's a powerful and detailed archive of our times:
https://www.1news.co.nz/2025/06/09/protests-intensify-in-la-after-trump-deploys-hundreds-of-national-guard-troops/
Middle photo with the sign, "No-one's illegal on stolen land".
Now, our own best debater ever, David Seymour, could not defeat this motion in the Oxford debate. He failed because it's not possible to argue against.
Musk sucking up
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1931896482355171587