Posts by tussock
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Clinton's policies would've been of huge benefit to the white working class in the US. Trump's will be a disaster.
You say Democrats should support unions and collective agreements, they already do, especially in the states they control, high minimum wages, good working conditions, decent hours, collective bargaining, all of it, but they can't force that on Republican controlled states, where the media play blames it on Washington elites and nefarious Asians rather than their own ruinous Republican state government policies.
What I see repeated, from the soft US left, is that they didn't trust Clinton. They thought she wouldn't really do the things to help them that she has always done to help them, and that her policies would really just help out the wealthy bankers instead. Trump hammering on about the "criminal" emails, as the wikileaks emails detailed campaign finance bargaining. After Bernie ranted about it because his campaign fucked up their own finance applications. That's why they didn't vote. The news, even the FBI, said she was a crook, a patsy for the elite, and maybe there was something in that, so they stayed home.
They didn't block Bernie. He got in, and he lost. He was even less popular with the Democrat base, even in those swing states. They picked the best candidates they had, and Hilary was the best of them. The attacks on her resonated with Democrats, maybe because eight years of hope with Obama just didn't really come true.
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Well. That was unfortunate. Apparently a near-plurality of USians would like their country to go die in a fire now, thanks, OK, bye.
He's not the first bloke like this to be elected in recent years, just the one put in the most powerful position.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder
Seems he will make for very interesting days, will President Trump. What with his rather constant insistence that people will have to listen to him once he's President, in that he will not have to listen to anyone, because he is so smart, and anyone disagreeing is just out to get him, which is basically terrorism once he's the President. And so many people needing locked up before he even got there, like his political opponents.
But man, when he turns off the people's shiny new healthcare, and shuts down abortion, and locks up all the minorities even more, and installs trade tariffs and makes prices go up, and guts environmental regulation like it's the 1960's again and river fires are good family fun, and blocks all the renewable power initiatives because it's a scam by China you know, and cuts back on immunisation programs, ... fucking hell.
Like, people's life expectancy back then was pretty shit. He's going to kill a lot of people, in the USA, let alone anywhere he decides to nuke.
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National's ballot stuffing became an embarrassment. Opposition parties wanted the private members bill time for more useful things, National wanted to be not continuing to embarrass itself.
Could have been done better, yes, in the past. The alternative at this point seems to be continuing to waste parliament and select committee time on non-controversial statute amendments in a way that also bought parliament into disrepute.
So hopefully we can get some useful non-government legislation before a select committee instead now. Because it's not just law changes that are a bit dodgy sometimes, but also the laws as they stand.
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Rosemary: when the police talk about changing people's habits, they mean coercively, that police will decide who you get to talk to and where you get to be.
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But it's nice to see this particular brand of bullshit might actually end. Though really, unless there's a political acceptance of wrongdoing, they will just produce a test that finds 2µg more often so they can sit the house in limbo for six months and then sell it for being empty.
Because again, Housing NZ is required to return a large sum of money to the government, and the only way they can legally do that is to turf people out and keep the houses empty and then sell them. Meth contamination is just the tool they needed to fulfil the idealistic requirements placed upon them from above, of less need for state housing.
Much like Dunedin Hospital solved the waiting room time problem at weekends by partitioning off a bit of it and calling that bit the triage room instead. So they let you into the "waiting room" when they're ready to see you, and then you don't wait very long in the waiting room. Box ticked, ministers happy, stats looking good come election time.Or how crime's down, because we cut all the resources off police that let them actually get convictions for minor offences, those non-essential legal type staff that just prepared the evidence and the charge sheets and stuff for court. So now a whole bunch of cases just get thrown out instead. Thus, less crime.
But importantly, taxes are very low on very rich people, which would be highly inflationary if you actually funded public services properly at the same time. Also, the minister's spouse runs a non-profit charity that could do all that work much more profitably, for such a modest salary. -
That editorial is quite heart-warming, Alfie.
Clinton is a presidential candidate; deliberate, serious, considered, and in a position to unite the country and make it stronger into a challenging future.
Trump is none of those things. Arizona's a long shot to swing Democrat, about 10% or so yet, but little things like that, you never know. It's really nice to see serious folks in the US notice the same things the rest of the world does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder
Just gunna leave that there.
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Hard News: Trump's Dummkopfs, in reply to Russell Brown,
You might be reading too much into that Russell. Conservatives are always fearful about something or another, that's quite natural, the things those ones are afraid about are largely bullshit race and class issues because it's a pretty good country to live in with a massively powerful military and there's not any real problems for the majority to fear any more. That terrorism thing got old years ago, and everyone hates the security theatre surrounding it.
