Bullies everywhere when challenged say “I was only joking”, or “can’t you take a joke?” and now from NZ National we have “it was just the vernacular”.
Shane Reti has backed up his leader’s nasty comment to Siouxsie Wiles “big fat hypocrite”, saying Ms Wiles has to answer and that the comment was just kiwi vernacular rather than personal targeting.
It is so often women that take a hit from tory bullies, as writer Eleanor Catton discovered when then PM John Key waded into her for daring to critique the NZ neo liberal state.
This is what the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary says:
Definition of big fat
used for emphasis
So the words "big fat" are used for emphasis. A big fat lie is a whopper of a lie. A big fat liar/hypocrite is someone who tells whoppers or is as hypocritical as they come.
Let’s cut to the chase – Dr Wiles has said that if we leave the house in level 2, we should wear a mask. She left her house in level 4 (4 is stricter than 2) but didn’t wear a mask. People will make of that what they will.
[Show us the evidence that “She [Dr Wiles] left her house in level 4 (4 is stricter than 2) but didn’t wear a mask”. If you made it up, withdraw, correct and apologise for spreading DP-like misinformation.
Secondly, since you like Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary so much why don’t you look up the meaning of “dog-whistle” and let us know? – Incognito]
This is what the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary says:
The word you’ve entered isn’t in the dictionary. Click on a spelling suggestion below or try again using the search bar above.
The one sound provocative, while the other sounds petulant and childish.
I've read both – the latter tries, and fails IMO, to use that same argument: '"big, fat is commonly used and understood etc etc etc'; being a typical example of explaining is losing.
Judith should accuse someone else of being a big fat hypocrite as an example James Shaw for travelling to Scotland. Would everyone on here then be losing their rag over the wording if she said the same thing about Shaw?
Wait for Collins to start coming out calling everyone 'big fat' this, 'big fat' that, a bullshit attempt to make people think there was nothing sinister in what she said about Wiles. Anyway, her ridiculous outburst backfired spectacularly because Wiles is so beautiful in every way.
Juduth Collins has a liking for trying to pass uncouth comments as "vernacular"
"he need's to meet his maker"
"people would like to bottle her"
"stab from the front"
And they're just the ones she's willing to make in public – god only knows what else she says – I think her colleagues are now painfully aware of her reckless tongue
Crushed and Oblivious to blow back.Collins throwing bullying shit all over the place despetately flailling around ends up covered in the muck she throws.
I'm quite far from a National supporter, but I have never seen Collins get away with any kind of coloquialism. They are always immediately taken in the worst light possible by govt supporters.
“never seen Collins get away with any kind of coloquialism. They are always immediately taken in the worst light possible by govt supporters.”
… … …
Well, to be fair, they likely always will be by any supporters of any government, won’t they? 🤔
I seem to remember Andrew Little getting constantly roasted over some pretty petty stuff, & Ardern’s strongly Wycaddo-accented pronunciation still attracts regular criticism (as does Bridges’ nasally whine) from supporters of other parties.
Out of interest, what are any more examples you can recall of Collins getting slammed for using colloquialisms?
Still, it’s another example of a likely language useage cock up by Collins that anybody else would have seen comong & stopped themselves saying.
“Bottling” someone is a common useage (& practice), meaning assaulting or attacking someone with a broken bottle.
Back my childhood days I DO recall a phrase being used by my parents that went something like “that’s so good/clever/funny/whatever you should bottle it & sell it”.
But Collins didn’t say that. She went with the short version. The one with the double (including nasty) meaning.
I think she’s a comms freaking disaster for the Nats, hoping to attract & find new voters.
Yes. Which is why you have think very carefully, politics, in about what you ate going to say in reply to reporters. Collins’ tendency is make some instant remark that she thinks is witty, when it is just as likely to be half-witty.
Compare her to Ardern, when she is asked difficult or potential-disaster questions – whether people should have sex in hospitals, for example. Ardern thought carefully about it & gave a very neutrally-worded response. But her genuinely-humoured p, perfectly natural reaction to being asked the question was a winner!
You mean sort of like Ardern getting away with anything? She could make an announcement about NZ researchers coming up with a cure for cancer and for the National/Act supporters it would be about the terrible clothing she was wearing, the fact that her hands moved while she spoke and the terribleness of her being excited.
Sure, there are plenty of partisans on both sides. But in most debate contexts its considered correct to take the best reading of the counter position. Social Media and Twitter not withstanding.
She wouldn’t be trying to sow discontent, would she? Ironic words coming from the Leader of the Nats who’s telling her caucus what and what not to do to keep the appearance of unity and common agendas [plural].
"They are always immediately taken in the worst light possible by govt supporters."
That's because almost everything she says is calculated, and comes from her core being which is fundamentally damaged by her suffering from some kind of personality disorder, whatever the precise diagnosis might be. So in the rare instance that might involve her honest use of a coloquial term, then it's understandable people will assume the worst. At very best it's a matter of boy who cried wolf.
A good example is Chris Hipkins' slip up the other day during the live Covid update. If Hipkins had a reputation as being someone who deliberately used innuendo whenever he opened his mouth then we'd be right to think what happened during the Covid update was just another sleazy remark from a grubby character. And although I personally think it was a bad move putting that coffee cup on public display, we didn't think that of Hipkins because he doesn't have that reputation (or not that I know of). Apply the same logic to Collins and it's a different story, regardless of what her intentions were.
Indeed they are. And they are fun to use – what about "big fat rationalisation" ?
Unfortunately your rationalisation doesn't really let Judith off the hook. She knows perfectly well that "big fat" is used for emphasis – but also knows that the charming Dr Wiles is not a sylph-like figure. So Collins gets to smirkingly point at the latter fact, while maintaining the built-in defence of vernacular usage. So in addition to the standard charge that Judith is vulgar and dishonest, we can now also add the charge of deliberate cynicism.
So in addition to the standard charge that Judith is vulgar and dishonest, we can now also add the charge of deliberate cynicism.
I would've thought that there are plenty of things Judith can be criticised for without needing to manufacture outrage. And even a stopped clock is right twice a day. 🙂
If you don’t like the Merriam-Webster dictionary, you are welcome to inform its editors. I'm not in the habit of shooting the messenger.
On 7 September 2021, Dr Wiles told NZers on RNZ:
"At level 2, if a case gets out and into the community, there's a chance for massive spread with Delta. .. For the good of everybody, wearing a mask when you're out of your home is a good idea."
That raises the question of why it would be a good idea to wear a mask at level 2 but not at level 4. (The good doctor has admitted going to the beach sans mask. That of course raises the question of whether that was a good idea. What if she had been hit by a car while biking…presumably emergency services would’ve been needed which would have exposed them and her to possible infection.)
I trusted that you wouldn’t read that Dr Wiles admitted to not wearing a mask in level 4, based on your form. LOL
Feel free to shoot the messenger. Again.
[Bye, Ross, take two weeks off for spreading a lie, again. Dr Wiles has tweeted that she did not leave her house without wearing a mask, as you wrongfully asserted, but that she did take off her mask at the beach when it was safe and allowed to do so in her bubble – Incognito]
Your second link contradicts your assertion: “Let’s cut to the chase – Dr Wiles has said that if we leave the house in level 2, we should wear a mask. She left her house in level 4 (4 is stricter than 2) but didn’t wear a mask”.
"Wiles said that on the day the video was filmed, she and her friend had cycled to Judges Bay, about 5km from her house, and taken off their masks to talk as the beach was “near-deserted”.
Let’s cut to the chase – Dr Wiles has said that if we leave the house in level 2, we should wear a mask. She left her house in level 4 (4 is stricter than 2) but didn’t wear a mask. People will make of that what they will.
What Wiles actually said,
If I'm out for a walk and there's a group of people passing by should I put my mask on?
"It depends on where the wind is blowing you could have a gust of wind that if someone infected blows it to you or if you were infected blows it to someone else… For the good of everybody, wearing a mask when you're out of your home is a good idea."
She didn't say that everyone, everywhere, should wear a mask at Level 2.
Misquoting out of context to mislead is a bannable offence. That's in addition to the lie about Wiles not wearing a mask when she left home.
Incog has given you a 2 week ban. I think you got off lightly.
Hang on I’ll have a listen. He’s onto a losing argument claiming that “big fat liar” is the just the Kiwi vernacular. It’s a common (very) young child’s retort.
If he’s admitting Collins was being childish that’s a different story.
Oops: Correction. It’s big “fat hypocrite” she called her, isn’t it.
Still very childish language usage tho. I suppose I can just add incredible immaturity to Collins’ suite of talents.
I just did a google search on nz sites for "big fat hypocrite" and I get two pages with 95% of the results being within the last 4 days. If it's vernacular then it's not very widely used.
It’s just a throwaway question, right at the very end.
Shane laughs it off by comparing it to a word BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) hec says was all the rage in corporate organisational circles a few years back. Epic fail, I’m afraid, Shane. Nothing like the same thing.
(Didn’t know he’s a “Mormon boy”.) I’m sure “Dr Shane Reti” (as Collins seems to persistently call him in interviews) is embarrassed as hell at this latest sow’s ear Collins has for made herself out of what she thought was a silk purse.
I’ve opined here a few times in recent days that National has got no one else to replace Collins if she tanks the polls again.
Janet Wilson, in Stuff a couple of days back, sees it differently:
… … …
“The National Party caucus is not short of talent. While Collins was hurling poison across the benches on the day the house resumed last week, Chris Bishop (recently demoted by Collins) opened his speech by celebrating the increased rates of vaccination and praising essential workers. Dr Shane Reti has been a conscience and critic on issues including the failure to fully include GPs in the Covid response. Erica Stanford has led the charge on the important, unsexy work of families split apart by the Covid immigration rules.
…
Simon Bridges was judged to have cocked up the National response in the first outbreak, but watch his performance on the epidemic response committee in 2020: there was a leader.
Louise Upston has been asking timely and important questions about the wage subsidy. Matt Doocey has done a heap of mahi on mental health, and is asking hard, important questions on a sector where the government, in my view, has let us down really badly.
Gerry Brownlee started a podcast, and it’s pretty good!
Maybe Collins’ is the hardest job in politics, and maybe that’s because we find out who you are.
Janet Wilson, an experienced, smart and measured former journalist and communications expert, worked loyally and stoically alongside Collins through the agony of the last election campaign. So appalled has she been by the National leader’s performance she recently described her as “Muldoonist”, as paranoid, leading a party “floundering, saddled with endless entitleditis” and on a path to “irrelevance”.
…
Senior members of John Key’s slick ninth floor team talk privately, but with striking candour, and more than a little despair, about the state of the leadership today. And who can blame them? Key and Bill English and others must weep at the sight of a years-long project to cement National as the sensible voice of a modern middle New Zealand collapsing a little further with each spring-loaded outburst from Collins.”
Dr Reti has actually been quite reasonable on the Govt. COVID strategy the last several weeks, but make no mistake he is a provincial tory through and through.
He is the classic Māori that barely recognises he is one–a 37 dwelling state house build is underway in Whangārei’s middle class Maunu suburb. The development was strongly opposed by pākehā property owners but an Independent Commissioner Okayed Kāinga Ora to proceed.
Shane Reti, spring loaded, immediately took the property owners side rather than advocating for Whangārei’s working class and homeless in urgent need of housing.
There are plenty of women who can attest to that. Its ingrained in the right-wing mindset that women are easy targets. So many of us have had multiple experiences of it. Ever since RD Muldoon, National Party cowards have indulged in bullying behavior towards well known women particularly if they think they represent a threat to them.
Pick a person like Siouxsie Wiles, undermine her and drag her name through the mud.
Yes, politicians use of “fat” is interesting dialectics–would Collins have used it on a slimmer woman than Ms Wiles? Trump and Collins might qualify for the epithet themselves, but some curious separation of the personal and political seems to apply in their cases.
This extra week (at least) of level 4 sux weeks-unwashed balls. I'm an introvert, I actually enjoy lots of alone time, and it still grates. I really feel for the extroverts right now.
It really is time to start differentiating on the basis of vaccination status. Two weeks ago, New Zealand passed the 50% mark for first jabs. We're now just short of 60%, and it's looking like the rate of first jabs is starting to fall off.
Most of my workplace is fully vaccinated, having got their second jabs two weeks or more ago. Of the people I work with closely, I'm the laggard having got my first a week ago. My workplace could safely go back to work right now with negligible risk of spreading covid, just by making me wait another week before allowing me back on site.
I've been strongly supportive of the strategy the government has used, and I agree extending the level 4 is the right thing to do (barely) for now. But the vaccination campaign has reached the stage where the game has now changed, and it's time for responses to change. And the better responses will now consider individual vaccination status.
Andre if we don't beat this outbreak in these lower socioeconomic suburbs this week then we will go down the gurgler just like NSW. So suck it up and try to have some empathy for the living conditions of the poorly treated poor. It looks to me that we are probably about to reap what we have sown with neoliberalism.
Fact: the young immigrants that are most of the people I work with are fully vaccinated now because they went as walk-ins to vaccination clinics in lower socioeconomic suburbs that had lots of resource thrown at them that wasn't being accepted by the residents of those suburbs.
Fact: vaccination take-up now is a lot lower than it was a couple of weeks ago.
Fact: if you wanted to get vaccinated today, there's hundreds of available slots all over Auckland. Let alone places that accept walk or drive-ins. Same tomorrow, or any day after that. Lack of availability is no excuse to not be jabbed. For those that first booked weeks ago and couldn't get a booking before later this month or October because supply was constrained, rebook it now. You can get it today if you genuinely want it.
It really looks like we're pretty much at the tail-end of the actual vaccine enthusiasts, and it's time to start showing the carrots and the sticks. I don't much care whether anyone views "get a jab, get back to earning" as a carrot, or "no jab, no job" as a stick.
The National party is green lighting your application to head the vacine marketing campaign. Whats the slogan to be? May I suggest, we have counted to 50 so here comes the virus, ready or not.
Seymour's already ahead of that game and running with it.
It really is an issue that could flip people's minds and votes if people start to feel their actual rights are being unreasonably restricted because Labour are pandering to idiots that have swallowed vaccine misinformation and disinformation.
National and ACT may be fkn useless and even outright bonkers on many issues, but they're at least vaccine-sensible. So it's not like the US where the RepubliQooks have painted themselves into bizarre rabid anti-vax and other kinds of nuttery on all issues.
Your first sentence Andre…" the young immigrants that are most of the people I work with". Therein lies our self induced problem. Our economic policies in the last thirty years have led to this situation. Need I say more?
Most of my workplace is fully vaccinated, having got their second jabs two weeks or more ago…..
