Posts by Kracklite
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to TracyMac,
Apologies for the butchery of your original...
People who [...] “agree to disagree” [...] when whatever-it-is has no actual impact on them personally.
No problem with that in particular, since I do it often enough myself. I interpret (and intend) it as "I won't/can't myself, but I acknowledge that I won't/can't stand in your way and won't press the point just to salve my ego... and besides, even if I won't/can't myself, the world would be a poorer place if you wouldn't/couldn't."
Emphasis on the "couldn't", I suppose.
Definitely though, I do appreciate that the "let's agree to disagree" is often a passive-aggressive version of "let's not discuss it so that the established norm can continue by default."
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to TracyMac,
Concern trolls […are] enforcing their norms on others.
And here I was thinking that concern trolls were simply disingenuous bastards trying to derail the opposition. Thanks for that. It’s the “norm” as subtext, as well as the more obvious derailling that I should be looking out for. Thanks (also without irony).
"The real thing we should be concerned with" fits very nicely under "who defines the terms wins the argument".
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Ross Mason,
How do I speak a capital “D”?
On tiptoes? Falsetto?
Billy Connelly does this great routine mocking people who use finger gestures to imitate quote marks, extending it to all other punctuation such as commas and full stops – and Victor Borge came up with a way of vocalising punctuation even earlier.
Of course the inestimable (not to mention inimitable) The Chap has, as part of it Chap Olympiad, an event, “Shouting at Foreigners” (fez on one side – cos’ they’re cool – and monocle on the other), which is adaptable as Shouting at Deaf People. Of course it’s done ironicially, and bless them, True Englishpeopleoids understand and will use without provocation irony (and I mean that without irony),
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
are not “babes” but adult women
And while I very much respect Brian Edwards, especially after what he has done for Phil Goff lately, ew.
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Kumara Republic,
And their NZ election chart is now updated for 2011
I’d like to see their methodology laid out, but as I have mild dyscalculia, the figures won’t mean much to me.
This is interesting, and reflects a trend I see thought what used to be called “The West”:
With the ideological gap between the main parties narrowing, issues of identity politics have largely replaced the great clashes of vision that older New Zealanders remember. Politicians of conviction seem increasingly outnumbered by politicians of mere career.
People on the other hand engage with politics through single issues, or mosaic alliances. With no authority or reputation whatsoever as a political analyst, I’ll recall that The Economist voiced befuddlement and scepticism at the anti-globalisation movements because the groups represented in the mass protests would oppose each other against other issues. 9/11 put a dampener on that movement, but the Occupy movement seems to represent is resurrection, and once again, it’s being attacked as vague, incoherent and temporary, but all of these criticisms miss the point, I think. People seem to have started seeing government as a ulitity, like the power and water supply. They’re happy with technocrats, providing that they’re responsive, and hate ideologues (consider the popularity of the US Congress now). Popular participation in politics is not through consistent devotion to a specific party, but around a specific given issue. Alliances will form, act and then dissolve, and then reform in new configurations with new issues.
Whether that is viable, sustainable in the long term, or a distant last on the list, better, I have no idea, but that seems to be the way things are drifting and reflects the nature of society now.
Disclaimers apply: I’m no political science expert by any means.
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Sounds remarkably like the Political Compass
Yep, and I’ll throw in Maslov’s hierarchy of needs just to complicate matters, though in practice, it's often been demonstrated that pride can trump sustenance.
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Minor note: a number of commentators – Matt McCarten for one – are saying that NZF took Labour votes. I’m not so sure about that – I think it’s very likely that National took a lot of votes that Labour might have earned, but likewise, a lot of votes that went to National in 2008 went back to NZF. I don’t think that one can take correlations at face value.
NZF strikes me as the ghost of Muldoon, that is, the old National Party tribe: a paternalistic, nationalist, populist, social conservative/reactionary party based on the appeal of a charismatic leader who can tell a gripping yarn to a certain sector of loyal followers.
I am not, of course, a fan of Peters or his style of politics (it’s trendy to call Key a psychopath, but Peters fits the profile pretty well too), but McCarten’s analysis shows the naivete that the “left” have in their view of the “right” – it’s potentially just as fractured as the various Judean Fronts/Fronts of Judea in Life of Brian, with social conservatives aghast at the internationalist neoliberals while many of the paleoleft, epitomised by T’ Standard, will happily go through all sorts of moral contortions to justify voting for NZF because Peters isn’t John Key, the perfect example of Homo ipsum (well “ipsum” is what Google Translate says is the Latin for “corporate"… kinda appropriate as Lorem ipsum is the graphic designer’s boilerplate copytext – ie, bland space-filler). I’ll stick by my opinion that people started voting for NZF not because they were suddenly convinced that they should, but realised that they could – again.
“Waitakere Man” (even though I would like to think of him as Piltdown Man) does seem to exist. One of my brothers is Dunedin’s answer to that, coming from a Labour-supporting family and turning to vote National, motivated particularly by finding that labour laws were having a negative effect – as he saw it – on his engineering business, and he started as an apprentice engineer in the Dunedin woolscour, an impeccably working-class origin. He could very well vote for Chris Trotter’s hallucination of what Labour “should” be.
On the other hand, both Craig, a former National supporter, and me, a former (even tribal) Labour supporter have voted Green.
Whatever happens on the surface with various “right” and “left” parties*, the underlying culture is changing radically and talking about parties owning their tribes’ votes is not only vile, it’s downright stupid.
*As an intellectual exercise, consider the meaning of “liberal” and “conservative” and then add the modifiers “social” and “economic” to them. It’s easy, and you end up with four very different ideologies.
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Craig, remember this?:
What isn’t going to be pretty, I suspect, is certain elements in Labour who going to try and build a Dolchstoßlegende around those awful Greens and Maori Party supporters
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Kewl.
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Steve Barnes,
You really don't get MMP, do you?
Don't worry, I intend to make sure that the babies have been diced and well marinated before I scarf them down.