Posts by Kumara Republic
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Bryce Wilkinson comes across as wilfully ignorant to the role his ideological world-view has played in laying the foundations for Brexitrump-ist illiberal democracy.
Scandi-style active labour market policies - as mentioned in my guest post on the topic - would do far more to fix poverty than any neo-Victorian finger-wagging. This old Hard News post also comes to mind:
Yes, folks, it was me. I called Doug Myers an arsehole and I would cheerfully do so again. He had written a smug little essay about local government for the Herald, in which he declared that libraries were not a public good, and it didn’t benefit him if some poor sod read a book for free. Coming, as it did, from someone who had never wanted for anything, I found that not only foolish, but unspeakably arrogant.
I recall a similar response when Alan Gibbs made a speech to a conference on the family in which he advanced the neo-Victorian view that poor people’s problem wasn’t so much a lack of money as a lack of morals. He even went so far as to blame the contraceptive pill for this moral decline. But only for the poor, presumably. Rich people can handle contraception, right? I used some stronger words than “arsehole” in that case.
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According to the Political Compass, there are 3 major types of Brexiteers (the same goes for Trumpniks, with my additions in boldface):
Like The Political Compass itself, the EU comprises a social dimension and an economic dimension.
...D. Those rejecting the EU's prevailing economics but accepting, at least to some extent, the social dimension (many Labour supporters and Rust Belt Democrats)
E. Those rejecting both (quintessentially UKIP and the Steve Bannon/Richard Spencer wing of the GOP)
F. Those comfortable with many of the EU's economic provisions, if only they could easily exit the Social Chapter (Conservative and the Paul Ryan/Rand Paul/Steve Mnuchin wing of the GOP)
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Hard News: Harkanwal Singh: What really…, in reply to Neil,
Foreign investment is one of the main drivers of the current boom in Auckland apartment construction which has made things a lot easier financially for first home buyers.
It depends on whether the foreign investment is greenfields (build something new) or brownfields (buying up existing property). IIRC there's no ban on greenfields property investment, which is basically in line with Australia.
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Among the sad parts of this story is that the "foreign money" conversation could have happened without anti-migrant language or dog-whistles.
Exactly. Had the "yellow peril" card not been played, clampdowns on non-resident house buyers would have been an otherwise justifiable capital controls measure. On the other extreme, the effective open-slather policy of the last lot was looking just as ignorant to the issue as David Cameron and Hank Paulson were to the post-GFC environment.
Also, if Labour wanted to tackle rentierism, doing so without looking at non-immigrant citizens would be a pointless waste of time.
Local rentiers are a known problem - they're likely the same fellas who suffered from irrational exuberance in 1987 - but their "share" of the nation's GDP has reached too-big-to-fail proportions. And as I've mentioned prior, property owners and speculators are powerful enough to be a de facto upper house.
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Hard News: News Memories 2: The Twitter thread, in reply to Gareth,
If there's one song that perfectly captures the Space Race optimism of the early 1960s, "Telstar" would have to be it. Even though it's way before my time, it sounds remarkably like the foundations for the synthpop scene that emerged a bit under 20 years later.
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Where would this be signed? Jersey? Bermuda? The Caymans? Switzerland?
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Hard News: Memories of the news, in reply to Kumara Republic,
PS. Towards the end of the 1980s I watched the Berlin Wall coming down, the Tianamen Square protests, and David Lange resigning as PM. I just as vividly remember the benefit cuts just a couple of years later. A cat showed up at our doorstep that time - which my family originally thought abandoned due to said benefit cuts - and it later turned out it had merely wandered off when its owner came back from an overseas trip.
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As a kid, it was the Rainbow Warrior bombing and the subsequent investigations, the ANZUS split, and the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster. The first sports story I remember well was when Ben Johnson made doping infamous at the Seoul Olympics.
The first current affairs school assignment I recall having to do was on the Gulf War, and later that year the Soviet Union collapsed.
My first "where were you when it happened" moment in adulthood was Princess Diana's fatal car accident, and I had a similar experience when 9/11 happened.
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Legal Beagle: Despite Simon Bridges'…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
The polarisation became visible during the Reagan presidency - widening inequality and the scrapping of the Fairness Doctrine among the factors - but the fuse was lit in the 1960s with the Vietnam War, the Southern Strategy and the Silent Majority. The following decade saw Watergate permanently hardening political cynicism in the US. The 1990s saw the collapse of the USSR - and with it a shared common enemy - and the rise of Newt Gingrich and Fox News.
9/11 could have been another chance to unite against a common enemy, but instead the polarisation further hardened. If the Mueller Inquiry gets Trump and his inner circle impeached or thrown in the slammer, it could be the last straw for his most radical loyalists. There may not be a rerun of Fort Sumter 1861, but all the same, the Troubles might just cross the Atlantic and speak American.
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In any case, NZ seems to be following overseas political trends in the decline of bipartisanship. With USA leading the pack, of course. (HT Iyad El-Baghdadi)
