Posts by Mikaere Curtis
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Auckland is full, has been for 20 years. If the problem is housing, we should stop importing more people. It really is that simple.
Other things we could do include:
* Don't allow foreigners to buy land/housing here unless they are permanent residents, and then only buy land/housing if they are going to live in it
* Introduce a capital gains tax to stop the skewing of investing in housing -
If reducing alcohol related harm is your argument to legalize MDMA, it will never be legalized. All you manage to do with that is to build a very strong argument for prohibition of alcohol.
You forget that we tried to prohibit alcohol and it was a complete failure and we aren't going to do that again. So, no, it is not an argument for prohibiting alcohol, it is an argument for MDMA because it reduces an existing, chronic and serious set of harms.
I see harm reduction as a step along the path to a proper approach that recognises the potential benefits that can flow from responsible psychoactive substance consumption. Kind of like we had to have the Homosexual Law Reform Act and then almost 20 years later the Civil Unions Act and then less than 10 years later we finally got gay marriage.
These idiots who think the sky is going to fall in if we liberalise, even slightly, on matters around what you can do with your own body can be overcome, but only if we make incremental improvements. And that's where harm minimisation comes in, the benefits outweigh the negatives.
Sure, I get your position, but I don't think it is the one that will move us forward.
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Hard News: The place where things happen…, in reply to BenWilson,
Ben, I'm not sure what you are getting at. Harm reduction is a reasonable model if you consider harm can come from sources other than the directly from the substance being consumed (e.g. actions of others such as drunk people or your drug dealer's gang connections).
Under a harm reduction model you would see MDMA being legalised as it would lead to a massive reduction in harm associated with alcohol (and probably a rise in MDMA-related harm - but an overall massive reduction in harm).
Similarly, you could have medical-grade opiates available on prescription for junkies to prevent them from overdosing on street-grade opiates of unknown provenance and strength.
So, less violence and fewer deaths, what's not to like about that ?
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And he's issued a clarification that his "legalise rape on private property" proposal is actually intended as satire. If you read the comments section, they picked up on it quite quickly when he published it, and referenced Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal".
So, yeah, maybe if you read all his sexist bullshit then you could perhaps get the joke as being absurd, but if you are new to his opinions then (like me) you can easily think he's being serious.
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Speaker: Stand Up for Women, in reply to SHG,
Every time. They fall for it every time.
I'm not so sure, I've read some of the stuff on the site and I reckon he really thinks he's onto something that only the ROK types can see, the feminist agenda has the wool pulled over everyone's eyes etc. In short, he's on a crusade to roll back the tide of history and get women back into subservient roles.
His books are all about game and becoming a pick-up artist, and coming across as a complete arsehole is not going to help him sell books, there are plenty other game books by men who aren't fundamentalist masculinists. He knows his market (in his books he calls then "betas") and betas are generally nice guys and nice guys don't buy books from men who promote rape as an acceptable male practice.
I think he was actually trying to get a movement started (from which he would profit) and he got shut down by a global backlash. Which is a good outcome IMO.
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I finally got to try out the LightPath this morning as part of my daily commute. I remember the concerns raised here so was interested to see how things turned out.
Very good, as it happens. I like and the perspex safety walls don't bother me too much. And the Nelson St cycleway feels ten times safer than when I've ridden down Nelson St in the traffic.
I commute from Morningside, and once I figure out the optimum way to include both the Arch Hill mountain bike trails AND the LightPath, I'll be set :)
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Polity: Hosking’s right about jobs, in reply to Tom Semmens,
What do you, realistically, suggest they do instead? Stick with a policy that the media uses as a stick to beat them with?
Although I reckon they could have had better messaging around this (e.g. that it's a tax on speculators and will increase investment in productive assets), the reality is that Labour couldn't sell this policy. So the next best thing is to drop it and then when they get into Government be all "The Greens Made Us Do It !".
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Hard News: Not yet standing upright, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I'll vote for the hypnoflag and then vote for our current flag because none of the National caucus approved options deserve to carry New Zealand into the future.
This.
Key wanted his legacy to be a silver fern derivative logo, and stacked the flag panel to deliver his preferred options in a 3:1 mix. Screw that, I'm voting Hypnoflag followed by Keep The Existing One, I want a proper process not this farce.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to BenWilson,
The whole business about microanalysing after the fact just how the press release could have been written? That’s all just opinion, and will never be settled, nor will it probably shed any light on anything, just sound and fury.
Here's the thing: there will never be a Labour/Green government until Labour can get their shit together*. As a Green, I'm sick of having "WTF Is Wrong With Labour ?" conversations, I actually want them to, y'know, be competent and unified for a change.
And analysing the latest debacle in terms of how it could have been better handled is one way of providing them with positive feedback of the kind of choices that they could easily be making that would provide the kind of political traction they so desperately need.
Are you actually happy with Labour being a basket case ? If so, why ? I'd love to know.
* or National spectacularly implode, but that is vanishingly unlikely to happen
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Steve Barnes,
It almost feels like the Left have been convinced by highly paid scribblers to believe that Labour is 100% Pure Evil and we need to experience Labour being perfect, beyond reproach before we would entertain the merest inkling of the idea that we could trust them in Government.
No, it's the Greens who have to be perfect and beyond reproach ;)
I'm not saying Labour need to bullshit and dissemble like the Key Government do, but they do need to frame their policy points in a way that a) associates National with concepts that show that National are a bad government (e.g. only interested in transferring wealth to the wealthy, making life hard for our most vulnerable etc) and b) coherently and consistently supports Labour's vision of a just and fair society where more people get a chance to do the best for themselves.
None of the above require Labour to relinquish their values or policies, nor misrepresent them, just communicate them in the right way.
Try listening to Politics on Mondays' Nine to Noon. Hooten consistently frames his arguments, and he's good at it, so good that the hapless Williams typically agrees with him, and hardly ever challenges him on anything other than the history of the Clark government.
Step 1 would be for Labour to replace Williams with someone who can frame arguments in a Labour-positive way.
Step 2 would be identify terms National uses and to de-fang them. For example, when National was in Opposition they always talked about government department "bureaucrats" but know they call them "officials", how about calling them out on that ?
Or when Anne Tolley calls benefit entitlements "tax-payers dollars", how about re-framing it as "the safety net for the most vulnerable" ?
Until Labour can engage in the ideological jiu-jitsu that National are so good at, they will forever be playing catch-up, simple as that.