Hard News: Burning down the house to feel better
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mark taslov, in reply to
Labour’s attempts to widen it’s appeal in the name of discredited liberal identity politics,
Would you expand ?
Widen it’s appeal to slut-shamers, victimisers, RadioLive listeners, misogynists and Tom.
Trump: "Some of my best friends are Russian..."
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Emma Hart, in reply to
Labour’s attempts to widen it’s appeal in the name of discredited liberal identity politics
Yeah, I mean, Poto Williams, what would a sitting Labour MP who's enormously popular in her working-class electorate know about Labour's base?
Of course, she also spoke at the Women's March in Christchurch, which I'm sure we all remember Tom telling us was an enormous success.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
Labour’s attempts to widen it’s appeal
... to the homophobic rape apologist demographic ...
Fixed that for you. -
@ Mark T.
It does get tricky, with atheistic Zionists claiming to have been chosen by God. -
mark taslov, in reply to
I’m sure we all remember Tom telling us was an enormous success.
Yes Emma, vividly, I took notes::
"So we need to understand – rather than spend months agonising about the race/gender mix of your party list spend time developing policies that appeal to th broad range of the population and build alliances with anyone who wants to help on a specific issue"
What I didn’t take that to mean – at the time – was ‘fast track a “reformed shock jock” with an aptitude for putting NZ’s daughters in their place’.
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Nick Russell, in reply to
I don't see Willie Jackson's recruitment as a deliberate provocation to the likes of Poto Williams so much as an attempt to kill off the Maori Party. They wanted Jackson but Labour got him.
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mark taslov, in reply to
an attempt to kill off the Maori Party
Accomplishing this is by slapping rape victims in the crotch? I strongly suspect their vision for our country. Who backs the rapists?
Timing is everything.
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According to Vernon Small, "Make no mistake, Jackson is a great recruit for Labour.
He is the equivalent of the proverbial 14 point intercept try; he will attract the votes of young urban Maori and "Shane Jones Maori" to the party while denying the Maori Party one of its flagship hopes."
Perhaps Small really is as down with the various subspecies of Maori voter as his confidence would indicate. Then again, after Gordon Campbell's breezy prediction that the kids would turn out in droves for the Internet Party because of Dotcom's alleged "music", I'm more than a little wary of this kind of easy punditry.
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mark taslov, in reply to
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On the 'widen the appeal' idea, I think I might be part of the target market. I know Willie Jackson outside his commercial radio career - met his mother too and got to understand what they were trying to do with both Maori broadcasting and the urban Maori authority. My respect for him and his family will never diminish;
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10650239
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
Perhaps Small really is as down with the various subspecies of Maori voter as his confidence would indicate.
I doubt it, the only urban Maori his organ has any consistent interest in are rugby players, corpses or referred to as "the defendant."
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mark taslov, in reply to
My respect for him and his family will never diminish;
That’s fair enough Katharine, Willie Jackson’s worst excesses are representative of many and his best attributes are what single him out. He certainly didn’t select himself for a place up the list of our oldest political party three years after the fact (Joe's link):
Which underscores why Little’s open and strong advocacy for Jackson has gone down like a lead balloon among some in the party – not least because it gazumps the party’s constitutional role in selecting candidates. After all he must first become a member, win a waiver of the 12-month membership rule and then get selected and ranked.
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nzlemming, in reply to
I doubt it, the only urban Maori his organ has any consistent interest in are rugby players, corpses or referred to as "the defendant."
I fully admit to reading this twice before I realised you meant the Fairfax machine.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
On the ‘widen the appeal’ idea, I think I might be part of the target market. I know Willie Jackson outside his commercial radio career – met his mother too and got to understand what they were trying to do with both Maori broadcasting and the urban Maori authority. My respect for him and his family will never diminish;
I had an extremely difficult personal relationship with Willie for some time, because of my criticism of that ghastly radio interview (from which I don’t resile a bit) but he’s a complex character and it does feel a bit like some of his most vocal critics this week only know the one thing about him. But other people perceive a different person.
Moana said to me once that she thought the backlash he and Tamihere copped when other hosts on Radio Live at the time (Andrew Fagan, Sean Plunket) had said shitty things on the same topic was a matter of racism. I don’t agree – the interview was much worse – but it’s an indication of how people can see things differently.
I have been somewhat bemused by the whirling fury of reactions on both “sides” though. Tom’s talk of “calculated undermining” and “sabotage” seems like utter tosh to me. There are times when an MP may feel point to take a stand. It’s hardly unprecedented and rarely amounts to undermining the party.
I’m not quite sure how he’ll fit as an MP though – he has a way of making things happen, but sometimes it’s making things happen for Willie, which might be difficult to accommodate within a party structure.
My other potentially unpopular opinion is that Greg O’Connor might make a very effective Labour MP. He’s an expert media communicator and has views on justice and drug law reform that I find quite encouraging. And again, I don’t resile from my criticism of some of the bullshit he spouted as a police union leader.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
I don’t see Willie Jackson’s recruitment as a deliberate provocation to the likes of Poto Williams so much as an attempt to kill off the Maori Party. They wanted Jackson but Labour got him.
