Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Farmer Green,
I’ve thought a lot about it Alfie and I think that at this stage it would be foolish to stick my head any further above the parapet.
Damn, that's a shame. I've found what you have to say in this really useful. Let me know if you reconsider.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to CJM,
Oh, and maybe Mr Taslov was going a bit overboard but I have to say it is rather weird that Dann has not engaged at all with the discussion since dropping his strop.
I do get why that's the case. He said what he had to say.
He's actually copping a bit of nasty hate-mail at the moment, which isn't exactly an incentive to keep talking either.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to mark taslov,
"Mark", this is getting silly.
You've made your narrow point repeatedly over hours and no answer seems to satisfy you.
Give it a rest, please.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to mark taslov,
Find another Guest blogger in recent memory on your site who has after two posts completely declined to engage with the discussion on your site about their posts and I’ll concede your point.
It might have been an idea for you to go and look before saying so.
Otherwise I’m not convinced that you get it.
I get the point you're making. I just don't think it's very relevant.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to mark taslov,
It's also absurd to declare that James is disengaged. Disengaged people don't do things like this.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to mark taslov,
As I said “I would have voted for either one of you”, what may now inform any change of heart here, is that reading between the lines, it would seem that not only might the two of you have played a role in putting James’s up to this, but that you are also certainly facilitators. What is absolutely clear is that he’s simply not engaging with people here. Like it or lump it at least John Key gives the impression that he can mix it up with Joe Tūmatanui.
Oh, get a grip. He's written an honest open letter that is frank, but not at all abusive (which stands in contrast to what I gather are some vile responses in comments at The Standard). It's not the kind of thing you go and endlessly relitigate. And no one has to agree.
Also: please desist with the accusations. Stephen and Keir have not "facilitated" James or "put him up to it". You know how I know that? Because he's an adult who can make his own decisions.
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Hard News: A message from The Fabians, in reply to Graham Dunster,
Colin James has a pertinent column today –
Parts of it are okay, parts of it are odd and even offensive. Where do James, Stephen and the other party members here fit into his frame of angry old lefties and identity politics warriors?
He lays the the blame on "a coalition of representatives of minorities such the gender-disadvantaged, the disabled, ethnic groups and the 1980s-type feminists who drove last year’s abortive “man ban” to manipulate women into electorate candidate selections."
Whatever,
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to giovanni tiso,
But yeah, let’s just say he needs to go, because it sounds good.
Well there’s also the fact that about three-quarters of his caucus, including his own deputy, don’t want to work with him. I don’t really see a way around that, even if Cunliffe is returned by his party with a thumping mandate (which I don’t think he will be).
I don’t think the experience of the Labour activists and candidate in this thread who report knocking on literally thousands of doors and repeatedly hearing that people wouldn’t vote Labour because of Cunliffe is irrelevant either.
And then there’s Cunliffe’s odd behaviour since the election, which seems to have been what tipped David Parker over the edge.
Basically, the guy led the party to a really terrible result – not just in scale, but in nature. His comparison of his position to that of Helen Clark in 1996 was absurd. I think I’ve known Cunliffe longer than anyone else in this discussion. He’s a good man and I’ve frequently noted his legislative achievements. But he can’t command the loyalty of his own caucus (in part because of actions driven by his own ambition), a fair slice of the public thinks he’s weird and I can’t see any way of his continued leadership being viable.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Kumara Republic,
I could tell you about Rio Tinto, SkyCity, Warners, Big Oil, Big Trucking, Puhoi-Wellsford… And with apologies to Rob Muldoon, Bill English wouldn’t recognise a current account deficit if he tripped over one. The real elephant in the room is private debt to foreign banks, mostly in mortgages and credit cards.
Labour was also at pains to be fiscally orthodox going into the election. They really weren’t proposing a spending spree.
This Pattrick Smellie story comparing the National and Labour policies for The Listener is very interesting, especially for what English says.
For the moment, English has National’s ongoing high opinion polling and Labour’s apparent lack of traction to back what might otherwise sound like hubris from a long-serving minister.
Yet he reckons for all the noise, Opposition parties aren’t contesting Government spending as aggressively as he’s used to.
“One of the Opposition’s problems is they’ve been expecting by the time they got to this election that a centre-right government will have eroded its political capital with slash-and-burn policies. I think they’ve only figured out in the last six months that didn’t happen.”
In other words, although Labour has moved ground substantially on fundamental economic policy settings, National may have moved into the centre in enough areas to obscure the extent of the policy differences between them.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Pathetic is the only word I have for it. Is that the best the Oily One can come up with? Reminds me of the antagonists from Foreskin’s Lament.
I gather he also went out this headline this morning with the headline "The King is Dead, Long Live the Queen" and a pic of Robertson with a tiara added.
So, yes: Slater is still a lamentable excuse for a human being.
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