Posts by Moz
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
"(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
Hahahahahaha. Oh, fscking ha de hahahaha. Yes indeed, what a hilarious joke that is. If you own a country, perhaps, it's "his country" and you are the man who has the vote.
Even in NZ which is extremely keen to giving voting rights to everyone, that's not even slightly within sight of true. There is just no way it's going to happen. Sure, if you are lawfully resident in NZ, not in prison or otherwise disqualified, mentally competant, over 18 and have managed to register to vote (or willing to make a stat dec on the day and are lucky or otherwise survive a challenge), you can vote. If you're homeless, mentally ill, unlucky with the legal system, under 18, or outside the country... you don't have this alleged "right to take part".
And "freely chosen representatives"... you can choose from a selection of people rich enough to stand and mainstream enough to attract enough votes to pass the 5% threshold that was specifically introduced to prevent that free choice from being effective.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Amy Gale,
I would say it’s more strict than voting locally, where the standard interaction has you providing your name and electoral workers believing you, and even the catch situation outlined above does not require third-party verification.
Just for comparison, in Oz they strongly prefer some kind of written evidence, albeit they also post out a "you're registered to vote, here's your bit of paper" before the election. I suspect that this is at least in part because of the sizeable population who suffer a significant mismatch between their name, their legal name, the names on their IDs and their name on the electoral roll. It does not look good if you're standing in the polling place going "Billy Smith? No? Well, maybe try Billy-Bob Smith then. No? William Smith?". And good luck if your name is Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono :)
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to tussock,
About seven. For more than that, they have to first sort those things into similar groups, of about seven. The more familiar you are with the subject at hand, the more that number creeps from five up toward nine.
One common reaction is to vote from 1..5 or so through the parties you like, then from 170..165 for the parties you particularly hate ("Is Golden Dawn worse than Pauline Hanson's One Nation?"), then basically donkey vote the rest. In most elections your vote will lodge with one of the 3-4 major parties, it's only in close senate races that you get the weird stuff, and the bottom-of-the-barrell ranking is purely a feel-good measure. I want to rank Winston First last, because reasons!
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Southerly: Sign this Petition, in reply to Lilith __,
I care about whether its content is true. None of its allegations have been disproved.
That's very important to remember.
Also, this from the Guardian about the influence of corporate donations in Oz. Important point: corporate donations swing away from parties that annoy them.
I suspect that in NZ this is costing Labour a lot of money because they can't govern without The Greens, and a great majority of corporates are not going to pay to have The Greens elected. -
Southerly: Sign this Petition, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Dirty Politics was obviously timed to influence this election and comments otherwise are disingenuous.
Yes. An awful lot of stuff is being done about now in an attempt to influence the outcome of the election. Some people are talking as though that's a bad thing.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to Steve Parks,
I wasn't sure whether UT meant that the crucial point was that more people are theists than atheists
That makes no sense, most theists are even more emphatic that other theists are wrong than atheists are. There's a famous quote to the effect that if you summarise the opinion of all theists on each faith, the result is that all faiths are wrong. To get a different result you would need to do it democratically and have one faith with an absolute majority. Given that any faith with more than a million believers also has internal schisms, that seems unlikely. I mean, ask a Greek Orthodox authority whether the Unitarians are right... let alone stuff like the Sunni/Shia gap.
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Interesting. googling the ACT site says there's not a lot going on. Prebble said it would be expensive and that appears to be their primary interest in the quake. Every non-emergency response to the quake seems to link it to National Party deficits. Like this:
Someone needs to spell out that on the day of the earthquake the Government spent $48,857,142 more than it earned. Not that the 21st day of February was, in that respect, an unusual day - the National Government has been borrowing $300 million a week all year and plans to continue to borrow until 2014.
If only they were still making that point and the media were picking up on it.
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Speaker: Telling Our Own Tales, in reply to Alfie,
"A few more prisons, nice five-storey buildings blocking everyone's view, all permitted without the RMA", he said,
I don't think 5 storeys would be the limit, land in Epsom is worth too much. It'd probably be better (viz, more profitable) to buy a gully, dig it out, fill it with something like PCBs or asbestos, then build a couple of storeys of parking with 20 storeys of apartments on top. If only NZ wasn't nuclear-free as a country someone could really pull in the profit by putting a layer of nuclear waste at the bottom.
If you could suspend a few other pesky layers of government interference the apartments would be worth dramatically more. Exclude Epsom from ICC jurisdiction, suspend the various silly treaties that impose foreign laws on NZ and you'd be able to fill them with very rich former dictators and war criminals.
Does ACT consider the Dictatorship of Christchurch to be an example of market failure, or do they blame Gerry for imposing the heavy hand of government regulation and preventing business from rebuilding? Or is that a question that hasn't occurred to anyone to ask, or them to have a policy on?
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to UglyTruth,
atheist, which is a more irrational position given the number of witnesses who support the idea of theism
Interesting that your god is so democratic. Most of them are more "my way or the highway".
Doesn't that cause problems since numerically more people disbelive in your god than believe in it, so by it's own measure it doesn't exist? It's only going to get worse, you know, the monotheists are growing in numbers and their god is most definitely not one for accepting will of the majority as having any validity in questions of faith.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
When you say "actually have to visit the country in order to vote", I assume you're referring to the need to have visited New Zealand in the last 3 years (if a citizen)
Yes. I've voted at a Sydney office before, and that was surprisingly quick and easy. But I haven't needed to visit NZ in the last 3 years so I can't vote.
izogi, I definately take your point about the half million kiwis iz oz who don't necessarily feel much involvement with NZ politics. I'm not going to work to change that, I'm just whining because I like voting... it makes me feel that I have some influence over the politicians.