Posts by Tom Semmens
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Legal Beagle: Questions, but no answers,…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Which is weird when ya think that Soper is 64 and his partner Heather du Plessis-Allan is 32 (younger than the PM even!) –
If you ask me that sort of age gap is quite informative of his views on women.
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Another day and the white male bully boy pile on continues – the dispicible Soper says in the hysterical rag he writes for
Well a series of photos have been sent to me, one showing her posing alone with a former pop singer called Simon Bikindi
Sent to you by who? Farrar? Slater? Quinn? You appalling c**t Soper.
I guess for a lazy old man in the sunset of his career this story is mana from heaven. No need to do any research or digging, the National party smear machine does it all for him, drip drip drip and he gets all his casual prejudices confirmed. Man, I am so angry right now.
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Legal Beagle: Questions, but no answers,…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
It seems Human Rights doesn’t include the right to a defence
It is the process of Justice being served not the criminals crimes.You know what has really got me hopping mad about this story though? It isn’t that Farrar and Kiwiblog is back into it’s dirty politics smear mode. it is that Barry Soper lifted the story right from Kiwiblog and ran it as a smear in the Herald. He acted as an enabler to the alt-right, and yet I bet he bitches about “fake news” all the time.
Soper has got no excuse this time round for acting as an enabler of smears. He can’t claim he didn’t know about the conveyor belt of laundered stories fed to the media via Farrar, it was all there covered in Nicky Hager’s “Dirty Politics”. Yet he chooses to run National party attack lines tonally verbatim lifted from Kiwiblog.
I don’t think it was a coincidence it was Soper who was first out of the blocks in mainstreaming a Farrar smear and I don’t think it is a coincidence the first target is a young, successful woman. His sneering tone and belittling line of questioning to Jacinda Ardern when she was made PM got him effectively name checked by Linda Clark on NatRad.
I am hopping mad that nasty, envious and misogynistic old men – yesterdays people, yesterdays stale generation – are yet again doing their level best to tear down the bright hopes of tomorrow. I am hopping mad Soper doesn’t even give a shit about being part of that smear machine. Such a gutless wonder during nine years of kissing Key’s arse as a fanboi, now he suddenly discovers his spine when the opposition is 32 year old Green woman. What an arsehole, just what an arsehole.
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Legal Beagle: Questions, but no answers,…, in reply to linger,
However, if only the visceral and tribal elements are emphasised, leading to polarisation, and disaffection and alienation of voters, democracy fails.
Tricky, innit.Tell that to David Farrar, who seems to think smearing Golriz Ghahraman is all in a fair days work for a mainstream right wing jerk.
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Legal Beagle: Questions, but no answers,…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
NO
That way you lose. Because that response is exactly the same childish retaliation as National’s questions.
Have you seen the manufactured smear on Golriz Ghahraman? Do you really think National, arseholes like Farrar and media enablers like Soper and all the rest are interested in playing along in your game of being the scrupulous high minded adult in the room? No fucking way they are interested. These bastards are out to smear, lie, and slander their way back to the power they think is theirs as of right. And if while they are at it they can ruin some upstart little girl refugee who thought she could boss around her betters like Soper and Farrar, then that’s all good.
Politics isn’t an exercise in high minded technocrats playing the glass bead game. Maybe that is how civil servants or possibly career managerialist politicians see themselves, but politics comes with a full measure of the visceral and the tribal.If you think any different then you are naive in the extreme.
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The more things change, the more they stay the same. The Farrar sewer is back pumping it’s shit, and Barry Soper has got his old man lips firmly stretched around the outfall pipe as he continues his misogynistic war on the young women of this government.
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After nine long years of insufferably arrogant and unaccountable National party rule, I don't give a shit about their whining about getting a dose of their own medicine.
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Hard News: Abroad and Home, in reply to Rich Lock,
No, far earlier than that. The notorious ‘bendy banana’ stories first appeared in 1994, for example, and the Murdoch press’s antipathy was well established by that point.
Oh yeah, that a bigger proportion of the British public than was ever suspected were susceptible to anti-EU propaganda from the crackpot right has always been the case. My view is that the GFC, Greece and the nakedly cruel use of power by Germany gave currency to anti-EU sentiment and alarmed not just the UK elites.
TBH, given the philhellenism of many upper class Brits and given it was Germany doing the bullying you couldn't have got a more unfortunate set of emotional triggers for the English.
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Brexit won because the UK is in the middle of a gigantic identity crisis and as part of that a majority in deep England decided they just wanted out of Europe. They want their country back – whatever that means – and as right or wrong or as delusional as you might think that sentiment to be.
The problem with the E.U. is it ran out of friends in high places in the UK. It has become a remote neoliberal organisation largely run by Eurocrats. At the top it is about as democratic as FIFA or the IOC and it’s high priests like Jean-Claude Juncker behave in the same manner. Over time, the E.U. alienated too many key political institutions in the U.K. to guarantee the ongoing longevity of the political consensus required to be sure of remaining in the E.U.
In my view Angela Merkel, a dogmatic right wing believer in austerity unaccountably beloved by liberals everywhere, will not be judged kindly by history. Her unbending economic conservatism and her globalist neoliberal views on migration has exposed EU consensus decision making as a charade. The shots are unequivocally called in Berlin. She set in motion events that led to not just Brexit but an ongoing and wider unravelling of the European project.
IMHO, the path to Brexit started ten years ago when Merkel insisted on humiliating and crushing the Greeks. A large section of the Oxbridge British elite are still liberally educated and they carry a big soft spot for the Greeks. They started attacking the E.U. over it’s behaviour towards Greece in liberal organs and the “serious” press. That in turn legitimised wider attacks on the European project in general in the British press. The high handed German actions against the Greeks alarmed and inflamed nationalists and leftists alike and badly weakened intellectual support for the EU across the UK and the continent.
The out-of-fashion UK left had long been uncomfortable with the E.U’s economic orthodoxy and authoritarianism whilst the nationalists and Tory drys hated being bossed around by EU technocrats. Not enough attention was being paid by pro-EU urban liberals (who were far too busy scoffing at UKIP and Corbyn anyway) to the impact immigration was having on nativist views in England. Not enough attention was being paid to English self-perception in the context of their history, their geography and how that interplays with their relationship to Europe. Not enough attention was paid to how brittle English nationalism can be. With the Tories and Labour paralyzed with internal division the only public supporters of the E.U. were the widely loathed Labour Blairites and the hopeless Social Democrats. Their mouthpieces in the media laughed at Farage and poured scorn on Corbyn and they were confident Britain would stay in the E.U. They have turned out to be a total busted flush and the politics of the 1990s has been swept away by the Corbynistas and the Brexiteers. The bureaucrats (supported by the managerial classes) are still fighting tooth and nail to stay in Europe but as I said, Neither of the two main political institutions currently have either the moral authority or political ability (or inclination) to reverse the outcome of the referendum.
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Hard News: Abroad and Home, in reply to Russell Brown,
Toynbee is a Blairite apologist who rode point in the spiteful "liberal" media's assault on Corbyn for daring to challenge their cosy New Labour club. If you believe she has any insights into Corbyn's inner circle and his thinking on anything then I've got some magic beans for sale you might be interested in.
Her article consists of nothing more than Corbyn re-stating the position he has always held on Europe. In any case, Labour is as hopelessly split on Europe as the Tories. The main UK political institutions are paralyzed on Brexit. Neither wants to suffer the fate of the pro-Europe Social Democrats, and be reduced to a political irrelevance. Neither of the two main political institutions have either the moral authority or political ability to reverse the outcome of the referendum. Brexit is now the default position.