Open mike 11/07/2023

Written By: - Date published: 6:00 am, July 11th, 2023 - 35 comments
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35 comments on “Open mike 11/07/2023 ”

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  1. Ad 1
    11 July 2023 at 9:17 am

    Curious to see Turkey acceding to allow Sweden to join NATO, dropping previous demands, right on the eve of the NATO summit.

    And also proposing that Ukraine start the membership process even while there is a hot war in process.

    Anyone got any insight into what is changing within Erdogan's thinking?

    • Belladonna 1.1
      11 July 2023 at 9:41 am

      This analysis seems to suggest it's more of the same – Erdogan wanting to position Turkey as a middleman in the conflict – working (and trading) with both sides.

      https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/expressions/turkey-walking-tightrope-between-nato-russia-and-ukraine

    • weston 1.2
      11 July 2023 at 9:48 am

      Erdogan's pissed Russia's cramping his style militarily in Syria ?

      • Francesca 1.2.1
        11 July 2023 at 12:00 pm

        Wiley old Erdogan would have used the utmost leverage to exchange his approval for being accepted into the EU (The EU has been holding back for years)

        He'll be wanting Kurds extradited and the treacherous Swedes will turn them in quick as a wink.

        You can bet plenty of other concessions were granted that NATO and the US will not want to be publicly known

        And then down the track he'll be shafting the Americans and EU all over again

        • Tiger Mountain 1.2.1.1
          11 July 2023 at 3:36 pm

          A fair summary indeed!

          Filthy Erdogan, a lot have not forgotten his 2016 purge and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of teachers, public servants and political opponents.

    • Dennis Frank 1.3
      11 July 2023 at 10:00 am

      There's clue here:

      On Monday morning, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters that Sweden’s membership of NATO should be linked to Turkey’s membership of the European Union.

      “First, let’s clear Turkey’s way in the European Union, then let’s clear the way for Sweden, just as we paved the way for Finland,” Erdogan said.

      Erdogan also emphasized that “Turkey has been waiting at the gate of the European Union for over 50 years now,” and “almost all NATO member countries are European member countries.

      https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/10/europe/sweden-turkey-nato-summit-vilnius-analysis-intl-cmd/index.html”

      Turkey being first in the queue now, after joining it half a century back, pressures the process. Allowing Sweden to jump the queue not being a good look, I suspect a covert deal amongst the key players: unsuitable to announce that due to contingent factors.

    • Sanctuary 1.4
      11 July 2023 at 10:01 am

      Erdogan wants everyone to know Turkey isn't the sick man of Europe anymore. He is sending an unsubtle message of Russia's diminished power and status and Turkish aspiration as a big regional power not beholden to anyone particularly.

    • Mike the Lefty 1.5
      11 July 2023 at 1:14 pm

      In my opinion, NATO should never have let Turkey join in the first place. Erdogan seeks to be the force of reason and restraint but his poor record on human rights and Turkey's flawed democratic system hardly seem appropriate amongst Europe's western democracies.

      • alwyn 1.5.1
        11 July 2023 at 1:51 pm

        Turkey joined NATO in 1952. At the time Turkey was definitely on the Western side of the Cold War split and it was a fairly democratic and secular society. It had also sent troops to Korea to support the UN campaign there.

        Other countries can hardly have been expected to anticipate the return to the Islamist state that has been going on 70 years after the welcome it received to NATO.

  2. Dennis Frank 2
    11 July 2023 at 10:10 am

    Plot thickens:

    Russian President Vladimir Putin met Yevgeny Prigozhin five days after the Wagner mercenary boss led a failed mutiny, the Kremlin has revealed. The BBC's Russia Editor gets to grips with the latest twist in the Wagner saga. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66154912

    Prigozhin, who heads the mercenary group, was among 35 Wagner commanders invited to the meeting in Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov added. He said that President Putin had given an "assessment" of the Ukraine war effort and the mutiny. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66154909

    "The president gave an assessment of the company's actions on the front," Mr Peskov is quoted as saying by Interfax news agency. "He also gave assessment to the 24 June events. Putin listened to the commanders' explanations and suggested variants of their future employment and their future use in combat." According to the spokesman, Prigozhin told Mr Putin that Wagner unconditionally supported him.

    The BBC tracked Prigozhin's private jet flying to Belarus in late June, and returning to Russia the same evening. Meanwhile Gen Gerasimov has been seen in public for the first time since the mutiny. The video suggests that President Vladimir Putin has kept both Mr Shoigu and Gen Gerasimov in their posts.

