Open mike 28/10/2024

Written By: - Date published: 6:00 am, October 28th, 2024 - 12 comments
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12 comments on “Open mike 28/10/2024 ”

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  1. Binders full of women 1
    28 October 2024 at 9:12 am

    The Bayley story has fizzled out. Way to go Ginny!! He owes you a Christmas card for your brainwave.

  2. Subliminal 2
    28 October 2024 at 9:48 am

    The Kamal Adwan Hospital in Northern Gaza had been under siege for days but now has tanks and bulldozers inside the compound,

    damaging the intensive care unit with sick children inside and the storage tanks that provide its water and oxygen supplies. Hospital staff and wounded patients were reportedly kidnapped by IDF troops.

    According toAl Jazeera, a number of children including babies died in the hospital due to a lack of oxygen.

    UNICEF has issued a statement to the effect that Gaza is the worlds most dangerous place for children and

    for the first time, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres this year added Israel to his "list of shame" of countries that kill and harm children during wars and other conflicts.

    But that is not all. The absolutely depraved attitude of Israel towards Palestinians, which is encompassed in the Amalek dogma, means that even when Palestinian children do survive their barbarity, every effort is made to ensure their eventual death inside the Gaza concentration camp.

    UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said Friday that "children are being medically evacuated from Gaza at a rate of fewer than one child per day."

    "If this lethally slow pace continues, it would take more than seven years to evacuate the 2,500 children needing urgent medical care," he continued. "As a result, children in Gaza are dying—not just from the bombs, bullets, and shells that strike them—but because, even when 'miracles happen,' even when the bombs go off and the homes collapse and the casualties mount, but the children survive, they are then prevented from leaving Gaza to receive the urgent care that would save their lives."

    "This is not a logistical problem—we have the ability to safely transport these children out of Gaza," Elder added. "It is not a capacity problem—indeed, we were evacuating children at higher numbers just months ago. It is simply a problem that is being completely disregarded."

    With Gaza, the US and UK as well as Germany, have no red lines. Israel is allowed to commit every and any atrocity. The money and weapons will continue to flow. The depravity of the settler colonial system that is the west, is now on full display.

    https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-killing-children-2669483489

  3. I Feel Love 3
    28 October 2024 at 10:40 am

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/27/australia-rejects-visa-application-by-rightwing-us-pundit-candace-owens

    I wonder what NZ will do? & who are the people who would pay money to listen to this grifter? Boggles my mind anyway.

    • Mike the Lefty 3.1
      28 October 2024 at 10:45 am

      The Free Speech Union will welcome him with open arms, no doubt, as they do to any right-wing attention seeker.

      • I Feel Love 3.1.1
        28 October 2024 at 11:43 am

        Oh I'm sure but there must be some conflict because they would agree with her anti trans & racist views, but may balk at her anti semitism, so should be interesting. Good on Australia anyway.

  4. Koina 4
    28 October 2024 at 11:34 am

    Why are so many entitled middle aged middle class men so angry and

    constantly lashing out at any one who does not believe their philosophy?

    • AB 4.1
      28 October 2024 at 1:18 pm

      It's called "system justification". People defend the status quo if it benefits them, or they think it will benefit them at some point in the future, or if any suggested departure from it is mostly voiced by people whom they regard as inferior – either innately because of race, gender, culture, etc. – or inferior in knowledge about the 'real' word because they are young, or have never owned a business, or work in a university, etc.

      The right wing, know-it-all, absurdly over-confident, pakeha Kiwi bloke (and we all know several and have to get along with them) is a product of this dynamic.

  5. Mac1 5
    28 October 2024 at 12:55 pm

    Part of a speech I wrote to commemorate Labour Day delivered by Samuel Duncan Parnell.

    "Well thank you ladies and gentlemen.

    First I'd like to say that though I came from London I was raised by my mother and my father was a gentleman but I never knew him well enough to quite pick up on his accent.

    What I say today has obviously benefitted from the experience of hindsight. Had I known then what I know now may have resulted in a different campaign. Do we learn from the lessons of history? Because I must say that what I fought for in 1840 as a thirty year old has been largely lost over 47 years.

    I did my apprenticeship as a carpenter in London where I met with fellow workers and discussed politics and the social issues of the day. Life was so hard in the slums of London that at the age of 29 I decided to emigrate away to New Zealand. In London I was exposed to many ideas. Like Wellington here, sea ports expose us to new people and therefore new ideas. I lived through the European revolutions in 1830, and then in 1848. I was an idealistic young man back then.

    In the 1830s slavery for example was done away with back home in England. People's ideas and sense of social justice were changing.

    Those ideas came with me to Wellington. When I got here, labour was in great demand and my skills as a carpenter were in very short supply.

    I decided then that life had to be made fairer and more just. So I struck for the right of the eight hour day. I told the shipping agent, Mr Hunter, who wished to engage me. "We have twenty-four hours per day given us; eight of these should be for work, eight for sleeping, and the remaining eight for recreation and in which for men to do what little things they want for themselves. I am ready to start to-morrow morning at eight o'clock, but it must be on these terms or none at all."

    I would meet ships coming in to Port Nicholson and tell the new men that they too should work for the eight hour day only, to be worked between 8 and 5 pm. It was agreed in October 1840 at a meeting that anyone agreeing to longer hours should be thrown into the harbour.

    In 1841 employers tried it on, saying men labouring on the Hutt Valley road would have to work longer hours. So they struck, and they won. We all won.

    You all know the story but the reason we won was because for a period of time the balance between the demand for labour and the supply of labour was in favour of the workers. The people of capital had to agree to our demands. There was little option. And so we prospered. We all prospered.

    Now, the balance has well and truly swung the other way. We have had wars, and a depression recently. The 48 hour week has become a sixty hour week again, eight hour working days have become ten or twelve hour days, all for a pittance in wages.

    I escaped the slums of London to see them re-created here again in Wellington. Houses are cold, and damp and unhealthy, and rents are very high.

    At the end of life there is no help save charity and that's often lacking in our community now. I am an old man at 77 years of age. I'm past work now, and I couldn't save enough on the pittance I got paid in later years. With no family, I must needs take people's charity.

    After we won the right to a fight hour working day, the government opened up the gates for immigration. Floods of people came in, borrowing money to do it, to be the new labour force and driving down the wages earned by working folk.

    I weep for the unsafe mines and farms, the danger of sawmills and the forests to the timber workers, the health of coal miners and the danger of our coasts and oceans to seamen and fisherfolk.

    Now we lock this poverty in by having a pool of permanent unemployed who keep the price of labour down, and the workers docile , working for contractors who treat them like slaves and for dangerously long and tiring hours.

    However, ladies and gentlemen, in this year of 1887 I sense a change in the air, even to these old nostrils. The ideas of my youth are now being talked about again by a new group of politicians.

    Even though this government has entrenched its rural rump well and truly on the seats of power with the 1881 country quota, yet the working class in the cities will again be fully represented in the corridors of power. And shortly.

    After a period of misrule and the balance being too much in favour of the owners of capital, there comes the time of the reformer, when people have had enough.

    History tells us this.

    The history of our country has yet to be written, but I'd venture this will happen soon enough."

  6. joe90 6
    28 October 2024 at 6:40 pm

    Apartheid Clyde reminds the world.

    /

    @Esqueer_

    Elon posted his MAGA hat which uses the Fraktur font, popular in nazi Germany. He wore this at a rally meant to evoke the 1939 nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. He's telling you who he is.

    https://x.com/Esqueer_/status/1850693791201522107