One more day, one more lie, one more smile, one more wave.
Some old joke wants my vote. Aspirational fail.
Did you see on TV? The third world disease on her face.
Unlike me, all you see, are scabs not your first world disgrace.
You’re the faeces of the species, you’re the disease, you’re the plague on the face of that girl.
You’re the hunger, you’re the plunder, all asunder, heaven wonder if there’s oil on the moon (in our bones).
You’re the statistic, optimistic, pessimist e-con-o-mystic, you’re the waste in the space.
Merchant banker, supertanker, deep drill wanker, pull your anchor, just get out of the way.
And we’ll rise. And when we rise up.
We will sing, and we will be glorious.
One more try, one more bribe, one more tea for your friend.
Some old bloke on a rope while they bury his dead.
Did you see on tv? The mould on kids in their bed.
Unlike me, all you see, is dirt and the profits from rent.
You’re the faeces of the species, you’re a disease, you’re a plague on the backs of us all.
You’re the sadistic, little twisted, first world gifted, Mi-pad whiz kid, the foul wind in the sales.
You’re the hunter, you’re the blunder, toxic numbers, six foot under, and you’re the slag of good grace.
Mother cluster, bunker buster, colonel mustard, general custard, just get out of our way.
And we’ll rise. And when we rise up.
We will sing, and we will be glorious.
19 on the daily chart, 304 on the wildcard chart, from two votes.
We’re all lefties here, right? we’re all anti poverty and pro children in need, right?
Two clicks, and you don’t even have to listen to the song to vote.
Pass the link around, and we’ll all have played a part in forcing the issue of child hunger and inept government in NZ in the faces of a head under the cover, not really listening public.
Surely you can see what the songs about, so please click to fight to win.
Underneath the title and band name, there’s an orange ‘vote’ button
Or click or mouse over the Al1en head picture and there’s an orange java vote button.
I’d do a screenshot if I knew how post it.
You can vote everyday until we win.
Viva revolution.
I have to to log in using my facebook details to access my profile, but if I log out, return to the site and dismiss the login screen, I always go straight to song page.
I don’t know why you can’t access the page, but I appreciate your efforts in trying.
Thanks.
Sometimes I like a crooked day dream to keep me company at work.
My fave is the song does well using the government’s (ours) money, and the pm handing over an award at the tuis (or whatever they’re called), to a stunt double dressed in an alien suit, with the whole nation knowing it’s about his premiership and him doing sod all to help our children out of poverty, live on TV.
It makes international news reels, and as we know, there’s no such thing as bad, free publicity.
Then my boss comes and wakes me and tells me he’s made my coffee. 🙂
I voted. But it still asks for some silly flash player, I have never had any trouble playing anything from the net before It would be nice to know what I voted for 🙂
My respect to all those who have voted.
231 after 7 votes.
You see how easy this could be to win if the just the site stalwarts here gifted a daily vote over the next couple of weeks.
Tell your friends, use the pc at work and home and we could all be having a right old laugh at Teflon john expense.
I don’t want to spam more than I have, and certainly don’t want to wear out my welcome here, so for bearing with me, ta very much.
Just in case anybody is still awake and or interested, I’ve made a Dr Evil pic to accompany the vote link if anyone wants it.
Right click, save as, and email away. http://www.al1en.org
Puff piece in the Herald today on Maggie Barry, written by Audrey Young, headlined ‘Maggie’s Way’.
A Q&A style article. She talks about the insults and bullying nature of parliament and it’s from her point of view all Labour’s fault. Gets politely and super lightly called on insulting and bullying Jacinda Adern, and it turns out it’s all because of Trevor Mallard twitter twatting or something.
Maggie doesn’t do insults or bullying, neither does National, its all Labour and the Greens fault. Of course Young leaves that and moves on to bigger more pressing issues.
Which MP outside your party impresses you?
That’s a hard one. Can I get back to you on that? That’s a really hard one.
Classy, there are good people on both sides of the house doing good work and you can’t even mention one, you f&^*ing work there on committees with these people . Says more about Barry than any of her other answers.
Maggie this may be the zenith of your political career, may your years of seat warming ahead be good for your garden.
This article was so light and fluffy from our hard hitting gallery journo I think the paper floated in from the letterbox this morning on its own.
All the Maori party mps, for services to the National party.
John Banks, that he’s still clinging on to his salary, despite everything that says he shouldn’t.
Simon Bridges, for carrying on and making the best of it, despite taking a severe beating with the wanker stick.
And last and very much least, Paula Bennett, for her continued support for NZ tent makers in these troubled times, and popularising the moo moo all over again, even if she does need help to zip it.
Audrey young doing her bit for the party her daddy served and her herald masters.
Maggie Barry is a vacuous nasty piece of work, can’t even shut the f up and learn the ropes. Finally got selected for one of the safest seats as they couldn’t risk her in anything less.
“I personally think that men and men and women and women should be allowed to marry if that’s what they want. Frankly, I don’t quite understand why they want to do it. I’ve never got married in my life.”
She even manages to screw up her pro-marriage equality stance. It’s like a pre-women’s vote man telling a woman ‘I don’t know why you want the right to vote, I’ve never done it’.
Yes Maggie, we shouldn’t marry because you think it’s silly.
On the subject of student loan defaulters, I have no idea why the IRD cannot just make an agreement with the tax collection agencies of the UK, USA, Ireland, and Aus to have the student debt recovered through their respective tax systems?
Probably because those countries want nothing to change. At the moment, they get all our educated people improving their economy / society.
Not only would it cost their tax systems to chase kiwis, but it would stem the tide of highly educated people working within their country.
I don’t know how anyone could really confuse the two though, the writing styles are worlds apart. “Cactus Kate” is just a horrible bogan wrapped in a logical fallacy.
I actually quite like Cactus’s writing. Sure she is a right wing bogan but at least she is an up front bogan and she writes and thinks rationally. Her principles may be different to ours but at least she has some principles. And unlike Key she is exactly who she is. There is not pretension. She is not trying to make out she is something she is not.
That’s very true micky, and I don’t doubt her sincerity one bit. She’s a straight up honest bastard.
However she does rely on some pretty flimsy logic. For example on RNZ she tried to argue that Matt McCarten shouldn’t criticise the operators of the Pike River mine because he wouldn’t want to run a mine himself.
Also there are times I think a responsible host should hide the keys to her computer…
That is a horrible accusation. I have never been on red radio.
And you’ve misrepresented the comments I did actually make on another station which were in relation to a defamatory comment made by another guest. One who consistently accuses directors of companies of all manner of bad behaviour, so I was merely making a point that it is not as easy and glamorously well remunerated that he may think it is and if it was he should be a mining company director.
What is the world coming to, with Hooton cheer leading for team Shearer, and Cactus Kate arguing (albeit in a nuanced sense) in favour of team Cunliffe. As I read her, she wants to see actual political engagement and a proper battle of ideas, rather than both left and right racing to see who can do the best job of cosseting the middle class. And I have to say, it is a lovely piece of writing.
Odgers can’t write to save herself. I find her at times close to illiterate. On top of this, no matter how much she tries to dress things up for her audience, her words are invariably littered with a belief that greed is good and spiked with a hatred for anyone she thinks may impede that pursuit. I would’ve loved to have seen her in parliament, getting roasted on a daily basis, away from the safety of her computer screen. Small fish in an even smaller pond.
Of all the things to talk about you are all hung up on whinging about grammar and calling me a bogan.
Little wonder Cunliffe cannot gain momentum in a working class party.
His supporters are a bunch of snobby toffs.
This kind of grammar policing, of anyone, really makes me cringe. The style of my writing is often poor and ungrammatical. Yet somehow, I feel entitled to have my say. If I felt insecure about all this, as so many people do, reading these kinds of comments would make me even more reticent about participating in conversations at the Standard.
Looks like you’re hung up on issues with your bad writing, too. There was this, you know:
“On top of this, no matter how much she tries to dress things up for her audience, her words are invariably littered with a belief that greed is good and spiked with a hatred for anyone she thinks may impede that pursuit.”
I hope you aren’t implying that those who are put off speaking out by comments deriding others for their writing deficits, are just being “oversensitive”.
I’m never too bothered about clumsy or wrong grammar, but “CK’s” summary of my post as:
The silly policy to build homes for middle class kiddies screaming poverty is an excellent example of this Cunliffe v Shearer tension. “Karol” has an excellent post on this and has thought of the conspiracy that capitalism in fact is to blame in forcing this idea that owning your own home is aspirational to all.
…. is just inaccurate, whether as result of clumsy use of words, or just a poor interpretation. I was critical of the political position and policy of the current Labour caucus leadership (Team Shearer really), but I’m pretty sure I never referred to Cunliffe directly or indirectly in my ‘state housing vs home ownership’ post. And “conspiracy” is not what I think of when I am writing about the way the loose networks of the wealthy and powerful operate to further their own interests.
So she doesn’t have much of an idea of what I was thinking, but then maybe the entity that is “karol” is just a quotation, a figment of someone’s (or some group’s) imagination?
You’re being far too charitable, Karol. Anyone who refers to the poor as the “pathetic heaving underclass”, believes beneficiaries should be paid not to “breed” and thinks Slater’s blog has anything to offer other than a window into how nasty the right can get can’t be taken seriously. Just as QoT saw the hook in Fran O’Sullivan’s piece, no matter how hard she tries Odgers cannot help but let her true colours show, even when she posts on The Standard as happened again throughout today. I do not see how some on the Left can place genuine value in anything she says.
There were some points of agreement between my views on home ownership & CK’s, but she went off on her own little tangent about the (allegedly continuing) Cunliffe-Shearer tension.
I’m more curious as to why TS suddenly got so much attention over the last 24 hours or so, from CK, MH, and a Labour MP and an LP policy person. Some things seem to be bubbling away out of my sight. Yes, FO’S was still being pretty right wing, but, also seemed to shift her position somewhat.
I’m wondering if it’s part of a growing sense of uncertainty about changes happening that some political people feel they are losing control of. While some may be just trying to manoeuvre so they’ll be in a relatively favourable position when the dust settles.
Hi weka, the game is far bigger than February, important as that is. Leaders come and go, MPs come and go, neither Shearer nor Cunliffe will be relevant 10-15 years from now. The real sea change has to happen at the Labour membership and constitutional level. And we’ve only just started.
As I read her, she sees the Shearer/Cunliffe tension as arising from the courting of the middle class by the Shearer people, and the desire for a genuinely left orientation by a lot of left wing people. And she sees the housing policy and your response to it as exemplifying this tension. But I agree that beyond those points, she does go off on her own tangent.
Queue some b/s about ck’s post being proof positive that ‘misguided’ types of the left are unwittingly in cahoots with portions of the right and in effect undermining the ‘nice’ Labour Party just as the ‘right’ wants, and how every one counted within the ‘misguided left’ ought now, and once and for all, STFU.
In fact. Haven’t I already read that line somewhere here at ts?
Does ‘indeed’ indicate you think that’s a reasonable line to spin, McFlock? The reason I ask is your follow-on, which I guess is attempting to posit the opposite of what I’d call a b/s line. And it’s another b/s line. No-one is calling on DS to resign the leadership. But lots of people are wanting to see democracy really exist within the Labour Party. And, I guess, pressure might be applied to mp’s who’d rather deny democracy in Feb.
Now, you might not agree with that sentiment or goal. Fine. But don’t mis-call it as a call for DS to resign.
Well, I have seen arguments that posit Hooten’s support for shearer is evidence that shearer is not fit to be leader.
If I were to make a similar quibble about your phrasing, I don’t recall seeing anyone here specifically demand that critics of the Labour party should “STFU”.
Yep things are getting really strange. Chris Trotter thinks the nats have a mandate to sell our assets and the right are calling for tax increases for the wealthy.
Has it ever occurred to any of you lot that most people don’t have a blindly ideological approach to every issue unlike yourselves – that there are good points and bad points to both sides of most given arguments? That most peoples views may shift back and forth somewhat over time?
I guess it is because you lot are in constant battle mode fighting the good war against the forces of evil, you have developed an us vs them mentality – “you are either with us or against us!”.
You are left exasperated an confused when you can’t squeeze someone into one of a few pigeon holes.
Has it ever occurred to you that us lot don’t give one big fat f**k what you ‘think’ and we only tolerate you as an object of mirth to bestow the odd piece of spittle upon when we have run out of jokes about the Prime Minister Slippery’s bad habit of public displays of ‘spastic dancing’…
Neo marxism is dead in the water – who’s suppose to be the Agent of change since the proletariat failed to turn up to the party? Why should anyone believe that knowledge is only ever Historical never Universal?
Has it ever occurred to any of you lot that most people don’t have a blindly ideological approach to every issue unlike yourselves – that there are good points and bad points to both sides of most given arguments? That most peoples views may shift back and forth somewhat over time?
Sounds like poststructuralist mumbo-jumbo to me…isn’t that usually your target?
No its not poststructurlist, its Humanist. I believe there is an objective reality and objective universal values about ethics/justice.
Post structuralists/Deconstructionist/various Feminists splinter groups/Neo Marxists/Cultural Relativists/Multiculturalists – they all suffer from hyper relativism and symptoms of solipsism of varying severity.
