Posts by Kumara Republic
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to Russell Brown,
Wow. The Conservatives' only success yesterday – the Scottish party – is saddling up and riding off on its own, having established a view on Brexit it does not share with London.
It's easy to see it go all Shipley-Peters.
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Either way, a lot of tweets about Jeremy Corbyn being the end of his party have aged poorly. That an absolute Tory majority has just been reduced to a hung parliament might just be political caffeine for Little, Turei and Shaw.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Asking the…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Correct!
The shit came down afterwards, I gather.
Baysting exiled himself to the other side of the Tasman for a few years, only coming back after the whole affair was quietly forgotten about. I suspect the original recording with the profanity on it got wiped and reused, since VCRs probably weren't yet widely available in NZ. From this Billboard article, VCR penetration in NZ was ~10,000 in early 1982.
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Hard News: Public Address founder…, in reply to WH,
From that particular song, which sounds more relevant than ever:
"Poor man wanna be rich
Rich man wanna be king
King ain't satisfied till he rules everything..." -
Were a carbon trade war to happen, Trump might just find himself in the same position as Anthony Eden during the Suez Crisis.
* CNN: Trump could start a trade war by ditching the Paris climate accord
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Hard News: Drugs and why Dunne did it, in reply to Russell Brown,
When the amendment was being debated in Parliament, Tony Ryall attacked it as “all part of a politically correct, liberal agenda being pushed by this Government and the health authorities under the name of harm minimisation”, which was the most despicable, destructive politicking over people’s lives.
I have a dim view of Tony Ryall for other reasons too. When I went to my local MP about a rare and pre-existing dental condition that threatened to send me bankrupt - as previously mentioned on this forum - Ryall's response was straight from what's now known as the Trumpcare manual.
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Hard News: Drugs and why Dunne did it, in reply to Joe Wylie,
It would seem that it's Anderton's belief in himself as some sort of historical great man that's led him to hold to some of his more controversial views. It probably accounts for his ruthlessness in dumping his former Alliance comrades once he'd secured his own terms for returning to the Labour fold. When he ran for the Chch mayoralty in 2010 a number of these former colleagues swallowed the dead rat and doorknocked thanklessly on the great man's behalf.
Jim Anderton was both the Alliance Party's biggest strength and biggest weakness - he led it to double-digit support in the 1990s, but it couldn't survive without him following a series of defections.
And his prohibitionist views on cannabis are largely emotional and driven by family tragedies. On the other hand...
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Hard News: Budget 2017: How do we get…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
I think that left parties are much better at the strategic visioning policy thing that David mentions here, but they aren't often in government to implement them. And these ideas are hard to get into sound-bites so aspiring politicians are less likely to 'perform' well in the media, and so less likely to get elected. Housing, health, education and social policies are so inter-related. But when politicians from the left try to express these complex ideas they often get attacked by the interviewer with the 'how many, when, how much will it cost, yes or no?' questions.
Sure enough, thinking long term isn't necessarily cheap. But the Patrick Gowers of this world need to realise the cost of doing nothing is Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen. When today's Rust Belters are driven to become tomorrow's Brownshirts or Bolsheviks, it doesn't take a history book to realise where it ends up.
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Hard News: Drugs and why Dunne did it, in reply to Russell Brown,
Back when he did – and it included the drug warrior Pauline Gardiner. I can't recall exactly what word he used, but it wasn't far off "nutbar".
At one point he had the theo-cons Paul "God's Little Rally Driver" Adams and Gordon Copeland beside him in Parliament.
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In America at least, its imprisonment rate has been attributed to a covert "New Jim Crow" agenda under the guise of the "War on Drugs" et al. Here in NZ, lock-em-upper Garth McVicar seems to be a covert "one law for all" type, going by his past rants, and his admiration for Donald Trump.