Posts by mark taslov
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Sacha,
he ran for an electorate this time. that’s committed enough, surely.
Yeah, from what I saw over the wire I never doubted James’ commitment.
I wish more people would get really clear about what they are prepared to support and what they aren’t and then act accordingly.
I wish people would stop grasping at technicalities, and on that note my response over the page was in relation to ‘so quickly’. :) But seriously.
I can’t fault that thought Sacha, and I’m strongly in favour, once someone has stated their position (even if that opinion later changes) to let them stand with it without chasing them down, taking them in bad faith, arguing semantics etc. Though these threads would be a hell of a lot less interesting, and despite how I may or may not respond when attacked. There are a lot of great writers here, but reading seems to so often take back seat to misreading between the lines. Take it slowly, stick to the lines. It’s difficult to feel comfortable posting when the calls for further justification of that opinion are most often bedded in dismissal, antagonism, formal written assessment, backhanded one liners, misappropriation, misreads and lexical disputes;If the US doesn’t withdraw troops from Iraq, I will paint my nails purple.
If you’d threatened to quit the army Lilith, that would have had an actual impact on the war.
a final, uncompromising demand or set of terms issued by a party to a dispute, the rejection of which may lead to a severance of relations or to the use of force.
e.g.
if you win, I’ll step aside from the party
I am a hypocrite, and it’s tiresome. As far as who I support, I’m with the Andrews.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Sacha,
seeing through an electorate campaign
Some citation may help there Sacha, I can’t find that in the letter:
I won’t be part of a party that you lead. Not because I don’t like you, but because I simply don’t want to lose again […] So I’ll promise you this. If you win, I’ll step aside from the party, to let you and your supporters mould it into the party you want.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Open letter to my wife:
贝贝,如果你不做他妈的鸡蛋,我们就离婚吧!
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Lilith __,
And whoever the Party chooses will still have to be elected by voters in the usual way.
As Sofie said:
James if Cunliffe wins again, your choice. If you love Labour, you could still help.
James’ ultimatum is that if Cunliffe is elected by voters in the usual way then James will leave the Labour Party. If Cunliffe loses then James expects him to leave Parliament. If either of these scenarios eventuate Labour loses, more than it already lost in the election. As Ben said; "you have to expect…"
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
It’s not beyond possibility that James has been told to pull his head in and not contribute further by a bunch of people.
Sorry I’d hoped the narrow points of my argument would stop be met with the same rebuttals, but as it really does appear the point isn’t being made; I’m with you there Kyle, I’m sure he even could pull his head in if were serious, but that doesn’t appear to be the case at all. Since my last post, James has posted on Twitter:
an army of keyboard warriors who descend upon the comments threads of feral message boards, yet when push comes to shove, don’t do anything
but there are a notable number from people who claim to be members who live in Ilam, yet did LITERALLY nothing during the campaign
That’s fine, I’m a big boy and I can cope with it. Most of them are cowardly and anonymous, from people who call me a “puppet” etc
In the last half hour. Of all the things here one could respond to, in the interest of transparency, James my details are available from your friend Russell, I seldom use my name here because I’m based in the PRC and on occasion I have had to post on issues that may be sensitive in nature and it’s better safe than sorry. Besides the internet is prone to the anonymous and cowardly, that should have been your first consideration when posted your letter on a web forum. As for people calling you a ‘puppet’, well that’s largely opt-in, if you feel this ‘puppet master politics’ applies to you. I don’t think that it necessarily does, or needs to. But anyway…
You didn’t think before posting this, that it’s possible that part of that 5 million dollars might be capital gains, and which might be taxed under the Labour CGT? Given that there’s very few poor people who are going to be picking up an extra $5 million in wealth each year, this flat tax would in effect be progressive in nature.
That’s right Kyle, I just didn’t think, and what I didn’t think was that an added 15% on John Keys’ current 2.8% still only equals 17.8% tax i.e. about half of the top tax rate. I didn’t think that the Labour Party have had 5 years+ to work on this. I didn’t think that you and others who aren’t the brains behind it and can’t verify myriad as yet unspecified details to be refined by the Expert Panel might still try to explain what Cunliffe didn’t and most certainly that these attempts would to set the record straight would further illustrate and directly contest my point i.e that I’m tired of hearing about the CGT from anyone but the brains behind it.
You could say this about several taxes. GST isn’t affected by your income. You could complicate our tax system by including it in a personal tax return that everyone has to complete so you know what their total income is, or you can simplify it and lose the ability to charge poorer people less.
Again, 5 years to refine it rather than more or less just copying something more or less wholesale from offshore could really reap benefits it’s lazy, and has been shown elsewhere it can easily be rorted, “this is my family home and I’m selling it so the sale is not subject to CGT”.
But please, as I said in my initial post, please:
I’m over hearing someone who rote learned the CGT stumble over the details, I want the brains behind it, someone so intimately acquainted with the detail that they can fill me with confidence about the every last scarab of the policy
Despite peoples’ best efforts my mind hasn’t been changed on this, I’m still over it. and so in the interests of keeping this thread on track and not dirtying up the site anymore. It may be best to just let your desire to be the brains behind the CGT go.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Ascribe further bad faith without elaboration if you must Joe. But the consistency of the meat doesn’t seem to have nudged a dot since it hit the grill.
