Posts by Tom Semmens
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The Vector car crash continues, we have no power AGAIN, their website has crashed AGAIN and their Twitter feed is total bollocks.
“Vector, we supply electricity unless it is a bit windy or there is a spot of rain about”
Incompetent rtrds, the minister of energy needs to re-nationalise them.
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Hard News: The remarkable rise of…, in reply to Dennis Frank,
I suspect he’s weathering the storm comfortably. Republican establishment attacks on him seem to have muted noticeably since election.
IMHO, none of the mud slinging over Trump’s private life adds up to anything remotely impeachable. Sure, Trump is clearly an unspeakable cad and a banal philanderer that no woman in her right mind will vote for if he runs again. But being an asshole who cheats on his wife with a porn actress even as she is giving birth to his child only barely falls on the wrong side of the moral line for the entitled class of monied wide boys Trump belongs to. And anyway, If the electoral reaction to Berlusconi’s bunga bunga parties are any guide a significant number of male voters actually admire and envy the way a porky middle aged billionaire can still be banging the hotties. History tells us that if Ted Kennedy could survive Chappaquiddick then paying off hookers should be a political walk in the park for Trump. As for the Russia probe – I am willing to bet that Mueller won’t find a smoking gun that implicates the president. He might take down some of his family (presidential pardons all round, thank you very much) but Trump will survive.
Trump may have a loud base of disgruntled aging whites, but his behaviour in office has alienated and mobilised practically everyone else. Trump’s women problems extend to massive gender gap in his support, and the mid-terms are likely to be a disaster for the GOP as more motivated Democrats get out and vote in bigger numbers. The question then turns on how the radicals who now run the Republican insurgency react. Most likely they will try and double down on stacking judicaries, gerrymandering districts, passing Jim Crow laws, and all the rest of it while supporting Trump. The craven GOP “moderates” will cave like they always do.
Trump is a shyster and confidence trickster who lives on bluster and bluff and he probably isn’t worth a dime. His primary goal as president seems to have been to enrich himself as fast as possible. I think that if he can get a guarantee that any new GOP president will give him a pardon he won’t run again. he’ll want to scuttle off and enjoy his new wealth and prestige of forever being addressed as “President Trump”. The question then is – could Trump – or a new GOP candidate – defeat the Democrats in 2020?
The establishment Democrats are a bunch of useless skunks. Having complacently picked the wrong candidate and run on all the wrong policies they’ve managed to blame everyone but themselves for Clinton’s defeat. It was Saunders fault. Even better, they’ve got Robert Mueller’s probe that gives them their very own Dolchstoßlegende myth as an excuse for pretending they need not change their own corrupt practices. It is highly likely the schism in the Democrats over Saunders will do them great damage. The corrupt establishment Democrats hate him. Rather than Saunders, they may go for Kamala Harris for a second round of identity politics dominated elections. If they do, then they could easily lose again if their civil war damages their turnout too much.
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A friend went down the rabbit hole over Syria – all based on material from social media.
I had to delete a FB friend who took great offense at my pointing out the inherent nonsense of the reports of new Russian wunderwaffe she kept posting up from dodgy news sites.
But we can only blame ourselves for this. Take Israel Folau’s notorious instagram comment. He was prompted by a question that he foolishly answered for his Instagram audience of 122K – 90% of whom wouldn’t have seen the post anyway. The click-bait MSM picked this up, amplified it, and turned it into another culture war battle de jour. The whole thing became angry culture warriors screaming their opinions past each other on social media, talkback and the telly.
But Folau is fake news. His views on anything are of little note and carry no weight. They were propagated not because they had any inherent value as news but instead to generate unreasoned outrage and clickbait, and made 1,000 times worse by being repeated ad naseum to a huge audience for no other reason than the cynical drive for profit at any cost.
In an environment where the so-called establishment, “respectable” corporate MSM itself creates, curates and assiduously grooms fake news it is pretty easy for Putin’s troll factories, fake news sites and outlets like RT to flood social media with sensationalist conspiracy theories, outlandish claims and downright nonsense. They know their stories will be picked up by a public already primed by the likes of the Daily Mail and the NZ Herald for knee jerk outrage and angry prejudice fulfilment.
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There isn’t a lot of talk about the Waitakeres in all this, but as a resident of the area it seems to me the power situation out on the Eastern slopes of the Waitakeres is dire. The whole area seems to be a classic example of our addiction since the 1980s to the cult of the free market absolving anyone of any responsibility for doing any planning whatsoever. The 12km loop up West Coast road towards Scenic Drive and down Forrest Hill road along with all the feeder roads is nowadays no longer bush. It is a large, very bushy suburb with many hundreds (or thousands) of houses nestled in the rather lovely forest. Power cuts plague the area – anything worse than routine bad weather causes outages from trees falling or cars crashing. Yet the lack of infrastructure is ridiculous. Why it should be so hard to underground the power lines in this area is beyond me; the diggers would be working largely in clay and would be untroubled by the complications caused by the presence of footpaths, sewage pipes or fibre cables.
It seems to me the main reason there is no underground power (and sewage and fibre broadband) for this area is simply parsimonious under-investment by people who haven’t updated their thinking from when the Waitakeres were still wild.
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Hard News: Paying for the storms to come, in reply to Sacha,
Botany, in his case. Figures.
So what side of the bridge is he talking about? Also, I think a drinking game involving every time a National MP says "hard working" wouldn't last very long until everyone was drop dead drunk.
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I see Dan Bidois, the new National party candidate for Northcote, is a man from another era when it comes to having a Pan-Auckland vision.
