Posts by James Littlewood*
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It's a farm house in central NSW, largely unchanged since my mother was borne there, 80-odd years ago.
See the table in the background? Just in front of that is where I learned to walk. With my childhood house in Auckland now long gone, this is the exact site of my earliest memories.
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Aah, the 80s.
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When I was a child of about 5 years I suggested to mum that there was no way she could prove I’d been borne and that maybe I was just dreaming my life in advance, inside her. She agreed, lovingly-in-a-casual way, and carried on pulling weeds out of the garden.
Then a few years later my dad was in the media commenting on a fracas that blew up between the Communist Party and the SIS, and kids started hassling me for being a communist. I asked what it meant. And after a long talk about people owning the outputs of their own work, and banding together to get what’s right, and so on, I said: but what about communism, that bad stuff? Oooh …
Then there was this period when the Auckland Star kept publishing maps of Auckland, illustrating with concentric circles the kind of damage that would be sustained if (or when) they dropped the bomb. I came to see no point or future in life at all. I became entirely nihilistic. Enter: punk rock, right on cue. Communism plus nihilism equaled anarchy.
Then one day I fell in love and got married. And it dawned on me that children might appear. And that even if I was still dreaming my life inside my mother, the fancy-pants idea of multi-generational intra-uterine dreaming was probably stretching the hypothesis beyond any usable application, and cut that shit out for a while.
So now, if there’s such a thing as lucid dreaming, I figure that’s probably just as well done with the eyes open.
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Up Front: How I Learned to Stop Worrying…, in reply to Deborah,
Oh, and don't get me started on Dale Spender. I still see that, repeatedly, every single day. All the time.
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unless you believe that there’s something about men that makes them inherently better at politics than women
LOL. And after the last 48 hours, I needed that.
Seriously though, it took me about a year of Green Party membership before I was comfy with it. But it's not just the list: it's everything. Co-leaders. Party co-convenors (who get called Presidents in other parties). Co-convenors for this and that. It's not at all aligned with constructed identity theory. But who gives a damn. It works.
But can the constructivists have it both ways? Can one argue for Being Anything You Want, and at the same time expect prescribed proportions of Each Kind of Thing? I guess so.
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And yet the only thing I feel for the men who hurt me is pity.
Amen. I relate to this most powerful ethos. I am going to have to work really, really hard to extend the same ethos to the people who are causing the pain right now.
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Hard News: After Len, in reply to Questioner,
I would guess: political expediency. And economic reality.
Becoming = more than it was.
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an annual conference that far outshone expectations
I know this is a side issue in an otherwise enlightening article, but, really?
At conference, the Labour Party
a) came out in support of capital, and
b) dismantled the one single policy that could have mitigated the impact of asset sales on the poor.If that outshines expectations, I'm a dead cat.
See you at the TPP march, Saturday.
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Hard News: After Len, in reply to Questioner,
I’m surprised no one has suggested taxing or rating this value uplift.
It would be anyway, wouldn't it, through the existing rate & valuation process? Or do you mean it hasn't been factored into the analysis/PR?
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I agree Auckland's better and also still improving. And the CCOs might be instrumental: fresh mandates and all that.
But one thing strikes me as odd: Len's council equalised rates before equalising services. This seems to undermine the logic of amalgamation.
So, out west, our rates went down, but we also get fewer services (i.e. the same ones we had before amalgamation). We pay separately for our rubbish, we have to separate paper from plastic and glass, and we don't get the inorganic collection. And between Pt Erin and Piha, there's only one decent swimming pool, which is in Henderson.
If they'd equalised the basic services (OK forget the pool), then the suppliers might have been able to achieve greater economies, no?