My workplace could safely go back to work right now with negligible risk of spreading covid,…. Andre
Just having some people vaccinated, is not how vaccination works. It’s a numbers thing. The more people who get vaccinated the more effective vaccination is.
For measles we know that number is 95%.
The percentage figure for Covid-19 is unknown. But Singhapore and Israel indicate that it has to be higher than 80% coverage.
Most fully vaccinated people who get Covid delta infections are asymptomatic, WHO says
Rich Mendez – CNBC, July 12, 2021
“There are reports coming in that vaccinated populations have cases of infection, particularly with the delta variant,”
“The majority of these are mild or asymptomatic infections.”
Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, World Health Organization’s chief scientist
Most of your workmates could be fully vaccinated and still catch Covid-19. possibly not even knowing they have it.
I am sure you can appreciate, Andre, the implications, of having vaccinated, asymptomatic persons, mixing in a partially vaccinated population.
All the more reason for those currently unvaccinated to rattle their dags and get jabbed. So when they get it, their infection is much more likely to be mild or asymptomatic.
By the numbers, we have about 360,000 people that have booked for their first jab and haven't got it yet. At rates of over 50,000 first jabs per day that were achieved a couple weeks ago, those 360,000 could be done in a week.
There's another million-ish of hesitants that are eligible that haven't yet booked. 20 days worth of jabs. Time for them to get shown the carrots and sticks.
Here's a thought. For the self-entitled Jaffas who flew to their Wanaka "holiday home", let's put them in quarantine before they're allowed back into Auckland – somewhere like a Mt Eden prison cell should be good. Then let's hope it can cost them a fortune in legal fees to get out of it and to stop their names being published. Oh, and get Slater to do some covert filming so we can see who they are. Name and shame.
[there is now a court order for name suppression in place. This means it is illegal to name the couple. It’s also against the TS rules to breach suppression orders, not least because it puts the site’s owners at legal risk. Please don’t encourage name and shaming while the name suppression is in place. Anyone naming the couple on TS can expect a substantial or permanent ban – weka]
Sorry but Mayor Boult has now made it clear that while he loves rich people and will bend over backwards to accommodate them, he doesn't want no stinky Aucklanders messing up the place at this time.
Look, I have suits that need drycleaning, properties that need annual tax-rebated inspections by flying there, the wine cellar is desperately low, the skis are barely used, the cleaners haven't been able to come around, the nails aren't done, the holiday home needs its cushions re-fluffed, I'm bored, everything in the house looks boring, there's spring Wisteria to trim back, the Airpoints are running low, and that mountain bike seriously needs its wheels rotated or there'll be hell to pay. Things are just getting desperate. Can't we just get a break here?
If they were smart and not as self-entitled as they seem to be , they would admit and take the punishment -which I hope is many years of community service, not a fine – and retreat back into a more considerate life. To me the name suppression thing suggests that rather than protecting, it is implicating the parents.
First they'll see what the privileged-person's penitential-triple can get them: a spontaneous donation to charity, a carefully drafted "heartfelt" apology (I wrote it myself with a pen, and they are my words because my lawyer paid the PR wonk to script them for me), and then a submission to the judge along the lines of "ohmagerd, if I get a conviction I might not get to travel overseas like I frequently do, and it might harm my career prospects". With an optional extra of "my good standing in the community should count in my favour".
The shit I saw some daddy's little girls and boys get away with at uni… not so much by the uni itself, but getting diversion multiple times because they were "promising young men" so the effort to prosecute would be futile. Yer honour, the dude was a smarmy little shit who would break random windows and fences for fun every saturday night. Spank him, or someone else eventually will – with a fist.
In what way should they be treated similarly? The two women ignored a police checkpoint, kept driving at dangerously high speeds, were eventually stopped by road spikes, nearly caused an accident with traffic coming the other way, and then resisted arrest.
The Auckland/Wanaka couple should be treated according to their own transgressions, which are serious enough but don't include the additional issues of resisting police directives. Pretty sure it will be clear in law what they have breached and what sentencing can go with that.
I was referring to that both consciously made efforts to break out of the boarder acting against the rules that many of us are following. And should luck have failed us and carried the covid to other areas what then of the consequences to the country and our strategy ? How so few can now, thru selfish reasoning cripple the country. That was what I was meaning by grouping these 2 incidents together. If there is no to minimal consequence how then do you signal the importance of following the directive ?
Then the 2 woman have two separate charges to be addressed quite separately.
I don,t like fines unless they are proportional to income and I think goal helps nothing. I do think a long term community service sentence might mean some thing constructive comes out of it all !
Janet I was thinking of the 2 options available that Weka quoted, and I feel with the limited info that I agree a fine would be nothing to these 2. It will be interesting to see what if any consequences there are. And I would believe that I am not alone within Auckland after 5+ weeks of lockdown and to see some flagrant totally selfish actions has brought out some of this frustration within me out 😤
Hopefully its lifted quickly, names are all over social media and sadly a woman with the same name as one of the parties is coping some pretty fucking horrible abuse.
I really hope that gets taken into account in the name supression arguements entitled prick needs to own his shit not hide behind mummy.
I do find it strange that he was given name suppresion because of his father. The man is 34 – surely at 34 his father is no longer answerable for his son's actions and noone could think it.
Fair call, death threats are too much and should be investigated. But stuff up? Mistake? Piss off. It's not like they popped out for some essential work and then "what the hell, how did we end up flying to queenstown and renting a car to Wanaka? That's an oopsie".
STFU. And save the "some of the stuff they have done in the community over the years" bullshit for the judge.
I think most of us have probably lost hope & interest & moved on already so I might knock off posting about Afghanistan, but I especially liked the author’s opening line for this NYT OP.
WAR ON TERROR CORRUPT FROM THE START
“The war in Afghanistan wasn’t a failure. It was a massive success — for those who made a fortune off it.
Consider the case of Hikmatullah Shadman, who was just a teenager when American Special Forces rolled into Kandahar on the heels of Sept. 11. They hired him as an interpreter, paying him up to $1,500 a month — 20 times the salary of a local police officer…. By his late 20s, he owned a trucking company that supplied U.S. military bases, earning him more than $160 million.
If a small fry like Shadman could get so rich off the war on terror, imagine how much Gul Agha Sherzai, a big-time warlord-turned-governor, has raked in since he helped the C.I.A. run the Taliban out of town. His large extended family supplied everything from gravel to furniture to the military base in Kandahar. His brother controlled the airport. Nobody knows how much he is worth, but it is clearly hundreds of millions….
Look under the hood of the “good war,” and this is what you see. Afghanistan was supposed to be an honorable war to neutralize terrorists and rescue girls from the Taliban. It was supposed to be a war that we woulda coulda shoulda won, had it not been for the distraction of Iraq, and the hopeless corruption of the Afghan government. But let’s get real. Corruption wasn’t a design flaw in the war. It was a design feature. We didn’t topple the Taliban. We paid warlords bags of cash to do it.
The White House & Senate may well soon end up under Republican control again, but I doubt it’ll be because of Afghanistan. There was never going to be a tidy way for the US (& the sucked-in NATO countries) to extricate themselves from that ill-thought-out invasion.
Biden’s said as much, publicly, twice & he’s betting that the hypocrtical criticism & fuss about abandoning the place in such shambolic way to the unstoppable Taliban is going to fade away. Pulling out & ending the “forever war” was what the great majority of US voters wanted.
“How 9/11 Turned America Into a Half-Crazed, Fading Power
…
“The painful condition of neither peace nor victory, against an enemy seen as practically subhuman, itself required vengeance,” Ackerman wrote. “Trump offered himself as its instrument. Declaring his presidential candidacy in his golden tower, he asked, ‘When was the last time the U.S. won at anything?’”
Now, as the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11 arrives with the Taliban back in power in Afghanistan, America is face to face with its defeat. In truth, the immediate collapse of the American-supported government probably saved many Afghan lives. If a Taliban victory was all but inevitable, as intelligence analysts apparently assumed, it’s probably better that it happened without a long siege of Kabul.
But the lack of a decent interval between America’s withdrawal and a Taliban takeover, besides being a tragedy for Afghans allied with us, revealed America’s longest war as worse than futile. We didn’t just lose to the Taliban. We left them stronger than we found them.
The sheer waste of it all is staggering. Twenty years ago, American politicians and intellectuals, traumatized by an unprecedented act of mass murder and not-so-secretly eager to see history revved up again, misunderstood what 9/11 represented. We inflated the stature of our enemies to match our need for retribution. We launched hubristic wars to remake the world and let ourselves be remade instead, spending an estimated $8 trillion in the process. We midwifed worse terrorists than those we set out to fight.
We thought we knew what had been lost on Sept. 11. We had no idea.”
Theatres of influence aren't static. They are also real, and active. Fine to keep underlining where the United States is withdrawing from. But as we've seen withdrawing itself is damaging.
It is very, very unlikely that President Biden is going to turn into the next Charles Lindberg. US global influence is going to stay huge.
The key question is whether Biden can make a better job of engaging with the Pacific and China more specifically than his predecessors Trump and Obama. He has a reasonable amount on at the moment.
Good points. I don’t personally think the US is fading as a superpower. More a case of China catching up to THEM.
Biden may irritate me if he paints himself as the “leader of the free world” as some of his predecessors have done, but he shows every sign of wanting the US to return to being the primary strategic guarantor of Western liberal democracies’ security.
As we mostly are not in any position to assume realistically that we can all defend ourselves from a sufficiently large, militarily-aggressive foe – should it ever come to that – it’s nice for us to be able to collectively assume that they probably have our backs.
Although I think he actually had a point about bludging NATO countries into stumping up their full agreed contributions to the cost of their own defence, Trump might well just abandon any traditional military alliance on a whim, should China or Russia ever setiously threaten another democratic country. And via a tweet.
Almost all of these pundits have a lot of fun poking at the US establishment as the big slow and easy target – but show the same ignorance around the role of the Afghans themselves in this disaster.
Most critically almost everyone has neglected the sad brutal truth that there is no Afghanistani nation – it never existed and isn't likely to anytime soon. It is instead a tribal society riven by ethnic divisions. The Taliban are the dominant Pashtun and the people that the Americans stupidly tried to put in power to unify the nation were largely Tajik or Uzbek with no regard to the local dynamics.
The reason why the Taliban took the country over is that they projected power in the interests of the majority of the people living in that country. When the Americans (and the Russians before them) left – the dominant ethnic group simply took over. The people it's now executing are of course mostly non-Pashtun. Good old fashioned medieval tribalism at work.
The American argument – for all of it's stupendous naivety – was that if they could remake authoritarian regimes like Germany and Japan into peaceful and democratic nations, why not Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan? The answer is pretty damned obvious in hindsight – that the former were ethnically homogenous while the latter were not. The Vietnamese were never going to tolerate the US handing over power to a corrupt Chinese elite, the Iraqi divisions between Sunni and Shiites has roots going back to the deathbed of the Prophet, and Afghanistan has 43 different ethnic groups who can barely tolerate the sight of each other.
That the Afghani locals were prepared to exploit American ignorance for their own purposes is not terribly surprising. That the Saudi Wahhibists were also prepared to build fundamentalist schools among the displaced Pashtun in Northern Pakistan, that the Pakistani authorities had their own games to play (very many Pashtun live in northern Pakistan) and that the CCP seem to have been playing their own hand – all gets conveniently airbrushed out of the analysis when it comes time to have another go at the perfidious Yanks.
A good read there. Last week at some point I found a “history of Afghanistan” youtube video about an hour long that started out as far back as 55O BCE. I had time to kill, I just let it play & listened to it while lying on the couch. The place actually has a very long history of parts or all of it being unified in one form or other & thus included in various different regional states or empires I’ve never heard of.
Several long before Islam arrived & eventually came to be the dominant religion.
Your comment makes me wonder why the US cops so muck flak from its critics, like me. The Russians’ behaviour in Afghanistan was pretty shit & their activities in Ukraine & particularly Syria has seen them either involved in their own, or supporting Assad’s, appalling atrocities.
The CCP have been guilty of various slaughters & terrible repressions in their own country & Tibet, too.
Some NATO European countries’ behaviour in their former colonies (that they finally departed from not all that long ago, historically speaking, and often left in the hands of equally appalling tribally-dominated regimes) was equally universally atrocious.
I think the US cops it so much because the Russians & Chinese simply don’t talk about what they’re up to where they’re misbehaving, while the US constantly talks about all the good that it’s doing or done for the countries they’ve invaded or interfered with.
It’s for their utter hypocrisy & their seemin national blindness to the reality of the misery & thousand of deaths & destruction they cause. It’s the rank double standards they demonstrate for their own people and those of the other countries they attack.
So you simply accept a wikipedia entry as the full and honest truth? I'm disappointed.
Do some investigating on the principal contributors to this article. e.g.Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Syrian Network for Human Rights.
Who are they? Where are they based? Have any reported from Syria? Who are their sources? Who funds them?
Read the Amnesty 'report' on so called Syrian Government atrocities and see if you can find a shred of evidence of their claims.
There was no Syrian Civil war. It was/is a proxy war against the Syrian people by mercenaries paid for by the US, UK, NATO, Saudi and Qatar. US still has troops in Syria.
You've a lot to catch up, you could start with Timber Sycamore.
Watch this: "Roland Dumas: The British prepared for war in Syria 2 years before the eruption of the crisis in 2011"
Find out what Gen. Wesley Clark has said on the destruction of the Middle East. That prior to the Afghan war there were plans to bring the Middle East to it's knees.
If you want to know what the about the inception of the war, do a youtube search on 'Talk With American-Syrians in Latakia'
Ask yourself why Syrians have been returning in their droves now that the country is safer? Why do you suppose Assad won the 2021 election with a vote of over 90%?
And before you listen to any claim that Syrian elections aren't fair and free this Observers Report to UN might be worth watching.
Perhaps wikipedia isn't always the most reliable source. In this case I'd have to say, and as any Syrian living in Syria will tell you, the article is simply fallacious.
“So you simply accept a wikipedia entry as the full and honest truth? I’m disappointed”
So am I, now you’ve complained about it. I’m aware the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is apparently just a one man operation based in London & that his reports have been challenged.
I don’t usually use Wikipedia as an only source for issues like this – I did a quick scan down the list of references before posting the link, & there seemed to be only one or two from the SOHR.
Not surprised at all to hear US & Western powers had long had plans to destabilise the ME.
My view on Assad’s & Russian forces has been partly formed by AlJazeera tv reporting, over the years that I’ve been watching tha channel on Freeview. Seeing the vid clips of barrel bombs being dropped by Assad’s choppers into cities, & e.g. the clips of White Helmets digging thru rubble pulling out survivors & bodies.