Makes it hard to pin that lot down as they twist and squirm, grabbing a bit of this and a bit of that to create what can only be described as very bad philosophy.
well, that is where we part ways friend; existence precedes essence; consider the “existence” of people born with profound impairments (at Templeton there were “patients” that resembled sun-fish, to put it politely); consider the “essence” of so-called “schizophrenics”; I have followed your comments over the year, and like mine, there is nothing “objective” about them. (we need new lock-nuts)
Ah, k-p, why so keen to put people in boxes? I do have difficulty following a party line or any one theory – the best still have their weaknesses. It depends on the context and the issue as to which is most useful. I am a little bit neo-Marxist and quite a bit post-structuralist. There are some things in postmodernism I agree with. There is no theory of everything. But I am for democratic socialism, social and economic justice/fairness, and am against violence, prejudice, persecution and oppression.
And I am for evidence-based research, knowledge, understanding and argument.
I do think there is an objectively (scientifically) verifiable material reality. I see objectivity as a process, not an end point. And it doesn’t necessarily cancel out subjectivity, especially when it comes to human activities and communications. Objectivity is haunted by subjectivity, as you demonstrated with that sentence of yours I quoted above. But, that’s the thing about language and human communications.
You seem to miss your own contradictions. “believing” in something is a subjective statement.
Yep. I’d say it’s an odd sort of humanism that fails to recognise that humans interpret reality both subjectively, and through socially constructed lenses.
not that flakey Post Modernist stuff which I think QofT suffers from.
No, please, do go on.
I’ll just be over here having a chuckle that you managed to get from “you stupid lefties just want to pigeonhole everyone” into “I bet you’re a neo-Marxist” in a mere six comments.
”i have never read the book,(Marx),tho i was told to take a look,i lifted my pool hall cue for another game”,
(Thanks to the Clash for the lines which i have gleefully altered with the addition of the Social/economists moniker),
LOLZ, my pidgeon hole is somewhere in the vicinity of Pol Pot, a Communizing Fascist,
Thanks to the good old New Zealand education tho i have the ability to realize that getting KP’s relatives to bang a four inch nail into the back of His head at gun-point just isn’t acceptable human behaviour so good old Post-Modernist,(whatever the fuck that means), me has had to accept simply being a Socialist…
Trotter must have holidayed in one of those Batchs that have 50 year old lumpy couches!
He didn’t get a good rest and over stretched some of the points he was making.
Shearer should front foot the mercenary thing so that it is yesterday’s news by the time the Nats get their research ready for leaking through their usual channels
This is twilight zone stuff…are Right Wing commentators giving Key and English room to launch one or two definitively Left Wing policies? Can their strategy for 2014 be really this cunning? Mix in one or two headline Left Wing policies (top tax rate hike and youth employment/youth training programmes), and use it as cover for austerity and asset sell downs elsewhere?
I wonder if they have found in their polling that a lot of ordinary NZers – including the middle class – are worried that their kids can’t seem to get ahead and that there is a shortage of decent jobs and training opportunities.
Nah, it just won’t happen via a lift in the top tax rate, the Fed crowd would string English up by a very sensitive part of His anatomy in a rotary shed at the very thought of it,
The only invite Slippery would get from now until the little Shyster is given the kick would be from those wishing to have Him behave naturally,(dance like a clown),in their presence while they took pics to show off to the Grand-kids in their dotage,
The Bizness lobby would immediately stop calling, i think that if they are going to spend money on any sort of employment initiative,(or pretend to), the usual suspect will be trotted out, asset sales proceeds will have yet another attachment of ‘youth employment’ attached to it along with the continuously growing list of roading,health,schools,debt, blah blah blah,
Other than that if the Slippery little Shyster has half a brain He will be offering employers a years worth of dole payments as a ‘training allowance’ to actually employ a large number of the 24% of unemployed youth, possibly with a slight hint at a top tax rate rise…
Have people forgotten about the youth changes for 16-17 year olds?
Does one think it’s possible that that was setting the scene for harsher benefit conditions for all youth and more privatisation?
The right taketh more than they giveth so creating an enviornment where it seems that they are taking positive steps to address the issue may simply be a way of saying to people well now there’s no excuse to be on a benefit.
Bootcamps won’t work this time to get that 5% of swinging vote but the strategy surely won’t change – we’re offering this but if you don’t avail yourself of our wonderful opportunity then benefit damnation is yours.
Can their strategy really be this cunning? It sounds eerily like their 2008 me-to strategy. The must be getting a bit of polling feedback telling them to DO something.
This is what I reckon. Also, any PR headline increase in the top personal tax rate can be more than compensated for by drops in corporate and trust tax rates, see how it works 😉
may I just pop in here?
I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter 🙂
(The last thing on knows when constructing a work is what to put first; continual eloquence is tedious) ;)-Blaise
WHAT WE CAN NEVER KNOW,or the collapsing hermeneutic (there’s your spiral)
-David Germez
“one could in the light of the fact that the divine life is itself a continued variation,,, apply to divinity in the most exalted sense the name of time. The old mythology of Chronos as primordial being and first divine principle seems thereby to be somehow in contact with the truth”
-Franz Bretano :Philosophical Investigations on Space Time and the Continuum.
“All created things are God’s speech. The being of a stone speaks and manifests the same as does my mouth about God: and people understand more by what is done than by what is said”
-Meister Eckhart : The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defence.
Let just get this out there. A person in receipt of a benefit, if they earn more than $3,400 are pushed up into the second lowest band of taxation. Key did this because obviously he never read the convention on human rights, that if someone is so in need that they receive a benefit then they cannot be treated differently, that everyone should receive the same amount of welfare. Yet Key believes that progressive taxation should kick on those on welfare!
Looking at it another way. People who earn $100,000 pay 10.5% on the first $14,000 they earn.
People who earn $3,400 pay only at the 10.5% rate. Those in receipt of a welfare
check, and have no income, get the full entitlement, pay no tax on income. But Key in
his infinite stupidity believes that those individuals who do have some paltry $3,400+
of income should not get the full welfare entitlement (as effectively they pay more tax,
pay the 17.5% rate on their measly income after the first $3,400).
Just for a moment imagine the cost of filing tax returns as all those people on welfare
whose taxation just became a complicated mess. Whatever happened to keeping
government taxation simple. But worse, how can government argue that families
on welfare should not get family tax credit when there is clearly income tax
bands for those on welfare. I mean whatever happened to equal treatment in taxation.
You pay a higher rate of tax makes you eligible for the programs its funds to those who
also pay higher rates of tax.
“whatever happened to equal treatment in taxation”, only when the main beneficiaries of such treatment are those at the top of the food chain or those who vote to put them there,
The Working for Families fiasco where the Clark Government deemed the middle class,(and quite high up in that decile), to be more ‘in need’ of relief from taxation than beneficiaries with children was the final straw for me that broke my connection with Labour,
Incidently the ‘loud noise’ us lot at the Standard have been making over housing affordability has obviously attracted the attention of Labour so much so that Annette King has paid a visit and at least aquainted herself with the concerns many of us here have regarding State owned rentals being provided to the decile of lower waged workers so there is a small glimmer of hope of seeing some specific and substantial gains in that area when Labour release it’s completed election policy,(hopefully sooner rather than later),
My view is that the next ‘issue’ that we as the Standard need to address is just that of ‘working for Families’ and just how grossly unfair is it to tax the benefits of welfare dependent children and then refuse to offer them the ‘tax relief’ offered to the children of the upper echelons of the middle class…
The money spent on some of WFF would be better off being spent on a) a universal family benefit, and b) an increase in the state housing stock. The same outcome would be achieved.
Though I agree with the sentiments leveled at Labour, my point was this, that Key introduced a second progressive tax in the middle of the welfare. Imagine for a moment that we pay benefit to help people out of poverty only to tax them more if they do the right thing on welfare!
Save or get some part time work????
But worse, by taxing them on welfare we also don’t pay them WFF, which is blatantly unfair.
But its even worse, the 10.5% tax rate is a farce since its really just a tax relief for the rich, those who don’t get welfare don’t the relief since unlike everyone else the MSD take the first
10.5% tax band when they provide welfare. So the low tax band had no effect except for the
free who live off assets with little income (and can’t claim benefit), those geared to reduce their
taxes using trusts – the super rich.
Merging Madness and Reason (it’s the DSM V season)
“you have never been diagnosed as mad-this is the shifting sand upon which you erect your sanity. Yet, your illness has gone unrecognized…you have been deprived of treatment because the steady, sure advance of science has taken too long to reach you.”
“Beneath the (can’t read my handwriting, some adjective) labels of consensus there is just the homogenous zone-our common origins and physiology bind us together; we are a crowd of open-eyed children staring with wonder at the world. This vast assembly of “thrown” people is the homogenous zone-a coat of many (red) colours”.
“Reason too, recognized itself as being duplicated and dispossessed of itself; it thought itself wise and it was and it was mad; it thought it knew and it knew nothing; it thought itself righteous and it was insane; knowledge led one to the forbidden world when one thought one was being led by it to eternal light.” (thats “progress” for ya’s; Get Ya YaYa’s Out) (those art-school rockers aye)
-Foucault :Mental Illness and Psychology
According to Scheff, relative to the rate of treated “mental illness” the rate of unrecorded residual rule breaking of societal norms is extremely high.
-consider this continual self-absorbed flouting of cell -phone /driving legislation, and it’s on the increase; BodyCount’s in the house.Listen to how close people are to stress thresholds in their daily discourse with children, family, associates, witness the behavioural temperature on the roads, the anasthetization and subsequent harms carried out; that’s why I drank alone in the end; Dos Gusanos was fun though, all those years ago 🙂 (an I’m not surprised productivity is tanking when I observe people ostensibly working yet using their work p.c for shopping and such-like)
“Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history’, but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed and the clever beasts had to die-One might invent such a fable and yet still it would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature.
-Friedrich Nietzsche :On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense
“Madness and sanity are variants of the same phenomena; everything that we see and fear in the madman can also be seen and feared in ourselves. We are all mad children, we are all autistic, we are all deluded, we are all abstract and solipsistic and we all madly cobble together systems of absurd beliefs on this lost planet of fools; perhaps a fundamental truth about our humanity can be found in the instability, ‘throwness’ and madness of the homogenous zone.”
(Baudrillard places his hopes in terrorism, viruses and catastrophe)
i read today of an analysts perspective on FIVE potential Asian Shocks
-Taiwanese Independence asserted by the democratic vote
-Islamic unrest reaching China
-US Defence (Naval) cuts
-Thailand destabilized
-Territorial disputes in E and S China seas (we do live in interesting times)
Exit Strategy
-Why, thou sayest well; I do now remember a saying, “The fool doth think he is wise, yet the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
-As You Like It (if you are ruled by mind, you are a king, if by body, a slave-Cato)
WHAT WE CAN NEVER KNOW- David Gamez. I whole-heartedly recommend this little book; I read it this afternoon at the library (air-con and I cannot afford to pay my fees, yet;)
HBT-10 more hot dry days forecast, little rain since August, Irrigation Ban on the way, Farmers may ‘dry out’
-if you’re walking a dog, they cannot eat anything they find in or around rivers or ponds, (cyano-bacteria) meanwhile we are going to supply more dairy to another Infant Formula Manufacturer establishing in NI
Dom-The Children’s Commissioner, a HB paediatrician,Russell Wills,, is “incredulous” about child poverty and inequality in our country…
from your friendly neighbourhood “madman” (hyper-rationally and reflexively yours)
now what am I gonna do for a crust. hmmm
11.29 By faith the people passed through the RED Sea, as on dry land, but when the Egyptians tried to do so, they were drowned. 🙂
🙂 It’s a Mad Mad World, btw D, I’m gettin “bored” again, don’t wanna write a book, there’s enough been written already, might start an Anarchist Commune ala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kropotkin 🙂
I assumed your “watch from the High Plains” remark meant that you weren’t going to be actively commenting for the moment, forgive me if I misinterpreted.
Loved your stuff, trooper, a message from Nu-Earth?
“And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts
And I looked and behold, a pale horse
And his name that sat on him was Death
And Hell followed with him.”
“What is happening at the moment? Because the Falklands are back in the news. Belfast is back in the news. It’s like some sort of hideous 80s revival, isn’t it? All we need is a heartless Conservative prime minister attacking the unemployed and demonising the poor, bankers making obscene profits, David Bowie releasing a single…”–Sandi Toksvig, The News Quiz
mickysavage -> So tell me KP is unfettered capitalism in a healthy state and just what this world needs?
Obviously not. I was never a supporter of neo liberalism, except back in the 80s when I was in my middle teens. But everyone was entranced by it then, Muldoon was gone, the Cold War over, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous was on TV.
