Posts by Kracklite
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Allow me to correct that oversight. I love you, Ben.
Cerytainly a lot of good work lately. Where do you find the time?
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Sacha,
Sadly answering emails is not all of ‘engaging with the public’.
Agree. "I answered an email" , "I posted something in Beige Alert", "Someone on T' Standard noticed me" and so on amounts to "My imaginary friend agreed with me, so I'm really, really happy in a job well done" (I'm sure Patton Oswalt could do something really hilarious - and tragic - with that...). However, it's not even remotely funny - it just amounts to "I ticked a box on my checklist and I've done my job, so there."
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Kumara Republic,
keeping their powder dry
And that is the mistake that Labour has made over the last three years*, in the most generous assessment I can make. In marketing, the rule of thumb is that it can take about three to four years to firmly embed a brand perception. As NZ politics unfortunately drifts towards the presidential style, coming up with good media management (Brian Edwards) and policy at the supposed “window of opportunity” before an election is simply too little, too late, and moreover, looks insincere and desperate instead of being the dramatic arrival of Blucher’s forces at Waterloo.
It’s not patronising or dismissive of the electorate as being shallow** in their not “rationally” appreciating the overwhelming brilliance of Labour’s policy that was revealed so late. A lot of the major judgments that people make are “intuitive” – that is, not dispassionately rational, but grounded in observation and assessment over a long period and formulated in a way that is not easily reducible to simple logic. Labour gave nothing to work on, no narrative, no consistency, no sense of there being an essential moral principle. The voters simply didn’t have a reason to care, or to trust them, and any “rational” or even “dramatic” presentation, without sufficient priming, just wasn’t going to resonate.
Labour simply had no foundation for a win this year. They’ll have to work building one over the next three years, starting NOW. No more of this “keeping their powder dry” bullshit.
*That’s generous. My opinion is that they were blah blah blah… shit, you don’t need to know.**And of course "it's the fault of the stupid voters" is itself stupid.
Anyway, apologies if this is redundant. I haven’t read pages 3-7 yet.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
” If only people had a chance to hear Phil for 2 more weeks, he would have won.
Sorry, I’d amend that to say, “If only Phil Goff had had taken the chance to say anything of substance/had some policy for the previous three years…”
The audience has to be receptive. “Brand perception” (an unfortunate concept with politics, but…) seems to be like an oil tanker – it takes a very long time to turn one.
For Labour’s sake, they need to start being worth listening to immediately after they decide on their new (and Aten, I hope it is new) leader and front trench, with none of their perennial bullshit about “their” voters “coming home” or staging re-enactments of Life of Brian.
The results for Mathers, Sepuloni, and Bennett all constitute good news however.
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Hard News: How long the leash on the…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Speaking of Crowley leads me to… Pratchett/ Gaiman’s Good Omens . According to that reputable tome, the M25 is in the shape of a Tibetan sigil for a curse, due to the efforts of a certain demon who “not so much fell as vaguely sauntered downward"… so I’d condemn Clarkson to an eternity orbiting that particular misplaced circle of Hell.
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Hard News: How long the leash on the…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Von Braun’s level of nazi collaboration was about the same as that of the majority of Germans.
Um… I hope that’s very dark irony. To wit: “…an estimated 20,000 Mittelbau-Dora forced laborers died: 9000 died from exhaustion and collapse, 350 were hanged (including 200 for sabotage), and the remainder died from disease or starvation (or were shot)”
Annnd…
Russian rockets did blow up just as frequently as American ones.
Indeed, and quite spectacularly sometimes.
Not to mention the sad fate of Phobos Grunt, which, alas, has not gone “BANG!”, but “phut!” (Mars missions seem particularly cursed, and rocket engineers joke nervously about the “Great Galactic Ghoul” that dines on Mars probes).
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Steve Parks,
most of the vote they lost to NZ First
I'm not sure it was so direct, actually. I've said it before, and admittedly repetition is merely truthiness, not truth, but while Winston First may have picked up a chink of the Waitakere Man vote, I think that it picked up a lot of the social conservative and economic "right" vote that might have swallowed the economic neoliberlalism of the current National Party if the social conservative Winston First hadn't seemed viable once again after a brief breakup.
My hypothesis is that a number of National voters are "Reagan Democrats" and Labour could do well to target them - not that I would approve, but WTF, it might make sense, strategically, for them...
Of course, yes, there, are plenty of former Labour voters who are now Green voters, but how soft or hard are they? I don't know myself, even in my own case.
I'd really like to see the results of polls that ask questions such as, "Who did you vote for before you voted for...?", "Who would you vote for if..." and "Who would you like to see go into a coalition with enter a confidence and supply agreement with a minority government of...?" Those questions are going to matter as the opposition parties jostle in the next couple of years.
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Sacha,
Kate Wilkshername actually said something?
A pity that it has to something predictably swinoidic.
Or we really do have the government we deserve. No, it’s someone else who has the government they deserve. It’s always someone else. Like those smegheads who voted Green, instead of Labour, who made a big deal of not mining national parks because it made headlines then but abruptly forgot about it when it came time to campaign.
Oh, and by the way, I am not joining the chorus saluting Phil Goff for so honorably falling on his sword. He played a good campaign, but an utterly rotten three years too… and since he was Roger Douglas’s acolyte back in the day, I can’t say that I’m sad to see him go.
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Since I'm reluctantly but inexorably sliding into middle age myself, I can say, "yes, alas" - so maybe the quote marks can be around the last bit.
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Well, doesn't that present a dilemma for a white male liberal? ;)