Posts by DeepRed
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In the days before email, when even toll calls were prohibitively priced, we would write each other letters. Rambling affairs, typed single-space (yes, some of us had typewriters – we weren't cave people) and full of news, gossip and extravagant ironic abuse. I wish I'd kept my letters from Roi Colbert.
What about bulletin board services? Or was that more an early 1990s thing?
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Hard News: Our own fake news, in reply to Neil,
As Trump falters, supporters in a Pennsylvania county that swung Republican in 2016 blame the media for his woes and insist Hillary Clinton would be worse
It's not just arsehole contrarianism that motivates people like Greenwald, it's also financial interest - there's a depressingly large market for the blame anyone but Trump line.
Seems consistent with stats showing it was middle-class precarity and cultural anxiety "wot won it" for Trump, rather than working-class economic anxiety. And if you haven't read these already...
* Iyad El-Baghdadi - The Seven Trends behind the Global Rise of Populism
* NYT - How Fear of Falling Explains the Love of Trump
* Nick Hanauer - To My Fellow Plutocrats: You Can Cure Trumpism -
Hard News: On benefit fraud, in reply to Helga,
I was standing exhaustedly ironing one day when I was on the DPB and on the radio was Parliament, and there was my PM Rob Muldoon declaring that women on the DPB who took money under the table were worse than tax evaders.
These were the days when my neighbours were encouraged to snitch if men stayed too many nights with me, and when mortgage interest rates were capped, but not mine because I'd owned a house with my husband and couldn't get an institutional loan - mine was 19%.
I didn't take Muldoon's assessment of me and my kind - I knew I wasn't trash as he implied - but it was mighty memorable.Has the IRD ever promoted dobbing in tax cheats as widely as dobbing in benefit fraud has? I remember under the Shipley Govt, the "Benefit fraud. It's a crime" and ACC's "someone else's money" TV adverts were frequently promoted.
And it sounds like WINZ's culture of punitivity goes back long before Christine Rankin became its CEO. In any case, the time seems right to rethink the existing orthodoxy, now that the Great Recession and acts like Theresa May's effective bribe to the DUP have made a complete mockery of the austerity mantra.
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Hard News: Our own fake news, in reply to Russell Brown,
Josh Marshall has been pointing this out for a while now. It might be that what does in Trump himself will be the unwanted light shed on his business finances by any investigation.
As in the kind of investigation that got Al Capone nabbed for tax evasion?
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Hard News: One big day at the drug symposium, in reply to Russell Brown,
Thing is, if you're Māori, it might be a really big issue.
That was the key topic on Day 2.
Sadly it's just the same with people of colour targeted by America's War on Drugs.
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Really! I have found his criticism of Israeli policies at times strident and wrong headed but never thought he was an anti Semite.
I suspect much of the current mess came from the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin before he could see the Oslo Accords through. Bibi Netanyahu basically cashed in on it to cement his hold on power to this day.
* http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/26/shot-in-the-heart
And a paradox has emerged amongst parties and figures on both sides of the Atlantic with long histories of anti-Semitism:
* https://newrepublic.com/minutes/140079/donald-trump-strange-pro-israel-anti-semitic-dance
* http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.777484 -
Hard News: Our own fake news, in reply to Russell Brown,
The other page, the account of the Pilger-to-Hitler person, was genuinely unnerving. Last time it was someone not bothered when I pointed out they were sharing hideous neo-Nazi cartoons – this time, full Hitlter. And they were both women who seemed to consider themselves sort of greenie-lefty. Buying the Assad-Putin narrative can lead to to really bad places.
Are they NZ or overseas-based? If US-based, they sound like Bernie-or-bust types who voted Trump out of spite. Some of them, like Cassandra Fairbanks, showed their true Pepe/Kek colours after Trump got in.
I unfollowed a couple of fellas on Twitter when they turned out to be "alt-Left" NWO types who are thinking out loud of NZ First on election day.
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Hard News: Our own fake news, in reply to R A Hurley,
Trump supporters know Trump lies. They just don’t care.
Or to put it another way: "If I can't have my whitebread 1950s America, then let it burn!"
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Hard News: Our own fake news, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
It’s amazingly visible with Trump stuff at the moment. Supporters see media stories about Trump as evidence that their belief in a compromised mainstream media is real. The more the media pushes, the more they are convinced that it’s a battle.
When conspiracy theorists are confronted with facts that contradict their ideas they classify it a government controlled disinformation, and the fact that the government is trying so hard to convince they world there’s no conspiracy is evidence that they are clearly onto something.
It’s fucking amazing!
Case in point: Trump's insistence the Central Park 5 should have been executed, even after they were acquitted and another man found guilty; and the Obama birther-ism.
If Trump does actually get impeached, odds are that it'll be a stab-in-the-back myth to his loyalists. What would be the Trumpist equivalent of invading Poland or annexing the Sudeten Mountains?
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Hard News: Barclay and arrogance, in reply to Dennis Frank,
When the structure of our government allows a member of parliament to retain their seat after breaking the law and lying to their local party colleagues to deny having done so, and lying to the media about what they told the Parliamentary Service, there's something fundamentally rotten in our democracy. That problem requires a permanent fix.
A Royal Commission would be just the starting point.