This is an interesting piece by a contemporary philosopher I like, applying some Humanist qualities – imagination, intuition, memory, ethics – to the current morass:
“I can only ask: is there a single example in Western civilisation over the past 2500 years when a broad policy of austerity has pulled a civilisation out of crisis and set it on the road to wellbeing, prosperity or growth? No. There is no example. There is no evidence. Only ideological conviction – romanticism – coming out of a political-economic theory packed into an apparently inevitable force called globalisation…
…Crises usually strike when ideologies have been around too long and the elites that serve them have lost their ability for critical thought…
…Instead of retreating inside a received wisdom, which has already revealed that it doesn’t work, we could turn to some basic, helpful human qualities…
…Ethics, for example, are a simple, practical reminder that the primary obligation of a civilisation is to its citizens’ wellbeing, not to the protection of commercial contracts or the servicing of debts. The fact that most of these debts were incurred by the commercial sector and its financiers reinforces this point…
…Memory is an essential tool of education. You can’t deal with a crisis if you are in the hands of economists, managers and business elites who don’t know the history of debt. They don’t know the history of competition. Very few read anything of consequence. They are the briefing paper generation. Many are, in reality, functionally illiterate, except on very narrow topics. They don’t know what has worked and not worked in their own society. In fact, they don’t seem to understand the concept of either society or civilisation…
…As for Imagination, it is not the privileged domain of the arts. Good financial policy is an expression of imagination. Throughout history great financiers and great ministers of finance have usually also been great consumers of culture, intellectuals, men of imagination. I think of Solon in Athens 2600 years ago, of Sully at the side of Henry IV in 1600, of Siegmund Warburg after World War II, of Jean Monet rebuilding Europe. As they would explain: you must imagine your way out of an economic cul de sac, just as a good general imagines his way out of a military stalemate. Bad generals stick to trench warfare…
…History is clear. When faced by unsustainable debts, the fools, the weak, the degenerate civilisations become obsessed by what they owe. They convince themselves that money is real, not an agreed-upon convention. They become its slave. And they destroy themselves. Successful civilisations make these impossible debts disappear – clearly, intentionally, massively. In this way they protect what needs to be protected, such as the savings of real people and their pensions. They clear the decks and the result is raw, new human energy to deal with society’s needs. History is filled with examples of this being done on purpose. It is also filled with the carcasses of those who refused to face reality and so caused their societies to commit suicide.”
For some reason no reply buttons are showing for Pascal or karol, so here goes:
Pascal -> “Yep. I’d say it’s an odd sort of humanism that fails to recognise that humans interpret reality both subjectively, and through socially constructed lenses.”
Where did I deny any subjectivity? It’s the post structuralists/post modernists who go the hyper relativistic route.
You end up with crazy feminists calling Newton’s Laws of Physics a ‘rape manual’, and prattling on about “Rape Culture”. Science is dismissed or supposedly ‘improved’ via “Critical Theory” to “Feminist Science” or “Post Modernest Science”.
It’s all very poor philosophy and embodies atrociously low Academic standards.
You don’t necessarily “end up with crazy feminists calling Newton’s Laws of Physics a ‘rape manual’” if you accept a lot of what PM theorists say. And to equate that sort of thing with rape culture’ is just asinine.
Do you think that cultural norms are socially constructed, partially through the way we talk about things? And that cultural norms affect individuals thoughts about behavior and blameworthiness?
If so, then it’s no stretch to say that the way a society talks about rape, will affect the incidence of rape. ie, that some ways of talking about rape could increase the incidence of rape by creating cultural norms that support rapists interpretations of reality.
You end up with crazy feminists calling Newton’s Laws of Physics a ‘rape manual’, and prattling on about “Rape Culture”. Science is dismissed or supposedly ‘improved’ via “Critical Theory” to “Feminist Science” or “Post Modernest Science”.
Oops, k_p’s brain overloaded and it’s back to copy-pasting MRA propaganda which he’s already been informed multiple times is inaccurate. Balance has been restored to the Force.
karol -> “Ah, k-p, why so keen to put people in boxes? ”
Just want to know where you stand is all, nothing wrong with that.
“I do have difficulty following a party line or any one theory – the best still have their weaknesses.”
I don’t follow a part line and I get MOBBED on here for it – especially by your girl pals.
“It depends on the context and the issue as to which is most useful.”
It’s not good enough to go with what is “useful”. Marxism for example is a theory of everything, the guy was a genius obviously, nevertheless his philosophical system crashed and burned. Why should anyone believe you have the intellectual ability to uplift a fragment of it, remove it from context and claim it is “useful” for contemporary application.
“I am a little bit neo-Marxist and quite a bit post-structuralist. There are some things in postmodernism I agree with.”
The main tenet in postmodernism is that language is meaningless. Apparently Focault back tracked from that to the position that the meaning the reader gets from a text may differ from the author’s intention. In which case he hasn’t made any insight that authors and readers haven’t been aware of already.
As for Derrida, he’s been called an intellectual fraudster by some luminary academic types. Anyone who says they have read Derrida is lying, its incomprehensible – worse than Hegel.
The fact that Post-structuralist professors still hand out As Bs and Cs to their students submitted essays suggest the whole exercise is an insider’s joke.
“There is no theory of everything. But I am for democratic socialism, social and economic justice/fairness, and am against violence, prejudice, persecution and oppression.”
“And I am for evidence-based research, knowledge, understanding and argument.”
You are keeping the word “science” out of it. Are you referring to science, if not why not, and to what are you referring, Karol?
“I do think there is an objectively (scientifically) verifiable material reality.”
Ok you do bring up science now. Don’t know how you can claim to believe in science but claim to be “quite a bit post-structuralist”
“I see objectivity as a process, not an end point. And it doesn’t necessarily cancel out subjectivity, especially when it comes to human activities and communications. Objectivity is haunted by subjectivity, as you demonstrated with that sentence of yours I quoted above. But, that’s the thing about language and human communications.”
I never denied that there is subjectivity, it is postmodernist who deny the objective.
“You seem to miss your own contradictions. “believing” in something is a subjective statement.”
Is it? Does it matter? Like I said I don’t deny there is subjectivity eg “Chocolate tastes better than vanilla!” [ proviso – scientist discover genetic basis for varying tastes ]
[lprent: There is no “partY line” – it is every person’s argument for themselves. However there is a moderation line.
Personally I tend to view you as having a problem with dealing with women (what is it with that?) and indeed with anyone who thinks. You have that kind of “I’m just a poor victim” mentality (as you have amply demonstrated in this comment) that makes it difficult for you to deal with anyone disagreeing with you. And to top it off you seem to be a poor excuse for a psuedo-intellectual. Generally a waste of bandwidth and a bit of a luser in social media terms.
But these are just my opinions – they don’t enter into moderation.
Most of the time you pick up bans for either personally attacking authors or peristently going off topic in posts – usually the female authors. Right now you’re on most moderators “watch for stupidity” lists, and includes r0b’s list (about your only NOTABLE acheivement to date). ]
“I am a little bit neo-Marxist and quite a bit post-structuralist. There are some things in postmodernism I agree with.”
To be very blunt and clear, to me you are the typical KIWI IDIOT, I frown on, you have neither any understanding of complex history, socialism, social science, alternative social agendas and even scientifically evidenced social data.
I am totally flabber-ghasted about what brought you here.
Sorry, my impression is, you know too little of what goes down.
My comment was not really directed at the quote “kiwi_prometheus” used re what Karol may have commented on before, it was just totally incoherent, confusing, contradictory and much senseless, what “kiwi_prometheus” commented on in a wider context, also using that particular quote.
I tried to read his truly bizarre comments a few times, and I still cannot make that much sense at all out of what “k_p” tried to say or argue. Sorry for the frustration that lead to anger and some over the top comment I made in return.
You are not even just that “Kiwi idiot” I sometimes dismissably refer to, you are a totally ignorant, one sided coffin slicer of sorts, getting another angle on why some people may have died.
That is the lowest and cheapest crap I ever read and heard, man. Rot in fucking hell for that.
I don’t follow a part line and I get MOBBED on here for it – especially by your girl pals.
Have you ever considered that’s because you say really stupid things about girls?
It’s not good enough to go with what is “useful”. Marxism for example is a theory of everything, the guy was a genius obviously, nevertheless his philosophical system crashed and burned.
There’s only one thing to say here and it was said by Marx himself: I don’t know what I am but I know that I’m not a Marxist.
Marx considered that Marxists had twisted his teachings. This can most clearly be seen by his writings on the Paris Commune of 1871 which was anarchist. It was destroyed by military attack from the government.
Is it? Does it matter?
Yes it does. Opinion and belief cannot change objective fact. This is something that the RWNJs and economists can’t seem to grasp.
“The main tenet in postmodernism is that language is meaningless. Apparently Focault back tracked from that to the position that the meaning the reader gets from a text may differ from the author’s intention. In which case he hasn’t made any insight that authors and readers haven’t been aware of already.”
Hi xtasy. This paragraph pretty much sums things up. Every point made here is complete and utter bullshit and incorrect no matter how you look at it. So much so it’s impossible to engage with. I’d tell kp sayonara.
A great experience I had today, or rather yesterday (12.01.) to visit and view the NEW Rainbow Warrior vessel down at Princes Wharf. I am IMPRESSED, Greenpeace got their shit together, had I not been a member of sorts, I would have signed up right way.
I am worried for the ones who do not get it, how much NZ, Australian and Antarctic environmen is in danger! It is damned serious.
I left the vessel in doubt and worry, who is going to keep them alive to fight, I asked, being myself in dire straits.
I can only hope they get donations, manage and do more good, as that is what Greenpeace are here for. I would dread the day they die. I would want to die also.
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New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has opened fire against "unreconstructed morons" after NZ First MP Shane Jones was photographed on holiday holding an AR-15 rifle. Mr Peters is defending Mr Jones, telling Magic Talk host Peter Williams that his MP was just having fun "like most people do". "The ...
New Zealand First Deputy Leader and Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development Fletcher Tabuteau was in attendance during the morning blessing of the Rotorua Lakefront development project. Around 60 people gathered on the shores of Lake Rotorua, including city mayor Steve Chadwick and deputy Dave Donaldson. The Lakefront development is a ...
Forestry Minister Shane Jones is considering reining in on conversions of farmland to forestry, and also issued a warning to foreign-owned forestry companies that make up nearly 75 per cent of the industry. He said too many foreign companies had not provided enough access for domestic processors to get timber. ...
Speaking to Radio NZ, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters said the tightening of the parental category visa is a direct result of the Party’s coalition negotiations with the Labour Party. He said the new changes switch the financial onus from the parent moving to New Zealand to the child ...
The Coalition Government is set to cut red tape in the building and construction sector in an effort to allow more houses to be built, including prefabricated houses. The changes will enable the mass factory production of "high quality" buildings, slash the likely number of building inspections for factory produced ...
Since coming into Government, we’ve worked hard to tackle homelessness and make sure everyone has a warm, dry home. And today, on World Homeless Day, we want to report back and update you on our progress so far. ...
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has hit back at National Party leader Simon Bridges who criticized the Coalition Government’s approach to crime, and said that the latter isn't credible in his attack on the Government over gang recruitment. "We've got as massive drug problem in this country. It is ...
New Zealand Mānuka honey exporters have welcomed an initiative by the Coalition Government to help secure the term “mānuka honey” to be used exclusively by Kiwi exporters, ensuring that our multimillion-dollar industry is protected. Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones had recently announced that a Provincial Growth Funding of $5.7 ...
Political commentator Mike Hosking has labelled New Zealand First leader Winston Peters as “the voice of reason in a government soft on drugs”, for the Party’s stance on drug testing at music festivals. “If common sense is worth a vote, Winston Peters is quids in,” Mr Hosking said. The Labour ...
Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development Fletcher Tabuteau has announced Provincial Growth Funding to ensure work opportunities in Turangi and Whanganui, through its skills and employment programme, Te Ara Mahi. A fund of $500,000 will go to Rafting NZ in Turangi for a 16-week river guide training course to train ...
Treasury has shown that the Coalition Government has a $7.5 billion surplus, which is $4 billion higher than what was expected in the 2019 Budget unveiled last May. It is also $2 billion higher than the actual surplus unveiled this time last year, and at a size that has not ...
Official Information Act figures released to NZME show there were 350 assaults on officers in the year to the end of June, 79 more than the year before. The increase in attacks have sparked calls for more legal protection for first responders to be enacted. The assaults included officers being ...
“Nobody wants to see babies uplifted”, this was the pronouncement of Minister for Children Hon. Tracey Martin as her department, Oranga Tamariki, faces multiple inquiries into the number of babies being taken from their families. “But a baby can die with a single punch, “the Minister continued. “So sometimes, Oranga ...
We're making progress on tackling the long-term challenges: from homelessness, to strengthening border security, to bringing banking back New Zealand's small towns. ...
Associate Transport Minister Shane Jones has backed the ambitious plan to move Auckland’s port to Northport, at Whangarei harbour, which he says will be the “King Kong of infrastructure”. The plan is part of the recommendations of a six-person independent working group, which has recommended the Ports of Auckland be ...
A six-member independent working group selected the option of moving Auckland’s port to Northport, in Whangarei, ahead of other options. In what could be New Zealand’s most ambitious infrastructure project yet, a major expansion of the Marsden Point port could happen within 15 years. The project, officially called the “Upper ...
The final Electricity Price Review recommended prohibiting prompt payment discounts but allowing “reasonable” late fees. The findings of this review was welcomed by the Coalition Government, but they hope companies will follow through with its recommendations without regulations needed to be passed. Meridian Energy had already stopped prompt payment discounts, ...
Fletcher Tabuteau, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development The Provincial Growth Fund (PGF)through its skills and employment programme, Te Ara Mahi,will invest nearly $600,000 to ensure work opportunities for locals in Turangia and Whanganui, Parliamentary Under Secretary for Regional Economic Development Fletcher Tabuteau announced today. “I’m pleased to announce the PGF ...
An export-led economy is one of New Zealand First’s key principles, and our commitment to achieving this is shown by the continuing skyrocketing demand for our beef and sheep meat exports. Beef + Lamb New Zealand's New Season Outlook 2019-20 report forecasts beef, lamb and mutton prices to lift from ...
The Government is investing in ambitious research that will digitise Te Reo, grow the low-carbon protein efficient aquaculture industry, help interpret environmental trends, and large data sets says Research, Science and Innovation Minister Megan Woods. The four projects range from teaching Siri to speak Te Reo to crunching large environmental ...
