Posts by Sam Bradford
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Also, for the Nth time today, nobody's talking about policy compromise.
OK, so how does this work?
You keep your principled policies, but refuse to talk about the ones that might prove unpopular?
I guess it works often enough for National. -
This approach is essentially telling people what they want to hear, right?
Stay quiet about the policies you suspect they won't like, emphasise the ones they're likely to be sympathetic to.This ignores the appeal of Corbyn/Trump/Tsipras figures (and I know it's weird to lump them together), which is that they are willing to take 'risky' stands. A whole lot of voters, particularly former non-voters, respect that in itself. As many is this thread have pointed out, many people have contradictory left-right tendencies and vote on the basis of personality or perceived competence. Appearing to really stand for something is part of that. Political dialogue has not degenerated as far towards complete meaninglessness here as it has in the UK and US, because MMP allows our parties to delineate themselves better, but it's still like pulling teeth to get a Labour or National leader to say anything that the hypothetical centrist voter might disagree with.
There are trends and fashions in politics, and I think the New Labour style is on the way out with good reason. For a while the Clark/Blair approach worked well, applying tourniquets as the welfare state rotted and inequality increased, but bold decisions will have be to be made. If a politician is afraid to speak boldly, why should I believe they'll act boldly?
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This whole analysis is so depressing, because it assumes the sole reason for the existence of the Labour party is to be elected. Maybe it is. I consider joining it sometimes, and then I remember it's run by indecipherable centrist robots who are terrified of disagreeing with anyone. I really believe and hope that the time of Blairism/Clintonism has passed, because it's clear that they did nothing but slow down ever so slightly the collapse of society.
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The young people don't write political songs anymore...
...or maybe, just maybe, you don't hear about them because some things haven't changed that much since 1981
Getting Paid -
To go back to the original point of the article: it bothers me that you say 'perception is reality in politics'. That's defeatist. The media is the missing piece of the analysis; now that 'disunited Labour' is a trope, they will flog it regardless of what actually happens (eg Paddy Gower's insistence that any MP who does not explicitly rule out ever running for the leadership ever is absolutely definitely planning a coup).
I want politicians who refuse to play that game; who make their principles clear and don't contradict themselves trying to please the media or the clueless 'floating voter', who usually doesn't vote anyway (or who, inevitably, decides to vote for Winston at the last moment).
Re the generational warfare that seems to have become the topic of this thread: it is infuriating when an older generation fall back on laziness as the explanation for young people not being able to afford housing. I'm a well-spoken, university-educated, physically healthy Pakeha male (30) with a wide circle of friends: journalists, teachers, scientists, people working in film, etc. Not one of us considers buying a home a possibility. All lazy? Even the ones who work 60+hour weeks? I teach English to refugees for a living; it was the best-paid job I could find. If I put every cent of my income after rent (no eating or drinking!) towards buying a house, I could pay for a modest home in the far outer suburbs in just... 108 years.
You know what? I don't even buy into the cult of home ownership. I could happily rent forever. But the rent takes up well over half my income, so I can't pay off much of my student loan -- much less invest in anything, at all. 'Mum and Dad investors' -- yeah, an apt phrase. Mum and Dad have capital. But their kids will have to wait another 30 years to participate in the economy as anything other than cheap labour, ie when they reach retirement age themselves they'll finally have assets... a gerontocracy indeed.
Yep, totally sustainable. Please consider this a very polite expression of rage. Being blase about the current situation really seems like a big 'fuck you' to those members of my generation who didn't pick the right qualification, or the right parents...
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Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to Katharine Moody,
Katharine, I think you're right. Economics is a profession where conflicting unprovable theories circulate, to be picked up and used by those in power -- not used to create policy, but to justify whichever policy they already wish to pursue. No analysis of the statistical validity of this research will make any difference. It's irrelevant. It could be as watertight as the theory of gravity, but it takes more than that to unseat an ideology. The fact that this report can come out of the OECD is a sign that new ideas are circulating amongst economists, but that will mean absolutely nothing to the gifted economic managers (property bubble! all-in on dairy!) running the government.
