Posts by izogi
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Hard News: We are, at last, navigating…, in reply to Ross Bell,
Stratford said more research should be done and jumping to conclusions based on the current science was "reckless".
Muuuust ... get .... government ... to ... keeeep ... loooking ....until .. it .... finds ... evidence ..... to ... vaaaalidaate .... industry.....!
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Hard News: We are, at last, navigating…, in reply to John Farrell,
Stratford was talking in that interview, of overseas research, but he didn't offer to provide it to RNZ. I wonder why not?
That occurred to me, too. Without clearly citing it he's just spouting vacuous rubbish. I was disappointed that Espiner didn't press him into specifying what this magical international research was so it could be presented to Gluckman et al for a useful response.
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Hard News: We are, at last, navigating…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I feel immense comfort today that people like Miles Stratford won’t have a business for much longer.
Guyon Espiner had him on Morning Report this morning. I haven't been following this story deeply, but his arguments just sounded ridiculous, alleging cherry-picked research and conflating moral issues (eg. character of meth users versus "hard-working New Zealanders") with science.
Guyon picked it out well. It might have been better to not have given him a platform, but I'm glad that as the interview went on he at least wasn't given much freedom to spout the crap without strong criticism.
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Thanks for the excellent summary, Russell.
Just on this closing:
Perhaps the party should just surrender its founding conceit and be done with it.
I can't speak for others, but my impression's been that ACT did that a long time ago. The values aren't strong when you can keep a straight face whilst putting forward a candidate like David Garrett.
Maybe ACT began with some kind of vision, driven by Prebble and Douglas, but it's been the political equivalent of a shelf company for many elections now. Certain people in the population will strongly consider voting for ACT no matter what it really is at any given time. Multiple times it's been picked up and wielded by the next group of rich crazy people who reckon it's an easier path to power and influence to use an already-established party than to start from scratch.
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Reading Jeanette Fitzsimons' thing on The Spinoff today, I was thinking it'd almost be appropriate if parties were to split apart over internal disagreements about voting for this Bill.
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And we really need to stop professing shock when well-known people observe, off the back of their own experience, that racism remains a blight in Aotearoa New Zealand.
I agree completely but it's also part of a wider pattern than just shock about someone calling out racism. It's also about the sense that someone overseas might have a whiff of it.
When the lynch mobs wanted to string up Mike Joy as an unpatriotic traitor because he dared to talk about NZ having environmental problems, it wasn't so much about whether the problems existed. It was also about the fact that he was a qualified expert attracting international publicity, and so letting the team down by not keeping our problems hidden and contradicting the non-negotiable 100% pure marketing slogans, as if to avoid talking about it could possibly have made sense.
Even when people reckon NZ's not a perfect place, some are terrified that someone might find out we're not all perfect down here... and racism is a really ugly badge to be wearing.
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Hard News: 1984, Cambridge Analytica and…, in reply to WaynePhillips,
I haven't seen it but the synopsis sounds comparable with a (fairly light-hearted) episode of The Orville that was on TV a few months ago.
If you can tolerate satire of Star Trek TNG and are within NZ, TVNZ OnDemand still has it up: https://www.tvnz.co.nz/shows/the-orville/episodes/s1-e7
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...a video sting carried out on Cambridge Analytica's senior management. First, them talking about the full range of dirty tricks their company could offer in foreign elections. And then, bragging about what they depicted as the company's comprehensive involvement in the Trump campaign, including what appear to be illegal activities and the destruction of material communications.
How does one go about arguing to the majority that this is a significant and serious thing which needs to be addressed?
I've been watching much of the fallout from the US election result, as many people have. The whole thing's so polarised, I guess because a lot of people who are strongly convinced of something do not want to accept or acknowledge that there's a chance they might have been manipulated through nefarious means.
In the end, we're not talking about someone secretly changing people's votes at the ballot box. We're talking about targeting people's specifically identified weaknesses, on a mass scale, to psychologically manipulate them into thinking something and then voting a certain way. If and where manipulation occurred, it seems to be of a sort where masses of people simply can't imagine that they'd ever have wanted anything different. Suggesting to people that they're not capable of independent thought is, understandably, quite an embarrassing thing, even though it's probably more about human nature than specific individuals.
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Legal Beagle: A submission on the…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Plus even the Green Party arguably only remained in parliament, after splitting from the Alliance, because Helen Clark effectively asked Coromandel Labour supporters to vote for Jeanette Fitzsimons in '99.
Without that support it's highly unlikely that she would have won Coromandel with a 250 vote majority. Without the realistic possibilty of her being able to do so, it's also unlikely that 5.16% of voters nationally would have been encouraged to vote Green. But they did, the Greens built on that success, and (IMHO) we've had a better and more representative Parliament because of it.
Has any new party ever entered parliament under MMP without either a defecting MP or benevolent (but really strategic) help from a big party that's more interested in gaming the system?
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Legal Beagle: A submission on the…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Yeah, sure. I'm not trying to defend imperfect methods of getting new parties into parliement any further than the fact that I think we can't seem to be bothered improving the mechanism of MMP -- even as far as seriously considering the report which came after the referendum to keep it. (I'm still waiting for Andrew Little to pull it out of Judith Collins's shredder, but there's apparently no interest.)
As long as we're intent on keeping a less perfect electoral system, we shouldn't be attacking the hacked mechanisms which enable it to produce and retain a parliement that has any realistic diversity of parties at all.