    Just a spat between comrades. No big deal. Okay, some Wagnerians got offed by a rocket from behind, but that's just business as usual in Russia…

    • Adrian Thornton 2.1
      11 July 2023 at 6:37 pm

      "Just a spat between comrades. No big deal"….I hate to say this, but it seemed obvious that the initial "coup" that the Western media and many on this site just couldn't help themselves from frothing at the mouth about…was an internal dispute that would have little to no effect on the battlefront…

      But I guess it gave both those groups of people something to focus on, rather than having to acknowledge the depth and meaning of the disastrous Ukrainian counter offensive.

  3. Dennis Frank 3
    11 July 2023 at 11:11 am

    On the public mood, and the sampling thereof:

    So what are polls actually useful for? What are their limitations? How are they actually conducted, and how do the political movers and shakers translate this data into rhetoric and actions?

    Stuff’s daily podcast Newsable sat down with three experienced but very different operators in the polling ecosystem to gain an insight into these topics – and plenty more besides.

    [Farrar] what ISN’T a poll is me walking down the street and asking 100 random people, because that’s going to be determined by who I happen to walk into.

    The rightist is correct in the formal sense and incorrect in the informal. He would get reliable indication of the public mood on his random walk through the public. Depending on the framing he used (binary by default, tertiary if he got clever) he'd get a definite sense of the lie of the current political terrain.

    Farrar describes Curia’s process as a ‘multi-mode model’, a pleasingly alliterative phrase meaning the firm uses a mixture of landlines, mobile phones and online panels to conduct polling.

    See the triad there? Three tactical strategies. Curia grounds them within a coordinated system. That method combines them into an operational tetrad.

    “One of the key tricky things is, how many different types of quotas do you have? If you have a quota for everything, you have to phone 10,000 people to find the 22 year-old left-handed Pacific Islander living on Waiheke Island … so you tend to do gender, age, area, income, sometimes ethnicity, to try and get that.”

    Such methodic weighting of minorities is relative (strength ratios). Incorporating creative design into a system is pentadic (it adds in a 5th element).

    “People don’t like to back losers. But if you see this party is sliding in the polls, the media coverage goes negative … this is why politicians, especially, are very focussed on the polls – I used to joke that John Key’s interest in the polls made Gollum look like a quitter when it came to the Ring.” https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300924859/newsable-why-you-should-take-individual-polls-with-a-pinch-of-salt

    Speaking of which, did you notice the uncanny resemblance of Prigozhin to Gollum?

    • Belladonna 3.1
      11 July 2023 at 1:52 pm

      " [Farrar] what ISN’T a poll is me walking down the street and asking 100 random people, because that’s going to be determined by who I happen to walk into.

      The rightist is correct in the formal sense and incorrect in the informal.

      He would get reliable indication of the public mood on his random walk through the public. Depending on the framing he used (binary by default, tertiary if he got clever) he'd get a definite sense of the lie of the current political terrain."

      But, you'd get a very different sense of the lie of the current political terrain from 100 people randomly encountered during a walk in Epsom, compared to a walk in Manukau.
      The whole point of polling, is to try to correct for these obvious biases.

      Peter Dunne's point that political parties are both polling much more regularly, and not releasing their poll data – even to lower levels of the party internally – is also a useful perspective.
      We have certainly seen a lot of policy points floated by Labour, only to be swiftly reversed, when (apparently) polling data indicates their unpopularity (cycling bridge over the Auckland harbour, for example).

      Vance's point is that they are a snapshot in time – and should not be used as a predictive tool (despite the fact that this is just about how every journalist does use them).

      All of them are saying that a poll is rarely useful in isolation – but it can indicate a trend. So it's a sequence that matters, not an individual result.

      And, all of the polling for the last year – basically has the election too close to call…. So the excitement (or despair) generated on TS from a single poll result is rather pointless.

      • Dennis Frank 3.1.1
        11 July 2023 at 2:24 pm

        Yeah I agree with all that. Re the sample of 100 & local/regional variations in the result, that would be why stats usage converged on the standard thousand model – to reduce the effect down to a negligible amount.

        And sometimes the aggregators are on entirely different tracks. FiveThirtyEight and Real Clear Politics are the big players in this arena. They both use different methods. FiveThirtyEight weighs polls on a variety of factors and gradually reduces how much a poll impacts the average. RealClearPolitics just aggregates recent polling data.