I watch Aljaz tv in the knowledge that some of their reporting is factual & neutral, but that they DO often have notable biases. Their reporting is invariably anti-Assad. They don’t report that the opposition now largely confined to the North I think includes some very nasty Islamist groups.
I’m not surprised that most of the Syrian population still there prefer living under the Assad regime to the rule of fundamentalist radicals.
I don’t know what to make of that video of those few Western election observers with the Syrian UN Ambassador,
“you want to know what the about the inception of the war, do a youtube search on ‘Talk With American-Syrians in Latakia'”- Will do.
…
“Ask yourself why Syrians have been returning in their droves now that the country is safer?” – Are they? This is news to me.
…
“Why do you suppose Assad won the 2021 election with a vote of over 90%?”
I plan to. The problem with the Middle East generally is that all sides involved in conflicts there are usually propagandising to the max. Sometimes a mixture of facts & deliberate omissions. ("The OTHER SIDE ARE VICIOUS ANIMALS: WE DON'T DO THAT.")
Getting to "the truth" often ends up amounting to choosing which side, or whose version – in complex situations with misbehaviours on both sides – you most prefer.
That UN link says Syria is still unsafe to return to. Gonna see if I can find any reliable evidence thousands of Syrian refugees are now returning to areas under Assad's forces' control as suggested by Brigid.
And yes, the vaccine doesn't 'beat' anything; it just flattens the curve, allowing the health system to cope. We're going to need more measures for sure.
Here's an interesting one (I'd never heard of the Stringency Index!):
The COVID-19 Stringency Index created by Our World in Data is a composite measure of the strictness of the COVID-19 containment policies in each country around the world. As of August 28 2021, Israel’s restrictions score was 45.4, far less strict than New Zealand, where outbreaks continue to be limited in scope (96.3), but comparable with the UK (44.0), which is reporting around 30,000 new cases per day.
Hopefully they are increasing the number of ICU beds etc. if they have modelled that they believe we will need them once everyone has had a chance to be vaccinated, and we have moved down to level 1 (or even level zero if it exists anymore?)
Correct, vaccines alone won't beat this. But Israel isn't the argument to show that. Israel isn't actually highly vaccinated. Lots of places have much higher vaccination rates than Israel.
The simple fact is real-world vaccine effectiveness is low enough and transmissibility is high enough that even a 100% vaccinated population will still have covid circulating in the population, in the absence of non-vaccine disease controls such as masks and restricting potential superspreading events.
The simple fact is also that permanent level 4 or level 3 lockdowns to maintain elimination aren't acceptable.
So our future lies somewhere in accepting that vaccines will reduce covid to a disease burden kinda like flu (in those that get vaccinated), and that masking in public places is good thing (as has been routine in a lot of Asian cities for a long time) and maybe places like pubs and nightclubs and sports stadiums and concerts etc need to change how they operate.
"Around 11% of COVID-19 cases were in Arab cities and towns last week, even though they constitute over 20% of the population. As of Sunday, some 26 cities were designated high-infection “red” areas; just one of them was an Arab locality."
So their infection rate is actually disproportionately low.
The data I referred to is for Israeli citizens. In East Jerusalem, Palestinains are being vaccinated by Israel. (Palestinians in East Jerusalem have Israeli residency status – so those living there pay Israeli taxes and have access to Israeli health insurance). From March, Israel began vaccinating all Palestinians who come to work in Israel or in Israeli settlements in the West Bank (Same source). Gaza is self governing – by Hamas. The West bank is seperated by regions under the control of Fatah and Israel. Various countries have donated vaccine to the palestinian territories, including Russia, UAE and Israel.
I don’t think I’d be prepared to sign this, though I’d like to see exactly what the petition says. I’m personally happy with using Māori names for some places that are still roughly the same place & even size of any original Maori-named rohe, region or settlement.
But some of these places are named after famous ancestors & so are some English language place names, so there’s an argument I agree with that such Rnglish place names have their own cultural validitt.
Case in point, my own city of Wellington. The city proper has for over achundred years well exceeded the size of any permanent or temporary Maori settlement (s suburbs still have their original Māori names (eg Hataitai, Petone).
Originally Port Nicholson (from where the area known as Poneke has probably come) the city was re-named Wellington by its Pākehā settlers & I’m very happy for it to continue to be called that.
On the other hand the HARBOUR was already long ago visited & reported on by a Māori rangatira sailor & thus the name Te Whanganui-a-Tara (the great harbour of Tara) works ok for me. So too does “Wellington harbour” – we Pākehā have a long tradition of naming ports & harbours after the city they service.
I think Rawiri over-eggs the “culturally insulted” side of things sometimes. You attract more bees with honey than vinegar.
(Te Pāti Māori has a really slick-looking website. )
Te Pāti Māori are calling for the House of Representatives to;
Change the country’s official name to Aotearoa and
Officially restore the Te Reo Māori names for all towns, cities and place names.
It’s well past time that Te Reo Māori was restored to its rightful place as the first and official language of this country. We are a Polynesian country – we are Aotearoa.
Name changes over our whenua and the imposition of a colonial agenda in the education system in the early 1900s meant that Te Reo Māori fluency among our tupuna went from 90% in 1910 to 26% in 1950. In only 40 years, the Crown managed to successfully strip us of our language and we are still feeling the impacts of this today. It’s totally unacceptable that 20% of the Māori population and 3% of people living in Aotearoa can speak te reo Māori.
Article 3 of Te Tiriti o Waitangi promises tangata whenua the same rights as British citizens, that Te Reo Māori me ōna tikanga katoa be treated and valued exactly the same as the English language.
This petition calls on Parliament to change New Zealand to Aotearoa and begin a process, alongside whānau, hapū and iwi, local government and the New Zealand Geographic Board to identify and officially restore the original Te Reo Māori names for all towns, cities and places right across the country by 2026.
Tangata whenua are sick to death of our ancestral names being mangled, bastardised, and ignored. It’s the 21st Century, this must change.
It is the duty of the Crown to do all that it can to restore the status of our language. That means it needs to be accessible in the most obvious of places; on our televisions, on our radio stations, on road signs, maps and official advertising, and in our education system."
“Apple has released an emergency software patch to fix a security vulnerability that researchers said could allow hackers to directly infect iPhones and other Apple devices without any user action.
The researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab said the flaw allowed spyware from the world’s most infamous hacker-for-hire firm, NSO Group, to directly infect the iPhone of a Saudi activist. The flaw affected all Apple’s operating systems, the researchers said.
It was the first time a so-called “zero-click” exploit had been caught and analysed, said the researchers, who found the malicious code on September 7 and immediately alerted Apple. They said they had high confidence the Israeli company NSO Group was behind the attack, adding that the targeted activist asked to remain anonymous”.
“We’re not necessarily attributing this attack to the Saudi government,” said researcher Bill Marczak.bAlthough Citizen Lab previously found evidence of zero-click exploits being used to hack into the phones of al-Jazeera journalists and other targets, “this is the first one where the exploit has been captured so we can find out how it works,” said Marczak.
Although security experts say that AVERAGE iPhone, iPad and Mac USERS generally NEED NOT WORRY – such attacks tend to be highly targeted – the discovery still alarmed security professionals.”
New Zealand’s cybersecurity agency CERT NZ has recommended Apple users update their software “as soon as possible” after a cyber surveillance company based in Israel developed a tool to break into iPhones.
This aggressive attack-Pākehā-oriented political style seems to be a deliberate strategy being quite frequently employed by Waititi & Ngarewa-Packer.
Not sure exactly what they aim to get from it but they’re neither of them fools. I’m presuming there’s a carefully-thought out, particular reason they are pushing the hostile “racist” envelope in this way.
Maybe it’s to make cultural connections with the haka? Try and sell themselves as more authentically Maori than Labour?
… in fact Winston’s probably doing exactly what they wanted someone like him to do. Get them more attention.
Let’s see how many other’s fall for it.
Ardern got asked what she thought about it at her Covid press standup today. She said no government plans to do what Rawiri wants; people are happy to use dual names, or their preferred on, from her observation.
On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a ...
TL;DR: In today’s ‘six-stack’ of substacks at 6.06pm on Tuesday, March 19:Kāinga Ora’s dry rot The Spinoff DailyBill McKibben on ‘Climate Superfunds’ making Big Oil pay for climate damage The Crucial YearsPreston Mui on returning to 1980s-style productivity growth NoahpinionAndy Boenau on NIMBYs needing unusual bedfellows Urbanism SpeakeasyNed Resnikoff's case ...
Negative yesterday, negative today. Negative all year, according to one departing reader telling me I’ve grown strident and predictable. Fair enough. If it’s any help, every time I go to write about a certain topic that begins with C and ends with arrrrs, I do brace myself and ask: Again? Are ...
Bryce Edwards writes – It’s been a tumultuous time in politics in recent months, as the new National-led Government has driven through its “First 100 Day programme”. During this period there’s been a handful of opinion polls, which overall just show a minimal amount of flux in public support ...
Inspirational: The Family of Man is a glorious hymn to human equality, but, more than that, it is a clarion call to human freedom. Because equality, unleavened by liberty, is a broken piano, an unstrung harp; upon which the songs of fraternity will never be played.“Somebody must have been telling lies about ...
Tax Lawyer Barbara Edmonds vs Emperor Justinian I- Nolo Contendere: False historical explanations of pivotal events are very far from being inconsequential.WHEN BARBARA EDMONDS made reference to the Roman Empire, my ears pricked up. It is, lamentably, very rare to hear a politician admit to any kind of familiarity ...
It’s been a tumultuous time in politics in recent months, as the new National-led Government has driven through its “First 100 Day programme”. During this period there’s been a handful of opinion polls, which overall just show a minimal amount of flux in public support for the various parties in ...
Buzz from the Beehive Housing Minister Chris Bishop delivered news – packed with the ingredients to enflame political passions – worthy of supplanting Winston Peters in headline writers’ priorities. He popped up at the post-Cabinet press conference to promise a crackdown on unruly and antisocial state housing tenants. His ...
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Bryce Edwards writes – Last week former National Party leader Simon Bridges was appointed by the Government as the new chair of the New Zealand Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA). You can read about the appointment in Thomas Coughlan’s article, Simon Bridges to become chair of NZ Transport Agency ...
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This is a guest post by Connor Sharp of Surface Light Rail Light rail in Auckland: A way forward sooner than you think With the coup de grâce of Auckland Light Rail (ALR) earlier this year, and the shift of the government’s priorities to roads, roads, and more roads, it ...
Note: As a paid-up Webworm member, I’ve recorded this Webworm as a mini-podcast for you as well. Some of you said you liked this option - so I aim to provide it when I get a chance to record! Read more ...
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Buzz from the Beehive Here’s hoping for a lively post-cabinet press conference when the PM and – perhaps – some of his ministers tell us what was discussed at their meeting today. Until then, Point of Order has precious little Beehive news to report after its latest monitoring of the ...
David Farrar writes – We now have almost all 2023 data in, which has allowed me to update my annual table of how labour went against its promises. This is basically their final report card. The promiseThe result Build 100,000 affordable homes over 10 ...
I’m a bit worried that I’ve started a previous newsletter with the words “just when you think they couldn’t get any worse…” Seems lately that I could begin pretty much every issue with that opening. Such is the nature of our coalition government that they seem to be outdoing each ...
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Depictions of Islam in Western popular culture have rarely been positive, even before 9/11. Five years on from the mosque shootings, this is one of the cultural headwinds that the Muslim community has to battle against. Whatever messages of tolerance and inclusion are offered in daylight, much of our culture ...
Last week Transport Minster Simeon Brown and Mayor Wayne Brown opened the new Auckland Rail Operations Centre. The new train control centre will see teams from KiwiRail, Auckland Transport and Auckland One Rail working more closely together to improve train services across the city. The Auckland Rail Operations Centre in ...
Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: Retiring former Labour Finance Minister Grant Robertson said in an exit interview with Q+A yesterday the Government can and should sustain more debt to invest in infrastructure for future generations. Elsewhere in the news in Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy at 6:36am: Read more ...
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TL;DR: The key events to watch in Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the week to March 18 include:China’s Foreign Minister visiting Wellington today;A post-cabinet news conference this afternoon; the resumption of Parliament on Tuesday for two weeks before Easter;retiring former Labour Finance Minister Grant Robertson gives his valedictory speech in Parliament; ...
New Zealand First Leader Winston Peters’s state-of-the-nation speech on Sunday was really a state-of-Winston-First speech. He barely mentioned any of the Government’s key policies and could not even wholly endorse its signature income tax cuts. Instead, he rehearsed all of his complaints about the Ardern Government, including an extraordinary claim ...
A listing of 35 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, March 10, 2024 thru Sat, March 16, 2024. Story of the week This week we'll give you a little glimpse into how we collect links to share and ...
A listing of 35 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, March 10, 2024 thru Sat, March 16, 2024. Story of the week This week we'll give you a little glimpse into how we collect links to share and ...
“I’ve been internalising a really complicated situation in my head.”When they kept telling us we should wait until we get to know him, were they taking the piss? Was it a case of, if you think this is bad, wait till you get to know the real Christopher, after the ...
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Ele Ludemann writes – The government is omitting general Treaty references from legislation : The growth of Treaty of Waitangi clauses in legislation caused so much worry that a special oversight group was set up by the last Government in a bid to get greater coherence in the public service on Treaty ...
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How much political capital is Christopher Luxon willing to burn through in order to deliver his $2.9 billion gift to landlords? Evidently, Luxon is: (a) unable to cost the policy accurately. As Anna Burns-Francis pointed out to him on Breakfast TV, the original ”rock solid” $2.1 billion cost he was ...
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The business section of the NZ Herald is full of opinion. Among the more opinionated of all is the ex-Minister of Transport, ex-Minister of Railways, ex MP for Auckland Central (1975-93, Labour), Wellington Central (1996-99, ACT, then list-2005), ex-leader of the ACT Party, uncle to actor Antonia, the veritable granddaddy ...
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Bob Edlin writes – The Māori Party has been busy issuing a mix of warnings and threats as its expresses its opposition to interest deductibility for landlords and the plans of seabed miners. It remains to be seen whether they follow the example of indigenous litigants in Australia, ...
The Government has accepted Labour’s change to the Road User Charge (RUC) discount for hybrid vehicles, meaning there will still be some incentive for people to buy greener vehicles. ...
Kicking the most vulnerable people out of state housing and pushing them towards homelessness will result in a proliferation of poverty and trauma across our most vulnerable communities. ...
Te Pāti Māori co-leader and MP for Waiariki, Rawiri Waititi has penned a letter asking MPs to support his members bill to remove GST from all food. The bill is expected to go through its first reading in parliament this Wednesday. “I’m calling on all political parties to support my ...