A new education-to-employment brokerage service to strengthen connections between local employers and schools. Funding for more trades focused ‘speed-dating’ events to connect schools with employers. Promotional campaign to raise profile of vocational education. The Government is taking action to increase the number of young people taking up vocational education and ...
A Bill to improve prison security and ensure the fair, safe, and humane treatment of people in prison while upholding public safety has passed its third reading. Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis says the Corrections Amendment Bill makes a number of changes to ensure the Corrections Act 2004 is fit for ...
Minister for Māori Development, Nanaia Mahuta, has selected Arihia Bennett MNZM, Chief Executive Officer of Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, as the Te Puni Kōkiri appointed representative on the New Zealand-China Council. The New Zealand-China Council (the Council) was established in 2012 as a New Zealand led and funded organisation ...
Responsibility for processing the small number of Southern Response claims still to be settled will be transferred to EQC by the end of the year. “As claim numbers reduce, it no longer makes sense for the Crown to have two organisations processing the remaining Canterbury claims,” Grant Robertson says. “Since ...
Health Minister David Clark is encouraging Whanganui residents to take up the opportunity for free bowel screening, which can detect cancer early when it’s easier to treat. Over the next two years 12,000 Whanganui locals, aged 60 to 74 will be invited to participate in the National Bowel Screening ...
Minister for Pacific Peoples Aupito William Sio, heads to Oslo today to represent New Zealand at the sixth Our Ocean Conference, which is being hosted by the Norwegian Government from the 23-24 October. “The Our Ocean Conference mobilises real action on issues like marine plastic pollution and the impacts of ...
Two secondary-school initiatives are being expanded as part of the Government’s plan to see more young New Zealanders take up a trade to help close the skills gap. This includes the largest single increase in Trades Academy places in recent years. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Education Minister Chris ...
Session 4: Pacific Connectivity – Youth, Media and New Opportunities Kia ora tatou katoa and Warm Pacific greetings to one and all. Representatives of Tainui, the local people of the land, or manawhenua – the indigenous peoples of this area – have welcomed you this morning in accordance with ...
The Government today announced its support for a project that could substantially reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions from cattle. The announcement was made as part of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s and Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor’s visit to Nelson’s Cawthron Aquaculture Park. The Cawthron Institute will receive $100,000 from the Government’s ...
Social Development Minister Carmel Sepuloni has welcomed the first reading of the New Zealand Superannuation and Veteran’s Pension Legislation Amendment Bill. “Every New Zealander has a stake in New Zealand Superannuation and Veteran’s Pension,” says Carmel Sepuloni. “They are our most common form of social assistance – nearly 800,000 New ...
Babies in Auckland aged six months and over can receive a free vaccination and children will all have access to vaccines, Associate Minister of Health Julie Anne Genter announced today at Papatoetoe High School. The move comes as part of Government efforts to step up the fight against measles. ...
***Check against delivery*** Good morning. It is a pleasure to be here, and to have the honour of opening this important conference on behalf of the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs. Let us take the opportunity to acknowledge all the people who have helped make today possible, including our special ...
Police Minister Stuart Nash says the safety of frontline officers and members of the public will be the focus of a new trial of specialist Police response teams in three of our largest urban centres. Police have this morning released details of an initiative to be trialled in Counties Manukau, ...
The Minister of Fisheries is calling for entries for a new public award to celebrate innovation in our seafood sector. “I have established the Seafood Sustainability Awards to recognise and celebrate those throughout industry, tangata whenua and communities who demonstrate outstanding dedication and innovation towards the sustainability of New Zealand’s ...
Minister for Women Julie Anne Genter welcomes leaders in the private sector taking action on closing their gender pay gaps to ensure a fairer workplace for all New Zealanders. Ms Genter today launched a new report, Addressing the gender pay gap and driving women’s representation in senior leadership, from the Champions for ...
Government Ministers today welcomed the release of a marine environment report highlighting the four key issues affecting our oceans, estuaries and coastlines. The release underlines the importance of government proposals to combat climate pollution, ensure clean freshwater, protect biodiversity, make land use more sustainable, and reduce waste and plastic. Environment ...
The Government has approved funding for a new acute mental health facility for Waikato which will provide better care and support to people with mental health and addiction issues. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Health Minister Dr David Clark announced the $100 million project to replace the aging Henry Rongomau ...
The Government is making progress on its goal to integrate te reo Māori into education by 2025, with over 500 teachers and support staff already graduating from Te Ahu o te Reo Māori, Associate Education Minister Kelvin Davis announced today. Kelvin Davis made the announcement at an awards ceremony in Waikanae today, for ...
Statistics Minister James Shaw has welcomed the first release of 2018 Census data. The first release of data today, 23 September, includes key data on population, regional growth, the number of homes and the size of different ethnic groups in New Zealand. Data from the 2018 Census will support the ...
Minister for Statistics James Shaw today announced a public consultation on a proposed algorithm charter for government agencies. The charter has been developed by the Government Chief Data Steward in response to growing calls for more transparency in government use of data. Computer algorithms – procedures or formulas for solving ...
Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor, Climate Change Minister James Shaw and visiting Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte co-hosted a business roundtable in Auckland this morning focused on working together to address climate change. “The Netherlands is an important partner for New Zealand. We share a strong agricultural history. Sustainable agribusiness and ...
The Government is taking action to build an inclusive economy where more of us receive our fair share at work and businesses can compete on great products and services, not undercutting wages and conditions, Immigration and Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Iain Lees-Galloway says. Two consultations launched today seek feedback ...
The future for New Zealand’s threatened indigenous freshwater fish looks brighter with the passing of the Conservation (Indigenous Freshwater Fish) Amendment Bill in Parliament today said Minister of Conservation, Eugenie Sage. “Until now, our freshwater fish legislation has been 20 years out of date. We have lacked effective tools to ...
At 1.30pm tomorrow, hundreds of thousands of Kiwis will join about 65 million people around the globe in ShakeOut, the world’s biggest earthquake drill. The annual drill is to remind people of the right action to take during an earthquake which is to Drop, Cover, Hold, and to practise their ...
Kiwis are benefiting from higher wage growth and low inflation under the Coalition Government. Stats NZ data out today shows the rise in the cost of living remains low, as annual Consumers Price Index (CPI) inflation fell to 1.5% in September from 1.7% in June. “The low inflation comes as ...
New Zealand’s economic strength and resilience has been recognised in a major update on the state of the global economy. The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook released overnight shows a reduced global growth forecast over the next two years as issues like the US-China trade war and Brexit take hold. ...
Justice Minister Andrew Little has today introduced a new Bill to prevent terrorism and support the de-radicalisation of New Zealanders returning from overseas. The Terrorism Suppression (Control Orders) Bill gives the New Zealand Police the ability to apply to the High Court to impose control orders on New Zealanders who ...
A Bill that proposes targeted changes to simplify the processes for Māori land owners when engaging with the Māori Land Court has had its First Reading today. “The approach taken by the Government is to ensure that the protection of Māori land remains a priority as we seek to improve ...
Let me first thank all the new unionists and members in the room. There is nothing more important to improving people’s working lives than people making the decision to care, to get on board and help, to take up the reins and get involved. Congratulations to you. You bring the ...
Minister of Defence Ron Mark has signed a certificate exempting the activity of engine testing at Whenuapai Airbase from the Resource Management Act 1991. The Act gives the Minister of Defence the power to exempt activities for the purposes of national security. The certificate will mean the recent Environment Court ...
Finance Minister Grant Robertson has announced New Zealand will join the Coalition of Finance Ministers for Climate Action while attending APEC meetings in Chile. The objective of the 39 member Coalition is to share information and promote action to tackle climate change. It was formed in April this year, in ...
Feedback sought– Lyttelton commercial zone parking The Associate Minister for Greater Christchurch Regeneration, Poto Williams, is seeking feedback on a proposal to remove on-site car parking requirements for new developments in the Lyttelton commercial zone. The proposal, by Christchurch City Council, asks that powers under section 71 of the Greater ...
Hon Minister Poto Williams Associate Minister for Greater Christchurch Regeneration MEDIA STATEMENT Tuesday 15 October 2019 Feedback sought – Hagley Oval The Associate Minister for Greater Christchurch Regeneration, Poto Williams, is seeking feedback on a proposal about Hagley Oval. The proposal was developed by Regenerate Christchurch ...
Ladies and gentlemen, NZCTU President Richard Wagstaff, members of respective unions – thank you for the invitation to speak to you today. This might be preaching to the choir, but the importance of trade unions in New Zealand’s historical arch is difficult to understate. And it is my belief that ...
"Let’s start by acknowledging that it has been a huge year. " Police Association Annual Conference James Cook Grand Chancellor Hotel Wellington Nau mai, haere mai. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, ka nui te mihi, ki a koutou katoa. President of the Police Association, Chris Cahill; Members of the Association and ...
Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters and Minister of Defence Ron Mark have announced the New Zealand Government’s decision to again deploy a Royal New Zealand Air Force P-3K2 (P-3) maritime patrol aircraft to support the implementation of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions imposing sanctions against North Korea. New ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters says New Zealand continues to have serious concerns for peace and stability in north-east Syria. “Recent reports that hundreds of ISIS-affiliated families have fled from a camp are deeply concerning from a humanitarian and security perspective”, Mr Peters says. “While we acknowledge Turkey’s domestic security ...
Biosecurity Minister Damien O’Connor is warning travelling Kiwis to be vigilant as the high-season for the crop-eating brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB) is under way. “We’re on high alert to stop BMSB arriving in NZ. The high season runs until April 30 and we’ve strengthened our measures to stop stink ...
The Government is moving swiftly to change the law to improve the welfare and pastoral care of students living in university halls of residence and other tertiary hostels. Cabinet has agreed to several changes, including creating a new mandatory Code of Practice that sets out the duty of pastoral care ...
Sky City and Fletcher Building see another "material delay" to opening of International Convention Centre as fire still rages. Plan B needed for APEC in November 2021, says Goff ...
First it was KiwiBuild, now it’s Auckland’s light rail that’s looking increasingly shambolic. Jenée Tibshraeny from Interest asks what’s going on, and how thin is that ice that transport minister Phil Twyford is skating on.The Opposition’s latest attack phrase aimed at the government is set to be one of its ...
At last, a break in the clouds for NZ’s dairy farmers : Fonterra suppliers could be looking at a sharp lift in income, as the co-op revises its forecast range for the milk price to $6.55-$7.55 kg/MS.And the signals are strong enough to underpin projections the milk price will rise ...
Members of the Indian community are angry at an immigration policy change making it harder for to bring spouses to NZ - but Shane Jones says anyone not happy should "catch the next flight home." ...
On October 7, New Zealand’s Labour Party-led coalition government announced draconian class-based restrictions on immigration. From February 2020, the government will reopen the Parent Category visa nearly four years after the previous National Party ...
Organise Aotearoa joined a rally held by the Chilean expatriate community on Tuesday outside the Chilean Embassy in Wellington, following widespread repression and brutality against protesters by President Sebastián Piñera’s armed forces. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Shine, Robinson Fellow, University of Sydney Have you ever sat down to complete your morning crossword or Sudoku and wondered about what’s happening in your brain? Somewhere in the activity of the billions of neurons in your brain lies the code ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mehmet Ozalp, Associate Professor in Islamic Studies, Director of The Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation and Executive Member of Public and Contextual Theology, Charles Sturt University The five-day ceasefire negotiated by US Vice President Mike Pence and Turkish President Recep Tayyib ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne The unprecedented blackout of front pages by Australia’s newspaper publishers this week is a highly significant event in Australian political and media history. It represents the completion of ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexandra Hansen, Chief of Staff, The Conversation In recent years coconut water has left the palm-treed shores of tropical islands where tourists on lounge chairs stick straws straight into the fruit, and exploded onto supermarket shelves – helped along by beverage giants ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Petterson, Professor of Geology, Auckland University of Technology CC BY-NDClimate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.If you have a question you’d like an expert ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Newman, Professor of Sustainability, Curtin University A Greenpeace video of me plugging a trackless tram that went viral with 4 million hits has caused a few eyebrows to be raised over whether I think light rail is dead. So let me ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anthony Asher, Associate Professor, UNSW Here’s the boldest idea the government’s inquiry into retirement incomes should consider but might not: no longer exempting all of the value of each retiree’s home from the pension assets test. The test would merely exempt part ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tracey Sernack-Chee Quee, PhD Candidate, Faculty of Design, Architecture & Building, University of Technology Sydney 1973 was a remarkable year for Sydney, with the opening of two major cultural icons. The first was the Sydney Opera House. The second, possibly more important ...
Good morning, and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: In today’s edition: Serious ramifications likely from SkyCity fire, dozens of partnership visas being denied, and yet another police pursuit death.The fire at the SkyCity Convention Centre construction site has continued to burn overnight. Fire crews were forced to abandon the roof, ...
Orange-fronted parakeets will still get protection but some mohua populations miss out as DoC reduces the area of forest being covered by 1080 poison. ...
The main way small countries like New Zealand can lead on climate change is through our ideas. Policies developed here may help other countries with similar issues, writes David Frame. ...
By Rebecca Ananian-Welsh Australians picked up their morning papers yesterday to find heavily blacked-out text instead of front-page headlines. This bold statement was instigated by the “Your Right to Know” campaign, an unlikely coalition of Australian media organisations fighting for press freedom and source protection. A key reform advocated by a ...