        For the record, RealClearPolitics has a Republican bias and doesn’t include every available poll in their aggregation with little explanation behind their methodologies. I’d use FiveThirtyEight if you are going to obsess over an election for some reason. https://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2022/11/opinion-election-polling-data-problem-unc-chapel-hill

        Plus a nice graph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2023_New_Zealand_general_election

        • Belladonna 3.1.1.1
          11 July 2023 at 3:29 pm

          Yes – I use the Wiki graph and polling results as a baseline check everytime I see a new political poll. Is there a trend? Or are we continuing to bumble along with no clear advantage in any direction?

          • Dennis Frank 3.1.1.1.1
            11 July 2023 at 3:35 pm

            No clarity yet. We await the next msm poll but the leaks from Labour & National of their internal results may suggest a trend in the interim. First thing to look for is any confirmation of a rise for TMP since that would be a game-changer. Second thing is damage to Labour via repetitive own-goaling.

  4. joe90 4
    11 July 2023 at 11:39 am

    Scorched earth. It's what Russia does.

    Pricks won't be satisfied with mining the big stuff. They'll leave plenty of surprises with the intent of killing and injuring lots of Ukrainian civilians, particularly children, for decades to come.

    @BruckenRuski

    A Watery Thread on the economic loss to due to the destruction of Kakhovka Dam, HPP, Navigation Locks & Reservoir.

    I can't begin to piece together all aspects of the devastation, but this is my attempt to identify the under-recognized assets & systems impacted.
    1/x

    https://twitter.com/BruckenRuski/status/1669801914303758337

    Russian forces have begun to mine critical infrastructure in occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov reported via Telegram on July 9.

    "The enemy endangers the residents of the occupied territories," Fedorov said.

    The town of Melitopol was captured by Russians shortly after the start of the war and has since been occupied by Russian forces.

    In his post, Fedorov said that Russians mined a water main that supplies the town with drinking water. He said electrical grids were also mined, leaving the town's power and water supplies vulnerable.

    https://news.yahoo.com/melitopol-mayor-says-russians-mining-023640427.html

    • Adrian Thornton 4.1
      11 July 2023 at 7:05 pm

      As usual your links are just straight misinformation and propaganda…does it ever occur to you to had least try and inform yourself with some even semi legitimate information?

      …."Fedorov also said that Russian troops continue to mine the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, placing explosives in technical and machine rooms"

      "There's no evidence that Russia has rigged Ukraine's Zaporizhzhya plant with explosives, nuclear watchdog says"

      https://www.businessinsider.com/no-sign-russia-has-mined-zaporizhzhya-plant-nuclear-watchdog-says-2023-7

      While the whole time Ukraine is shelling the Russian occupied and controlled Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant…

  6. Dennis Frank 6
    11 July 2023 at 1:11 pm

    Whenever capitalist organisations feed upon consumers of their products, you get nirvana, plus a left-wing response:

    A recent Commerce Commission market study into the grocery sector found New Zealand supermarkets were earning $1 million a day in excess profits. Appointing a Grocery Commissioner was one of the multiple recommendations made by the study's authors.

    Labour's response is to do as the experts tell them: toss a bureaucrat at the problem.

    The acting Prime Minister says the newly-appointed Grocery Commissioner will monitor unfair behaviour in the sector. But Carmel Sepuloni told AM on Tuesday she hadn't seen the work programme for the Commissioner, so couldn't say how quickly he could effect change.

    How fast does a wizard do wizardry? As fast as the situation requires. A feasible flaw in the Labour strategy is that bureaucrats aren't necessarily wizards. How long to wait to see if the deployment works? As long as a piece of string is Labour's default stance.

    "That allows us to have this particular person in place who is monitoring, shining a light, highlighting where this is anything that is unfair or unreasonable that is occurring. That information can then inform regulatory change or legislative change but also the watchdog will have a role in making sure there is the right level of competition in the grocery sector," Sepuloni said of the Commissioner.

    The point is to simulate governance to create the impression in the minds of floating voters that Labour is solving the problem. Delegation via dickhead Don Quixote, tilting against the market cartel. Kicks the can down the road into the next electoral cycle.

    https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2023/07/carmel-sepuloni-hopes-grocery-commissioner-will-make-a-difference-but-doesn-t-know-how.html

  7. AB 7
    11 July 2023 at 1:52 pm

    A Grocery Commissioner is what you get when you believe that markets can serve the interests of everybody with a bit of tweaking to restore perfect competition. To think otherwise, you need to be able to see markets as cannibalistic, tending to disequilibrium and containing no in-built self-correcting mechanisms. That's a hell of a stretch for almost all of us.

    • UncookedSelachimorpha 7.1
      11 July 2023 at 4:27 pm

      Left to themselves, markets often concentrate power and wealth.