This year is about getting real with Kiwis and discussing the tough issues, as the National Government exacerbates inequality and divides New Zealand, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said ...
The Government adding Significant Natural Areas (SNAs) to its already roaring environmental policy bonfire is an assault on the future of wildlife that makes Aotearoa unique. ...
After 12 years of fighting to protect our moana we are finding ourselves back at square one and back at court. Today, the Environmental Protection Agency is sitting in Hawera to reconsider an application from Trans-Tasman Resources to dig up 50 million tonnes of the seabed in South Taranaki. This ...
Minister Shane Jones’ decision to step away from a seabed mining project is evidence of the murky waters surrounding the Government’s fast-track legislation. ...
The growth of Treaty of Waitangi clauses in legislation caused so much worry that a special oversight group was set up by the last government in a bid to get greater coherence in the publicservice on Treaty matters. When ministers first considered the need for tighter oversight in 2021, there ...
The growth of Treaty of Waitangi clauses in legislation caused so much worry that a special oversight group was set up by the last government in a bid to get greater coherence in the publicservice on Treaty matters. When ministers first considered the need for tighter oversight in 2021, there ...
The Coalition Government’s miscalculation saga continues as it has forgotten an eyewatering $90 million gap in its interest deductibility cost figures, say Labour Finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds and Revenue Spokesperson Deborah Russell. ...
He Pou a Rangi Climate Change Commission has today released advice that says if the Government doesn’t act now New Zealand is at risk of not meeting its climate goals. ...
The Coalition Government has today confirmed it is abandoning first home buyers who are struggling to get ahead, says Labour Finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds. ...
The New Zealand public voted for a change in direction at the 2023 general election and that is exactly what this coalition government has been delivering in its first 100 days. There was an immediate focus on the economy, easing the cost of living, cracking down on law and order ...
The Government has left the health system as an afterthought, announcing half-baked targets at the last minute of their 100-day plan, says Labour Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall. ...
Kiwis are still waiting for their promised cost of living support after 100 days of a National Government that is taking us backwards, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said today. ...
The National Government has spent its first 100 days stopping, cutting and reversing. They have scrapped stuff for stuff for the sake of it, without putting up any solutions of their own – and it’s hardworking New Zealanders who will pay for it. ...
100 days of National taking NZ backwardsThe National Government has spent its first 100 days stopping, cutting and reversing. They have scrapped stuff for stuff for the sake of it, without putting up any solutions of their own – and it’s hardworking New Zealanders who will pay for it. ...
The Government must commit to funding free and healthy school lunches, as thousands of people sign the petition to keep them, education spokesperson Jan Tinetti says. ...
If the Government was serious about moving families into public housing, they would build more houses so there is actually somewhere for people to go. ...
The free and healthy school lunches programme feeds our kids, helps them to learn, and saves families money – but it is at risk under this Government, education spokesperson Jan Tinetti said. ...
The Government’s proposed changes to Firearms Prohibition Orders (FPO) add almost nothing new and are merely an attempt to distract from its plans to loosen gun laws, police spokesperson Ginny Andersen and justice spokesperson Dr Duncan Webb said. ...
The great Victorian era English politician Lord Macauley stood in the British House of Parliament and said, "The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm".He understood and outlined even way back then, the significant role and influence media have in a democracy. ...
"The Government is moving quickly to realise an additional $46 million in tariff savings in the EU market this season for Kiwi exporters,” Minister for Trade and Agriculture, Todd McClay says. Parliament is set, this week, to complete the final legislative processes required to bring the New Zealand – European ...
New Zealand’s social workers are qualified, experienced, and more representative of the communities they serve, Social Development and Employment Minister Louise Upston says. “I want to acknowledge and applaud New Zealand’s social workers for the hard work they do, providing invaluable support for our most vulnerable. “To coincide with World ...
Cabinet has agreed to a reduced road user charge (RUC) rate for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. Owners of PHEVs will be eligible for a reduced rate of $38 per 1,000km once all light electric vehicles (EVs) move into the RUC system from 1 April. ...
Minister of Agriculture and Trade, Todd McClay, says that today’s opening of Riverland Foods manufacturing plant in Christchurch is a great example of how trade access to overseas markets creates jobs in New Zealand. Speaking at the official opening of this state-of-the-art pet food factory the Minister noted that exports ...
Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Wellington today. “It was a pleasure to host Foreign Minister Wang Yi during his first official visit to New Zealand since 2017. Our discussions were wide-ranging and enabled engagement on many facets of New Zealand’s relationship with China, including trade, ...
Kāinga Ora – Homes & Communities has been instructed to end the Sustaining Tenancies Framework and take stronger measures against persistent antisocial behaviour by tenants, says Housing Minister Chris Bishop. “Earlier today Finance Minister Nicola Willis and I sent an interim Letter of Expectations to the Board of Kāinga Ora. ...
Tēna koutou katoa. Greetings everyone. Thank you to the Auckland Chamber of Commerce and the Honourable Simon Bridges for hosting this address today. I acknowledge the business leaders in this room, the leaders and governors, the employers, the entrepreneurs, the investors, and the wealth creators. The coalition Government shares your ...
Minister Winston Peters completed the final leg of his visit to South and South East Asia in Singapore today, where he focused on enhancing one of New Zealand’s indispensable strategic partnerships. “Singapore is our most important defence partner in South East Asia, our fourth-largest trading partner and a ...
Minister of Internal Affairs and Workplace Relations and Safety, Hon. Brooke van Velden, will travel to the Republic of Korea to represent New Zealand at the Third Summit for Democracy on 18 March. The summit, hosted by the Republic of Korea, was first convened by the United States in 2021, ...
ICNZ Speech 7 March 2024, Auckland Acknowledgements and opening Mōrena, ngā mihi nui. Ko Andrew Bayly aho, Nor Whanganui aho. Good morning, it’s a privilege to be here to open the ICNZ annual conference, thank you to Mark for the Mihi Whakatau My thanks to Tim Grafton for inviting me ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Lead Coordination Minister Judith Collins have expressed their deepest sympathy on the five-year anniversary of the Christchurch terror attacks. “March 15, 2019, was a day when families, communities and the country came together both in sorrow and solidarity,” Mr Luxon says. “Today we pay our respects to the 51 shuhada ...
Speech for Financial Advice NZ Conference 5 March 2024 Acknowledgements and opening Morena, Nga Mihi Nui. Ko Andrew Bayly aho, Nor Whanganui aho. Thanks Nate for your Mihi Whakatau Good morning. It’s a pleasure to formally open your conference this morning. What a lovely day in Wellington, What a great ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters held discussions in Jakarta today about the future of relations between New Zealand and South East Asia’s most populous country. “We are in Jakarta so early in our new government’s term to reflect the huge importance we place on our relationship with Indonesia and South ...
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters has announced that the Foreign Minister of China, Wang Yi, will visit New Zealand next week. “We look forward to re-engaging with Foreign Minister Wang Yi and discussing the full breadth of the bilateral relationship, which is one of New Zealand’s ...
Transport Minister Simeon Brown has today opened the new Auckland Rail Operations Centre, which will bring together KiwiRail, Auckland Transport, and Auckland One Rail to improve service reliability for Aucklanders. “The recent train disruptions in Auckland have highlighted how important it is KiwiRail and Auckland’s rail agencies work together to ...
The Government is proud to support the 10th edition of Crankworx Rotorua as the Crankworx World Tour returns to Rotorua from 16-24 March 2024, says Minister for Economic Development Melissa Lee. “Over the past 10 years as Crankworx Rotorua has grown, so too have the economic and social benefits that ...
Legislation implementing coalition Government tax commitments and addressing long-standing tax anomalies will be progressed in Parliament next week, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. The legislation is contained in an Amendment Paper to the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2023–24, Multinational Tax, and Remedial Matters) Bill issued today. “The Amendment Paper represents ...
Associate Environment Minister Andrew Hoggard has today announced that the Government has agreed to suspend the requirement for councils to comply with the Significant Natural Areas (SNA) provisions of the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity for three years, while it replaces the Resource Management Act (RMA).“As it stands, SNAs ...
Agriculture Minister Todd McClay has classified the drought conditions in the Marlborough, Tasman, and Nelson districts as a medium-scale adverse event, acknowledging the challenging conditions facing farmers and growers in the district. “Parts of Marlborough, Tasman, and Nelson districts are in the grip of an intense dry spell. I know ...
The Government is helping farmers eradicate the significant impact of facial eczema (FE) in pastoral animals, Agriculture Minister Todd McClay announced. “A $20 million partnership jointly funded by Beef + Lamb NZ, the Government, and the primary sector will save farmers an estimated NZD$332 million per year, and aims to ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has completed a successful visit to India, saying it was an important step in taking the relationship between the two countries to the next level. “We have laid a strong foundation for the Coalition Government’s priority of enhancing New Zealand-India relations to generate significant future benefit for both countries,” says Mr Peters, ...
Cabinet has agreed to provide $7 million to ensure the 2024 ski season can go ahead on the Whakapapa ski field in the central North Island but has told the operator Ruapehu Alpine Lifts it is the last financial support it will receive from taxpayers. Cabinet also agreed to provide ...
Health Minister Dr Shane Reti says the launch of a new mobile breast screening unit in Counties Manukau reinforces the coalition Government’s commitment to drive better cancer services for all New Zealanders. Speaking at the launch of the new mobile clinic, Dr Reti says it’s a great example of taking ...
Health Minister Dr Shane Reti says the launch of a new mobile breast screening unit in Counties Manukau reinforces the coalition Government’s commitment to drive better cancer services for all New Zealanders. Speaking at the launch of the new mobile clinic, Dr Reti says it’s a great example of taking ...
Unlocking economic growth and land for housing are critical elements of the Government’s plan for our transport network, and planned upgrades to State Highway 29 (SH29) near Tauriko will deliver strongly on those priorities, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “The SH29 upgrades near Tauriko will improve safety at the intersections ...
Unlocking economic growth and land for housing are critical elements of the Government’s plan for our transport network, and planned upgrades to State Highway 29 (SH29) near Tauriko will deliver strongly on those priorities, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “The SH29 upgrades near Tauriko will improve safety at the intersections ...
Lower fruit and vegetable prices are welcome news for New Zealanders who have been doing it tough at the supermarket, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. Stats NZ reported today the price of fruit and vegetables has dropped 9.3 percent in the 12 months to February 2024. “Lower fruit and vege ...
Tēnā koutou katoa and greetings to you all. Chair, I am honoured to address the sixty-eighth session of the Commission on the Status of Women. I acknowledge the many crises impacting the rights of women and girls. Heightened global tensions, war, climate related and humanitarian disasters, and price inflation all ...
Tēnā koutou katoa and greetings to you all. Chair, I am honoured to address the 68th session of the Commission on the Status of Women. I acknowledge the many crises impacting the rights of women and girls. Heightened global tensions, war, climate related and humanitarian disasters, and price inflation all ...
The coalition Government is supporting farmers to enhance land management practices by investing $3.3 million in locally led catchment groups, Agriculture Minister Todd McClay announced. “Farmers and growers deliver significant prosperity for New Zealand and it’s vital their ongoing efforts to improve land management practices and water quality are supported,” ...
Good evening everyone and thank you for that lovely introduction. Thank you also to the Honourable Simon Bridges for the invitation to address your members. Since being sworn in, this coalition Government has hit the ground running with our 100-day plan, delivering the changes that New Zealanders expect of us. ...
Recommendations from the Climate Change Commission for New Zealand on the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) auction and unit limit settings for the next five years have been tabled in Parliament, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says. “The Commission provides advice on the ETS annually. This is the third time the ...
The coalition Government is beginning its fight to lower building costs and reduce red tape by exempting minor building work from paying the building levy, says Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk. “Currently, any building project worth $20,444 including GST or more is subject to the building levy which is ...
Proposed changes to tax legislation to prevent the over-taxation of low-earning trusts are welcome, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. The changes have been recommended by Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee following consideration of submissions on the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2023–24, Multinational Tax, and Remedial Matters) Bill. “One of the ...
Assalaamu alaikum. السَّلَام عليكم In light of the holy month of Ramadan, I want to extend my warmest wishes to our Muslim community in New Zealand. Ramadan is a time for spiritual reflection, renewed devotion, perseverance, generosity, and forgiveness. It’s a time to strengthen our bonds and appreciate the diversity ...
Former Transport Minister and CEO of the Auckland Business Chamber Hon Simon Bridges has been appointed as the new Board Chair of the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) for a three-year term, Transport Minister Simeon Brown announced today. “Simon brings extensive experience and knowledge in transport policy and governance to the role. He will ...
Good morning all, it is a pleasure to be here as Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology. It is fantastic to see how connected and collaborative the life science and biotechnology industry is here in New Zealand. I would like to thank BioTechNZ and NZTech for the invitation to address ...
Regional Development Minister Shane Jones says he is looking forward to the day when three key water projects in Northland are up and running, unlocking the full potential of land in the region. Mr Jones attended a community event at the site of the Otawere reservoir near Kerikeri on Friday. ...
Associate Finance Minister David Seymour has today announced that the Government has agreed to restore deductibility for mortgage interest on residential investment properties. “Help is on the way for landlords and renters alike. The Government’s restoration of interest deductibility will ease pressure on rents and simplify the tax code,” says ...
Sport and Recreation Minister Chris Bishop will travel to Switzerland today to attend an Executive Committee meeting and Symposium of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). Mr Bishop will then travel on to London where he will attend a series of meetings in his capacity as Infrastructure Minister. “New Zealanders believe ...
Pacific Media Watch Earthwise hosts Lois and Martin Griffiths. Earthwise presenters Lois and Martin Griffiths on Plains FM 96.9 community radio talk to Dr David Robie, a New Zealand author, independent journalist and media educator with a passion for the Asia-Pacific region. David talks about the struggle to raise awareness ...
Pacific Media Watch Ismail al-Ghoul, an Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent who was held for 12 hours at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital, says Israeli forces rounded up Palestinian journalists at the facility and made them kneel on the ground for hours, while naked and blindfolded. “The occupation forces handcuffed and blindfolded us ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Wood, Program Director, Energy, Grattan Institute chinasong, Shutterstock Electricity customers in four Australian states can breathe a sigh of relief. After two years in a row of 20% price increases, power prices have finally stabilised. In many places they’re ...
Chumbawamba have reportedly issued the deputy PM a cease-and-desist notice after he used their song 'Tubthumping' before his state of the nation speech. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deborah Lupton, SHARP Professor, Vitalities Lab, Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Centre, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, UNSW Sydney kitzcorner/Shutterstock The assertion from Queensland’s chief health officer John Gerrard that ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Martin, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University Shutterstock Why are musicians so keen to get played on the radio? It can’t be because of the money. In Australia they are paid at rates so low they ...
