Posts by Angus Robertson
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Megan Wegan,
I don't know how many times in the past 2 days I have said "There's a sexual assault charge, and there's Wikileaks. These two things are not necessarily related."
Perhaps seperate threads:
One for Wikileaks and the assorted revelations of diplomatic leakage.
And one for Julain Assange's sex life and legal troubles.
Very macho -- goobye #wikileaks, hello #wikicreeps. Am I the only person smell the faint odour of whale oil?
Having to wade through 13 tonnes of hearsay, innuendo and assorted filth to reach any nuggets of interest - the Whale Oil effect.
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Random Play: Alt.Republic: The rolling mall, in reply to FletcherB,
I went along to a meeting at the St Lukes library about 10 years ago when they were "consulting" on the upgrade to include cinema/food hall and exclude Big Fresh. Had the dubious pleasure of listening to some members of the local council opposition party (can't remember which) saying how bad it would be with all the extra traffic/noise for the neighbourhood of St Lukes and how they were committed to preventing this from happening. I took the opportunity to ask them what their stance was on the SH20 motorway (that had just been granted go ahead to be connected to the south end of Sandringham Rd) being extended through Mt Albert to Waterview and they said that they were committed to preventing the extension from happening.
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A shopping mall which most planners would agree is in entirely located in the wrong place. St Lukes is where it is because of short-sighted decisions in the past – so why would we want to go and compound those mistakes.
Much the same could be asked of Auckland City as a whole. Who'd want to put half the country on an squiggly isthmus? And even if you had to do that, why would you put the CBD on the skinniest part?
Probably best if we stop compounding the Auckland problem right now and start moving people to a place where a properly circular city can take shape. Christchurch (when it stops shaking), Palmerston North, Hastings or Hamilton are all much better places for urban development.
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Isaac, its a discussion about safety and road fatalities. Any preventable death is a tragedy, but this death is no more important than any other preventable future death. It is a callous debate.
Allowing legal car parking on Tamaki Dr increases traffic constriction with potentially hazardous mingling of cyclists and motor vehicles.
Preventing car parking on Tamaki Dr may do several things:
- increase the distances to walk to the beach, which increases the risk to pedestrians as they have to cross more roads.
- encourage illegal parking, which may occur in even worse spots.
- encourage double parking where the family unloads in traffic, parks car elsewhere, repeats the process at the end of the day.
- stop people coming to the beach. -
How come only hard news shows up on the front page Recent Posts?
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Hard News: I'm not a "f***ing cyclist".…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
The community board had to address the concerns of the community and very few support removal of parking spaces on Tamaki Drive. There are lots of very popular beaches and people need to park their cars. If there are too few carparks people will park illegally or park on narrow residential streets or not come - two of these things are bad for road safety and the other one is very bad for the community.
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Room ideologically, sure (that space is infinite; one can always play "lefter-than-thou"). But what matters isn't the ideological space, but how many people are in it. That's the core issue a political party has to grapple with. And based on recent voting trends, the answer is "not a lot". At the last election, the "left of Labour" vote was ~182,000 votes, 7.72% of the total - and a great chunk of that will be off-axis Greens. This is not a lot of space to support a new party. In order to be successful, they would have to move large numbers of people into it, which is a very big ask.
Space could emerge post 2011 in the event of National being re-elected. National will continue moving slowly rightwards and Labour will follow suit (to a lesser degree) in an attempt to capture the centre. You wouldn't have to look very far to find some within the left who see this sort of "right turn" as unacceptable.
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I can't for the life of me understand why the Party of Palin isn't being confronted with its own record.
It was, in public, during the Republican primaries, by the Tea Partiers. Played a big part of why the Tea Party did so well in those primaries.
Also why the GOP is looking so good, they've aired there dirty laundry in public and mainstream Republicans are promising to not be so porky in future. (Personally I think they are selling pork pies, but Americans do like politicians who promise such things.)
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Well, we agree there. I still think you're reluctant to acknowledge quite how crazy some of the ideas animating the Tea Party phenomenon are.
There is some insane and some pretty standard right wing stuff. Since they are not going to have the numbers to do everything, they'll almost certainly drop the crazy stuff. To what extent this happens remains to be seen, but it will happen. And Americans probably can work this out for themselves and in very reasonable manner will vote against the Democrats.
Sharon Angle is not going to have a chance of winning because Nevadan's like Sharon Angle's ideas. Nevada is suffering very poorly in the recession and Harry Reid has been in office claiming credit for every piece of economic good news to hit Nevada for 24 years.
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Hopefully -- but not likely -- with a sounder understanding of TARP than you have expressed above. Did you miss the part about how the TARP money comes back?
No. I was aware of that. And the money being repaid is not the point.
Loaning money to vast corporations owned by very rich people because those corporations are so big that they cannot ever be alowed to fail - politically that is a hard sell. It sets up those rich arseholes as set for eternity, they officially can only ever prosper.
And the point wasn't to "cause growth" -- it was to stave off a collapse of the banking system. There were some hideous policy failures in the years leading up to the crunch, but once it had happened, there weren't a whole lot of other options, for either Bush or Obama.
Well you say that and Bush said that and Obama says that, but theres these guys down the street who say differently. They say America didn't need to bail out the bankers.
And even if they are wrong, politically it sells.