Surrounding sites evacuated and one reported hospitalised in serious condition as blaze rips through two floors of the under-construction building in the Auckland CBDLast updated: 6.30pmParts of central Auckland have been brought to a standstill this afternoon after a major fire broke out shortly after 1pm at the Sky City ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Phil McManus, Professor of Urban and Environmental Geography: Head of School of Geosciences, University of Sydney In the wake of a shocking ABC report on the dismal end of many racehorses’ lives in slaughterhouses, many Australians are questioning whether the horse racing ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mohiuddin Ahmed, Lecturer of Computing & Security, Edith Cowan University Machines and the internet are woven into the fabric of our society. A growing number of users, devices and applications work together to produce what we now call “big data”. And this ...
After an unusually nasty campaign for their country, Canada has gone to the polls. They’ve decided that Justin Trudeau will continue as prime minister, but just like in New Zealand, he’ll have to work with coalition politics. What’s happened?After a brutal and at times humiliating campaign, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau has ...
“The Prime Minister must publicly support an immediate ban on Gay Conversion Therapy . If I was Jacinda I would feel morally obligated to give more confidence on where I stand, when I have asked for, and received, support from that community.” ...
New abortion law marks significant and needed progress for reproductive rights in New Zealand Amnesty International has today made its submission to the Abortion Legislation Committee in Wellington. The rights at stake in the legislation include the rights ...
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage.New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.Today’s content by Dr Bryce Edwards.Transport Thomas Coughlan (Stuff): NZ Transport Agency to Phil Twyford: We should have done better ...
Crisis of Safety and Confidence in our Engineering, Building and Construction Industries Please find attached a copy of an Open Letter from Professor Maan Alkaisi, Spokesperson CTV Families Group. This was sent a short time ago to the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern, ...
Safe speed limits are survivable speed limits and this is what AT has endorsed in its step change decision today. This decision is a landmark that sets the scene for a new focus on road safety in New Zealand. ...
The Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS) says the inadequate treatment of urology patients in Southern District Health Board is distressing and should serve as a broad reminder to DHB management to listen when specialists raise concerns. ...
Informed via telegram that Netflix has released a full trailer for the new season of The Crown, Tara Ward puts on her best boxhat and white gloves to find out what round three will bring. The good Lorde told us we’ll never be royals, so the first full trailer for the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sara Dehm, Lecturer, University of Technology Sydney Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie has some sobering reading to do over the coming weeks: an 88-page Senate report into the government-sponsored bill to repeal the medevac law that allow refugees and asylum seekers in Papua ...
Eric Crampton has fun imagining a version of MBIE that worried it could be subject to cartel criminalisation provisions for the anticompetitive regimes it has established. ...
Criminologist Antje Deckert has just completed a two-year study of how women offenders are portrayed in New Zealand newspapers. The results show that journalists are telling very different stories abut Māori and Pākehā. That our criminal justice system is in desperate need of reform and that we need to reduce the ...
China continues its march into the Pacific with a China-Pacific Island Countries Economic Development and Cooperation Forum in Samoa this week. Ahead of the forum, Beijing has signed seven new agreements with Samoa covering education, trade, e-commerce, investment, infrastructure and agriculture. China’s Vice-Premier Hu Chunhua heads his delegation in Apia ...
It might be tempting to yell, but there are more effective ways to talk to doubters about the value of vaccines, write Julie Leask and Maryke Steffens.Your neighbour is telling you about his new baby. He feels nervous about vaccinating, and says he’s considering delaying Lucy’s vaccines.Your mother’s group is ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Debra Wain, Academic in Professional and Creaive Writing, Deakin University Why do we tell stories, and how are they crafted? In this series, we unpick the work of the writer on both page and screen. Anna Spargo-Ryan’s debut novel, The Paper House ...
The Movies, a documentary series that celebrates movies and their impact on culture, is available on TVNZ OnDemand today. Sam Brooks pulls some of the best quotes from its galaxy of stars.Ever wanted to get a snapshot of cinematic history without leaving the comfort of your couch, or even your ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ronald F Pol, Senior researcher NZ, La Trobe University Money laundering rarely gets as literal as the case in Thailand last week, where police raided homes of a ring suspected of laundering a billion baht (about A$48 million) of drug proceeds and ...
The NZTA chair has acknowledged the agency dropped the ball in its early handling of Auckland's light rail project, as the NZ Infra proposal grips ministers. ...
On Friday it was announced that Armed Offenders Squad patrols will be trialled in Counties Manukau, Waikato and Canterbury over the next six months. The data suggests this will increase police violence and unfairly target Māori, writes Emilie Rākete.Police Commissioner Mike Bush announced on Friday that cars of Armed Offender ...
This summary is provided to assist in the understanding of the Court’s judgment. It does not comprise part of the reasons for that judgment. The full judgment with reasons is the only authoritative document. The full text of the judgment and reasons ...
There’s something about the feeling of wind whipping my face that brings me out of my head and into the moment. Once a month we pedal as a group: recreating the feeling of childlike glee riding our bikes together, writes Helen King.The first bike I learned to ride belonged to ...
More than 10,000 school support staff around the country have begun two weeks of paid union meetings to discuss progress on pay equity, and next steps following the Ministry of Education's failure to present a collective agreement offer. ...
Government ministers are adamant New Zealand’s economic fundamentals are solid, unemployment is at a record low, growth is faster than in Australia, and the surplus in the government accounts and low debt present further opportunities to strengthen the economy. Yet, across the road from the Beehive, the view from the ...
Wellington's mayor-elect Andy Foster says talk about a recount is causing a "distraction" for the council at the start of their term, but the incumbent Justin Lester says it's essential for a democratic process. ...
Police Commissioner Mike Bush has today announced an independent review of the systems and processes NZ Police has in place to address complaints of bullying. ...
The Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry has formalised an integrated pathway for survivors to seek justice for the abuse they suffered in State care or in the care of faith-based institutions. ...
The small-claims mediation process is meant to give real people a voice, but the financial and emotional sacrifice just isn’t worth it, writes Jai BreitnauerWhen we moved to the semi-rural dreamland of Te Henga (Bethell’s Beach) in 2017, we couldn’t imagine that anything would be able to tarnish the beautiful ...
The New Zealand Bar Association welcomes a Court of Appeal decision which gives detailed guidance on sentencing people convicted of offences related to the importation, manufacture and supply of methamphetamine. ...
Methamphetamine (meth) dealers who can prove their own addiction caused their drug offending could have their sentences cut by 30 per cent, according to a landmark judgement released by the Court of Appeal. The role of an offender in a drug network ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Ananian-Welsh, Senior Lecturer, TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland Australians picked up their morning papers yesterday to find heavily blacked-out text instead of front-page headlines. This bold statement was instigated by the “Your Right to Know” campaign, an ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul McGreevy, Professor of Animal Behaviour and Animal Welfare Science, University of Sydney The slaughter of horses bred for racing in Australia, as revealed in the ABC’s investigation, highlights the challenge of what to do with racehorses when their careers are over. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carlina Black, PhD candidate, La Trobe University It’s a year since the national apology to victims and survivors of institutional child sexual abuse. While national apologies can acknowledge survivors, sorry is just the beginning. Access to healing is needed. Our research shows ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Samantha Hepburn, Director of the Centre for Energy and Natural Resources Law, Deakin Law School, Deakin University Right now, two projects have been proposed to import gas from overseas to supply eastern Australia. This is an absurd prospect. Australia is a resource-rich ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Pitman, Senior Research Fellow, Curtin University In a recent nation-wide survey by online tutoring company Cluey Learning, 75% of Australian senior students said their ATAR score would impact on the rest of their life. And more than 80% said a score ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shih-Wen Sue Chen, Senior Lecturer in Writing and Literature, Deakin University There is a new challenger to Disney’s hold on the global animation industry, and he is a Chinese demon child. [embedded content]Ne Zha: Birth of the Demon Child, from Chengdu Coco ...
Good morning, and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Wellington’s new mayor faces difficult three years, Zero Carbon bill select committee report comes back, and extremist preacher barred from NZPartly because it was a widely unexpected result, the opening days of Wellington mayor Andy Foster’s tenure have been gripping. He ...
Open mike 12/01/2013 
Canadians went to the polls today in parliamentary elections, and appear to have re-elected blackface wearer Justin Trudeau. Unfortunately, they use first-past-the-post, and they've provided a perfect demonstration of how unfair this system is:PartySeats% Seats% VoteLiberal15746.4%33.1%Conservative12135.8%34.4%Bloc Québécois329.5%7.7%New Democratic Party247.1%15.9%Green Party30.9%6.5%Other10.3%2.4% [Results from Elections Canada] Yes, the Liberals got fewer votes ...12 hours ago
A few days ago, a friend sent me a link to a health-related FB page that had published a post from a homeopathist, offering homeopathic “vaccination”¹ against measles (using something called a “Morbillinum nosode” at a “potency” of 200C, which I’ll explain shortly). I followed the link, left a comment ...16 hours ago
by Gearóid Ó Loingsigh This year marks the 20th anniversary of the La Gabarra massacre. The community organised an event to remember the most well-known of the horrendous heart-breaking events that befell the communities of this area of the municipality of Tibú: the massacre carried out on August 21st 1999. ...17 hours ago
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by the Council of Disobedient Women We call on the Council of Trade Unions to show some fortitude and take a stand with your sisters. Unionists know that there is a material world, otherwise workers could simply identify out of poverty. They could declare themselves Well Paid. Why stop ...2 days ago
Keir Starmer has hinted that Labour might vote in favour of the Johnson government's shoddy deal, with the proviso that a second referendum is attached:Speaking to BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show, he said: “We will see what that looks like but it makes sense to say that by whatever ...2 days ago
In 1994, I was the editor for an issue of Planet magazine focused on cannabis, its culture and the prospects for the end of its prohibition. Part of that issue was an interview with 'Ringo', an experienced cannabis dealer.I recently posted my essay from that issue, and I figured it ...4 days ago
Media Statement for Immediate Release 16th October 2019 “Fake News” from Auckland City Council CCOs Board Chairs re pay and performance bonuses for top managers Despite comments from Auckland City Council CCOs Board Chairs re pay and performance bonuses for top managers—Herald Newspaper Tuesday Oct 15th–there is very little evidence ...6 days ago
Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz There is a lot of discussion on the benefits of ...7 days ago
Thanks to a report from the Acting Inspector General of Intelligence and Security following a complaint by Nicky Hager, we have come to find out that the SIS illegally spied on Mr. Hager on behalf of the NZDF after publication of Hager’s 2011 book, Other People’s Wars. The NZDF justified ...1 week ago
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http://www.theaudience.co.nz/the-al1en/the-faeces-of-the-species-1/
Click the link, and vote to get NZonAir funding.
One more day, one more lie, one more smile, one more wave.
Some old joke wants my vote. Aspirational fail.
Did you see on TV? The third world disease on her face.
Unlike me, all you see, are scabs not your first world disgrace.
You’re the faeces of the species, you’re the disease, you’re the plague on the face of that girl.
You’re the hunger, you’re the plunder, all asunder, heaven wonder if there’s oil on the moon (in our bones).
You’re the statistic, optimistic, pessimist e-con-o-mystic, you’re the waste in the space.
Merchant banker, supertanker, deep drill wanker, pull your anchor, just get out of the way.
And we’ll rise. And when we rise up.
We will sing, and we will be glorious.
One more try, one more bribe, one more tea for your friend.
Some old bloke on a rope while they bury his dead.
Did you see on tv? The mould on kids in their bed.
Unlike me, all you see, is dirt and the profits from rent.
You’re the faeces of the species, you’re a disease, you’re a plague on the backs of us all.
You’re the sadistic, little twisted, first world gifted, Mi-pad whiz kid, the foul wind in the sales.
You’re the hunter, you’re the blunder, toxic numbers, six foot under, and you’re the slag of good grace.
Mother cluster, bunker buster, colonel mustard, general custard, just get out of our way.
And we’ll rise. And when we rise up.
We will sing, and we will be glorious.
19 on the daily chart, 304 on the wildcard chart, from two votes.
We’re all lefties here, right? we’re all anti poverty and pro children in need, right?
Two clicks, and you don’t even have to listen to the song to vote.
Pass the link around, and we’ll all have played a part in forcing the issue of child hunger and inept government in NZ in the faces of a head under the cover, not really listening public.
Surely you can see what the songs about, so please click to fight to win.
Click what Alien? I’ve followed the link twice and still can’t figure out how to vote.
Thanks for that, mate.
Underneath the title and band name, there’s an orange ‘vote’ button
Or click or mouse over the Al1en head picture and there’s an orange java vote button.
I’d do a screenshot if I knew how post it.
You can vote everyday until we win.
Viva revolution.
278 on the wildcard chart from 5 votes. 😉
I’ve voted now. Thanks for telling us how. I couldn’t work it out either. 🙂
Funny isn’t it? You put a bright orange button with the word “vote” on it in the middle of a sparsely decorated page…
that’s not where that link takes me.
What do you see? js.
Your facebook page. I have to click on the picture to go further.
I have to to log in using my facebook details to access my profile, but if I log out, return to the site and dismiss the login screen, I always go straight to song page.
I don’t know why you can’t access the page, but I appreciate your efforts in trying.
Thanks.
That’s kind of you, thanks very much.
Sometimes I like a crooked day dream to keep me company at work.
My fave is the song does well using the government’s (ours) money, and the pm handing over an award at the tuis (or whatever they’re called), to a stunt double dressed in an alien suit, with the whole nation knowing it’s about his premiership and him doing sod all to help our children out of poverty, live on TV.
It makes international news reels, and as we know, there’s no such thing as bad, free publicity.
