Hard News: Popular Paranoiac Politics
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Muriel Newman's tin-foil hattery on Maoridom is nothing short of the old Terra Nullius doctrine.
Any WikiLeaks stuff on all the above?
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I shall refrain from commenting on the Coastal Coalition and NZCPR, lest I be accused of blatantly promoting the word "twatcock".
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As someone who has voted for ACT the last 3 elections, few things scare me more than Muriel Newman getting back into parliament.
The words "Bat Shit Crazy" come to mind, and thats from one of them crazy right wing gun totin rednecks...
I'll never forget coming down after a gig in the days where party pills were legal and hearing her reccomend (I shit you not) at some meeting on the shore - that we cut the hands of shoplifters .... then some crazy fucker with a neck beard start a 20 minute rant on the evils of the word "liberal"...
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Another problem with forming a Bell Tea Party is that, unlike the castrated moderates in the Republican Party, people like Chris Finlayson are willing and able to call bullshit in no uncertain terms.
BTW, Muriel, it's a little disingenuous to whine about Finlayson "not having an open mind" when the Coastal Coalition is appearing in front a select committee it has previously assailed as a "travesty of democracy" it has no confidence in or respect for.
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Amy Brooke's annual Summer Sounds Symposium
That link should come with a Papyrus warning. Which at least shows they're not "clowns", since clowns would obviously use Comic Sans.
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Just what then is New Zealand's leading Internet-based think tank?
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
I'll never forget coming down after a gig in the days where party pills were legal and hearing her reccomend (I shit you not) at some meeting on the shore - that we cut the hands of shoplifters .... then some crazy fucker with a neck beard start a 20 minute rant on the evils of the word "liberal"...
And the irony of these Wahhabists-by-another-name invoking the Eurabia domino theory isn't lost on us.
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I'd never heard of the Summer Sounds Symposium. I see that it describes itself as 'the most stimulating intellectual event on the year's calendar' and that the master of ceremonies is Herald columnist Jim Hopkins.
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Two statements that immediately and abruptly contradict each other.
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Heh, they needed a special comment to explain after all the leading questions that 52% of respondents still rated National's performance as "average to excellent".
The questions reminded me the those notorious "free personality tests" which were a ploy to get you in a room to hassle you into buying a Scientology book. So long as you are only asked how close to perfection you are (and display normal human modesty), then the form is designed to make you feel stink about yourself. They were more careful about asking questions that actually outright asked you if you wanted to buy a book about Scientology, to which the answer 100% of the time would be "Hell, no". I really put the guy out of kilter, though, when he produced the book, and said it could help me with all my problems if I just bought it, when I responded (truthfully) "I doubt it man, I got that out of the library years ago, and it obviously hasn't helped". Same answer could actually apply to the formation of a new right wing party. It happened years ago, and it hasn't helped.
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Meahwhile, what's scarier -- getting an anatomically implausible tea bagging from the Herald on Sunday or the Sunday Star Times not only giving Winston Peters a front page blow job but swallowing the jizz and asking for seconds? Not for the first time, I've got to ask WTF is up with the toxic waste bromance between Peters and the meedjia.
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I get the distinct feeling that you RB and the rest of us at PA would love to see a far right party
Just for the fun we could have blowing it out of the water
Talk about fish in a barrel
I think (or rather I hope) its popular support would be hardly above the margin of error
But then there is support for those old troppers Jim A and dear old Winston so who knows -
Craig Ranapia, in reply to
I get the distinct feeling that you RB and the rest of us at PA would love to see a far right party
No, not really. Torturing puppies meets all my brain-melting sadism needs.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Two statements that immediately and abruptly contradict each other.
One year they had Jim Hopkins and Kerre Woodham.
Suck on that, scholar-boy.
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Sacha, in reply to
Just what then is New Zealand's leading Internet-based think tank?
About same amount of thoughtfulness as Muriel and co..
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I really put the guy out of kilter, though, when he produced the book, and said it could help me with all my problems if I just bought it, when I responded (truthfully) “I doubt it man, I got that out of the library years ago, and it obviously hasn’t helped”.
This is an entire argument for the public library system, right there.
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
To be fair, there is a delightful drinking game you can play with the Winston Peters interview:
Every time he tells a transparent falsehood, take a drink.
Call me when you get out of detox.
All brought to you as part of the Sunday Star Times' 'two facts max' campaign.