"Farmers make a point not to tell our urban cousins how to live, yet Chlöe from central Auckland is hell-bent on having her say about farmers," says ACT Rural Communities spokesman Mark Cameron. “On her first day in the House as Green ...
Analysis by Dr Bryce Edwards – Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)Political scientist, Dr Bryce Edwards. It’s been a tumultuous time in politics in recent months, as the new National-led Government has driven through its “First 100 Day programme”. During this period there’s been a handful of opinion polls, which overall just ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Curran, Associate Professor of Ecology, Lincoln University, New Zealand Getty Images/Gerald Corsi In the latest move to reform environmental laws in New Zealand, the coalition government has introduced a bill to fast-track consenting processes for projects deemed to ...
Uber has argued it does not have as much control over drivers as the unions suggest, and wants a judgment ruling that drivers are employees and not contractors set aside and sent back to the Employment Court. The 2022 ruling followed a three-week hearing in which four drivers sought to ...
What can and can’t be purchased by disabled people or their carers has been slashed in an effort by the Ministry of Disabled People Whaikaha to save money. The purchasing guidelines, a set of rules that sets out what can be purchased using the various streams of Government disability funding, ...
The Treasury has published today a new Analytical Note by Tod Wright and Hien Nguyen, Fiscal incidence in New Zealand: The effects of taxes and benefits on household incomes in tax year 2018/19 . Analyses of the distributional impact of taxation and government ...
The Treasury has published today a new Analytical Note by Cory Davis, Boston Hart and Benjamin Stubbing, Household cost-of-living impacts from the Emissions Trading Scheme and using transfers to mitigate regressive outcomes . This Analytical Note ...
A coalition of public transport and climate organisations, united as ‘Transport for All’, is actively opposing the government’s transport proposals. The draft Government Policy Statement (GPS) includes plans for higher fares for public transport, ...
Greater Wellington is inviting feedback on proposed changes to its Revenue and Financing Policy. The Revenue and Financing Policy covers the Council’s various sources of funding, and how the cost of services is shared across the region. This includes ...
Labour has conceded it could have done more to deal with disruptive state housing tenants while in government but says the current coalition is going too far. ...
The band has asked their record label to issue a cease and desist to stop the NZ First leader using their 1997 hit to support his ‘misguided political views’. “I get knocked down, but I get up again,” blared through the speakers on Sunday as Winston Peters took the stage ...
By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist Food rationing is underway in remote areas in Papua New Guinea’s Highlands following torrential rain and flash flooding. More than 20 people have been reported dead in Chimbu Province. In nearby Enga Province, the centre of last month’s massacre, a 15-year-old boy has been ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Hughes, Lecturer, Research School of Management, Australian National University After months of debate and intrigue, the AFL’s 19th and newest team, the Tasmania Devils, finally launched its jumper, logo and colours in Devonport this week. The Devils will wear green, ...
Brannavan Gnanalingam reviews the debut novel by Saraid de Silva.One of the most baffling things for children who move to a new country is what their parents’ (or grandparents’) lives were like prior to moving – for kids in particular, they’re too busy trying to fit in in their ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Gaunson, Associate Professor in Cinema Studies, RMIT University Narelle Portanier/Binge “If you don’t know who your mob are, you don’t know who you are,” Detective Andrea “Andie” Whitford (played by Leah Purcell) is told early into the new crime ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elise Klein, Associate professor, Australian National University It’s commonly accepted that women do the vast majority of caregiving in Australian society. But less appreciated is that Indigenous women do larger amounts of unpaid care than any other group. Working with the Aboriginal ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne Joe Biden and Donald Trump have both secured their parties’ nominations for the November 5 United States general election by winning a ...
Comment: There has been a striking contrast in trans-Tasman interest about Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi’s visit to New Zealand and Australia. While the Australian press has been full of articles about the visit – including his curious decision to meet with former prime minister and China booster Paul Keating ...
After years of pressuring banks and other institutions to stop investing in fossil fuels, climate campaigners are making some progress. So how does divestment work?For years, climate activists have been pushing banks and other big institutions to divest from fossil fuels. New research from climate advocacy group 350 Aotearoa ...
For Boba, Ethan and Ashley, K-pop is a place to belong, a way to express themselves, and a bridge to connect with others. The three young Polynesians are part of a K-pop fan community in Tāmaki Makaurau. It’s one of many that have sprung up worldwide as K-pop has gone ...
For Boba, Ethan and Ashley, K-pop is a place to belong, a way to express themselves, and a bridge to connect with others. This one-off documentary presents three intimate portraits of young Polynesians who are pulled into a Korean cultural phenomenon. K-POLYS is directed by Litia Tuiburelevu, Produced by Hex ...
There’s ample evidence demonstrating free school lunch programmes provide wide benefits across schools, households and communities according to public health researchers. ACT Minister David Seymour wants to reduce the spending on Aotearoa New Zealand’s ...
By Wata Shaw in Suva Fiji is facing an exodus of Fijians as many are leaving for overseas seeking employment and education and others are migrating, says Opposition MP Viliame Naupoto. Speaking in Parliament, he said: “His Excellency’s speech (Ratu Wiliame Katonivere) comes after a little over one year of ...
The Taxpayers’ Union is welcoming comments from Christopher Luxon this morning recommitting to ‘no new taxes’ as part of Budget 2024. “Mr Luxon’s refusal at the Post-Cabinet press conference yesterday to repeat the ‘no new taxes’ promise ...
SAFE is urgently calling on the Environment Committee to reject the Government’s Fast-Track Approvals Bill, and is urging New Zealanders to rally behind the call. The proposed Bill, currently under consideration with the Environment select committee, ...
Teammates who spend all their time picking fights with spectators are only helpful for the other team, writes Madeleine Chapman. Anyone who has ever played a team sport competitively, particularly as a child and particularly, for some reason, basketball, will know that there’s a lot of politics involved. While there ...
The long-running Wellington music festival is too focused on the Jim Beam-ness and not enough on the Homegrown-ness.There is something about Homegrown that’s difficult to place. A barely perceptible-ness. Like feeling a ghost is watching you from the corner of the room but when you look, there’s nothing there. ...
The latest Ipsos New Zealand Issues Monitor reveals that fewer New Zealanders believe crime / law and order is one of the top issues facing our country. In 2018, Ipsos New Zealand started tracking the key issues facing New Zealand. In this wave ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Griffiths, Deputy Program Director, Budgets and Government, Grattan Institute Australia’s political donations rules are woefully inadequate, but donations reform is finally on the agenda. The federal government has signalled its interest in reform and will soon begin briefing MPs on its ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Patrick Taylor, Chief Environmental Scientist, EPA Victoria; Honorary Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University Naiyana Somchitkaeo/Shutterstock A recent study published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine has linked microplastics with risk to human health. The study ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Albert Van Dijk, Professor, Water and Landscape Dynamics, Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University Global climate records were shattered in 2023, from air and sea temperatures to sea-level rise and sea-ice extent. Scores of countries recorded their hottest year ...
As part of our series exploring how New Zealanders live and our relationship with money, a teacher explains why he and his partner are in frugal mode – and how they’re making it work. Gender: Male Age: 35Ethnicity: Pākehā Role: I am an intermediate school teacher and my partner is ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Bendall, Senior Lecturer, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University Binge Mary & George, the new British television drama series, depicts the real-life story of Mary Villiers and her son George, and their social climbing at the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jason Nassios, Associate Professor, Centre of Policy Studies, Victoria University This article is part of The Conversation’s series examining the housing crisis. Read the other articles in the series here. Australian state and federal governments spend money in many ways to ...
The finance minister is denying that there’s a $5.6b shortfall in paying for the government’s campaign promises, including tax cuts. At his post-cabinet press conference yesterday, the PM refused to rule out new taxes to pay for the cuts, writes Anna Rawhiti-Connell in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s ...
Kāinga Ora tenants abused by their neighbours are doubting the government's crackdown on disruptive tenants will make a difference on their behaviour. ...
Kāinga Ora is New Zealand’s biggest residential landlord, housing more than 180,000 vulnerable people in more than 67,000 properties. Yesterday the government announced a crackdown on its tenants who fall behind on rent. One longtime Kāinga Ora tenant shares her experience.For 18 years I lived in a 1960s standalone ...
Why does this myth persist, and what’s the real reason our skin is suffering?It’s one of the biggest international grievances New Zealanders hold, up there with the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior and 1981’s underarm incident. We’re quick to tell international travellers that the world’s pollution led to the ...
Opinion: We are fast approaching a fundamental change in prisons. As the number of people on custodial remand looks set to overtake the number of sentenced prisoners, the main function of prisons in New Zealand may become incarcerating un-sentenced people who may not be guilty of offending. We have already ...
A huge seven months lies in store for the White Ferns, beginning this week with the visit of England and culminating with the T20 World Cup in Bangladesh in September and October. Starting on Tuesday in Dunedin, the world ranked No. 2 visitors will play five T20s and three ODIs, ...
Opinion: In a move that has shocked road safety advocates across the country, the new Minister of Transport, Simeon Brown, is poised to abandon the previous government’s speed limit reduction policy, particularly around schools. Even more alarmingly, he wants school speed limits to be variable rather than full-time, arguing ...
Auckland Council is opposing a fast-track development backed by Sir John Kirwan and Spark NZ, because it doesn’t meet stringent new climate adaptation requirements The post Surf-data centre faces new 3.8C climate warming rules appeared first on Newsroom. ...
When the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act was introduced in 2009 it was firmly targeted at gangs and drugs. The legislation means police no longer need a conviction to seize assets that criminals can’t prove were paid for legitimately, as long as their alleged offences are punishable by more than a ...
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Bob’s relationship with certain members of Lincoln’s academic staff continued to deteriorate in the 1990s. Others supported him publicly, though articles such as Roland Clark’s 1993 piece in Growing Today cannot have pleased the university management. Clark wrote that Bob was selling onions from the Biological Husbandry Unit to a ...
SailGP’s races feature in-your-face action, with agile, hydro-foiling catamarans tacking and jibing for the title over several days. However, public comments ahead of the global series’ return to New Zealand have left this past year’s controversy in the shadows, as a key appointment attracts criticism from dolphin advocates. A year ...
The letters, which were published last week, were addressed to Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) Chairperson Megawati Sukarnoputri, National Democrat Party (NasDem) Chairperson Surya Paloh, National Awakening Party (PKB) Chairperson Muhaimin Iskandar, Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS) President Ahmad Syaikhu and United Development Party (PPP) Chairperson Muhammad Mardiono. In ...
Evicting more people from state housing is ignorant to the consequences of poverty, the Greens say, but the Housing Minister says it's a privilege that can be taken away if abused. ...
Evicting more people from state housing is ignorant to the consequences of poverty, the Greens say, but the Housing Minister says it's a privilege that can be taken away if abused. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emerald L King, Lecturer in Humanities, University of Tasmania IMDB Between Netflix’s 2023 live-action version of One Piece, and its latest take on Avatar: The Last Airbender, fans are once again asking: why are live-action anime adaptations so tricky to ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emerald L King, Lecturer in Humanities, University of Tasmania IMDB Between Netflix’s 2023 live-action version of One Piece, and its latest take on Avatar: The Last Airbender, fans are once again asking: why are live-action anime adaptations so tricky to ...
The government says it still intends to deliver tax cuts by July, but will not lock them in until they have got them past their coalition partners. ...
Bullies everywhere when challenged say “I was only joking”, or “can’t you take a joke?” and now from NZ National we have “it was just the vernacular”.
Shane Reti has backed up his leader’s nasty comment to Siouxsie Wiles “big fat hypocrite”, saying Ms Wiles has to answer and that the comment was just kiwi vernacular rather than personal targeting.
Dr Reti’s comment at 6:49 of the interview…
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/first-up/audio/2018812219/reti-border-community-response-vaccination-rates-for-covid
It is so often women that take a hit from tory bullies, as writer Eleanor Catton discovered when then PM John Key waded into her for daring to critique the NZ neo liberal state.
Never heard that "BFH" before in Kiwi.
I think what he means its Collins vernacular
dv
You've never heard of big fat lie?
This is what the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary says:
Definition of big fat
So the words "big fat" are used for emphasis. A big fat lie is a whopper of a lie. A big fat liar/hypocrite is someone who tells whoppers or is as hypocritical as they come.
Let’s cut to the chase – Dr Wiles has said that if we leave the house in level 2, we should wear a mask. She left her house in level 4 (4 is stricter than 2) but didn’t wear a mask. People will make of that what they will.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/big%20fat
[Show us the evidence that “She [Dr Wiles] left her house in level 4 (4 is stricter than 2) but didn’t wear a mask”. If you made it up, withdraw, correct and apologise for spreading DP-like misinformation.
Secondly, since you like Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary so much why don’t you look up the meaning of “dog-whistle” and let us know? – Incognito]
"BFH"
NEVER HEARD BIG FAT HIPOCRITE.
This is what the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary says:
The word you’ve entered isn’t in the dictionary. Click on a spelling suggestion below or try again using the search bar above.
dv
"Big fat" is a figure of speech and is used for emphasis.
He opened his big fat mouth. You've not heard someone say that? The speaker doesn't have a fat mouth LOL
https://www.yourdictionary.com/big-fat
Here's an comparison: Michael Moore's book titled Stupid White Men compared to this one: Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man.
The one sound provocative, while the other sounds petulant and childish.
I've read both – the latter tries, and fails IMO, to use that same argument: '"big, fat is commonly used and understood etc etc etc'; being a typical example of explaining is losing.
Oh thank you for explaining that with references.
Now what does a BIG FAT PEDANT mean?
Judith should accuse someone else of being a big fat hypocrite as an example James Shaw for travelling to Scotland. Would everyone on here then be losing their rag over the wording if she said the same thing about Shaw?
Wait for Collins to start coming out calling everyone 'big fat' this, 'big fat' that, a bullshit attempt to make people think there was nothing sinister in what she said about Wiles. Anyway, her ridiculous outburst backfired spectacularly because Wiles is so beautiful in every way.
'Wiles is so beautiful in every way'
Yes beauty is in the eye of the beholder as they say.
Some people may think Judith is so beautiful in every way!!!!!
Pukish does but his thinking is questionable at the best of times.
Giving everyone a big fat Talofa.
Sure, but meaning is in the context, not the words. What's the context here? Clue: Judith Collins.
Juduth Collins has a liking for trying to pass uncouth comments as "vernacular"
"he need's to meet his maker"
"people would like to bottle her"
"stab from the front"
And they're just the ones she's willing to make in public – god only knows what else she says – I think her colleagues are now painfully aware of her reckless tongue
Crushed and Oblivious to blow back.Collins throwing bullying shit all over the place despetately flailling around ends up covered in the muck she throws.
