Posts by Tom Semmens
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I believe we have had plenty of examples in the past of how a virulent, all pervading ideology at the political leadership level that wishes to dehumanise a section of the population can then easily harness the power of a powerful bureaucracy eager to prove how effective it is at achieving outcomes that align to the wishes of the political leadership.
A nickname for meth is crystal. Fitting, since housing NZ seems to have been in the grip of it’s very own kristallnacht against the poor.
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If you want to see where the alternative reality of Trumpland comes from, I thoroughly recommend reading the comments section on the Kiwiblog post on this matter. Forget about what those retards are actually saying and focus on the cognitive processes at work.
It is marvel of the type, full of the simple rejection of inconvenient science through the creation from thin air of nebulous conspiracy theories. As an exercise in looking into the workings of the mind of the regulars in Farrar’s sewer, it is fascinating. And remember, in America these same sorts of people have the NRA, their preacher and Fox News all repeating the same stuff, 24 x 7 x 365.
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Hard News: We are, at last, navigating…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I feel immense comfort today that people like Miles Stratford won’t have a business for much longer.
Cynical and despicable.
I don’t think I’ve seen such a mild mannered man as yourself wish financial ruin on anyone. These guys must be right bastards.
BTW, I hear on RNZ that the government is going to have an investigation into Standards New Zealand (who developed the guidelines for Housing NZ) to discover why they are so much at variance with the findings of Sir Peter Gluckman. There will be a few shiny arse managers at MBIE sweating on that news, methinks.
One might speculate that the investigation will find cronyism and corruption flourished in an MBIE gutted by funding cuts and encouraged to outsource it’s advice and guidelines to those friendly to the minister and aligned with the (then) governments philosophy, but that would just be idle speculation on my part, of course.
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The meth panic was never about science, or even drugs.
It was used to feed a National government approved narrative of criminalising poverty, and provided a convenient fig leaf for the flogging off of the state housing stock to the private sector.
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Poor old Mr. Quax has made the final Quaxing.
RIP, you were a fine middle distance runner and as an elected official contributed to civic society.
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The myth of egalitarianism in this country is a poison that allows us to pretend that Jack is still as good as his master and we don’t have to face the cultural and social elephant in the room.
Roger Douglas and his mates main success was to turn a uniquely egalitarian social experiment into just another provincial shopping mall on the edge of the capitalist empire, complete with all the petty entrenched class and privilege of Smalltown, Everywhere.
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And the award of the utterly unflattering urn of uselessness for being a clusterfuck of cluelessness goes to....
Clare Curran.
She was a totally inactive infection of inability in opposition, and she is proving in government to be a wandering wazoo of unwitting nescience.
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Hard News: The remarkable rise of…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Wait up: now Cohen has told someone that Giuliani’s version was bullshit and he’s pissed off.
Given the age of some of these geezers (Guliani is 73, Trump is a 71 year old who has had a fairly louche life) it all sometimes sounds perilously like the confused and rancorous parish pump politics of a retirement village.
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Well in that case they are on a hiding to nothing.
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Hard News: The remarkable rise of…, in reply to nzlemming,
The issue is not who Trump slept with, but how and why he covered it up. The affairs and Cohen’s role in them may serve as a gateway into Cohen’s information, but they are not what’s at stake, at least according to the reports around the obtaining of the search warrant for Cohen’s office and home. It appears that there are serious business issues that Cohen has to answer for, which may be leverage to get him to turn on Trump.
I thought the actual legal issue was the 130k given to Daniels should have been part of Trump’s campaign costs and declared as such? It is a ridiculously trumped-up charge to persue the president on given the miasma of millions and millions of dirty and corrupt dollars that hangs around US politics these days, but such is the detached, Byzantine fantasyland the US establishment lives in nowadays.
Otherwise, I find the idea that a prosecutor may use one piece of information to blackmail someones lawyer into letting him go on a fishing expedition to see what he may find that is in any way illegal exceedingly troubling. The Clinton’s were dogged by the Whitewater investigation for years, and the GOP were rightly condemned for their enthusiasm for that witch hunt and their subsequent incessant investigations of Hillary Clinton. If anything goes, I guess the US presidency will from now on be conducted against a background of theatrical judicial farce of investigation after investigation.
The use of politicized judicial processes to hound your opponents and re-litigate electoral outcomes you don’t like might now be business as usual now in the USA, but it just adds to the perceptions that much of what is reported in the MSM is fake news.