Posts by Kumara Republic
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I've made my submission. One area that definitely needs looking at is dark money, and the astroturfers and concentrated media monopolies that it sponsors. I've read that such monopolies are just as detrimental to freedom of speech as the Great Firewall of China or the Putin regime in Russia.
https://theconversation.com/is-australias-media-market-one-of-the-worlds-most-concentrated-68437
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Speaking of art, I used the tightest COVID levels to revisit a long-neglected hobby of mine. It's online for the world to see at DeviantArt and Renderosity:
https://www.deviantart.com/deepred6502
https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/gallery/?uid=64652 -
Hard News: Housing, hope and ideology, in reply to ,
Newshub, nice to see some healthy anger. “All those wankers you see in the paper that are 32 years old and ‘I bought my first house at 22 and now I own 12 houses’ have just been lucky enough to be in this 10-year period where [house prices have soared] and they just keep re-leveraging. Well, those guys will be fucked, which is good…
I agree, owning more than one home is greedy. It’s okay to be angry about that sort of thing.
Mark Todd is rightly our local version of Nick Hanauer, who's also posted on Newsroom:
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/a-stake-through-the-heart-of-neoliberalism
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I forgot to mention: there's freedom of speech, and then there's freedumb of speech.
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The “Great Replacement” theory as bel;ieved by the Christchurch terrorist is tantamount to volume 2 of the “Elders of Zion"…
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The Royal Commission on the Christchurch Mosque Shootings in 2 pictures…
https://twitter.com/kumararepublic/status/1359376644058742786
And on a related note...
https://twitter.com/kumararepublic/status/1197863901724999680
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In any case, NZ needs either of the following about as much as it needs a nuclear waste dump:
- a Great Firewall of China
- a Wild West oligopoly dominated by Fox News & The SunIn fact, both of the above have far more in common than they overtly seem. Investigative journo Peter Maass summed it up best:
Peter Maass @maassp
24 Jun 2019:
I’ve watched North Korean state TV, Romanian under Ceausescu, lots of Soviet TV (I was a student there), Serbian TV during Milosevic, and this is indistinguishable. And we have kids in cages and a president reliably accused of assault/rape by many women.Matthew Gertz @MattGertz:
Jeanine Pirro talking about President Trump is completely indistinguishable from what you get in an authoritarian state media apparatus. "This kind of enthusiasm has never been matched in American history... there is a chord that this man strikes in the American heart." -
Legal Beagle: Election '20: The No…, in reply to Bruce Ward,
It appears that keeping the 5% is intended to reduce representation diversity. While I am not sure about the sense/effect of 0%, surely 2% or even a mere 3% would not lead to a downfall of ‘democracy’!
The original rationale for the threshold in the German version of MMP was to prevent another Nazi Party from pulling a 1933. It's worked mostly well to date, even wannabes like the AfD are kept mostly in check.
That said, NZ's threshold can do with some tweaking. 4% would be a good compromise between political stability and political diversity.
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Hard News: Family Matters: a post about 2020, in reply to Steve Parks,
Same. I remember that episode of Mythbusters where they did myths suggested from reddit users and I learned that Reddit was considered – or described itself as – “the front page of the internet”.
For me, PA was the front page of the internet, at least in New Zealand.
Not sure why I drifted away but some country singer could write a song about it.
The rise of social media, methinks?
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I've already notified Russell on Twitter about it.