Keep it up paunch and Judy.
It's not reckless, it's designed to get a giggle out of the angry simply minds that think shes the bees knees. Yes they do exist.
You’re right Ross & I’ve been pointing out this language usage nearly always implies THE LIE is huge. Telling whoppers.
If Collins had had the presence of mind to say in her opinion Wiles is telling whoppers, she might have got away with it.
But instead, she’s gone off half-cocked with a kid’s language useage that was BOUND to attract immediate criticism for fat shaming.
Collins’ way of thinking is highly suspect. No way I’d ever want her in the PM’s job.
I'm quite far from a National supporter, but I have never seen Collins get away with any kind of coloquialism. They are always immediately taken in the worst light possible by govt supporters.
“never seen Collins get away with any kind of coloquialism. They are always immediately taken in the worst light possible by govt supporters.”
… … …
Well, to be fair, they likely always will be by any supporters of any government, won’t they? 🤔
I seem to remember Andrew Little getting constantly roasted over some pretty petty stuff, & Ardern’s strongly Wycaddo-accented pronunciation still attracts regular criticism (as does Bridges’ nasally whine) from supporters of other parties.
Out of interest, what are any more examples you can recall of Collins getting slammed for using colloquialisms?
For example, when she said she wanted to bottle Poto Williams.
Which resulted in this, even by mickey.
https://thestandard.org.nz/judiths-last-stand/
Oh Gawd, yes – how could I have forgotten that??
Still, it’s another example of a likely language useage cock up by Collins that anybody else would have seen comong & stopped themselves saying.
“Bottling” someone is a common useage (& practice), meaning assaulting or attacking someone with a broken bottle.
Back my childhood days I DO recall a phrase being used by my parents that went something like “that’s so good/clever/funny/whatever you should bottle it & sell it”.
But Collins didn’t say that. She went with the short version. The one with the double (including nasty) meaning.
I think she’s a comms freaking disaster for the Nats, hoping to attract & find new voters.
Or as Mickey suggested, if (as a politician) you acidentally use clumsy language in ways which can be miss construed as threatening, it will be.
Yes. Which is why you have think very carefully, politics, in about what you ate going to say in reply to reporters. Collins’ tendency is make some instant remark that she thinks is witty, when it is just as likely to be half-witty.
Compare her to Ardern, when she is asked difficult or potential-disaster questions – whether people should have sex in hospitals, for example. Ardern thought carefully about it & gave a very neutrally-worded response. But her genuinely-humoured p, perfectly natural reaction to being asked the question was a winner!
Collins just can’t pull this sort of thing off.
You mean sort of like Ardern getting away with anything? She could make an announcement about NZ researchers coming up with a cure for cancer and for the National/Act supporters it would be about the terrible clothing she was wearing, the fact that her hands moved while she spoke and the terribleness of her being excited.
Sure, there are plenty of partisans on both sides. But in most debate contexts its considered correct to take the best reading of the counter position. Social Media and Twitter not withstanding.
I thought; "I’m sick and tired of listening to her telling everyone else what to do" was Collins' most revealing phrase.
She wouldn’t be trying to sow discontent, would she? Ironic words coming from the Leader of the Nats who’s telling her caucus what and what not to do to keep the appearance of unity and common agendas [plural].
Spot on Robert .
"They are always immediately taken in the worst light possible by govt supporters."
That's because almost everything she says is calculated, and comes from her core being which is fundamentally damaged by her suffering from some kind of personality disorder, whatever the precise diagnosis might be. So in the rare instance that might involve her honest use of a coloquial term, then it's understandable people will assume the worst. At very best it's a matter of boy who cried wolf.
A good example is Chris Hipkins' slip up the other day during the live Covid update. If Hipkins had a reputation as being someone who deliberately used innuendo whenever he opened his mouth then we'd be right to think what happened during the Covid update was just another sleazy remark from a grubby character. And although I personally think it was a bad move putting that coffee cup on public display, we didn't think that of Hipkins because he doesn't have that reputation (or not that I know of). Apply the same logic to Collins and it's a different story, regardless of what her intentions were.
Clearly I don't rate Collins abilities as much as you.
ffs
It's an image she's cultivated over many years.
See my Moderation note @ 8:01 am.
That Judee's a sly one alright isn't she Ross. Woulda got away with it if it weren't for those darn woke kids.
"So the words "big fat" are used for emphasis…"
Indeed they are. And they are fun to use – what about "big fat rationalisation" ?
Unfortunately your rationalisation doesn't really let Judith off the hook. She knows perfectly well that "big fat" is used for emphasis – but also knows that the charming Dr Wiles is not a sylph-like figure. So Collins gets to smirkingly point at the latter fact, while maintaining the built-in defence of vernacular usage. So in addition to the standard charge that Judith is vulgar and dishonest, we can now also add the charge of deliberate cynicism.
So in addition to the standard charge that Judith is vulgar and dishonest, we can now also add the charge of deliberate cynicism.
I would've thought that there are plenty of things Judith can be criticised for without needing to manufacture outrage. And even a stopped clock is right twice a day. 🙂
Yep – but I'm not really outraged at all. For me the whole silly business is just another small bit of incremental evidence of what she's like.
… given Collins own rather generously-proportioned physique, with a huge dollop of pot calling the kettle black.
Incognito,
If you don’t like the Merriam-Webster dictionary, you are welcome to inform its editors. I'm not in the habit of shooting the messenger.
On 7 September 2021, Dr Wiles told NZers on RNZ:
"At level 2, if a case gets out and into the community, there's a chance for massive spread with Delta. .. For the good of everybody, wearing a mask when you're out of your home is a good idea."
That raises the question of why it would be a good idea to wear a mask at level 2 but not at level 4. (The good doctor has admitted going to the beach sans mask. That of course raises the question of whether that was a good idea. What if she had been hit by a car while biking…presumably emergency services would’ve been needed which would have exposed them and her to possible infection.)
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/450925/covid-19-dr-siouxsie-wiles-on-mask-wearing-in-alert-level-2
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/126351648/covid19-dr-siouxsie-wiles-warns-of-disinformation-after-claims-she-was-caught-breaking-lockdown-rules
[I trust that you’d choose to misinterpret my Moderation note, based on your form on this site.
Here’s your last opportunity.
You said that Dr Wiles left her home without wearing a mask.
Provide evidence for that, or correct/withdraw and apologise – Incognito]
See my Moderation note @ 10:53 am.
I trusted that you wouldn’t read that Dr Wiles admitted to not wearing a mask in level 4, based on your form. LOL
Feel free to shoot the messenger. Again.
[Bye, Ross, take two weeks off for spreading a lie, again. Dr Wiles has tweeted that she did not leave her house without wearing a mask, as you wrongfully asserted, but that she did take off her mask at the beach when it was safe and allowed to do so in her bubble – Incognito]
See my Moderation note @ 1:20 pm.
Your second link contradicts your assertion: “Let’s cut to the chase – Dr Wiles has said that if we leave the house in level 2, we should wear a mask. She left her house in level 4 (4 is stricter than 2) but didn’t wear a mask”.
"Wiles said that on the day the video was filmed, she and her friend had cycled to Judges Bay, about 5km from her house, and taken off their masks to talk as the beach was “near-deserted”.
We need better wingnuts.
What you claimed Wiles said,
What Wiles actually said,
She didn't say that everyone, everywhere, should wear a mask at Level 2.
Misquoting out of context to mislead is a bannable offence. That's in addition to the lie about Wiles not wearing a mask when she left home.
Incog has given you a 2 week ban. I think you got off lightly.
Hang on I’ll have a listen. He’s onto a losing argument claiming that “big fat liar” is the just the Kiwi vernacular. It’s a common (very) young child’s retort.
If he’s admitting Collins was being childish that’s a different story.
Oops: Correction. It’s big “fat hypocrite” she called her, isn’t it.
Still very childish language usage tho. I suppose I can just add incredible immaturity to Collins’ suite of talents.
I just did a google search on nz sites for "big fat hypocrite" and I get two pages with 95% of the results being within the last 4 days. If it's vernacular then it's not very widely used.
I think it is archaic now, but it did exist. My dear old mother had a retort for what she did not believe: "Oh, so's your fat aunt!"
Glorious retort, whether you had a fat aunt or not.
Such is language, but I would not trust Judith not to consciously use it with bad intent…
It’s just a throwaway question, right at the very end.
Shane laughs it off by comparing it to a word BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) hec says was all the rage in corporate organisational circles a few years back. Epic fail, I’m afraid, Shane. Nothing like the same thing.
(Didn’t know he’s a “Mormon boy”.) I’m sure “Dr Shane Reti” (as Collins seems to persistently call him in interviews) is embarrassed as hell at this latest sow’s ear Collins has for made herself out of what she thought was a silk purse.
I’ve opined here a few times in recent days that National has got no one else to replace Collins if she tanks the polls again.
Janet Wilson, in Stuff a couple of days back, sees it differently:
… … …
“The National Party caucus is not short of talent. While Collins was hurling poison across the benches on the day the house resumed last week, Chris Bishop (recently demoted by Collins) opened his speech by celebrating the increased rates of vaccination and praising essential workers. Dr Shane Reti has been a conscience and critic on issues including the failure to fully include GPs in the Covid response. Erica Stanford has led the charge on the important, unsexy work of families split apart by the Covid immigration rules.
…
Simon Bridges was judged to have cocked up the National response in the first outbreak, but watch his performance on the epidemic response committee in 2020: there was a leader.
Louise Upston has been asking timely and important questions about the wage subsidy. Matt Doocey has done a heap of mahi on mental health, and is asking hard, important questions on a sector where the government, in my view, has let us down really badly.
Gerry Brownlee started a podcast, and it’s pretty good!
Maybe Collins’ is the hardest job in politics, and maybe that’s because we find out who you are.
Janet Wilson, an experienced, smart and measured former journalist and communications expert, worked loyally and stoically alongside Collins through the agony of the last election campaign. So appalled has she been by the National leader’s performance she recently described her as “Muldoonist”, as paranoid, leading a party “floundering, saddled with endless entitleditis” and on a path to “irrelevance”.
…
Senior members of John Key’s slick ninth floor team talk privately, but with striking candour, and more than a little despair, about the state of the leadership today. And who can blame them? Key and Bill English and others must weep at the sight of a years-long project to cement National as the sensible voice of a modern middle New Zealand collapsing a little further with each spring-loaded outburst from Collins.”
🙄 Beg pardon. The author of those lines I quote above is Toby Mahire, writing in the Spinoff, carried by The Herald.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/the-spinoff-new-zealand-urgently-needs-a-serious-opposition-leader/VSJXHUHRKWZAHNDED7D6QD4A2I/
Arrgh! 😠
MaNhire. Damn this turning off javascript & losing the edit function !
Dr Reti has actually been quite reasonable on the Govt. COVID strategy the last several weeks, but make no mistake he is a provincial tory through and through.
He is the classic Māori that barely recognises he is one–a 37 dwelling state house build is underway in Whangārei’s middle class Maunu suburb. The development was strongly opposed by pākehā property owners but an Independent Commissioner Okayed Kāinga Ora to proceed.
Shane Reti, spring loaded, immediately took the property owners side rather than advocating for Whangārei’s working class and homeless in urgent need of housing.
There are plenty of women who can attest to that. Its ingrained in the right-wing mindset that women are easy targets. So many of us have had multiple experiences of it. Ever since RD Muldoon, National Party cowards have indulged in bullying behavior towards well known women particularly if they think they represent a threat to them.
Pick a person like Siouxsie Wiles, undermine her and drag her name through the mud.
Shame on Dr Shane Reti. He really needs to leave the Nasty Party.
The scurrilous Ms Collins is not the only politician to employ the word "fat" inappropriately…
http://news.ku.edu/2021/01/06/trumps-fixation-fat-exposes-cultural-and-political-divisions
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/16/politics/donald-trump-fat-new-hampshire-rally/index.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/joe-biden-look-fat-iq-angry-fight-video-iowa-campaign-a9235936.html
Yes, politicians use of “fat” is interesting dialectics–would Collins have used it on a slimmer woman than Ms Wiles? Trump and Collins might qualify for the epithet themselves, but some curious separation of the personal and political seems to apply in their cases.
This extra week (at least) of level 4 sux weeks-unwashed balls. I'm an introvert, I actually enjoy lots of alone time, and it still grates. I really feel for the extroverts right now.
It really is time to start differentiating on the basis of vaccination status. Two weeks ago, New Zealand passed the 50% mark for first jabs. We're now just short of 60%, and it's looking like the rate of first jabs is starting to fall off.
Most of my workplace is fully vaccinated, having got their second jabs two weeks or more ago. Of the people I work with closely, I'm the laggard having got my first a week ago. My workplace could safely go back to work right now with negligible risk of spreading covid, just by making me wait another week before allowing me back on site.
I've been strongly supportive of the strategy the government has used, and I agree extending the level 4 is the right thing to do (barely) for now. But the vaccination campaign has reached the stage where the game has now changed, and it's time for responses to change. And the better responses will now consider individual vaccination status.
Andre if we don't beat this outbreak in these lower socioeconomic suburbs this week then we will go down the gurgler just like NSW. So suck it up and try to have some empathy for the living conditions of the poorly treated poor. It looks to me that we are probably about to reap what we have sown with neoliberalism.
Fact: the young immigrants that are most of the people I work with are fully vaccinated now because they went as walk-ins to vaccination clinics in lower socioeconomic suburbs that had lots of resource thrown at them that wasn't being accepted by the residents of those suburbs.
Fact: vaccination take-up now is a lot lower than it was a couple of weeks ago.
Fact: if you wanted to get vaccinated today, there's hundreds of available slots all over Auckland. Let alone places that accept walk or drive-ins. Same tomorrow, or any day after that. Lack of availability is no excuse to not be jabbed. For those that first booked weeks ago and couldn't get a booking before later this month or October because supply was constrained, rebook it now. You can get it today if you genuinely want it.
It really looks like we're pretty much at the tail-end of the actual vaccine enthusiasts, and it's time to start showing the carrots and the sticks. I don't much care whether anyone views "get a jab, get back to earning" as a carrot, or "no jab, no job" as a stick.
The National party is green lighting your application to head the vacine marketing campaign. Whats the slogan to be? May I suggest, we have counted to 50 so here comes the virus, ready or not.
Seymour's already ahead of that game and running with it.
It really is an issue that could flip people's minds and votes if people start to feel their actual rights are being unreasonably restricted because Labour are pandering to idiots that have swallowed vaccine misinformation and disinformation.
