Posts by Joe Wylie
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Sorry, will try not to lower the tone again.
Introducing the WINZ red herring wasn't your doing, paula. It's my own recollections of more than one elderly individual going without food while being too proud to inform their relatives under Shipley's 'market rentals' scam that tends to get me exercised about cynical beneficiary bashing.
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I'm still surprised by the blowback.
As I said, if one wanted to be hard-arsed. It's not an option I'd be regularly inclined to take, but when it's done with blatant dishonesty in the guise of providing some kind of conservative balance, it should be called out for what it is.
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. . . the maze of entitlements and regulations that is WINZ . . .
What does any of this have to do with Fay and Richwhite, anyway? Spuriously linking their situation with the old tory shibboleth of bludging beneficiaries reveals something of the patrician contempt and loathing that underlay their brazen plundering of what were once publicly owned resources.
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Does any of the above make me a nasty right-wing beneficiary basher?
Not at all. It was the tens-of-thousands making-shit-up from your earlier post. If one wanted to be hard-arsed, there are times when you come across as a real piece of work.
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. . . tens of thousands of beneficiaries who've clearly received money they're not entitled to . . .
Tens of thousands? Is that right? Got a link for that?
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Kiwi seduces Japanese housewives
It's certainly a headline to conjure with, although I'd have thought New Police Poultry Porn Scandal rather than Yellow Peril
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Although second hand the detail of the description of washing in kero seemed credible.
If it was from a few years back it was probably true - degreasing your mitts with kero was still common garage practice in NZ 20-odd years ago.
In Australia they use it on their old folks:
http://www.agedcarecrisis.com/acc/show_news.asp?id=newsitem&item=news0156 -
I love that line about the future...
Yr welcome - it was the overwhelming impression that arose from a severe case of culture shock after being dumped back into the grey Sydney winter of '75.
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. . . you gotta see the party rallies here..quite something, and there is a massive pride in what has been achieved, as there should be.
The four occasions that I've returned from Indonesia, whether to NZ or to Oz, I've always had something of a sensation of returning from the future.
Re. the emergent middle class, this was the biggest change I noticed when visiting after an 11-year absence in the mid-80s. The phenomenon of Indonesians as tourists in their own country was almost unlnown in the mid-70s.
Australia's record re. Indonesia is tragic. When I first visited in late '74 I envied the Australians who'd learned Bahasa in high school. After the Timor debacle Indonesia became seriously uncool, and under Fraser the teaching of Bahasa was slowly dropped.
In the dark days of May '98, while the army was provoking riots in Jakarta, Paul Keating emerged from his seclusion to assure ABC radio listeners that his good friend Suharto would do the right thing. He might be a military dictator who'd been in power since before the Beatles' White Album came out, but at heart he was a constitutionalist. As long as you had a constitution, democracy could wait. Sadly, Keating's views were probably the most progressive of any Australian leader, including Whitlam.
One of my favourite writers is Pramoedya Ananta Toer. He makes a pretty good case that Indonesia's elites have a centuries-old tradition of participating in a divide-and-conquer collusion with foreign interests.The army's actions in Irian, Aceh, Timor, the Moluccas etc. under Suharto were simply a continuation of this.
There have been times when the Republik has seemed like a political myth about to disintegrate. Right now it seems that a genuine unity, independent of the army, is finally possible.
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. . . in an imperfect capitalist world there is a degree of Canute-ism in your comments.
This seems to have come full circle, back to Marcus's assertion that treating economic globalisation as some kind of natural force (tide?) amounts to a
. . . deterministic, There-Is-No-Alternative ideology
From your description of the rise of democratic people power in Indonesia, and perhaps the current crisis between the US and Mexico, it appears that globalisation is very much subject to being shaped by mass political will.