Posts by Tom Semmens
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Life is journey which includes some unpleasant realities. Baby boomers and Generation Xer’s are guilty of clinging on far past their use by dates. In life you are relevant, then experienced, then wise, then past it. The trick is to know when you enter each phase and accept the process with grace and, perhaps, not a little relief and pride when you realise the burden of fighting your good fight is in the safe hands of a younger generation.
In an aging world where the young are in an often enforced prolonged adolescence it is easy to remember that once being 20 was old enough to lead seven men in a lumbering four engine bomber at night over a hostile Germany with no modern navigation aids.
Yes, there is an agism abroad – an agism that says age isn’t relevant not because you can still do the job, but as an excuse for not letting go, which is a category I would put Annette King in. Any politician whose best days are behind them need to go immediately, and make way for a young thruster with the energy and enthusiasm they now lack.
There are far to many old people in parliament. Jacinda is just 35. She is entering that phase of her life where she will harness both still youthful energy with an ability to adapt and learn, while having the confidence that comes with a decade of experience.
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Failed crackpot economic theory creates hopeless underclass, instead of offering to pay to help clean up it's economic fuck ups it blames the underclass and seeks to replace it with indentured labour from the third world.
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Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump – many of them Russian. Last week they have been in action in the Stoke byelection – Russian bots, organised by who? – attacking Paul Nuttall.
If we want to protect our democracy, we need to get our heads around the reality this is a declaration of war from Russia, and we need to teach Putin that war will come with a cost to Russia he can’t afford. Send all the weapons and money we can to the Chechens and every other rebel group in Russia, and let Putin know we won’t stop until he does.
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Personally (but I am sure i speak for many) I can’t wait to dance on Sky’s grave. Appalling customer service, rip-off packages, and a managment culture of a two finger salute to consumers mean their viewers are hostages to their sport monopoly, not customers to be looked after.
Fuck them, and the boat they came in.
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Speaker: Broadcasting and the Public Interest, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
First of all, Gareth Morgan's rambling on public broadcasting simply confirmed to me he is just another in our lamentable history of somewhat to very odd millionaires feeling obliged to favour us with their brilliance via some sort of political vanity project.
Broadcast TV is pretty much obsolete technology – looking at a clean sheet of paper, why would you spend millions on a dedicated radio pipe to do the same thing as near free internet bandwidth?
Viewing figures of free to air TV would tend to indicate reports of it's obsolescence and death are premature. I guess you keep dirty public broadcast services because an important function of state broadcasters of record is their role in disasters, and radio and broadcast TV are relatively robust in the face of disaster. When the aliens attack no one is going to tune their emergency pack transistor into the afternoon crew of Inane Rock FM. They'll be going to Radio New Zealand, which will still be on air and broadcasting from Wanganui using a bit of wire, a car battery and a 1930's transmitter that no one got around to replacing long after Wellington or Auckland's ISPs were vapourised in a big hit from the orbiting starships death ray.
But if we accept that free to air broadcast services are going the way of the Dodo, then it raises questions around the current model of access to online services. At the moment the access "pipe" is controlled by private ISPs. But if access to the internet becomes the only way to gain information on key parts of civil society, should we consider nationalising the ISP's and providing access for free and only charging for content (i.e. break net neutrality with a public good argument)? Or perhaps the state should compel all ISP's to offer free access to any device to access any website on a white list, for example - any website that ends in .govt.nz? This would give a powerful inbuilt advantage to state websites, should the government re-create state media on the internet as, say, tvnz.govt.nz.
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Hard News: Burning down the house to…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
See life is treating you as well as it ever does Craig.
Not sure of your point, other than i can discern it consists of an angry ball of resentment bundled up in a permanent red mist of outrage, so sorry about that.
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Hard News: Burning down the house to…, in reply to Rich Lock,
It wasn’t meant to be an insult dude, have a lie down! Jesus, did you get shortchanged by the coffee cart this morning?
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Hard News: Burning down the house to…, in reply to Rich Lock,
From my own ‘micro’ point of view, if I want my liberal bubble burst, I just have to go and stand in the queue at the local supermarket, and while I’m waiting have a quick skim of the front pages of The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Express, The Telegraph, The Times, and so on, and let the vitriol wash over me.
This doesn't count as "bursting your liberal bubble". This counts as "reinforcing my preconceived notions of people who don't agree with me".
If you really want to burst you liberal bubble, try talking (or even better, listening) to some people who voted Trump, or spend eight weeks working with pruning gang as a summer job (which is what my sister did after she overheard my nephew being a little snob with his mates), or something else that involves actually engaging with people who think differently from you.
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In regards to the bathrobe nonsense – Winston Churchill stayed in bed until 11am, had his first drink shortly after he got up, had a two to three hour lunch featuring more liquor, had a 90 minute snooze at 5pm, then had a four hour plus dinner with freely flowing alcohol, and took two long baths a day. In other words, a certain sybariticism doesn’t preclude effective leadership.
Having spent a lot of time talking – and more importantly listening – to my many American friends, several of whom voted for Trump, this what I have concluded: First, Illegal immigration is a gigantic issue and is hated by Trump supporters mainly on ideological grounds. We forget the Puritan thread that runs through much of American society at our peril. Wage class Americans are generally more conservative than we are and they revere values of being law abiding and hard working combined with thrift and self-discipline. Illegal immigrants are simply dismissed as law breaking queue jumpers and freeloaders. Throw in a bit of lazy racism (encouraged by the rabble rousers of the conservative US media) and a huge dollop of male resentment at the loss of manly dignity that come with the loss of breadwinner status that comes with a steady, good paying job and you’ve got a huge cross section of the people who voted for Trump.
Secondly, the liberal & salaried professional/managerial class right across the English speaking world is completely clueless as to how hated it is by those in the precariat/wage class below it. The liberal managerial class have a lifestyle untouched by globalisation and from their positions of power in HR departments, middle management and consultancies they are the human face of a class war waged by them on the poor, the precariat and the low waged on behalf of their neoliberal corporate masters. The professional elites response to that hatred has largely been one of smug arrogance and condescension, which has made the class and cultural war even worse. This cultural and class war element cannot be emphasised enough.
This article in the Havard Business Review is the most accurate assesment of the mood of Americans I know that I have read, and it offers suggestions for the way forward for the left that are, in the light of Poto Williams calculated attempt to undermine her leader and sabotage Labour’s attempts to widen it’s appeal in the name of discredited liberal identity politics, particularly pertinent.
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Are they safe to use on dual use cycle ways at 30km/h?