National and ACT may be fkn useless and even outright bonkers on many issues, but they're at least vaccine-sensible. So it's not like the US where the RepubliQooks have painted themselves into bizarre rabid anti-vax and other kinds of nuttery on all issues.
Your first sentence Andre…" the young immigrants that are most of the people I work with". Therein lies our self induced problem. Our economic policies in the last thirty years have led to this situation. Need I say more?
Yes, you do need to say more
punching down on the most vulnerable in society who are doing the most societally responsible thing possible right now does need an explanation.
Fucking twit
Most of my workplace is fully vaccinated, having got their second jabs two weeks or more ago…..
My workplace could safely go back to work right now with negligible risk of spreading covid,….
Andre
Just having some people vaccinated, is not how vaccination works. It’s a numbers thing. The more people who get vaccinated the more effective vaccination is.
For measles we know that number is 95%.
The percentage figure for Covid-19 is unknown. But Singhapore and Israel indicate that it has to be higher than 80% coverage.
Most of your workmates could be fully vaccinated and still catch Covid-19. possibly not even knowing they have it.
I am sure you can appreciate, Andre, the implications, of having vaccinated, asymptomatic persons, mixing in a partially vaccinated population.
All the more reason for those currently unvaccinated to rattle their dags and get jabbed. So when they get it, their infection is much more likely to be mild or asymptomatic.
By the numbers, we have about 360,000 people that have booked for their first jab and haven't got it yet. At rates of over 50,000 first jabs per day that were achieved a couple weeks ago, those 360,000 could be done in a week.
There's another million-ish of hesitants that are eligible that haven't yet booked. 20 days worth of jabs. Time for them to get shown the carrots and sticks.
Bear Down for Midterms!
salty…
You know it, brutha.
Here's a thought. For the self-entitled Jaffas who flew to their Wanaka "holiday home", let's put them in quarantine before they're allowed back into Auckland – somewhere like a Mt Eden prison cell should be good. Then let's hope it can cost them a fortune in legal fees to get out of it and to stop their names being published. Oh, and get Slater to do some covert filming so we can see who they are. Name and shame.
[there is now a court order for name suppression in place. This means it is illegal to name the couple. It’s also against the TS rules to breach suppression orders, not least because it puts the site’s owners at legal risk. Please don’t encourage name and shaming while the name suppression is in place. Anyone naming the couple on TS can expect a substantial or permanent ban – weka]
mod note for you RosieLee, please acknowledge.
Understood.
I believe name suppression is allowed far to often in NZ for numerous crimes. You would think it should only be used in rare cases.
It's interim name suppression (24 hours from last night until another hearing can be had today).
Quite right there – but the Standard isn't the vehicle for outing them at present.
In order to get to Wanaka I nominate my two weeks in Blanket Bay Lodge first.
https://blanketbay.com/
Sorry but Mayor Boult has now made it clear that while he loves rich people and will bend over backwards to accommodate them, he doesn't want no stinky Aucklanders messing up the place at this time.
Look, I have suits that need drycleaning, properties that need annual tax-rebated inspections by flying there, the wine cellar is desperately low, the skis are barely used, the cleaners haven't been able to come around, the nails aren't done, the holiday home needs its cushions re-fluffed, I'm bored, everything in the house looks boring, there's spring Wisteria to trim back, the Airpoints are running low, and that mountain bike seriously needs its wheels rotated or there'll be hell to pay. Things are just getting desperate. Can't we just get a break here?
I can only imagine how much of a stress not being able to do tax-rebated inspections would be on top of everything else.
If they were smart and not as self-entitled as they seem to be , they would admit and take the punishment -which I hope is many years of community service, not a fine – and retreat back into a more considerate life. To me the name suppression thing suggests that rather than protecting, it is implicating the parents.
What are they, poor?
First they'll see what the privileged-person's penitential-triple can get them: a spontaneous donation to charity, a carefully drafted "heartfelt" apology (I wrote it myself with a pen, and they are my words because my lawyer paid the PR wonk to script them for me), and then a submission to the judge along the lines of "ohmagerd, if I get a conviction I might not get to travel overseas like I frequently do, and it might harm my career prospects". With an optional extra of "my good standing in the community should count in my favour".
The shit I saw some daddy's little girls and boys get away with at uni… not so much by the uni itself, but getting diversion multiple times because they were "promising young men" so the effort to prosecute would be futile. Yer honour, the dude was a smarmy little shit who would break random windows and fences for fun every saturday night. Spank him, or someone else eventually will – with a fist.
should be interesting in watching the 2 cases unfold to see if they are treated in a similar way. Both have flouted the rules in a very open manner. For my bit give them all 2 weeks in prison, and do not consider a financial penalty, as for some a financial penalty is no penalty.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/northern-advocate/news/covid-19-coronavirus-delta-outbreak-two-sisters-remanded-in-custody-for-allegedly-driving-through-northlandauckland-border/BWISA5HEV44D6MUVJWXXMIP6H4/
In what way should they be treated similarly? The two women ignored a police checkpoint, kept driving at dangerously high speeds, were eventually stopped by road spikes, nearly caused an accident with traffic coming the other way, and then resisted arrest.
The Auckland/Wanaka couple should be treated according to their own transgressions, which are serious enough but don't include the additional issues of resisting police directives. Pretty sure it will be clear in law what they have breached and what sentencing can go with that.
I was referring to that both consciously made efforts to break out of the boarder acting against the rules that many of us are following. And should luck have failed us and carried the covid to other areas what then of the consequences to the country and our strategy ? How so few can now, thru selfish reasoning cripple the country. That was what I was meaning by grouping these 2 incidents together. If there is no to minimal consequence how then do you signal the importance of following the directive ?
$4,000 fine or 6 months in prison is what I've seen as the potential sentence for the couple.
I don't see how the additional offending from the two women can be separated out from the covid breaches.
Then the 2 woman have two separate charges to be addressed quite separately.
I don,t like fines unless they are proportional to income and I think goal helps nothing. I do think a long term community service sentence might mean some thing constructive comes out of it all !
Weka- fair enough
Janet I was thinking of the 2 options available that Weka quoted, and I feel with the limited info that I agree a fine would be nothing to these 2. It will be interesting to see what if any consequences there are. And I would believe that I am not alone within Auckland after 5+ weeks of lockdown and to see some flagrant totally selfish actions has brought out some of this frustration within me out 😤
Well, we've yet to hear their ethnicity, or for a spokesperson from that ethnicity to apologise to the rest of NZ, etc.
It is a laugh out loud irony, the horsey folks reason for name suppression is a lack of trust in strangers.
You can't make this sort of stuff up.
Hopefully its lifted quickly, names are all over social media and sadly a woman with the same name as one of the parties is coping some pretty fucking horrible abuse.
I really hope that gets taken into account in the name supression arguements entitled prick needs to own his shit not hide behind mummy.
I do find it strange that he was given name suppresion because of his father. The man is 34 – surely at 34 his father is no longer answerable for his son's actions and noone could think it.
Mother?
lol so their mate is in the ODT saying how sad it is for them after a "stuff up".
Fair call, death threats are too much and should be investigated. But stuff up? Mistake? Piss off. It's not like they popped out for some essential work and then "what the hell, how did we end up flying to queenstown and renting a car to Wanaka? That's an oopsie".
STFU. And save the "some of the stuff they have done in the community over the years" bullshit for the judge.
I think most of us have probably lost hope & interest & moved on already so I might knock off posting about Afghanistan, but I especially liked the author’s opening line for this NYT OP.
WAR ON TERROR CORRUPT FROM THE START
“The war in Afghanistan wasn’t a failure. It was a massive success — for those who made a fortune off it.
Consider the case of Hikmatullah Shadman, who was just a teenager when American Special Forces rolled into Kandahar on the heels of Sept. 11. They hired him as an interpreter, paying him up to $1,500 a month — 20 times the salary of a local police officer…. By his late 20s, he owned a trucking company that supplied U.S. military bases, earning him more than $160 million.
If a small fry like Shadman could get so rich off the war on terror, imagine how much Gul Agha Sherzai, a big-time warlord-turned-governor, has raked in since he helped the C.I.A. run the Taliban out of town. His large extended family supplied everything from gravel to furniture to the military base in Kandahar. His brother controlled the airport. Nobody knows how much he is worth, but it is clearly hundreds of millions….
Look under the hood of the “good war,” and this is what you see. Afghanistan was supposed to be an honorable war to neutralize terrorists and rescue girls from the Taliban. It was supposed to be a war that we woulda coulda shoulda won, had it not been for the distraction of Iraq, and the hopeless corruption of the Afghan government. But let’s get real. Corruption wasn’t a design flaw in the war. It was a design feature. We didn’t topple the Taliban. We paid warlords bags of cash to do it.
As the nation-building project got underway, those same warlords were transformed into governors, generals and members of Parliament, and the cash payments kept flowing.”
…
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/opinion/afghanistan-war-economy.html
It's interesting that these views are now part of mainstream thinking about Afghanistan ,and published in the "respectable" news media
People like John Pilger have been writing about the Afghanistan scam for decades, and not been amplified in the same news media.
Nor is he credited now
US withdrawal from Afghanistan gives a very good chance that both the White House and the Senate will return to Republican control.
US foreign policy over 20 years has fundamentally altered domestic politics; even worse and deeper than LBJ's exit.
The White House & Senate may well soon end up under Republican control again, but I doubt it’ll be because of Afghanistan. There was never going to be a tidy way for the US (& the sucked-in NATO countries) to extricate themselves from that ill-thought-out invasion.
Biden’s said as much, publicly, twice & he’s betting that the hypocrtical criticism & fuss about abandoning the place in such shambolic way to the unstoppable Taliban is going to fade away. Pulling out & ending the “forever war” was what the great majority of US voters wanted.
You're so optimistic!
Here’s another NYT OP from a pessimist:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/opinion/how-9-11-turned-america-into-a-half-crazed-fading-power.html
“How 9/11 Turned America Into a Half-Crazed, Fading Power
…
“The painful condition of neither peace nor victory, against an enemy seen as practically subhuman, itself required vengeance,” Ackerman wrote. “Trump offered himself as its instrument. Declaring his presidential candidacy in his golden tower, he asked, ‘When was the last time the U.S. won at anything?’”
Now, as the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11 arrives with the Taliban back in power in Afghanistan, America is face to face with its defeat. In truth, the immediate collapse of the American-supported government probably saved many Afghan lives. If a Taliban victory was all but inevitable, as intelligence analysts apparently assumed, it’s probably better that it happened without a long siege of Kabul.
But the lack of a decent interval between America’s withdrawal and a Taliban takeover, besides being a tragedy for Afghans allied with us, revealed America’s longest war as worse than futile. We didn’t just lose to the Taliban. We left them stronger than we found them.
The sheer waste of it all is staggering. Twenty years ago, American politicians and intellectuals, traumatized by an unprecedented act of mass murder and not-so-secretly eager to see history revved up again, misunderstood what 9/11 represented. We inflated the stature of our enemies to match our need for retribution. We launched hubristic wars to remake the world and let ourselves be remade instead, spending an estimated $8 trillion in the process. We midwifed worse terrorists than those we set out to fight.
We thought we knew what had been lost on Sept. 11. We had no idea.”
Theatres of influence aren't static. They are also real, and active. Fine to keep underlining where the United States is withdrawing from. But as we've seen withdrawing itself is damaging.
It is very, very unlikely that President Biden is going to turn into the next Charles Lindberg. US global influence is going to stay huge.
The key question is whether Biden can make a better job of engaging with the Pacific and China more specifically than his predecessors Trump and Obama. He has a reasonable amount on at the moment.
Good points. I don’t personally think the US is fading as a superpower. More a case of China catching up to THEM.
Biden may irritate me if he paints himself as the “leader of the free world” as some of his predecessors have done, but he shows every sign of wanting the US to return to being the primary strategic guarantor of Western liberal democracies’ security.
As we mostly are not in any position to assume realistically that we can all defend ourselves from a sufficiently large, militarily-aggressive foe – should it ever come to that – it’s nice for us to be able to collectively assume that they probably have our backs.
Although I think he actually had a point about bludging NATO countries into stumping up their full agreed contributions to the cost of their own defence, Trump might well just abandon any traditional military alliance on a whim, should China or Russia ever setiously threaten another democratic country. And via a tweet.
Almost all of these pundits have a lot of fun poking at the US establishment as the big slow and easy target – but show the same ignorance around the role of the Afghans themselves in this disaster.
Most critically almost everyone has neglected the sad brutal truth that there is no Afghanistani nation – it never existed and isn't likely to anytime soon. It is instead a tribal society riven by ethnic divisions. The Taliban are the dominant Pashtun and the people that the Americans stupidly tried to put in power to unify the nation were largely Tajik or Uzbek with no regard to the local dynamics.
The reason why the Taliban took the country over is that they projected power in the interests of the majority of the people living in that country. When the Americans (and the Russians before them) left – the dominant ethnic group simply took over. The people it's now executing are of course mostly non-Pashtun. Good old fashioned medieval tribalism at work.
The American argument – for all of it's stupendous naivety – was that if they could remake authoritarian regimes like Germany and Japan into peaceful and democratic nations, why not Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan? The answer is pretty damned obvious in hindsight – that the former were ethnically homogenous while the latter were not. The Vietnamese were never going to tolerate the US handing over power to a corrupt Chinese elite, the Iraqi divisions between Sunni and Shiites has roots going back to the deathbed of the Prophet, and Afghanistan has 43 different ethnic groups who can barely tolerate the sight of each other.
That the Afghani locals were prepared to exploit American ignorance for their own purposes is not terribly surprising. That the Saudi Wahhibists were also prepared to build fundamentalist schools among the displaced Pashtun in Northern Pakistan, that the Pakistani authorities had their own games to play (very many Pashtun live in northern Pakistan) and that the CCP seem to have been playing their own hand – all gets conveniently airbrushed out of the analysis when it comes time to have another go at the perfidious Yanks.
Weirdly similar to the breakup of Yugoslavia.
A good read there. Last week at some point I found a “history of Afghanistan” youtube video about an hour long that started out as far back as 55O BCE. I had time to kill, I just let it play & listened to it while lying on the couch. The place actually has a very long history of parts or all of it being unified in one form or other & thus included in various different regional states or empires I’ve never heard of.
Several long before Islam arrived & eventually came to be the dominant religion.
Your comment makes me wonder why the US cops so muck flak from its critics, like me. The Russians’ behaviour in Afghanistan was pretty shit & their activities in Ukraine & particularly Syria has seen them either involved in their own, or supporting Assad’s, appalling atrocities.
The CCP have been guilty of various slaughters & terrible repressions in their own country & Tibet, too.