The hard-working people of Northcote are not a piggy bank for Phil Goff, Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters to raid to pay for pet projects on the other side of the Bridge that won't benefit us here," he said.
Good grief. Next he'll be claiming rail to the shore will just bring brown people from South Auckland to steal their cars.
Seriously where the fuck does National find these people in 2018?
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OK so I re-read the essay. Caution, rant to follow.
IMHO, it is a piece of almost nauseating naivety. The foundation idea appears to be a breathless belief that if only the media told the public the truth, gave the public the important facts, if only SOMEONE could think of democracy, then truth, justice and the New Zealand way will be restored, and the self-evident truths of progressive politics will march on interrupted with all the joy of Volga Russian girls waving flowers at the presidium on a Soviet May day parade in red square.
That is BULLSHIT. Let’s spell that out. B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T. WTF is the “truth” anyway? Your truth and my truth can be completely different things. It is true that a coal mine will bring jobs. It is also true that stopping the coal mine saves a fishery and an endangered frog; even if most people would say fuck the frog if they could get a good job at the mine. Coal mine good, coal mine bad? One truth and another truth give completely different answers. And facts. Facts are sacred, right? BULLSHIT. B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T. My facts are may be the same as your facts, but I order them in importance differently. Fuck that river; there is another one with plenty of fish in it. Screw that frog. Who gives a shit about frogs anyway?
The left needs to accept it has no chance. It needs to understand that. An “independent media” is a nice meme for dumbasses like Hager and middle class twots who think everyone should just be reasonable.
I need to explain this. Imagine this, imagine you are a journalist dedicated to “the truth”, and you are taking your big story to be published and that requires driving it into town in a big folder (that you got at Warehouse stationary on special) sitting on the passenger seat of your 2006 Mazda 323 with it’s slightly worn vinyl interior and fucking annoying obsolete CD player and you pull up to a red light and next to you is Mike Hoskings in a 2018 Ferrari all wheel drive racing sport edition with leather trim and the public – let’s imagine the public looks like Jennifer Lawrence – in the passenger seat, on their way to some flash as fuck soiree at Skycity with the captains of media ownership. So imagine that. Hoskings is in his Ferrari with Jennifer Lawrence in the passenger seat. Who is on your vinyl passenger seat? Oh yeah, the truth, whatever the fuck that looks like, that you are taking it to some shitty generic office with a broken seat to publish it to a choir of 2000 like-minded people who have no life beyond commenting on the internet. But the light is about to turn green and from the corner of your eye you notice Jennifer is glancing at you, giving you that twinkle in her eye, maybe-a-hint-of-a-smile look and for a second you convince yourself you are in with a chance, you are on the same road as Hoskings and you are in the same journalism game so maybe the public/Jennifer is interested and so hope flickers and you gather your courage and you gun your 1500cc motor – Vroom Vroom! VROOOOOM! – maybe it isn’t the car, maybe it isn’t the accessories, maybe it isn’t the money maybe the public/Jennifer is interested in YOUR story maybe she is interested in objective TRUTH and you believe that for a moment and if you just put on your best “hey baby, play your cards right and you’ll get to see the actual facts” smile you might get onto a level playing field and you look over and she’s gone! – VASSSSZOOOM! – 0-100km in 3.5 seconds in that Ferrari. You sit there stunned. And then your phone buzzes and you read the message and it hits you - You've just been made redundant again! And you sit there. You realise your sort of journalism didn’t have a fucking chance. You sit there at the lights in your pathetic Suzuki in silence and you look down on your story in it's folder and you realise – this is as good as it gets for your progressive journalism in the current media environment.
This is how the modern MSM is.
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Speaker: The crisis is all around us,…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Holy shit. I can only imagine your response if a National government did anything of the kind. Try reading Nicky’s essay again and see if that gets through.
Apparently the Herald posted up 28 stories – all attacking Labour – over the Curran story. It was a group think bullying pile on of the most disgusting kind. In the same time, they posted up two – yup, just two – stories on the health catastrophe unfolding at Middlemore in South Auckland. Tonight Heather du Plessis Allan declared the attacks will not cease until Labour is a lame duck and that Labour will be a one term government.
The idea of an “independent media” is a chimera, a middle class luxury for people who still think Polly Toynbee has a constituency. The enemy has imprinted their ideology into the fabric of the “independent” media. Even moderate, liberal centre reform such as this piss water weak Labour led coalition wants will be opposed by a propaganda machine of walking and talking drones made more effective by never needing orders.
If you don’t think the rules have changed and the fight has got to get dirty and partisan, then you are part of the problem.
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Which is why it was so disastrous for Clare Curran to even give the appearance of going around the system to influence the decisions of Radio NZ’s board and CEO.
Richard Griffin gives every impression of being an arrogant partisan appointment determined to go out with a bang designed to cause maximum damage to the government. If Curran had any brains she should work out she might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb and issue a press release citing an irreversible break down in her trust and relationship with the RNZ board and her loss of confidence in the RNZ board & chairman. If that doesn’t get the desired result then just peremptorily fire the lot.
Whatever you think of how Curran plans to spend the money democracy demands the elected political leadership must stamp it’s authority on a rebellious bureaucracy.
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Speaker: The crisis is all around us,…, in reply to Ron E Wilson,
It was obvious from day one that the depth of anti Labour feeling had permeated deep into the structure of TVNZ and line managers in the company had bought into the Right WIng policy of how it should be run.
Essentially you seem to be saying the organisation is incapable of reform. The solution should be to fire the lot, close the whole place down and hand over their frequency to RNZ TV1?
We haven't had a Labour government with those sort of balls for fifty years.