Not that the actual race issues in the US are bullshit, they're terrible, but the way conservatives look at it over there is bullshit. Factually incorrect. Racist, if you will.
But overall, it just looks like most conservative US voters aren't put off by his racism, because they're mostly racist, nor his foreign policy gaffs, because they can't even find their own country on a world map, nor his sexism, because they're mostly sexist, and so on.
But the ones he is putting off, because not all conservative voters are any of that stuff, that's why he's still 7 points down rather than a couple points up that historical trends would put an average Republican at this point.
He's not attracting people because he's racist, he's losing them, it just increases the relative concentration of racists that remain. Like the people at his rallies don't really give a shit what he's saying, because if you did you probably aren't at his rally.
Take a group, exclude a sub section of it, remains of group seems to have more people not in that sub section. Really not more, just less of the excluded ones.
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Percentage growth rates aren't particularly useful for understanding things like growth in wealth, in that 1000% of nothing is still nothing, the peak at 50% may well represent a much smaller net growth than the dip at 80%.
Late 80's is also a weird start point, it's mostly going to capture the massive economic growth of China and India as they underwent their equivalent of the industrial revolution in combination with the digital revolution, with nearly half the world's population between them.
While presumably the near-zero relative growth is for western countries who piled on the neoliberalism, cut taxes on the rich to nothing, smashed unions, and slashed social spending to pay for it all in the early 90's, along with getting rid of any notion that the state should provide for full employment and a rising standard of living (or much of anything else). We have 6% unemployment because that is government policy, to hold wages down: obviously that limits the growth of wealth for most people here.
None of which really has anything to do with modern trade networks.
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The largest protests the western world had ever seen were on the streets of their major cities on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. There is almost no mainstream record of that. Millions of people marched, and it was ignored.
The politicians, the press, they wanted a war. Anything said they shouldn't have a war was ignored, everything said maybe it was possible there was a reason to have one was seized on and played up endlessly, without any checking at all.
The documents presented to the UN about WMDs were a from a decade old university thesis, everything else was thrown out because it didn't say what they wanted to hear. Carl Rove summed them up nicely, as described by a reporter. "The aide" is Carl Rove.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works any more." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
They don't actually believe in empiricism. Evidence, that's not how the world works any more. They know what it is and reject it. You just invade Iraq and make it work and then that's the new evidence, just because. When John Key talks about getting another scientist if you don't like the science, about how climate change isn't a problem because science will solve it (despite all of science pointing out what a colossal problem it is, and already having given them the solutions, which they ignore just because they're going to do that other thing and then you can study that instead), that's the same deal.
They went to war in Iraq because it was going to be easy, and work really well, and be hugely profitable and help the people of Iraq too, because everyone saying otherwise just hasn't seen it happen yet. Just like that.
Blair was the same, the war was going to go gloriously and promote Britain to being a new world leader and authority on all that is right and good, just because that's what they were going to do. When evidence means nothing, that's all there is left.
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This certainly isn't new, in NZ, or I assume from what I've read, anywhere else.
Machiavelli didn't write about how things could be, he wrote about how they really were, behind all the lies. Where the powerful serve the interests of the very few who keep them in power at the expense of everyone else, and that they do so with the cruellest of methods imaginable if it fits their purpose. Offshore torture camps to keep the racist party donor happy? Why not.
French oil interests in Lybia. US/British oil ambitions in Iraq. German banker loans to various poor Euro states. No one really thought cutting taxes for millionaires and wages for the poor and middle class would "trickle down" the wealth, or no one who mattered, when obviously it just creates new landlords for an ever-more indebted underclass. Which politicians always promise to "fix" by giving us more loans and subsidising our landlords, funnily enough.
Democracy hasn't changed that. It just makes for less revolutions, because we get to swap the puppets for the puppet show now and then.
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Only thing I read made any sense was British folk have used their relatively proportional votes on Europe as a means of expressing discontent with their local government for the last lifetime, and not actually cared what happened with them afterward.
Because that's all the papers and other media ever talk about with 'em, and for most folk that's all there is.
So when there was a referendum on something the government didn't want, the people protested against their government (which is not at all proportionate in the regular elections, and really very unpopular) by voting for the other thing.
Which got them what they wanted, the PM will quit and the local politicians are all being appropriately po-faced for a bit. All this "things might be bad now" is just another day, things are always "might be bad now", like the wars and stuff.
Oh, but, don't mention the wars. Isn't it a warm summer, and such thunderstorms, every day!