Great word salad? You're the one invoking ANZAC Day as a justification for why we should continue to send people to die in Imperial adventures (because we must "always defend Australia" and all that, even when nothing Australia does pertains to defence). I...
The key word is "conventional." Mao and his mob were experts in guerilla warfare (recall his line about fishes and the sea?). You don't fight conventional battles in that context. He was, however, infinitely more effective at fighting the Japanese (or at ...
Yes, ANZAC Day. The anniversary of the day that countless young men (including my great-great-uncle) were first sent into the meat-grinder because Winston Churchill wanted to help out Tsar Nicky and his bunch of reactionary anti-semitic crooks. In the ...
Good grief. For all Mao's many, many faults, he did a far better job at fighting the Japanese than Chiang ever did. In fact, whenever Chiang got weaponry and resources, he'd use it to fight the Communists, not the Japanese occupiers.
Some of us remember Iraq, and how we emphatically did not join Australia in its idiotic adventure. Our commitment to international order runs through the United Nations. Sure, we'd help out Australia if Australia were ever attacked, but that is quite ...
A check of wikipedia suggests that the regime on Taiwan claimed to be the sole ruler of China until the 1990s, when they unofficially dropped that. Emphasis on "unofficial" - the legal situation is messier.
Umm... the Chinese Communist Party did not "overthrow the ancient Chinese imperium." 1912 was not 1949.
For many years, Taiwan insisted that it was the legitimate ruler of the mainland (it might still do). It's not a matter of a separate nation, but rather one part of the country winding up occupied by a different faction in a civil war.
Margaret Thatcher. Ruth Richardson. Jenny Shipley. Sarah Palin. Liz Truss. Paula Bennett. Remind me again of how capitalism and the 'patriarchy' are somehow one and the same, seeing as women are just as capable of being neoliberal kooks as men? Quite apart...
Actually no. Jack was never going to win Taieri. This is just poor candidate selection for an unwinnable seat. (The seat known as Taieri would be better described as 'Dunedin South and Clutha').
I live in Taieri. As a rule of thumb, 70% of it is urban, centred around South Dunedin. The remaining 30% is rural Clutha - which while National-leaning, is not ultraviolet the way rural Southland is. Jack is a Clutha farmer - and based off his press-...
"When the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled." Invisibility - and staying out the way - seems an eminently sensible approach for New Zealand.
Those working class supporters stopped voting during the Blair years (seriously, check the turnout in the Northern seats in 2001 and 2005). They turned out for Brexit in 2016 (the real turning point - it's the point at which Britain entered Culture War), ...
"Worst result since 1935" is one hell of a misrepresentation. In overall seat numbers? Sure. Problem is, 2019 had one thing 1983 and 1987 lacked - the SNP as the dominant party in Scotland. And that had nothing to do with Corbyn. In terms of Labour in ...
There hasn't been an election since the Truss debacle. The Tax Cut Reversal was one of those epoch-defining screw-ups on a level with 1993 Black Wednesday. None of this has anything to do with Starmer.
Nah, the Conservative Party is removing itself from power. The self-immolation under Truss has pretty much doomed them, regardless of what Labour has been doing.
Being a Bad Person (and this person definitely qualifies as such, IMHO) is not grounds to stop them entering New Zealand. The Transgender Activists trying to get a Judicial Review of Wood's decision are wasting their time and money, unfortunately. People ...
Labour in 1997 would have won regardless of its positioning. The Tories were literally that toxic, on account of the VAT betrayal, Black Wednesday, corruption, sex scandals, and the relentless party civil wars over Europe (plus Major in 1992 benefited from...
Lack of cabinet experience didn't stop Labour in 1972 (hint: Hugh Watt was the only one of Kirk's ministry to have previous cabinet experience). Eventually, voters do actually get sick of incumbents, so Labour would have returned to office at some point.* ...
That's not really an issue for Science, but rather people misinterpreting data, based off correlation/causation and other things. The actual limits of Science were established by Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, when he pointed out that what our ...
Wee issue here: prior to the development of Science, the West itself had systems of Natural Philosophy. Not ones based off the Scientific Method, of course, but others. Such things are interesting in a "History/Philosophy of Science" sense, but in no way ...
Socialism is a journey, not a destination, and the Mixed Economies of the post-war era tended to be built by self-identifying socialist parties. And, yes, Sweden's Social Democrats identified as such. May interest you to know that the German Social ...
Clement Attlee's 1945 Labour Government in Britain nationalised a quarter of the economy (and half of British industry). Does that count as socialism? Perhaps I would suggest that the norm for the West from the 1940s to the 1970s was the Mixed Economy. ...
The Great Crash, 1929, by John Kenneth Galbraith.
It very much did fail. The Global Financial Crisis could only have happened with deregulated financial markets, and the inherent celebration of glorified gambling. It was resolved by Government (hitherto "always the problem and never the solution") ...
Neoliberalism did fail in 2008, yes. Alas, it remains in charge because the mainstream social-democratic parties of the Left are now committed to it (no-one cares because the Left has bought into Identity Politics instead of Class). Internationally, we ...
While I honestly could not care less about use of Maori loan words, I would raise the obvious point: English is not descended from Brittonic (a Celtic language). It is a Germanic language, descended from Old English/Anglo-Saxon. Brittonic words in English ...
On 1951: it wasn't as if Labour were energetically defending the waterfront workers. Nash rather infamously declared that he was neither for nor against them. Meanwhile, the form of "voluntary unionism" enacted by Holyoake was still far more union-friendly...
Because entrenchment doesn't work, and just means you hand the high-ground to National (who wouldn't respect the entrenchment anyway). The way to stop future privatisations is to declare a Labour policy of renationalisation, at the price the asset was sold...
There are people in prison for rape who serve less than seven years in prison. Do you think a bottom pinch is worse than rape? Because that's what Three Strikes says.
It's called proportionality. Or in this case, disproportionality. Frankly, seven years for a kiss on a cheek is a greater affront to the conscience than the initial kiss on the cheek.
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