Posts by Joe Wylie
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Anyone else noticed the troll squad out & about promoting live sheep exports to Mexico? Someone who'd been let loose on Facebook after apparently passing Creative Trolling 101 took the interesting line that opposition was motivated not by economic or animal welfare concerns, but by racist sentiments towards Mexicans.
While I felt that the writer's invoking their own claimed Mexican business connections as "whanau" was a bit of a stretch, they really jumped the shark when they suggested that opponents of the live sheep trade would be better employed turning their indignation against cashed-up Chinese ruining NZ's property market. I'll bet a fine mind like that could flip over to Twitter and argue exactly the opposite should the occasion demand.
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In the course of scrutinising a cheque I'd presented at his Hobson Street establishment, the late George Wah Lee once suggested that I should spell my name "properly", i.e. the same as he spelt his.
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Speaker: Honest Bastards & Dishonest Cowards, in reply to BenWilson,
The Social Credit version of economics had at least some hold then and for many decades later, and it was quite a different view of how to reconcile capitalism with socialism. It was a view that might have been ahead of its time then, because it envisaged not a world of work for everyone to more fairly distribute the social product (the way Marxism seems to), but instead a world where work itself was becoming less and less necessary
Social Credit went into the 1984 election with the slogan "Chipping Away", focusing on the rise of technology and its threat to traditional jobs. What should have been the perfect issue for a party whose time had come was overwhelmed by the small-party glamour of Bob Jones's spoiler NZ Party.
As the Party's only Douglas-doctrine intellectual with a public profile, Bruce Beetham's election night defeat left only the lukewarm Neil Morrison and the flagrant opportunist Gary Knapp. While Social Credit founder C.H. Douglas's aversion to "international jewry" wasn't exactly a cornerstone of the Party's policies, it was certainly a factor in it becoming a magnet for a host of crackpot causes.
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Hard News: About Campbell Live, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
An expensive education may go some way towards mitigating apparent intellectual shortcomings. IMHE of such things, even the well-meaning are much quicker to condemn or patronise slow learners they identify as coming from the wrong side of the tracks.
Izogi:
Pointing and shouting at any kids who die and screaming "obvious neglect from useless parents" simply isn't helpful, whatever the upbringing of the speaker.
Yet the tragic case of the death of the Wanganui surgeon's child seems to have gone unremarked by the hapless Hooper.
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Hard News: About Campbell Live, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
These kids were not bad kids, just really young and sheltered and from affluent families. Really young and with that came a tad shallow.
This is an adult woman in her mid-20s. When Ashburton mayor Angus McKay says "It shows the intelligence of the person who made the comment" he has a point. It wouldn't be the first time that the media has groomed and fetishised someone who might well have a borderline intellectual disability in its quest to reduce its market to the lowest common denominator.
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Speaker: SIBs: The reality of…, in reply to Sacha,
NZ's first social bond experiment
Sounds like a prime example of fracketeeering.
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Hard News: About Campbell Live, in reply to Alfie,
Pebbles Hooper
Wasn't the Greaseball running a crusade a while back against people with stupid names?
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Hard News: Friday Music: Mixed Blessings, in reply to Russell Brown,
Muldoon wasn't actively corrupt in the way Sir Joh was – he just tended to surround himself with dimwitted cronies – and he didn't really have the Christian bigotry. He had more of a don't-frighten-the-horses take on sexual issues.
All true. There are numerous anecdotes of how Muldoon in private could display an affable and rounded personality that was the opposite of how he projected in public. Yet the same man who could charm the likes of John Walker by offering him fruit from the boot of his car after giving him a lift home could ruthlessly exploit the terminally ill Keith Allen, while seeming quite capable of reflecting on what he was doing.
By contrast, Bjelke-Petersen seems to have been one of those strange beasts who succeed because they're missing some essentially human check or balance, rather than because of an identifiable strength.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Mixed Blessings, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Around the same time Sir Joh ruled Queensland with an iron fist, Rob Muldoon was wearing the pants in NZ.
When former Whitlam Government Minister lJim Cairns visited NZ in the late 70s he noted that there appeared to be an "unhealthy fascination" with the likes of those two in this part of the world. According to Cairns, their appeal lay in publicly voicing the kind of bigotry that many were tacitly assumed to agree with, but were forbidden to say out loud.