Then my boss comes and wakes me and tells me he’s made my coffee. 🙂
Daily chart is updated at midnight, wildcard chart by the hour.
So far, 242 with 6 votes.
A famous victory for the left slipping away. 😆
Come on.
I voted. But it still asks for some silly flash player, I have never had any trouble playing anything from the net before It would be nice to know what I voted for 🙂
why wont it play??
I don’t know why it won’t play for you, but cheers for the solidarity.
If you want to hear the track it’s also up at https://soundcloud.com/theal1en/the-faeces-of-the-species
But don’t blame me if you can’t sleep tonight. 😆
My respect to all those who have voted.
231 after 7 votes.
You see how easy this could be to win if the just the site stalwarts here gifted a daily vote over the next couple of weeks.
Tell your friends, use the pc at work and home and we could all be having a right old laugh at Teflon john expense.
I don’t want to spam more than I have, and certainly don’t want to wear out my welcome here, so for bearing with me, ta very much.
Actually I think you are ranked 220…
You must have just hit the hourly change over.
Cheers for looking out for me 😉
Just in case anybody is still awake and or interested, I’ve made a Dr Evil pic to accompany the vote link if anyone wants it.
Right click, save as, and email away. http://www.al1en.org
And I’m serious, or one million dollars.
Always looking out for you mate. This Viper has your six.
Now lost amongst dead open mikes.
Got up to 7 in the daily chart and 168 on the chart that counts – The wildcard chart.
14 plays and 9 votes.
Not bad for a days revolutioneering. Thanks comrades.
Now please, do it again, and tell a friend. 🙂
Puff piece in the Herald today on Maggie Barry, written by Audrey Young, headlined ‘Maggie’s Way’.
A Q&A style article. She talks about the insults and bullying nature of parliament and it’s from her point of view all Labour’s fault. Gets politely and super lightly called on insulting and bullying Jacinda Adern, and it turns out it’s all because of Trevor Mallard twitter twatting or something.
Maggie doesn’t do insults or bullying, neither does National, its all Labour and the Greens fault. Of course Young leaves that and moves on to bigger more pressing issues.
Which MP outside your party impresses you?
That’s a hard one. Can I get back to you on that? That’s a really hard one.
Classy, there are good people on both sides of the house doing good work and you can’t even mention one, you f&^*ing work there on committees with these people . Says more about Barry than any of her other answers.
Maggie this may be the zenith of your political career, may your years of seat warming ahead be good for your garden.
This article was so light and fluffy from our hard hitting gallery journo I think the paper floated in from the letterbox this morning on its own.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=10858622
“Which MP outside your party impresses you?”
All the Maori party mps, for services to the National party.
John Banks, that he’s still clinging on to his salary, despite everything that says he shouldn’t.
Simon Bridges, for carrying on and making the best of it, despite taking a severe beating with the wanker stick.
And last and very much least, Paula Bennett, for her continued support for NZ tent makers in these troubled times, and popularising the moo moo all over again, even if she does need help to zip it.
Audrey young doing her bit for the party her daddy served and her herald masters.
Maggie Barry is a vacuous nasty piece of work, can’t even shut the f up and learn the ropes. Finally got selected for one of the safest seats as they couldn’t risk her in anything less.
“I personally think that men and men and women and women should be allowed to marry if that’s what they want. Frankly, I don’t quite understand why they want to do it. I’ve never got married in my life.”
She even manages to screw up her pro-marriage equality stance. It’s like a pre-women’s vote man telling a woman ‘I don’t know why you want the right to vote, I’ve never done it’.
Yes Maggie, we shouldn’t marry because you think it’s silly.
Im sure blokes all over the country will be breathing a sigh of relief, dont know why anyone would want to marry her…
Saw the headline, and figured I wanted to keep my breakfast.
No wonder our young are heading to Aussie, if this story is anything to go by.
Headline on the Herald : Student loan debtor: I’m better off in OZ.
In NZ a borrower has to pay back $10.000 a year,across the Tasman it’s only $3.000
Sorry i can’t link the story..
Here’s the link vivaciousviper:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10858618
Thanks for linking Olwyn (:
On the subject of student loan defaulters, I have no idea why the IRD cannot just make an agreement with the tax collection agencies of the UK, USA, Ireland, and Aus to have the student debt recovered through their respective tax systems?
Probably because those countries want nothing to change. At the moment, they get all our educated people improving their economy / society.
Not only would it cost their tax systems to chase kiwis, but it would stem the tide of highly educated people working within their country.
http://asianinvasion2006.blogspot.co.nz/2013/01/labour-struggles-with-its-direction.html
I wasn’t sure where to post the above. It is a blog by Cactus Kate, primarily abut Karol’s post, ‘State Housing versus Home Ownership’.
I haven’t left a teaser, it’s all pretty interesting.
Am half way through, yes it is interesting, but for the rest of the weekend can we please refer to Cactus Kate as “Cactus Kate”? 🙄
Sorry? You’ll have to explain.
“Cactus” decided to call Karol “Karol”.
Ahhh. Missed it. Ta.
And as for the delusion that anyone in their right mind would mistake “Cactus Kate” for QoT. And to say the least QoT makes way more sense.
I’m a bit stunned, I agree with almost everything “Cactus Kate” is saying.
It’s possibly an impostor writing. Maybe QoT.
She has paid homage to QoT I notice…..
(as is only fitting).
I don’t know how anyone could really confuse the two though, the writing styles are worlds apart. “Cactus Kate” is just a horrible bogan wrapped in a logical fallacy.
I actually quite like Cactus’s writing. Sure she is a right wing bogan but at least she is an up front bogan and she writes and thinks rationally. Her principles may be different to ours but at least she has some principles. And unlike Key she is exactly who she is. There is not pretension. She is not trying to make out she is something she is not.
I wish more right wingers were like that.
That’s very true micky, and I don’t doubt her sincerity one bit. She’s a straight up honest bastard.
However she does rely on some pretty flimsy logic. For example on RNZ she tried to argue that Matt McCarten shouldn’t criticise the operators of the Pike River mine because he wouldn’t want to run a mine himself.
Also there are times I think a responsible host should hide the keys to her computer…
That is a horrible accusation. I have never been on red radio.
And you’ve misrepresented the comments I did actually make on another station which were in relation to a defamatory comment made by another guest. One who consistently accuses directors of companies of all manner of bad behaviour, so I was merely making a point that it is not as easy and glamorously well remunerated that he may think it is and if it was he should be a mining company director.
Sorry, radio live perhaps?
But yes, that’s precisely the logical fallacy to which I refer. Thanks for restating it.
Should have stood on the ACT list IMO.
What is the world coming to, with Hooton cheer leading for team Shearer, and Cactus Kate arguing (albeit in a nuanced sense) in favour of team Cunliffe. As I read her, she wants to see actual political engagement and a proper battle of ideas, rather than both left and right racing to see who can do the best job of cosseting the middle class. And I have to say, it is a lovely piece of writing.
That’s the difference between Hooten and “Cactus” 😉
“it is a lovely piece of writing.”
Maybe I’m just not used to her writing style, but I found myself repeatedly tripping over her use of grammar.
Yes, on re-reading I noticed a couple of grammatical mistakes as well, but her arguments were clearly thought out and hung together well.
Odgers can’t write to save herself. I find her at times close to illiterate. On top of this, no matter how much she tries to dress things up for her audience, her words are invariably littered with a belief that greed is good and spiked with a hatred for anyone she thinks may impede that pursuit. I would’ve loved to have seen her in parliament, getting roasted on a daily basis, away from the safety of her computer screen. Small fish in an even smaller pond.
Maybe concentrate on the subject matter, and add some value into a discussion that way.
Small picture types are one reason this country has become a joke!
Grammar – It’s not going to halt the county’s decline!
+1
Communication is a two way street. If you want to get your point across, grammar can help.
Of all the things to talk about you are all hung up on whinging about grammar and calling me a bogan.
Little wonder Cunliffe cannot gain momentum in a working class party.
His supporters are a bunch of snobby toffs.
Fair cop.
http://paintingthegreyarea.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/literacy-privilege/
This kind of grammar policing, of anyone, really makes me cringe. The style of my writing is often poor and ungrammatical. Yet somehow, I feel entitled to have my say. If I felt insecure about all this, as so many people do, reading these kinds of comments would make me even more reticent about participating in conversations at the Standard.
Looks like you’re hung up on issues with your bad writing, too. There was this, you know:
“On top of this, no matter how much she tries to dress things up for her audience, her words are invariably littered with a belief that greed is good and spiked with a hatred for anyone she thinks may impede that pursuit.”
Who are you replying to, Mary?
I hope you aren’t implying that those who are put off speaking out by comments deriding others for their writing deficits, are just being “oversensitive”.
No, just saying, it’s a response to Cactus Kate Viper who seems to think the focus of comments here is her bad grammar. It’s not.
Have another look at of what I said and see if you can see where the emphasis is.
I’m never too bothered about clumsy or wrong grammar, but “CK’s” summary of my post as:
The silly policy to build homes for middle class kiddies screaming poverty is an excellent example of this Cunliffe v Shearer tension. “Karol” has an excellent post on this and has thought of the conspiracy that capitalism in fact is to blame in forcing this idea that owning your own home is aspirational to all.
…. is just inaccurate, whether as result of clumsy use of words, or just a poor interpretation. I was critical of the political position and policy of the current Labour caucus leadership (Team Shearer really), but I’m pretty sure I never referred to Cunliffe directly or indirectly in my ‘state housing vs home ownership’ post. And “conspiracy” is not what I think of when I am writing about the way the loose networks of the wealthy and powerful operate to further their own interests.
So she doesn’t have much of an idea of what I was thinking, but then maybe the entity that is “karol” is just a quotation, a figment of someone’s (or some group’s) imagination?
You’re being far too charitable, Karol. Anyone who refers to the poor as the “pathetic heaving underclass”, believes beneficiaries should be paid not to “breed” and thinks Slater’s blog has anything to offer other than a window into how nasty the right can get can’t be taken seriously. Just as QoT saw the hook in Fran O’Sullivan’s piece, no matter how hard she tries Odgers cannot help but let her true colours show, even when she posts on The Standard as happened again throughout today. I do not see how some on the Left can place genuine value in anything she says.
There were some points of agreement between my views on home ownership & CK’s, but she went off on her own little tangent about the (allegedly continuing) Cunliffe-Shearer tension.
I’m more curious as to why TS suddenly got so much attention over the last 24 hours or so, from CK, MH, and a Labour MP and an LP policy person. Some things seem to be bubbling away out of my sight. Yes, FO’S was still being pretty right wing, but, also seemed to shift her position somewhat.
I’m wondering if it’s part of a growing sense of uncertainty about changes happening that some political people feel they are losing control of. While some may be just trying to manoeuvre so they’ll be in a relatively favourable position when the dust settles.
And February is approaching fast.
Hi weka, the game is far bigger than February, important as that is. Leaders come and go, MPs come and go, neither Shearer nor Cunliffe will be relevant 10-15 years from now. The real sea change has to happen at the Labour membership and constitutional level. And we’ve only just started.
As I read her, she sees the Shearer/Cunliffe tension as arising from the courting of the middle class by the Shearer people, and the desire for a genuinely left orientation by a lot of left wing people. And she sees the housing policy and your response to it as exemplifying this tension. But I agree that beyond those points, she does go off on her own tangent.
Paying homage to a greater being, self preservation being the aim. That’s the base level she operates on.
I think I’m meant to be hurt that “Cactus Kate” has noticed I get angry sometimes. How very unladylike of me.
(And interestingly *I* don’t get scarequotes on my name, which is nice and revealing about why “Kate” applies them to karol.)
It’s a white flag QoT. CK doesn’t want to get into any debate she is guaranteed to lose and that’s any debate with you.
Take it as a compliment.
Oh, I do. It would be quite a debate though, the epic battle of Chaotic Good vs Chaotic Neutral.
Maye because she knows that Karol wont tell her to Fark off!! 🙂
The same here. Now I too want to know who wrote that article because it dont look at all like the usual “Cactus Kate” stuff.
Queue some b/s about ck’s post being proof positive that ‘misguided’ types of the left are unwittingly in cahoots with portions of the right and in effect undermining the ‘nice’ Labour Party just as the ‘right’ wants, and how every one counted within the ‘misguided left’ ought now, and once and for all, STFU.
In fact. Haven’t I already read that line somewhere here at ts?
Indeed.
And if you replace “STFU” with “resign the leadership”, you’ll have it in both directions.
Does ‘indeed’ indicate you think that’s a reasonable line to spin, McFlock? The reason I ask is your follow-on, which I guess is attempting to posit the opposite of what I’d call a b/s line. And it’s another b/s line. No-one is calling on DS to resign the leadership. But lots of people are wanting to see democracy really exist within the Labour Party. And, I guess, pressure might be applied to mp’s who’d rather deny democracy in Feb.
Now, you might not agree with that sentiment or goal. Fine. But don’t mis-call it as a call for DS to resign.
Well, I have seen arguments that posit Hooten’s support for shearer is evidence that shearer is not fit to be leader.
If I were to make a similar quibble about your phrasing, I don’t recall seeing anyone here specifically demand that critics of the Labour party should “STFU”.
Fran is off the reservation, calling for the “the top personal tax break” to be cancelled amoungst other heresies: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10858589
Another impostor!