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
One year they had Jim Hopkins and Kerre Woodham.
Dear Lord. What would I give to have been a fly on the wall. A dead one, preferably.
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This is an entire argument for the public library system, right there.
Yes, freely appreciating good books is only half of it. Freely debunking utter shite is also important.
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Sacha, in reply to
Just as Ms Woodham pulled a sane post out of the bag recently, I have to congratulate Deborah Coddington on her reasoned analysis in that column.
There is certainly enough unhinged money sloshing around to bankroll a spoiler campaign next year. I wonder if a dry redneck party might deny Winston enough votes to be a potential swinging coalition partner for Labour (much like Bob Jones' role in 1984)? Only the Nats could hold their nose long enough to negotiate with Brash or Newman but Key could make mileage by publicly refusing as he did with Winston and with Roger Douglas.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
The questions reminded me the those notorious “free personality tests” which were a ploy to get you in a room to hassle you into buying a Scientology book. So long as you are only asked how close to perfection you are (and display normal human modesty), then the form is designed to make you feel stink about yourself.
I recall many years ago being stopped by a Scientology recruiter on Queen Street and allowing myself to be subjected to their personality test. The man got increasingly irritated at my insistence on answering the questions in a cheery, confident and optimistic fashion. I became increasingly amused by him.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
There is certainly enough unhinged money sloshing around to bankroll a spoiler campaign next year. I wonder if a dry redneck party might deny Winston enough votes to be a potential swinging coalition partner for Labour (much like Bob Jones' role in 1984)?
Didn't a certain theo-con eat into John Banks' mayoral vote?
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Muriel Newman is downplaying her pseudo-history fancies in the Herald today.
But, this being the internet, the truth is still out there:
While our government appears to hold tightly onto the view that Maori are tangata whenua (with even the stories of the early Moriori occupation that our generation was taught in school having almost disappeared), local and international research is now painting a different picture of the early history of New Zealand.
Claims have been made that New Zealand was discovered from as early as 600BC by Phoenician, Indian, Greek and Arab explorers. In fact, claims of these visits help to explain the existence in the South Island of the fossilised remains of rats that have been carbon dated at 160 BC - more than 1,000 years before Maori!
There are further claims that before Maori arrived in New Zealand settlements had already been established, by the Waitaha, the peace-loving fair skinned ancestors of the Moriori, by Chinese miners, and by the Celts.
As I noted in a post at the time, she was also claiming that Maori were resisting the global Genographic project because they wanted to cover up evidence that other races were here centuries before them.
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Muriel Newman is downplaying her pseudo-history fancies in the Herald today.
And as I've seen with my own eyes, trying to take on Finlayson with truthiness is bringing a toothpick to a machete fight. Whatever else you say about him, he does take serious arguments seriously but you can't wing it. And, yes, Muriel -- Chris does know how to use Google. Deal with it.
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Russell says that my liberation blog post about Don Brash invokes ‘the word “principles” to characterise the former National Party leader’s motivations’. This is an accurate reading of my post, but of course some caveats or further unpacking of this idea of “Brash as a principled politician” are probably necessary. What I was trying to convey was this idea that many on the right of politics feel that National’s current economic orientation is driven by pragmatism and moderation. It’s harder to characterize the Don Brash’s campaign critique of National’s orientation to the foreshore and seabed issue, and my feeling is that Brash’s Orewa speech was much more focused on economic issues, with just a few nodes to the foreshore and seabed debate thrown in, rather than an in depth critique of it (even though some news media hyped up this aspect up).
Also, the use of terms like principled and populist probably need quite a bit of unpacking to understand New Zealand politics. In my view Don Brash the politician is actually a very interesting mix of radicalism, populism, and principled and opportunistic politics. This to me is one of the key themes of his time as National Party leader, and is particularly clear from reading Nicky Hager’s Hollow Men expose. The whole Hager story is essentially how “Brash the Principled” became “Brash the Populist Opportunist”. What is now frequently forgotten is that throughout Brash’s time as leader he actually oversaw the ditching and de-emphasizing of virtually all of the National Party’s more neoliberal and rightwing policy, and instead (despite traditionally being rather socially liberal) Brash started to emphasize and strengthen National’s more socially conservative policies. Essentially he ditched his principled politics in favour of more populist vote-winning stuff around ethnicity. Now in 2010 he’s more interested in returning to the principled neoliberalism (with a dash of populism thrown in around issues of ethnicity).
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