      What we need to see here is a big drop in business profits (supermarket profits, in this case). Not a message Labour or NAct will say out loud?

      The narrative that soaring business profits indicates all is well in the world, is sometimes false.

  8. joe90 8
    11 July 2023 at 1:56 pm

    Autism as a condition didn't exist until 1980, Aspergers until 1994, which means all those who were on the spectrum before those dates were labeled as suffering a multitude of other illnesses.

    But this vain, over-privileged former junkie uses the evolution of diagnostic psychiatry to claim that there's been a huge outbreak of autism.

    Dude’s a crank and a dangerous one at that.

    .

    If there is a madness, slight or otherwise, in Kennedy’s bid, it is not confined to his hubris. He is roiling with conspiracy theories: S.S.R.I.s like Prozac might be the reason for school shootings, vaccines cause autism. There are many. To prepare for the conversation, I listened to some of Kennedy’s podcast sessions with the likes of Bari Weiss, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, and Joe Rogan. I watched his marathon announcement speech and tuned in to all the hosannas he was getting from a peculiar amen corner that includes Steve Bannon, Jack Dorsey, and Tucker Carlson. In his 2021 book “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy accuses Fauci, who was then the nation’s top infectious-disease doctor, of helping to carry out “2020’s historic coup d’état against Western democracy.” (The book has blurbs from Carlson, Naomi Wolf, Alan Dershowitz, and Oliver Stone.)

    Kennedy’s habits of mind are MAGA-adjacent, but his manner differs from that of his Republican doppelgänger. Donald Trump is a bully—rude, swaggering, out to flatten his questioner under an avalanche of lies and volume. Kennedy is not rude. Rather, he is serenely convinced of his virtue and his interlocutor’s pitiful susceptibility to conventional wisdom. The experience of interviewing him and listening to his previous interviews, I found, was like settling in for a long train ride with a seemingly amiable stranger in the next seat. You ask a straightforward question and, an hour later, as you race by Thirtieth Street Station, in Philadelphia, he is still going on about the fraud of COVID vaccines and how he was unfairly “deplatformed” for spouting conspiracy theories. By the time you’ve pulled into Wilmington, he might be talking about how drugs known as poppers helped cause the AIDS epidemic, or how “toxic chemicals” might contribute to “sexual dysphoria” in children. As you head south, he is talking about being “censored” by Instagram, the F.B.I., and the Biden White House. New technologies like 5G towers and digital currencies are totalitarian instruments that could “control our behavior.” Wi-Fi causes “leaky brain.” After a while, you begin to wonder why you bought a ticket. But it’s too late. You’re pinned into the window seat.

    https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-alternative-facts-of-robert-f-kennedy-jr

    • Dennis Frank 8.1
      11 July 2023 at 5:04 pm

      We have a new Top Kennedy tho…

      What Kennedy does undeniably desire is public attention, something his presidential campaign is delivering, with critical profiles in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time, the Atlantic and a particularly damning and comprehensive one by Rebecca Traister in New York magazine.

      In just a couple of months, Kennedy has gone from “that anti-vaccine guy” to a staple of cable news coverage, making him The Top Kennedy for now, even if much of the publicity is bad.

      It’s always been a competitive clan, so he’s got to be happy that he now occupies a larger presence in the public mind than his cousin Caroline Kennedy, an ambassador to Japan and now Australia

      Rebel hotshot nowadays seems somewhat Trumpian. US media has noticed & been drawing the parallel for a while now.

      The political gene, which often comes bundled with the one for narcissism, never adequately thrives until fed by some form of adulation. The current Kennedy moment will soon be swamped by the Biden machine.

      Empire will strike back, and the moment will be peak Kennedy… https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/10/rfk-jr-has-already-won-00105442

  9. Shanreagh 9
    11 July 2023 at 2:39 pm

    Now here's a good reason to be competent in mathematics……you get to do fun stuff like this study.

    https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/300925157/the-perfect-swear-word-has-been-discovered-thanks-to-mathematics

    banger, banger. banger. bxxger, bxxxer. The last two are very similar to bugxer.

    My two bit critique makes me wonder if a key to a successful sounding swear word is a hard consonant in there somewhere…banger does not have this unless the ‘g’ is hard.

  10. ianmac 10
    11 July 2023 at 3:36 pm

    Oh dear! Mr Coughlan must have hated reporting on Labour' fall. Not.

    Labour’s support has crashed to its lowest point in at least four years in the latest Talbot Mills corporate poll, tumbling five points to 31 per cent, its lowest rating in that poll since at least 2019.

    National rose one point to 36 per cent, as did likely governing partner Act which is on 12 per cent.