Must have banged Her head on something, Fran is just about demanding a Socialist solution to ‘youth unemployment’ from a Tory Government no less,
Wonder if Slippery lost control of His bowels when He read that lot this morning…
Ah, but if you read carefully, bad, you’ll see that Fran’s concerns are actually about “gaps in the NZ workforce”.
So solving youth unemployment is really just a side effect of her real goal, helping NZ businesses recruit.
Wonder if Slippery lost control of His bowels when He read that lot this morning…
That could lead to an awful mess, considering the lack of toilets on Planet Key.
😀
Yep things are getting really strange. Chris Trotter thinks the nats have a mandate to sell our assets and the right are calling for tax increases for the wealthy.
What is going on?
Has it ever occurred to any of you lot that most people don’t have a blindly ideological approach to every issue unlike yourselves – that there are good points and bad points to both sides of most given arguments? That most peoples views may shift back and forth somewhat over time?
I guess it is because you lot are in constant battle mode fighting the good war against the forces of evil, you have developed an us vs them mentality – “you are either with us or against us!”.
You are left exasperated an confused when you can’t squeeze someone into one of a few pigeon holes.
Has it ever occurred to you that us lot don’t give one big fat f**k what you ‘think’ and we only tolerate you as an object of mirth to bestow the odd piece of spittle upon when we have run out of jokes about the Prime Minister Slippery’s bad habit of public displays of ‘spastic dancing’…
Yet another good illustration of why the Left is so broken it can’t even grab the ball of a team of drop kicks ie the Nats.
Goran Therborn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6ran_Therborn
Neo marxism is dead in the water – who’s suppose to be the Agent of change since the proletariat failed to turn up to the party? Why should anyone believe that knowledge is only ever Historical never Universal?
So tell me KP is unfettered capitalism in a healthy state and just what this world needs?
Has it ever occurred to any of you lot that most people don’t have a blindly ideological approach to every issue unlike yourselves – that there are good points and bad points to both sides of most given arguments? That most peoples views may shift back and forth somewhat over time?
Sounds like poststructuralist mumbo-jumbo to me…isn’t that usually your target?
No its not poststructurlist, its Humanist. I believe there is an objective reality and objective universal values about ethics/justice.
Post structuralists/Deconstructionist/various Feminists splinter groups/Neo Marxists/Cultural Relativists/Multiculturalists – they all suffer from hyper relativism and symptoms of solipsism of varying severity.
Makes it hard to pin that lot down as they twist and squirm, grabbing a bit of this and a bit of that to create what can only be described as very bad philosophy.
well, that is where we part ways friend; existence precedes essence; consider the “existence” of people born with profound impairments (at Templeton there were “patients” that resembled sun-fish, to put it politely); consider the “essence” of so-called “schizophrenics”; I have followed your comments over the year, and like mine, there is nothing “objective” about them. (we need new lock-nuts)
You are putting forward an Existential argument, not a Post Modernist one.
Good example again of how the Left is in disarray.
Existentialism enjoyed brief popularity post WWII thanks to a French philosopher or 2. It descended into Nihilism fast and sank out of sight.
ciao
I believe there is an objective reality and objective universal values about ethics/justice.
Interesting statement.
It would be interesting to know where you stand – I’m picking neo-marxist, not that flakey Post Modernist stuff which I think QofT suffers from.
But like I said before you lot dart here and there depending on the direction of fire. Good tactic I guess as its harder to hit a moving target.
Ah, k-p, why so keen to put people in boxes? I do have difficulty following a party line or any one theory – the best still have their weaknesses. It depends on the context and the issue as to which is most useful. I am a little bit neo-Marxist and quite a bit post-structuralist. There are some things in postmodernism I agree with. There is no theory of everything. But I am for democratic socialism, social and economic justice/fairness, and am against violence, prejudice, persecution and oppression.
And I am for evidence-based research, knowledge, understanding and argument.
I do think there is an objectively (scientifically) verifiable material reality. I see objectivity as a process, not an end point. And it doesn’t necessarily cancel out subjectivity, especially when it comes to human activities and communications. Objectivity is haunted by subjectivity, as you demonstrated with that sentence of yours I quoted above. But, that’s the thing about language and human communications.
You seem to miss your own contradictions. “believing” in something is a subjective statement.
Yep. I’d say it’s an odd sort of humanism that fails to recognise that humans interpret reality both subjectively, and through socially constructed lenses.
not that flakey Post Modernist stuff which I think QofT suffers from.
No, please, do go on.
I’ll just be over here having a chuckle that you managed to get from “you stupid lefties just want to pigeonhole everyone” into “I bet you’re a neo-Marxist” in a mere six comments.
”i have never read the book,(Marx),tho i was told to take a look,i lifted my pool hall cue for another game”,
(Thanks to the Clash for the lines which i have gleefully altered with the addition of the Social/economists moniker),
LOLZ, my pidgeon hole is somewhere in the vicinity of Pol Pot, a Communizing Fascist,
Thanks to the good old New Zealand education tho i have the ability to realize that getting KP’s relatives to bang a four inch nail into the back of His head at gun-point just isn’t acceptable human behaviour so good old Post-Modernist,(whatever the fuck that means), me has had to accept simply being a Socialist…
PS, i think it all got lost in the translation for poor old Pol Pot, He thought it meant retribution when He was reading redistribution…
Trotter must have holidayed in one of those Batchs that have 50 year old lumpy couches!
He didn’t get a good rest and over stretched some of the points he was making.
Shearer should front foot the mercenary thing so that it is yesterday’s news by the time the Nats get their research ready for leaking through their usual channels
This is twilight zone stuff…are Right Wing commentators giving Key and English room to launch one or two definitively Left Wing policies? Can their strategy for 2014 be really this cunning? Mix in one or two headline Left Wing policies (top tax rate hike and youth employment/youth training programmes), and use it as cover for austerity and asset sell downs elsewhere?
I wonder if they have found in their polling that a lot of ordinary NZers – including the middle class – are worried that their kids can’t seem to get ahead and that there is a shortage of decent jobs and training opportunities.
Nah, it just won’t happen via a lift in the top tax rate, the Fed crowd would string English up by a very sensitive part of His anatomy in a rotary shed at the very thought of it,
The only invite Slippery would get from now until the little Shyster is given the kick would be from those wishing to have Him behave naturally,(dance like a clown),in their presence while they took pics to show off to the Grand-kids in their dotage,
The Bizness lobby would immediately stop calling, i think that if they are going to spend money on any sort of employment initiative,(or pretend to), the usual suspect will be trotted out, asset sales proceeds will have yet another attachment of ‘youth employment’ attached to it along with the continuously growing list of roading,health,schools,debt, blah blah blah,
Other than that if the Slippery little Shyster has half a brain He will be offering employers a years worth of dole payments as a ‘training allowance’ to actually employ a large number of the 24% of unemployed youth, possibly with a slight hint at a top tax rate rise…
Have people forgotten about the youth changes for 16-17 year olds?
Does one think it’s possible that that was setting the scene for harsher benefit conditions for all youth and more privatisation?
The right taketh more than they giveth so creating an enviornment where it seems that they are taking positive steps to address the issue may simply be a way of saying to people well now there’s no excuse to be on a benefit.
Bootcamps won’t work this time to get that 5% of swinging vote but the strategy surely won’t change – we’re offering this but if you don’t avail yourself of our wonderful opportunity then benefit damnation is yours.
Can their strategy really be this cunning? It sounds eerily like their 2008 me-to strategy. The must be getting a bit of polling feedback telling them to DO something.
This is what I reckon. Also, any PR headline increase in the top personal tax rate can be more than compensated for by drops in corporate and trust tax rates, see how it works 😉
http://asianinvasion2006.blogspot.co.nz/2013/01/labour-struggles-with-its-direction.html?m=1
No, o revered one. I would not read Cactus Kate that way.
While she can be snappy, she never comes across as being anyone’s poodle.
Or they have all finally figured out that the Emperor really has no clothes
may I just pop in here?
I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter 🙂
(The last thing on knows when constructing a work is what to put first; continual eloquence is tedious) ;)-Blaise
WHAT WE CAN NEVER KNOW,or the collapsing hermeneutic (there’s your spiral)
-David Germez
“one could in the light of the fact that the divine life is itself a continued variation,,, apply to divinity in the most exalted sense the name of time. The old mythology of Chronos as primordial being and first divine principle seems thereby to be somehow in contact with the truth”
-Franz Bretano :Philosophical Investigations on Space Time and the Continuum.
“All created things are God’s speech. The being of a stone speaks and manifests the same as does my mouth about God: and people understand more by what is done than by what is said”
-Meister Eckhart : The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defence.
Invasion of the body snatchers. A pod has got her – there’s a reason why they call Mars the “Red Planet”
scaloppine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernesto_Screpanti
Let just get this out there. A person in receipt of a benefit, if they earn more than $3,400 are pushed up into the second lowest band of taxation. Key did this because obviously he never read the convention on human rights, that if someone is so in need that they receive a benefit then they cannot be treated differently, that everyone should receive the same amount of welfare. Yet Key believes that progressive taxation should kick on those on welfare!
Looking at it another way. People who earn $100,000 pay 10.5% on the first $14,000 they earn.
People who earn $3,400 pay only at the 10.5% rate. Those in receipt of a welfare
check, and have no income, get the full entitlement, pay no tax on income. But Key in
his infinite stupidity believes that those individuals who do have some paltry $3,400+
of income should not get the full welfare entitlement (as effectively they pay more tax,
pay the 17.5% rate on their measly income after the first $3,400).
Just for a moment imagine the cost of filing tax returns as all those people on welfare
whose taxation just became a complicated mess. Whatever happened to keeping
government taxation simple. But worse, how can government argue that families
on welfare should not get family tax credit when there is clearly income tax
bands for those on welfare. I mean whatever happened to equal treatment in taxation.
You pay a higher rate of tax makes you eligible for the programs its funds to those who
also pay higher rates of tax.
“whatever happened to equal treatment in taxation”, only when the main beneficiaries of such treatment are those at the top of the food chain or those who vote to put them there,
The Working for Families fiasco where the Clark Government deemed the middle class,(and quite high up in that decile), to be more ‘in need’ of relief from taxation than beneficiaries with children was the final straw for me that broke my connection with Labour,
Incidently the ‘loud noise’ us lot at the Standard have been making over housing affordability has obviously attracted the attention of Labour so much so that Annette King has paid a visit and at least aquainted herself with the concerns many of us here have regarding State owned rentals being provided to the decile of lower waged workers so there is a small glimmer of hope of seeing some specific and substantial gains in that area when Labour release it’s completed election policy,(hopefully sooner rather than later),
My view is that the next ‘issue’ that we as the Standard need to address is just that of ‘working for Families’ and just how grossly unfair is it to tax the benefits of welfare dependent children and then refuse to offer them the ‘tax relief’ offered to the children of the upper echelons of the middle class…
The money spent on some of WFF would be better off being spent on a) a universal family benefit, and b) an increase in the state housing stock. The same outcome would be achieved.
Though I agree with the sentiments leveled at Labour, my point was this, that Key introduced a second progressive tax in the middle of the welfare. Imagine for a moment that we pay benefit to help people out of poverty only to tax them more if they do the right thing on welfare!
Save or get some part time work????
But worse, by taxing them on welfare we also don’t pay them WFF, which is blatantly unfair.
But its even worse, the 10.5% tax rate is a farce since its really just a tax relief for the rich, those who don’t get welfare don’t the relief since unlike everyone else the MSD take the first
10.5% tax band when they provide welfare. So the low tax band had no effect except for the
free who live off assets with little income (and can’t claim benefit), those geared to reduce their
taxes using trusts – the super rich.
Merging Madness and Reason (it’s the DSM V season)
“you have never been diagnosed as mad-this is the shifting sand upon which you erect your sanity. Yet, your illness has gone unrecognized…you have been deprived of treatment because the steady, sure advance of science has taken too long to reach you.”
“Beneath the (can’t read my handwriting, some adjective) labels of consensus there is just the homogenous zone-our common origins and physiology bind us together; we are a crowd of open-eyed children staring with wonder at the world. This vast assembly of “thrown” people is the homogenous zone-a coat of many (red) colours”.
“Reason too, recognized itself as being duplicated and dispossessed of itself; it thought itself wise and it was and it was mad; it thought it knew and it knew nothing; it thought itself righteous and it was insane; knowledge led one to the forbidden world when one thought one was being led by it to eternal light.” (thats “progress” for ya’s; Get Ya YaYa’s Out) (those art-school rockers aye)
-Foucault :Mental Illness and Psychology
According to Scheff, relative to the rate of treated “mental illness” the rate of unrecorded residual rule breaking of societal norms is extremely high.
-consider this continual self-absorbed flouting of cell -phone /driving legislation, and it’s on the increase; BodyCount’s in the house.Listen to how close people are to stress thresholds in their daily discourse with children, family, associates, witness the behavioural temperature on the roads, the anasthetization and subsequent harms carried out; that’s why I drank alone in the end; Dos Gusanos was fun though, all those years ago 🙂 (an I’m not surprised productivity is tanking when I observe people ostensibly working yet using their work p.c for shopping and such-like)
“Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history’, but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed and the clever beasts had to die-One might invent such a fable and yet still it would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature.
-Friedrich Nietzsche :On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense
“Madness and sanity are variants of the same phenomena; everything that we see and fear in the madman can also be seen and feared in ourselves. We are all mad children, we are all autistic, we are all deluded, we are all abstract and solipsistic and we all madly cobble together systems of absurd beliefs on this lost planet of fools; perhaps a fundamental truth about our humanity can be found in the instability, ‘throwness’ and madness of the homogenous zone.”