Some NATO European countries’ behaviour in their former colonies (that they finally departed from not all that long ago, historically speaking, and often left in the hands of equally appalling tribally-dominated regimes) was equally universally atrocious.
I think the US cops it so much because the Russians & Chinese simply don’t talk about what they’re up to where they’re misbehaving, while the US constantly talks about all the good that it’s doing or done for the countries they’ve invaded or interfered with.
It’s for their utter hypocrisy & their seemin national blindness to the reality of the misery & thousand of deaths & destruction they cause. It’s the rank double standards they demonstrate for their own people and those of the other countries they attack.
" supporting Assad’s, appalling atrocities."
Such as?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_during_the_Syrian_civil_war
So you simply accept a wikipedia entry as the full and honest truth? I'm disappointed.
Do some investigating on the principal contributors to this article. e.g.Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Syrian Network for Human Rights.
Who are they? Where are they based? Have any reported from Syria? Who are their sources? Who funds them?
Read the Amnesty 'report' on so called Syrian Government atrocities and see if you can find a shred of evidence of their claims.
There was no Syrian Civil war. It was/is a proxy war against the Syrian people by mercenaries paid for by the US, UK, NATO, Saudi and Qatar. US still has troops in Syria.
You've a lot to catch up, you could start with Timber Sycamore.
Watch this: "Roland Dumas: The British prepared for war in Syria 2 years before the eruption of the crisis in 2011"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeyRwFHR8WY&list=FLxnNx0VACX_z9BniCIRa_3A&index=142&t=4s
Find out what Gen. Wesley Clark has said on the destruction of the Middle East. That prior to the Afghan war there were plans to bring the Middle East to it's knees.
If you want to know what the about the inception of the war, do a youtube search on 'Talk With American-Syrians in Latakia'
Ask yourself why Syrians have been returning in their droves now that the country is safer? Why do you suppose Assad won the 2021 election with a vote of over 90%?
And before you listen to any claim that Syrian elections aren't fair and free this Observers Report to UN might be worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnFQd4wBXnk&list=FLxnNx0VACX_z9BniCIRa_3A&index=162
Perhaps wikipedia isn't always the most reliable source. In this case I'd have to say, and as any Syrian living in Syria will tell you, the article is simply fallacious.
“So you simply accept a wikipedia entry as the full and honest truth? I’m disappointed”
So am I, now you’ve complained about it. I’m aware the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is apparently just a one man operation based in London & that his reports have been challenged.
I don’t usually use Wikipedia as an only source for issues like this – I did a quick scan down the list of references before posting the link, & there seemed to be only one or two from the SOHR.
Not surprised at all to hear US & Western powers had long had plans to destabilise the ME.
My view on Assad’s & Russian forces has been partly formed by AlJazeera tv reporting, over the years that I’ve been watching tha channel on Freeview. Seeing the vid clips of barrel bombs being dropped by Assad’s choppers into cities, & e.g. the clips of White Helmets digging thru rubble pulling out survivors & bodies.
I watch Aljaz tv in the knowledge that some of their reporting is factual & neutral, but that they DO often have notable biases. Their reporting is invariably anti-Assad. They don’t report that the opposition now largely confined to the North I think includes some very nasty Islamist groups.
I’m not surprised that most of the Syrian population still there prefer living under the Assad regime to the rule of fundamentalist radicals.
I don’t know what to make of that video of those few Western election observers with the Syrian UN Ambassador,
“you want to know what the about the inception of the war, do a youtube search on ‘Talk With American-Syrians in Latakia'”- Will do.
…
“Ask yourself why Syrians have been returning in their droves now that the country is safer?” – Are they? This is news to me.
…
“Why do you suppose Assad won the 2021 election with a vote of over 90%?”
I suggest doing some research on what that "western observers with the Syrian UN ambassador" thing really was.
Propagandists are very skilled at creating facades and illusions of false legitimacy.
I plan to. The problem with the Middle East generally is that all sides involved in conflicts there are usually propagandising to the max. Sometimes a mixture of facts & deliberate omissions. ("The OTHER SIDE ARE VICIOUS ANIMALS: WE DON'T DO THAT.")
Getting to "the truth" often ends up amounting to choosing which side, or whose version – in complex situations with misbehaviours on both sides – you most prefer.
Still seems to be a "shithole country", with all sides in the conflct behaving badly at times:
https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/Pages/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=27456&LangID=E
That UN link says Syria is still unsafe to return to. Gonna see if I can find any reliable evidence thousands of Syrian refugees are now returning to areas under Assad's forces' control as suggested by Brigid.
Anyone thinking that vaccines alone can beat this thing need only look at Israel.
Can you link to the latest?
And yes, the vaccine doesn't 'beat' anything; it just flattens the curve, allowing the health system to cope. We're going to need more measures for sure.
Here's an interesting one (I'd never heard of the Stringency Index!):
Hopefully they are increasing the number of ICU beds etc. if they have modelled that they believe we will need them once everyone has had a chance to be vaccinated, and we have moved down to level 1 (or even level zero if it exists anymore?)
I doubt it… they rushed builders in under level 4 to create more negative pressue rooms…
The numbers dying goes down exponentially from high rates of vaccination
Correct, vaccines alone won't beat this. But Israel isn't the argument to show that. Israel isn't actually highly vaccinated. Lots of places have much higher vaccination rates than Israel.
The simple fact is real-world vaccine effectiveness is low enough and transmissibility is high enough that even a 100% vaccinated population will still have covid circulating in the population, in the absence of non-vaccine disease controls such as masks and restricting potential superspreading events.
The simple fact is also that permanent level 4 or level 3 lockdowns to maintain elimination aren't acceptable.
So our future lies somewhere in accepting that vaccines will reduce covid to a disease burden kinda like flu (in those that get vaccinated), and that masking in public places is good thing (as has been routine in a lot of Asian cities for a long time) and maybe places like pubs and nightclubs and sports stadiums and concerts etc need to change how they operate.
Israel isn't actually highly vaccinated.
What's the vaccination rate for the "Israeli Arabs", i.e. the local Palestinians in the state of Israel?
Gee, mozzie, that might indeed be an interesting little morsel of information.
Howzabout you go look for it and let us know what you find?
Go on, the exercise of finding actual facts will be good for you.
Google is your friend.
As of 9th August, 51% of the Arab population were vaccinated, compared with 66% across the whole population.
The Israeli PM is actively encouraging Arab citizens to get vaccinated.
And:
"Around 11% of COVID-19 cases were in Arab cities and towns last week, even though they constitute over 20% of the population. As of Sunday, some 26 cities were designated high-infection “red” areas; just one of them was an Arab locality."
So their infection rate is actually disproportionately low.
Does that include the West Bank and the Gaza strip .what about the Arab populations age cohorts
The data I referred to is for Israeli citizens. In East Jerusalem, Palestinains are being vaccinated by Israel. (Palestinians in East Jerusalem have Israeli residency status – so those living there pay Israeli taxes and have access to Israeli health insurance). From March, Israel began vaccinating all Palestinians who come to work in Israel or in Israeli settlements in the West Bank (Same source). Gaza is self governing – by Hamas. The West bank is seperated by regions under the control of Fatah and Israel. Various countries have donated vaccine to the palestinian territories, including Russia, UAE and Israel.
Interestingly, there is reportedly significant vaccine reluctance in Gaza, which is holding back the vaccination program.
I feel for them all.
"what about the Arab populations age cohorts"
The Arab population of Israel is significantly younger than it's Jewish counterpart. The median age of the Jewish population is 32, the Arab median age is 21.
That could be one reason for the lower vaccination rate.
I can’t see a link to their actual petitition, either in here or on Te Pāti Māori website (unless it’s just because I’ve got javascript turned off):
https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/te-reo-maori/126369919/petition-to-rename-new-zealand-as-aotearoa-launched
I don’t think I’d be prepared to sign this, though I’d like to see exactly what the petition says. I’m personally happy with using Māori names for some places that are still roughly the same place & even size of any original Maori-named rohe, region or settlement.
But some of these places are named after famous ancestors & so are some English language place names, so there’s an argument I agree with that such Rnglish place names have their own cultural validitt.
Case in point, my own city of Wellington. The city proper has for over achundred years well exceeded the size of any permanent or temporary Maori settlement (s suburbs still have their original Māori names (eg Hataitai, Petone).
Originally Port Nicholson (from where the area known as Poneke has probably come) the city was re-named Wellington by its Pākehā settlers & I’m very happy for it to continue to be called that.
On the other hand the HARBOUR was already long ago visited & reported on by a Māori rangatira sailor & thus the name Te Whanganui-a-Tara (the great harbour of Tara) works ok for me. So too does “Wellington harbour” – we Pākehā have a long tradition of naming ports & harbours after the city they service.
I think Rawiri over-eggs the “culturally insulted” side of things sometimes. You attract more bees with honey than vinegar.
(Te Pāti Māori has a really slick-looking website. )
"Change our official name to Aotearoa
Tōku reo, tōku ohooho. Tōku reo, tōku māpihi maurea. Tōku reo, tōku whakakai marihi.
Te Pāti Māori are calling for the House of Representatives to;
Change the country’s official name to Aotearoa and
Officially restore the Te Reo Māori names for all towns, cities and place names.
It’s well past time that Te Reo Māori was restored to its rightful place as the first and official language of this country. We are a Polynesian country – we are Aotearoa.
Name changes over our whenua and the imposition of a colonial agenda in the education system in the early 1900s meant that Te Reo Māori fluency among our tupuna went from 90% in 1910 to 26% in 1950. In only 40 years, the Crown managed to successfully strip us of our language and we are still feeling the impacts of this today. It’s totally unacceptable that 20% of the Māori population and 3% of people living in Aotearoa can speak te reo Māori.
Article 3 of Te Tiriti o Waitangi promises tangata whenua the same rights as British citizens, that Te Reo Māori me ōna tikanga katoa be treated and valued exactly the same as the English language.
This petition calls on Parliament to change New Zealand to Aotearoa and begin a process, alongside whānau, hapū and iwi, local government and the New Zealand Geographic Board to identify and officially restore the original Te Reo Māori names for all towns, cities and places right across the country by 2026.
Tangata whenua are sick to death of our ancestral names being mangled, bastardised, and ignored. It’s the 21st Century, this must change.
It is the duty of the Crown to do all that it can to restore the status of our language. That means it needs to be accessible in the most obvious of places; on our televisions, on our radio stations, on road signs, maps and official advertising, and in our education system."
http://www.maoriparty.org.nz/nz_to_aotearoa?recruiter_id=62238
Thank you. 👍🏼
I’m sure I looked at that website page section as soon as I saw the Stuff article. Maybe it’s been loaded since.
The MIQ absconder's mum potted and then apologised for her son's behaviour.
Odds of Bonnie and Clydes’ parents doing the same?
Potted= plotted?
And it seems to me they need to be named and shamed. That is more than a fine.
I'm sure Bonnie and Clyde's daddy will throw cash and influence around till this all goes away.
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/put+someone%27s+pot+on
OK
I’m aving a bad day with idioms.
Lesson in aussie culture and values:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/rugby/international/300406242/hes-an-australian-hero-quade-cooper-set-to-be-awarded-citizenship-after-long-battle
On that subject, a lovely exchange between a heavy weight boxer and rugby league legend and a rugby boof head
Both declaring their love for each other without embarrassment or shame.
Welcome to the 21st century.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hEeW7a7C-XM
Fantastic. Would be great if there were more of that.
With the left installed in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland, the Labor Party win yesterday in Norway completes the left revival for Scandinavia.
https://www.politico.eu/article/norways-labor-party-on-course-for-election-win/
Hopefully we get to see this in Germany as well in the next week.
“Apple has released an emergency software patch to fix a security vulnerability that researchers said could allow hackers to directly infect iPhones and other Apple devices without any user action.
The researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab said the flaw allowed spyware from the world’s most infamous hacker-for-hire firm, NSO Group, to directly infect the iPhone of a Saudi activist. The flaw affected all Apple’s operating systems, the researchers said.
It was the first time a so-called “zero-click” exploit had been caught and analysed, said the researchers, who found the malicious code on September 7 and immediately alerted Apple. They said they had high confidence the Israeli company NSO Group was behind the attack, adding that the targeted activist asked to remain anonymous”.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/300406391/apple-releases-emergency-software-patch-to-fix-vulnerability-to-zero-click-spyware
“We’re not necessarily attributing this attack to the Saudi government,” said researcher Bill Marczak.bAlthough Citizen Lab previously found evidence of zero-click exploits being used to hack into the phones of al-Jazeera journalists and other targets, “this is the first one where the exploit has been captured so we can find out how it works,” said Marczak.
Although security experts say that AVERAGE iPhone, iPad and Mac USERS generally NEED NOT WORRY – such attacks tend to be highly targeted – the discovery still alarmed security professionals.”
Newshub website reports:
New Zealand’s cybersecurity agency CERT NZ has recommended Apple users update their software “as soon as possible” after a cyber surveillance company based in Israel developed a tool to break into iPhones.
Winston making a come back?
'Left-wing radical bull dust': Peters blasts Māori Party petition to change country's name to Aotearoa (msn.com)
Ever the chancer, is 🗣 Winston.
Wonder how many would fall for it again, & vote NZF next election?
Very few, if any, I imagine.
Prity divisive approach by te Maori party imho.
Surely daul naming should suffice, but hell you dont get headlines by being sensible and inclusive.
This aggressive attack-Pākehā-oriented political style seems to be a deliberate strategy being quite frequently employed by Waititi & Ngarewa-Packer.
Not sure exactly what they aim to get from it but they’re neither of them fools. I’m presuming there’s a carefully-thought out, particular reason they are pushing the hostile “racist” envelope in this way.
Maybe it’s to make cultural connections with the haka? Try and sell themselves as more authentically Maori than Labour?
Winston certainly knows how to get headlines!
So do Rawiri & Debbie.
They’re the new kids on the block.
Winston’s just blowing his usual bubbles.
… in fact Winston’s probably doing exactly what they wanted someone like him to do. Get them more attention.
Let’s see how many other’s fall for it.
Ardern got asked what she thought about it at her Covid press standup today. She said no government plans to do what Rawiri wants; people are happy to use dual names, or their preferred on, from her observation.
🙄 other’s = others
on = one
[typo in e-mail address fixed]
Yup, there is one place worse than 'Murica in vaccine refusal and skepticism. They're No2 behind Russia.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/09/06/america-has-remained-unusually-vaccine-sceptical?
WTF did they think the reaction would be.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/alleged-wanaka-covid-19-breachers-remorseful-about-bad-decision-says-friend/ZSCJA2G2GAVVHDJE5VW4SGXUP4/
Community service as cleaners in Middlemores ED, and a hefty fine.