    The Greens are up one point too, on 8 per cent.

    Chris Hipkins tumbling six points to 32 per cent in the Preferred Prime Minister poll.

    Christopher Luxon was unable to capitalise on Hipkins’ malaise. His preferred prime minister polling was still 11 points behind Hipkins on 21 per cent, down one point on the last poll.

    https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/labour-and-chris-hipkins-crash-in-latest-poll-gap-with-national-widest-since-2017/R6MWQK2TQBGK5FY3ZKOEYGVYPU/

    • Dennis Frank 10.1
      11 July 2023 at 5:08 pm

      For Labour's pollster to register a fall of that amount seems highly significant! Also we have this news:

      Te Pati Maori scored 4.2 per cent, NZ First was on 4 per cent, and TOP was on 2.9 per cent.

      A lift for TPM but not confirming the RM result. Sceptics will abide awhile.

      • Anne 10.1.1
        11 July 2023 at 6:42 pm

        "For Labour's pollster to register a fall of that amount seems highly significant!"

        Disingenuous comment. Talbot Mills polling company have a clientele which covers the political spectrum. My understanding is: most of them are high flying members of the business community who pay for the ability to keep their fingers on the pulse of the nation.

        It is not unknown for these polls to be leaked to the media by the persons who commissioned them and not the polling company.

        • Belladonna 10.1.1.1
          11 July 2023 at 8:25 pm

          TM is always 'leaked' rather than officially released.

          However, given that it's a consistent poll (based on the news reports – i.e. is polling the same numbers of people on the same issues) – and is 'leaked' virtually very time – it seems clear that the same organization is commissioning it, regularly.

          Which organization that would be…. we can only speculate.

          • Anne 10.1.1.1.1
            12 July 2023 at 9:44 am

            Which-ever is no problem if they are leaking them regularly. In a way – as I'm sure you will agree – they are performing a civic duty.

    • Corey 10.2
      11 July 2023 at 8:16 pm

      Preferred PM is one of the more irrelevant polls, not least because parliament elects the pm not the public, but because incumbents are always more popular than the opposition because of name recognition.

      The only popular opposition leaders were Ardern and Key, and even Ardern lost most if not all, preferred Pm polls to the likes of Bill English.

      The old phrase Oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them is looking truer every day for this government.

      It looks out of steam, out of touch and too chaotic and the people are in a "throw the bums out" mood.

      This government was elected, more than anything, to fix housing and make it affordable for all… Six years and a sole majority later it's done everything but radically address housing, which is worse than ever.

      You can't run on let's do this, and not do a damn thing, even with a full majority and expect a high turn out from young and poor people.

      Young people aren't stupid either, they aren't interested in Labour or national they are looking at top, green, Maori party and some at act … But many just won't vote.

      The sad thing is, it probably would have been best if the greens had of sat in the crossbenches and attacked labour from the left for three years, they'd be polling as high as act.

      Im hoping for the best, expecting the worst this election. I'm voting TOP and Green, I can't justify voting for do nothing NZ Labour in any capacity, every again after this sole majority.

      We either get brutal free market capitalism without regulations and a punch in the face, or brutal free market capitalism without regulations and a hug. .

  11. roblogic 11
    11 July 2023 at 5:10 pm

    Luxon is a munter. Audience member complains about Maori language, Luxon does not have the balls to say something positive about Te Reo, instead he gives tacit support to racism. Not the sort of thing I would expect from a potential Prime Minister

    https://twitter.com/StrayDogNZ/status/1678619038434598912?s=20

    • roblogic 11.1
      11 July 2023 at 5:45 pm

      Responses:

      Luxon is a blank slate and the more he hangs out at these boomer town halls the more reactionary he gets— antihobbes (@antihobbes) July 11, 2023

      Deeply distressing to see aged New Zealanders so deeply concerned and angry about the use of Te Reo. My Grandfathers fought alongside Māori Battalion guys in Crete, North Africa and Italy and he would have been disgusted by the anti Māori bigotry National and Act are encouraging https://t.co/FRR3ecdoD9— allimsayingis (@hellomotorbike) July 11, 2023

      It means school. https://t.co/PvDtQaeOmO— Jemaine Clement (@AJemaineClement) July 11, 2023

      After listening to Luxon I tweeted that I had learnt nothing.This is incorrect.I learnt that the old white people are terrified. They are scared of gangs, violence and Māori language & the saddest thing is they have tied these 3 things together in their heads. Please vote. https://t.co/p0boygV4aE— Kate ( ANTI anti co governance ) Davis (@kateinthebay) July 11, 2023