More apocalyptic language!
They wooed a candidate the Maori Party was also trying to woo. That's not the same as "attempting to kill off the Maori Party". C'mon.
The interesting thing, I think, is that the iwi establishment has clearly been drifting away from Labour and towards the Maori Party. Labour has now tapped someone who has his own battles with that same establishment. It's not necessarily a straight swap, but it's quite an interesting dimension to the whole thing.
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WH, in reply to
I learned a lot from that Elizabeth Warren lecture after first seeing her in Maxed Out. Your comment made me think of this Ezra Klein interview with JD Vance that has a broadly similar focus.
David Leonhardt recently recommended this David Frum article which is also very interesting.
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mark taslov, in reply to
this David Frum article which is also very interesting.
I was just reading that, in parts reminiscent of the approach Lynn was proposing over the page.
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Katharine Moody, in reply to
The interesting thing, I think, is that the iwi establishment has clearly been drifting away from Labour and towards the Maori Party. Labour has now tapped someone who has his own battles with that same establishment. It’s not necessarily a straight swap, but it’s quite an interesting dimension to the whole thing.
It sure is an interesting dimension. That 'iwi establishment' you refer to seems to be becoming an iwi Establishment and an iwi establishment - a development that I suspect is of concern for all tangata whenua. We need Hone back in Parliament desperately as well.
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Katharine Moody, in reply to
Thanks for all the links, WH. Homework for me :-). It's one of the reasons I love this blog site.
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Back to the US for a moment - if you want to truly terrify yourself listen to History hit interviewing Laurence Rees about the conditions and state of pre-war Germany.
Essentially talking to Germans of that era they voted for a completely inexperienced extremely radical leader because he wasn't a politician. Everyone expected his extreme rhetoric to be tempered once he gained power ...
There, I've Godwin'd the thread good and proper
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Nick Russell, in reply to
Maybe you're right about the apocalyptic language. But there is definitely a huge fight for the Maori electorates this time, and one which may determine the outcome of the election, particularly in terms of how important NZ First is. The Maori Party has raised the ante by getting the approval of the Kingitanga and arranging a deal with Hone Harawira in Te Tai Tokerau. But they couldn't get Ratana approval and those big name candidates Tuku Morgan was talking about last year haven't turned up. Willie Jackson clearly isn't going to be one of them. If Labour keeps the seats it won in 2014, NZ First may become the only route to power for both sides - even more so if O'Connor can beat Dunne in Ohariu.
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mark taslov, in reply to
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mark taslov, in reply to
Ezra Klein interview with JD Vance that has a broadly similar focus.
A good interview
But to connect it to the conversation about white privilege, I think it’s always important to note that there are obviously still advantages to being white, there are still disadvantages to being black, even when you control completely for class, income, and so forth. But one of the points I tried to make is that if you’re asking the son of an unemployed West Virginia coal miner to check his privilege or to appreciate the ways in which, let’s say, Barack Obama’s daughters are going to be privileged or underprivileged relative to him in certain ways, I think that you’re asking just too much from basic human cognition.
That kid cannot look at his life and say about a group of people that he doesn’t understand, that he doesn’t even interact with a lot day to day, that their lives are much worse than his, and I think that’s one of the things that the modern discourse around racial privilege and racial disadvantage misses. I don’t think most of the people making these arguments are that reductive, I think they’re a lot more sophisticated in what they’re saying [about] how privilege operates along different dimensions in our society, but the way it’s actually talked about appears very reductive, and I think that’s a really significant problem.
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Lynn Yum, in reply to
Can you provide an example of an article on The Guardian that meets this goal?
I’m not saying they aren’t there, but the number of articles I’ve seen that do what you say needs doing (aimed at Trump voters, extending a hand halfway, in good faith), is zero.
It goes both ways, right? They are a leftwing paper. What they can do to find common ground is to shift their own lefty views more to the centre rather than shifting the Trumpian right to the centre. Publishing that Davidson article, from what I see, is doing just that. Thomas Frank is another example. Here is another.
Look I'm not saying they don't have a whole lot of lefty articles saying more or less the same thing on repeat. They do, day in day out. But after the Trump win (and Brexit) at least they try to burst their own bubble. They even have a handy series. The very act of bursting the bubble is about finding common ground with others rather than living in our own universe.
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Farmer Green, in reply to
"If you would stereotype a group of people by presuming to guess their politics or deeming them inferior to yourself – say, the ones who worked third shift on a Boeing floor while others flew to Mexico during spring break; the ones who mopped a McDonald’s bathroom while others argued about the minimum wage on Twitter; the ones who cleaned out their lockers at a defunct Pabst factory while others drank craft beer at trendy bars; the ones who came back from the Middle East in caskets while others wrote op-eds about foreign policy – then consider that you might have more in common with Trump than you would like to admit."
Eloquent.
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