Anyway, I’ll leave that one in the pot to broadly stew over. As you were.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Joe Wylie,
James ’Macduff’ Dann’s Facebook
I don’t know Joe, I just assumed you may be, and that mainly comes down to the fact that I can’t see where you’re getting my lack of good faith from here, why would I bother? Who has the time? I’m not trying to lay cheap shots on James at all. The blog you linked to shows far more thoughtfulness and nuance than either of these posts or the Twitter account. From his posts here and his Twitter and his Facebook, I’d have credited him as a funny guy, a talented activist, I’m down enough with that shit, but until all of these align into a more cohesive and measured representation, James’s greatest enemy in terms of becoming the MP for Ilam, at least amongst its more serious and earthy voters won’t be so much Brownlee as James himself. Perception is everything.
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*have no ability to grasp how a by-election could help an already weakened opposition
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Joe Wylie,
I agree Joe that no one is obligated, but I really think it depends on what your objectives are, and what’s going to encourage support and what’s just frivolous. on Twitter at 20:33pm Tuesday night James Dann posted:
BREAKING: Labour in Chaos as DC drops Clayton and Chippie from his MySpace Top 8 friends. We cross live to our resident social media guru Ja
Meanwhile over at Publicaddress.net at 20:36 30 Sept cathy holloway posted:
Hi James Macbeth Dann,
Yes i sympathise with you and your letter.
Undoubtedly you are very sincere and will be a loss to the Labour party if you have to leave.
But if David Cunliffe is does not continue as leader, many many thousands of members and supporters will leave. This is known.
So either way, Labour will lose some members and supporters, but with Cunliffe as leader, Labour will lose far less.
And as for Labour’s fortunes “going forward” Grant Robertson will never be Prime Minister of this country. With him as leader, Labour will not be elected into Government. This too is known.
Followed almost immediately at 20:41 by slewratedotnet’s:
Well said James. As a volunteer in Wellington the same issues came up here also with Cunliffe. My family who all voted Labour throughout the Clark years had the same response and voted either National or Green whilst still giving GR their electorate vote. Whilst I certainly believe other issues were at play with policy, the economy and internal politics the public simply did not resonate with DC and it is time to move on.
And I can’t see any political downside if James had slipped into the conversation there and then with a genuine:
"Thanks a lot, I appreciate your support.”
1841 Twitter followers could quite easily be supplemented by some of the (to date) 9303 page views here, especially if one were to actually join the discussion whereby (due to Russell being on the pulse) Twitter handles are included in the posts. Beyond all other considerations, democratic politics is a numbers game, and while this discussion has been going on I’m not getting much more than a sense of aloofness from James’s Twitter account. These are all small things in their way:
Only if you assume that making a guest post here obliges you to indulge anyone who happens to be living on the internet. You ramped your argument beyond the level of good faith in order to provoke a reply.
This discussion isn’t indulging "anyone who happens to live on the internet". Russell and co. moderate well. John Key isn’t obligated to visit malls and factories. No politician is obligated to do any of these things but they sure can help.
Ascribe bad faith to me if it makes you feel better, but I was deadly serious in the points I made, for a die-hard Labourite that may be difficult to swallow, but getting angry at those of us who have lost the buzz or are swinging, offering conflicting observations, and have ability to grasp how a by-election could help an already weakened opposition, this portrayal does nothing to get us back with the program. I’m never running for Parliament, I don’t own Twitter but if I did, I’d never post anything like this:
I don’t know where the beltway is, but I know this one thing: it’s where my enemies live
At least not while an impassioned and thoughtful discussion like this one, that I had personally initiated, and am avoiding, is ongoing. Not if my political ambitions involved anything beyond activism.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Stephen Judd,
Nope. Had no idea this was in the works and the first I knew was via Twitter. It was actually slightly annoying as it undercut a rant I had at a caucus member about getting their shit together the day before.
Thanks for that clear and coherent response Stephen, and I empathise. I didn’t actually expect to cause such a stir, I’d perhaps prematurely assumed that things like Cunliffe fluffing the CGT details or that some issues with his campaign might be attributable to bad advice from actual Muppet Pastors wouldn’t be such contentious ideas to broach so late in the piece, so your temperance in reply is very much appreciated.
As a background to my post, I read through most of the thread on Tuesday night, writing then deleting my observation. what first struck me, and I hope this in part explains my use of the term ‘facilitator’ was your initial post:
I’ll take that one, as James’ former campaign manager…
Outside the sphere I hope you can imagine how that may appear, as I don’t feel my presumption from an intro like that was too avant garde. But yeah, as I read on through the thread, and observed both you and Keir answering more questions that James most probably could have, I just kept thinking to myself “where’s the guy?”, “Surely it would be better that he respond to some of this stuff personally?”, because he is an adult.
I mean, what an opportunity, with a relatively sympathetic audience. Anyway. I hope I caused no offense Stephen or Keir. If either of you are up to answering any more questions, I’d love to get my head around this bit:
if you lose this primary, you resign from parliament.
In this case is James suggesting that DC should resign as an MP and force a by-election?