(Baudrillard places his hopes in terrorism, viruses and catastrophe)
i read today of an analysts perspective on FIVE potential Asian Shocks
-Taiwanese Independence asserted by the democratic vote
-Islamic unrest reaching China
-US Defence (Naval) cuts
-Thailand destabilized
-Territorial disputes in E and S China seas (we do live in interesting times)
Exit Strategy
-Why, thou sayest well; I do now remember a saying, “The fool doth think he is wise, yet the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
-As You Like It (if you are ruled by mind, you are a king, if by body, a slave-Cato)
WHAT WE CAN NEVER KNOW- David Gamez. I whole-heartedly recommend this little book; I read it this afternoon at the library (air-con and I cannot afford to pay my fees, yet;)
HBT-10 more hot dry days forecast, little rain since August, Irrigation Ban on the way, Farmers may ‘dry out’
-if you’re walking a dog, they cannot eat anything they find in or around rivers or ponds, (cyano-bacteria) meanwhile we are going to supply more dairy to another Infant Formula Manufacturer establishing in NI
Dom-The Children’s Commissioner, a HB paediatrician,Russell Wills,, is “incredulous” about child poverty and inequality in our country…
from your friendly neighbourhood “madman” (hyper-rationally and reflexively yours)
now what am I gonna do for a crust. hmmm
11.29 By faith the people passed through the RED Sea, as on dry land, but when the Egyptians tried to do so, they were drowned. 🙂
This Isn’t the Petition Response You’re Looking For
🙂 It’s a Mad Mad World, btw D, I’m gettin “bored” again, don’t wanna write a book, there’s enough been written already, might start an Anarchist Commune ala
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kropotkin 🙂
It was Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread that introduced me to anarchism.
Well, The Standard sure has evolved. That’s all from me, and that’s all from him. (a little birdy messaged me that a “challenge” is a moot point).
Adios Amigos, I’ll watch on from the High Plains from now on. 🙂 🙂 🙂
Don’t go too far away, mon ami 😉
?
Oh, Clint, you’re back. It read like you were heading off along the ridge and leaving this little village behind.
High Plains Drifter
Great movie.
And The Two Ronnies
This is too much – I really going to miss you.
I assumed your “watch from the High Plains” remark meant that you weren’t going to be actively commenting for the moment, forgive me if I misinterpreted.
No I am going CV, it has been fun, and I have learned a lot (Thank You All and One and All A Good Night)
John James Elijah (Ha, comment 101 ers) 🙂
Farewell mate, take good care.
Nooooo, don’t go away!
Oh alright, if you must. I can’t force you to stay… but know that I’ve loved your contributions.
Take good care, as CV says. Fare thee well.
Loved your stuff, trooper, a message from Nu-Earth?
“And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts
And I looked and behold, a pale horse
And his name that sat on him was Death
And Hell followed with him.”
Great Clint Eastwood movie!!!
“What is happening at the moment? Because the Falklands are back in the news. Belfast is back in the news. It’s like some sort of hideous 80s revival, isn’t it? All we need is a heartless Conservative prime minister attacking the unemployed and demonising the poor, bankers making obscene profits, David Bowie releasing a single…”–Sandi Toksvig, The News Quiz
mickysavage -> So tell me KP is unfettered capitalism in a healthy state and just what this world needs?
Obviously not. I was never a supporter of neo liberalism, except back in the 80s when I was in my middle teens. But everyone was entranced by it then, Muldoon was gone, the Cold War over, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous was on TV.
This is an interesting piece by a contemporary philosopher I like, applying some Humanist qualities – imagination, intuition, memory, ethics – to the current morass:
“I can only ask: is there a single example in Western civilisation over the past 2500 years when a broad policy of austerity has pulled a civilisation out of crisis and set it on the road to wellbeing, prosperity or growth? No. There is no example. There is no evidence. Only ideological conviction – romanticism – coming out of a political-economic theory packed into an apparently inevitable force called globalisation…
…Crises usually strike when ideologies have been around too long and the elites that serve them have lost their ability for critical thought…
…Instead of retreating inside a received wisdom, which has already revealed that it doesn’t work, we could turn to some basic, helpful human qualities…
…Ethics, for example, are a simple, practical reminder that the primary obligation of a civilisation is to its citizens’ wellbeing, not to the protection of commercial contracts or the servicing of debts. The fact that most of these debts were incurred by the commercial sector and its financiers reinforces this point…
…Memory is an essential tool of education. You can’t deal with a crisis if you are in the hands of economists, managers and business elites who don’t know the history of debt. They don’t know the history of competition. Very few read anything of consequence. They are the briefing paper generation. Many are, in reality, functionally illiterate, except on very narrow topics. They don’t know what has worked and not worked in their own society. In fact, they don’t seem to understand the concept of either society or civilisation…
…As for Imagination, it is not the privileged domain of the arts. Good financial policy is an expression of imagination. Throughout history great financiers and great ministers of finance have usually also been great consumers of culture, intellectuals, men of imagination. I think of Solon in Athens 2600 years ago, of Sully at the side of Henry IV in 1600, of Siegmund Warburg after World War II, of Jean Monet rebuilding Europe. As they would explain: you must imagine your way out of an economic cul de sac, just as a good general imagines his way out of a military stalemate. Bad generals stick to trench warfare…
…History is clear. When faced by unsustainable debts, the fools, the weak, the degenerate civilisations become obsessed by what they owe. They convince themselves that money is real, not an agreed-upon convention. They become its slave. And they destroy themselves. Successful civilisations make these impossible debts disappear – clearly, intentionally, massively. In this way they protect what needs to be protected, such as the savings of real people and their pensions. They clear the decks and the result is raw, new human energy to deal with society’s needs. History is filled with examples of this being done on purpose. It is also filled with the carcasses of those who refused to face reality and so caused their societies to commit suicide.”
http://www.johnralstonsaul.com/eng/articles_detail.php?id=98&lang=eng
Wow, just as I’m signing off, kiwi_prometheus posts a relevant comment 🙂
postscript
http://philosophynow.org/issues/74/What_We_Can_Never_Know_by_David_Gamez
subscription only
Sound familiar?
http://truth-out.org/news/item/13852-latvias-economic-disaster-as-a-neoliberal-success-story-a-model-for-europe-and-the-us
For some reason no reply buttons are showing for Pascal or karol, so here goes:
Pascal -> “Yep. I’d say it’s an odd sort of humanism that fails to recognise that humans interpret reality both subjectively, and through socially constructed lenses.”
Where did I deny any subjectivity? It’s the post structuralists/post modernists who go the hyper relativistic route.
You end up with crazy feminists calling Newton’s Laws of Physics a ‘rape manual’, and prattling on about “Rape Culture”. Science is dismissed or supposedly ‘improved’ via “Critical Theory” to “Feminist Science” or “Post Modernest Science”.
It’s all very poor philosophy and embodies atrociously low Academic standards.
There are silly things said in all schools.
You don’t necessarily “end up with crazy feminists calling Newton’s Laws of Physics a ‘rape manual’” if you accept a lot of what PM theorists say. And to equate that sort of thing with rape culture’ is just asinine.
Do you think that cultural norms are socially constructed, partially through the way we talk about things? And that cultural norms affect individuals thoughts about behavior and blameworthiness?
If so, then it’s no stretch to say that the way a society talks about rape, will affect the incidence of rape. ie, that some ways of talking about rape could increase the incidence of rape by creating cultural norms that support rapists interpretations of reality.
You end up with crazy feminists calling Newton’s Laws of Physics a ‘rape manual’, and prattling on about “Rape Culture”. Science is dismissed or supposedly ‘improved’ via “Critical Theory” to “Feminist Science” or “Post Modernest Science”.
Oops, k_p’s brain overloaded and it’s back to copy-pasting MRA propaganda which he’s already been informed multiple times is inaccurate. Balance has been restored to the Force.
karol -> “Ah, k-p, why so keen to put people in boxes? ”
Just want to know where you stand is all, nothing wrong with that.
“I do have difficulty following a party line or any one theory – the best still have their weaknesses.”
I don’t follow a part line and I get MOBBED on here for it – especially by your girl pals.
“It depends on the context and the issue as to which is most useful.”
It’s not good enough to go with what is “useful”. Marxism for example is a theory of everything, the guy was a genius obviously, nevertheless his philosophical system crashed and burned. Why should anyone believe you have the intellectual ability to uplift a fragment of it, remove it from context and claim it is “useful” for contemporary application.
“I am a little bit neo-Marxist and quite a bit post-structuralist. There are some things in postmodernism I agree with.”
The main tenet in postmodernism is that language is meaningless. Apparently Focault back tracked from that to the position that the meaning the reader gets from a text may differ from the author’s intention. In which case he hasn’t made any insight that authors and readers haven’t been aware of already.
As for Derrida, he’s been called an intellectual fraudster by some luminary academic types. Anyone who says they have read Derrida is lying, its incomprehensible – worse than Hegel.
The fact that Post-structuralist professors still hand out As Bs and Cs to their students submitted essays suggest the whole exercise is an insider’s joke.
“There is no theory of everything. But I am for democratic socialism, social and economic justice/fairness, and am against violence, prejudice, persecution and oppression.”
“And I am for evidence-based research, knowledge, understanding and argument.”
You are keeping the word “science” out of it. Are you referring to science, if not why not, and to what are you referring, Karol?
“I do think there is an objectively (scientifically) verifiable material reality.”
Ok you do bring up science now. Don’t know how you can claim to believe in science but claim to be “quite a bit post-structuralist”
“I see objectivity as a process, not an end point. And it doesn’t necessarily cancel out subjectivity, especially when it comes to human activities and communications. Objectivity is haunted by subjectivity, as you demonstrated with that sentence of yours I quoted above. But, that’s the thing about language and human communications.”
I never denied that there is subjectivity, it is postmodernist who deny the objective.
“You seem to miss your own contradictions. “believing” in something is a subjective statement.”
Is it? Does it matter? Like I said I don’t deny there is subjectivity eg “Chocolate tastes better than vanilla!” [ proviso – scientist discover genetic basis for varying tastes ]
[lprent: There is no “partY line” – it is every person’s argument for themselves. However there is a moderation line.
Personally I tend to view you as having a problem with dealing with women (what is it with that?) and indeed with anyone who thinks. You have that kind of “I’m just a poor victim” mentality (as you have amply demonstrated in this comment) that makes it difficult for you to deal with anyone disagreeing with you. And to top it off you seem to be a poor excuse for a psuedo-intellectual. Generally a waste of bandwidth and a bit of a luser in social media terms.
But these are just my opinions – they don’t enter into moderation.
Most of the time you pick up bans for either personally attacking authors or peristently going off topic in posts – usually the female authors. Right now you’re on most moderators “watch for stupidity” lists, and includes r0b’s list (about your only NOTABLE acheivement to date). ]
“I am a little bit neo-Marxist and quite a bit post-structuralist. There are some things in postmodernism I agree with.”
To be very blunt and clear, to me you are the typical KIWI IDIOT, I frown on, you have neither any understanding of complex history, socialism, social science, alternative social agendas and even scientifically evidenced social data.
I am totally flabber-ghasted about what brought you here.
Sorry, my impression is, you know too little of what goes down.
My comment was not really directed at the quote “kiwi_prometheus” used re what Karol may have commented on before, it was just totally incoherent, confusing, contradictory and much senseless, what “kiwi_prometheus” commented on in a wider context, also using that particular quote.
I tried to read his truly bizarre comments a few times, and I still cannot make that much sense at all out of what “k_p” tried to say or argue. Sorry for the frustration that lead to anger and some over the top comment I made in return.
You are not even just that “Kiwi idiot” I sometimes dismissably refer to, you are a totally ignorant, one sided coffin slicer of sorts, getting another angle on why some people may have died.
That is the lowest and cheapest crap I ever read and heard, man. Rot in fucking hell for that.
HC
I AM HAPPY TO BE BANNED AFTER SUCH IGNORANT POST AND ME GOING OVER THE TOP. SORRY, I COULD NOT HELP MYSELF. ALL THE BEST.
Have you ever considered that’s because you say really stupid things about girls?
There’s only one thing to say here and it was said by Marx himself:
I don’t know what I am but I know that I’m not a Marxist.
Marx considered that Marxists had twisted his teachings. This can most clearly be seen by his writings on the Paris Commune of 1871 which was anarchist. It was destroyed by military attack from the government.
Yes it does. Opinion and belief cannot change objective fact. This is something that the RWNJs and economists can’t seem to grasp.
“The main tenet in postmodernism is that language is meaningless. Apparently Focault back tracked from that to the position that the meaning the reader gets from a text may differ from the author’s intention. In which case he hasn’t made any insight that authors and readers haven’t been aware of already.”
Hi xtasy. This paragraph pretty much sums things up. Every point made here is complete and utter bullshit and incorrect no matter how you look at it. So much so it’s impossible to engage with. I’d tell kp sayonara.
A great experience I had today, or rather yesterday (12.01.) to visit and view the NEW Rainbow Warrior vessel down at Princes Wharf. I am IMPRESSED, Greenpeace got their shit together, had I not been a member of sorts, I would have signed up right way.
I am worried for the ones who do not get it, how much NZ, Australian and Antarctic environmen is in danger! It is damned serious.
I left the vessel in doubt and worry, who is going to keep them alive to fight, I asked, being myself in dire straits.
I can only hope they get donations, manage and do more good, as that is what Greenpeace are here for. I would dread the day they die. I would want to die also.