Posts by Mr Mark
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Good God !!!! I've been away too long. Craig party-voted Green at the last Election ???? Last I remember he was proclaiming himself the very, very proudest of proud Tories. It's like the world's suddenly turned upside-down and now, much like Baldrick, I have no idea what my name is or what country I live in.
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Personally, I'm hoping against hope that both NZ First and the Cons each receive 3-4 % of the Party-Vote, but no Electorate seat.
This Election will, of course, be very tight indeed and there are a number of scenarios (like the one above) where Right Bloc support slightly eclipses the Left Bloc's vote, but where the Left win a 1-3 seat majority in Parliament. Undemocratic ? Maybe. Upsetting to Craig Ranapia ? Absolutely. But for me - Lovely-Jubbly.
As for the Kim Dotcom Party, assuming its still on the cards, I have a feeling it'll snatch votes largely from the Left while (obviously) failing to make it over the threshold. Every Opinion Poll age-breakdown I've seen over the last decade suggests the under 35s are disproportionately supporters of the Left, the broad middle-age is always well to the Right, while the over 55s are close to the national average. In a knife-edge election, you just need the Internet Party to take, say, 2% of the vote, drawing two-thirds from erstwhile young Lefties and one-third from erstwhile young Righties - and it's all-over-rover for the Left.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Square Two, in reply to Jolisa,
Around here we were wondering what happens to the balloon-dinosaur when it bumps into the giant, invisible, Spiny Norman
I'm thinking Doug. I'm thinking Dinsdale. I'm thinking John Cleese as a 6ft 4 transvestite with an improbably high-pitched, middle-class accent and a deep, dark five o'clock shadow ?
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to dc_red,
Yeah, I seem to remember they were polling in the mid/late-teens (behind NZ First) going into the 96 election campaign.
Labour's ultimate 28%: all down to Clark's very well-received TV Election-debate performances.
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So - to sum everything up - time for a leadership change.
Fresh, exciting new face, unencumbered by the (recent/distant) past, new momentum, possibly, just possibly, a game-changer.
Risk of public perceiving it as desperate, last-minute, panicky stuff (aided, no doubt, by the dear old MSM). So, a high-risk strategy. Especially if Labour's core, dyed-in-the-wool-vote turns out to in fact be lower than the 30-34% they're currently polling. But I suspect ultimately Labour have nothing to lose (and quite possibly everything to gain). Could be just the thing to revitalise the Left.
The Shock of the New.
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Awful stuff.
I suspect one of the important stories to emerge over the next few days will be the extremely poor communications between the Beehive and Chch (reported about half an hour ago by Radio NZ's Jane Patterson). The Emergency Cabinet meeting was apparently relying heavily on TVNZ/TV3 coverage for their information. More than 30 minutes after RNZ reported multiple deaths (via Chch Emergency Services), journalists at the Beehive were still being briefed that Cabinet had no knowledge of any fatalities.
Mary Wilson on RNZ is Excellent. Asked some very important questions to greatly clarify things.
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@Russell
"Who'd have thought discussion about fake Twitter accounts could have taken such a turn ? This is why we'll never have threaded discussions".
Hardly surprising, Russell, surely ? I mean this thread goes from Twitter to Atheism/Religion; Long Will Be The Lunches (Aug 24) began with discussion on advertising revenue in the Oz Election and ended with the relative merits of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore; and Little Pieces of a Big Picture (Sept 5) began with everyone expressing genuine sympathy for the Chch earthquake victims before quickly turning - almost inevitably - to an in-depth discussion on Oral Sex.
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Dawkins is undoubtedly correct when he argues that: "As a devout Catholic, he [Ratzinger] would have had dinned into him, along with the Catechism, the obnoxious idea that all Jews are to be held responsible for killing Jesus - the 'Christ-killer' libel - not repudiated until the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). The Roman Catholic psyche of the time was still shot through with the anti-Semitism of centuries."
The annual Roman Catholic Passion Plays, in particular, appear to have generated a certain amount of anti-semitic violence - especially in Bavaria. And the Catholic Church does appear to have placed a much greater emphasis on the "Jews as Christ-killers" libel than most of the Protestant churches.
Having said that, it's also a fact that more than a few leading historic Protestant figures - including Martin Luther himself - had anti-semitic leanings. And it 's also true (despite Daniel Goldhagen's nonsense to the contrary) that Religious anti-semitism was not 'eliminationist' or 'genocidal' in the way that National Socialism was.
Historically, (and,again, this is despite Goldhagen's crude thesis to the contrary), anti-semitism in Germany appears to have varied greatly from region to region. Strong in some areas (both Catholic and Protestant), weak-to-almost non-existent in others. And it seems to be a historiographical consensus that Catholics were, in fact, less likely to vote Nazi ( in both the late 1920s and early 1930s) than Protestants. For example, in July 1933 (when the Nazis were at their electoral apex - taking about 38 percent of the vote nationally), a little less than a quarter of Roman Catholics supported them. The core Nazi vote was Rural and Small-town Middle-class and Lower Middle-class Protestant.
However, the Nazis did achieve quite significant levels of support in a range of Catholic villages and small towns, especially in the Rhineland, the Black Forest and parts of Bavaria (Ratzinger grew up in the latter). Most Catholics, though, were urban and (like much of the unionised working-class) tended to be immune to Nazi overtures.
End of history lesson !
@ Russell: "As last week's BBC Panorama programme,"What the Pope Knew", demonstrated, there is good evidence that Ratzinger left child-rapists in place (or at the very least, delayed their removal for years and kept them from the police)..."Yep. I remember seeing a BBC documentary (almost certainly Panorama) on this not long after Ratzinger became Pope. From memory, it focussed on his role in Central America and especially Mexico, revealing how he personally intervened to ensure that a number of Paedophile priests were just quietly moved on to another parish - so to merrily continue their long record of abuse.
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Blimey !, there's some shocking mug-shots on that Libertarianz site.
One or two axe-murderers and cat-stranglers by the looks of it.
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The most bizarre thing to come from the Quake so far.
Thanks, George. Extraordinary website.
Mind you, I loved the "Possible Connections of Significance" between a "Chimp with Down-Syndrome" and John Campbell. Have to admit, the photos of the two were pretty similar.