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Hard News: Some reprehensible bullshit, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Oh, I'm not optimistic! It's actually hard for me to imagine how pointless or ill-informed a story would have to be before they'd apologise for running it. The problem is that people still take it seriously. (OK, the bigger problem is lack of an alternative.)
I'd consider making a line of T-shirts bearing 'the NZ Herald is a bucket of piss' or similar. Or maybe just the Herald masthead and 'Len Brown: Hero'.
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The New Zealand Herald is a bad fucking joke, and the more often people say that out loud, the better. The editorial team need to be embarrassed into upping their game.
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I have postgrad philosophy degree too, and his arguments are so obviously shit that it's actually embarrassing. I doubt Russell had to put a lot of effort into dismantling them here. He deserves ridicule, and the fact that he taught philosophy at a prestigious university only reinforces my growing prejudice against prestigious universities.
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Sorry to return to APRA, but I have an opinion to share, damn it.
I'm an APRA and RMNZ member, and in many respects they treat me well. They send me small amounts of money. If I email them or visit their office, they reply promptly and do their best to help. I don't doubt their goodwill towards me at all.
BUT I don't feel like they're connected to the scene that I'm part of -- which is a formless and boundaryless entity I'm loath to try and describe, but basically it's the bands that play shows at Whammy Bar, the bands that release records on MUZAI, the broke-ass bands that get a little bit of bNet airplay, that know they'll never be Lorde, who go to shows every week and who never see anyone who looks like an APRA representative (middle-aged, well-dressed, the inscrutable confidence of the Arts Professional or 'advertising creative') at any of these shows, which are sometimes grim but sometimes a shitload more exciting than anything that would be allowed onstage at the Silver Scrolls. The kinds of bands that Blink frequently deals with, in other words, and I've played at a couple of his events, which he really does run with a refreshing organisational skill and attention to detail that is far beyond the average capacities of our cashless and booze-ravaged scene.
It's a cultural thing, is what I'm saying. The Silver Scrolls mean nothing to me, and yeah, given that some of my favourite bands struggle to afford petrol money to get to their own gigs, it does look kind of extravagant. I realise that this may be hard to fathom for grown-ups who work in the media or advertising rather than wasting their time making unpopular music; to them, with their stainless-steel fridges and solvency, the event probably looks like a rustic, low-budget knees-up. I'm not calling for the Scrolls to be scrapped, just pointing out that they're about as irrelevant to the people I know as the Grammys; and it's the people I know that keep small venues open by actually going to shows, often, sometimes (incredibly) even when they don't know what the bands will sound like because they've never been on the radio.
Practically speaking: Blink's vision for universal exact tracking of playlists might be a bit ambitious for now, but it's worth working towards. The suggestion in his book that APRA collect fees from venues based on performances actually registered for the venue by artists makes complete sense to me; it means venues don't pay more than is fair, and in the current system, artists who don't register their performances don't get paid for them anyway. The APRA web interface for artists is also really bad. Painful. The whole process seems designed for artists who play a few well-paid festival shows each year -- you have to log each individual song performed, which is extremely bloody tiresome if you're gigging a lot, pointless if you improvise, remix, or perform a set of 40 nine-second thrash tunes, and completely unverifiable anyway.
As for the vexed question of why more people don't go to shows, the 1:4 price ratio for a beer at home vs at a bar is a big part of it. There's a shortage of good venues for many reasons, including people who move into the central city and complain about the noise from an existing venue -- which really should be illegal, and I'm not joking, because the level of selfishness and anti-social sentiment that such an act betrays just blows my mind. Finally, bands need to be more interesting, and those few remaining public outlets for 'music criticism' in this country need to be a lot more adventurous and maybe get out of the house more often.