Posts by Tom Semmens
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Trump sounded like what I imagine Leighton Smith would sound like after one too many visits to the sherry decanter. Or in Trump's case, if the sniffles are any guide, one too many fat lines in the toilet cubicle before the debate...
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I am uncomfortable with writing anything on this discussion, because the very title ("dummkopfs") is an awesome QED on culture wars and the rise of Trumpism.
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Cripes, I heard that Michelle Boag sock puppet Vic Crone on Natrad this morning. Dreadful woman.
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Up Front: Our House, in reply to B Jones,
That sounds an awful lot like “hey, why don’t we put more women at risk so they can help men overcome their violence problems.” The idea that prison is a safe place for people seems naïve.
several overseas countries, including Spain, do it already to generally positive results. All I am saying is perhaps if what we are currently doing is broken, maybe we should investigate doing something else.
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Fiddling around with the law isn’t going to change anything. It never does. WHERE IS THE EXTRA MONEY??? We need money for specialist family courthouses and courts and judges and lawyers. We need specialist councillors and programs. We need TV, radio and print media campaigns to change attitudes. But I don’t see an extra red cent here from the government.
We need new ways of thinking. For example, why do we take men with violence and woman issues and put them in all male, hyper masculine and hyper violent prisons where the only women they see are in the de-humanised form of smuggled porn? How is that going to help when they get out? Many countries have integrated jails and conjugal rights. Why can’t we experiment with this? Men and women can have separate sleeping wings, but they are allowed to mingle in prison jobs and surely a woman’s perspective on domestic violence during rehabilitation sessions, where they are safe to say their piece in a prison environment, would be useful? Maybe while in prison male and female prisoners can form better relationships? Surely, a supervised conjugal visit where respect is part of that visit is a good form of behavioural modification?
New Zealand’s level of generalised violence is unbelievable, as is our level of normalised domestic violence. We need to start thinking very differently about how to deal with it, AND SPEND SOME BLOODY MONEY ON IT.
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Every time Rob posts something, a little bit of me dies. Because all he ever does is display how firmly a talentless Labour party is marooned in the 1990s. FFS mate, you have to come up with something a bit better than economic rationalism as a reason to not impose economic rationalism.
The thinking of the NZ Labour party is so yesterday that it is actually the day before. I know "third way" politics was supposed to coincide with the end of history, but I didn’t think it also coincided with the end of thinking.
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…But the Labour Party, its shills and the teacher unions…
Hooton, in one neat sentence (repeated in the peculiar staccato delivery method of the paranoid Kiwi right wing male), shows us exactly why National cannot be trusted on education. The authoritarians of the neoliberal right are more interested in revenge on teachers unions they see primarily as political enemies and in punishing them for daring to offer one of the last centres of resistance to the values of the corporate Borgs who want to make money from our kids than they are in better educational outcomes.
National want to smash the teaching profession so they can then privatise it to profit-driven education companies that will drive down costs by cutting pay and conditions, primarily by employing disempowered and/or untrained teachers and by dumping expensive special needs or difficult students into out-of-sight-out-of-mind COOLs. I mean, does anyone here seriously believe Hekia Parata and John Key and Bill English are interested in properly funding an online education system that will primarily be a dumping ground for the difficult, the poor and the special needs children? If you do, I have got a nice bridge for sale.
And once they’ve achieved their goal, destroyed the unions and fobbed off education to their cronies they will sit back and enjoy what for National and it’s shills like Hooton and Farrar will be sweet, sweet revenge on one group of those who have dared to stand up to them.
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I read the Du Fresne piece. I came away profoundly grateful he hadn’t managed to work in the phrase “cultural Marxists”.
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The TPP failed because the majority of voters realised all the “benefits” of free trade go to someone other than them.
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Hard News: Stop acting like the law is…, in reply to mark taslov,
Andrew Little:
There are negative health effects for young people, young brains young minds, now the brain is still developing until the early twenties, and this is not, greater liberalisation of cannabis is not going to help when it comes to potential health effects there.
I happen to think Andrew Little is wrong here, because I am of the view that legalisation and regulation would drastically reduce the availability of drugs to young people. But this is Little's view, and it seems an honestly held one, and so we know what we have to do convince him of to change his mind. Key is just a lying opportunist who can't sleep straight in bed at night.