Posts by Kumara Republic
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to llew40,
And it goes back that far .... I remember Michael Cullen being particularly (and cavalierly) dismissive of the idea of introducing a capital gains tax.
This sort of institutionalised crisis takes decades to form, and will probably take a long way to unwind - assuming there is a political will to do so.
I'm still not sure if he was ideologically opposed to a CGT, or because he was spooked by NZ Inc's "winter of discontent" in the Clark Govt's 1st term.
I was listening to an RNZ segment last night where Kim Hill interviewed Walter Scheidel, who identified the "four horsemen" of inequality: mass mobilization or state warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and plague. Generation Rent-Seeker has become just as powerful as an upper house, and it'll likely take one of those horsemen to dislodge them.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Zach Bagnall,
I imagine if the fabled Great Correction does eventuate, it will be framed as a National Crisis, and the government will attempt to prevent all those mortgages from going upside-down. That will be expensive.
In addition to derailing the neoliberal just-world orthodoxy, a bailout of toxic mortgages would also drive a wedge between the market pragmatists and the market purists within the NACT bloc. I suspect both the red and blue blocs are secretly hoping the opposing bloc is in power if/when the housing bubble pops.
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I'd have to agree that these pieces are FIRE-sector advertorials pretending to be news stories. I know motivational snake oil when I see it, and it's getting horribly tiresome. It'll sting painfully, but bring on the bubble burst for the sole reason that it might just force Generation Rent-Seeker to eat humble pie. More importantly, I hope a bubble burst will discredit the currently dominant just-world fallacy that's polarising advanced societies these days.
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The online activist group Sleeping Giants has been doing some groundwork in helping to de-fund sites like Breitbart. However, tech giants Amazon and Facebook have so far not responded to the call. Is it going to take Breitbart to go full-on kompromat on Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg for them to get arse into gear?
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Was TVNZ's head of news in charge of the offending headline & story? If so, it's not the first time he's been involved in racial controversy.
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Hard News: The lessons of Prohibition, in reply to Shaun Lott,
The vandals are sacking Rome.
Only this time, the vandals are from within Rome's fortifications - and that includes the North American Maginot Line, oops, Mexican Border Wall proposal.
Going by his previous predictions, Johan Galtung is predicting that America could be in for a Soviet-grade downfall.
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Hard News: Meet the new bots, same as…, in reply to Neil,
I've noticed this cluster of opinions:
* It's not that I support Trump but Hillary Clinton is a warmonger.
* It's not that I support Assad but there's no moderate opposition.
* It's not that I support Putin but he shouldn't be provoked.
Not sure what motivates the pretense. In the US some of that is you can earn money in the pundit world - being an arsehol gets attention. But there's a growing authoritarian voice out there on the internet that sees advantage in hiding behind the It's Not That... facade. And certain pundits are feeding that for their own reasons.
It's the same kind of fallacy that's closely related to saying, "some of my best friends are Jewish, but..." or saying, "I'm not anti-gay, but I don't approve of homosexual acts."
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But whatever it is, it feels like something is going on. And the fact that that something includes a ramping-up of anti-Trump provocations makes it even more intriguing. Is this a new entrant to the mass-manipulation game? Or is the same old network of automated emotional dividers recalibrating for a new zeitgeist?
With the emergence of Robert Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, Rupert Murdoch and Crosby/Textor already look like relics of the last decade.
On Twitter, Sleeping Giants and Shannon Coulter have been doing some sterling work in defunding and boycotting sites like Breitbart, one tweet at a time. But boycotts can only go so far - if we really want to take down Mercer and his ilk, maybe Al Capone's one fatal weakness comes to mid.
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While we're still on broadcasting, or what's left of it, NZ gets a name check from across the ditch in an article on the relentless attacks on public broadcasting the world over, particularly from Planet Murdoch. Bonus points for mentioning the old NZBC.
Grauniad: Michelle Guthrie, the ABC and the turning of a once-shining jewel into mainstream sludge
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Not surprisingly, primary industries experienced near-total de-unionisation following the passage of the Employment Contracts Act 1991.