Posts by dc_red
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My two cents ... Annette King should fall on her sword to save Goff's leadership, just as David Caygill did to save Helen Clark's. King was a great minister, particularly in the first term of the Clark government, but today offers next to nothing, and is unable to even land a punch on the walking disaster that is Basher Bennett.
Promote someone younger and/or more energetic to the Deputy Leadership (no, not you Maryann Street). Get the cantankerous and negative Andrew Little out of the news (thankfully his presidency is ending). Develop a decapitation strategy targeting weak National ministers in key portfolios (cough, education, cough, welfare).
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RadioNZ live web feed pretty much overwhelmed, no accessing it from here that's for sure ... massive delays on clips recorded a bit earlier too.
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warm itself on the embers of Act’s credibility.
Ha! That's very good.
Attention wing bats. If the ACT party is (was) just too mainstream, sensible and populist for you, here's an attractive alternative!
You can fight the Libertarianz for their 1176-strong base.
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Hard News: What about that Welfare…, in reply to Craig Young,
How much did this little piece of conservative ideological purity cost the rest of us, BTW?
I could have cut-and-paste it from Kiwiblog, and reformatted, in about 8 hours.
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long-term benefit dependency for the able-bodied is very destructive at every level: it destroys initiative and drive ... [insert bog-standard right wing rant here]
And what about the costs of not providing benefits?
And isn't there structural unemployment in NZ anyway?
Where are all the jobs these feckless benefit recipients are supposed to be taking up? Oh, what's that, there are none? Not at or above the current minimum wage, anyway.
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I fear this issue, and the potentially catastrophic loss of economic multipliers, will be well beyond the limited political management abilities of Key, English & Brownlee.
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And everyone will be hoping for good weather
Because half the seating is still uncovered, right?
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@ Caleb
"Canadians." Of course. But that's a nationality, not an ethnicity. It's kind of an important distinction.
Right, so "Canadians" shouldn't put "Canadian" down as an ethnicity, then (at least not in Canada) ... which brings us back to the question of what they "should" be instead.
The nationality/ethnicity distinction is pretty tenuous. Look at the 2006 NZ Census: Chinese, Indian, Tongan, Samoan, Dutch ... all listed as potential ethnicities, and all clearly nationalities as well.
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@ Caleb
I would argue that "Australian," "Canadian," "American," and "New Zealander" are indeed "not-ethnicities." Or rather, they're pseudo-ethnicities, the assertion of which is a way of denying the fact of colonial settlement and the basic un-originality of their supposedly distinctive (white) national cultures.
What should "Canadians" be called, then? I'm surrounded by them at the moment ... all different hues, and a tremendous diversity of family names too of course.
Some will know where their "ancestors" came from, and be happy to share, but many won't, or the answer will be ludicrously (and delightfully) complicated.
If I followed up each answer with "so you're not really an ethnic Canadian but better described as ethnicity X" I would not be particularly popular. In fact, I would quickly get a punch in the chops (and not just from the white/white-ish respondents).
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@ Caleb
Except New Zealander is not an ethnicity. It is, at most, a particular combination, at a particular moment in time, of pre-existing ethnicities, all of which (with the exception of one) originated outside of this country within the very recent past, in terms of human history.
Of course it's a combination. Which makes it very similar to "Australian", "American", "Canadian", ... and perhaps even "British" (Act of Union pretty recent in human history too).
"Italian" and "German" presumably suspect on the same grounds that federation/confederation was pretty recent there.
Also every other settler/colonial society: "Jamaican", "Mexican", "Cuban", etc.
That's a lot of not-ethnicities.
Good luck with telling Germans to enter "Hessian" or "Vandal", and Jamaicans to write in "some sort of African".