Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: On the Clark candidacy, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
You have your timing wrong on this. Clark announced her intention to legislate in 2003 when English was still National leader. The Bill was passed in 2004. Here is a history of the issue one of my staff wrote in 2010 for a newsletter:
Thank you. Hindsight certainly is a wonderful thing. Nevertheless you don't appear to have felt the need to take issue with Russell Brown when he stated upthread:
National at the time want to legislate over all rights. And they very, very nearly got the chance to do so. Had Brash become PM things would’ve got very serious.
Further to your claim of Jim Bolger exemplifying some kind of pastoral empathy with Maori "values" - perhaps there's some truth in that, insofar as Bolger represented the fag end of an arrangement where vested elites found accomodation with one another's interests. This kind of thing, for example. That only begs the question, why did such cosy accommodations unravel so nastily under Brash?
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Hard News: On the Clark candidacy, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
I really don't think the Helen Clark had the same sort of natural connection with Maori (at least those with a more traditional outlook) that Jim Bolger had...
Talk about Myths & Legends of the Grammar Zone. In the lead-up to the 2005 election, when Clark presumably allowed herself to be spooked by the idiots' auction of Maori-bashing driven by Don Brash's enablers, National's sole Maori MP was stripped of her Maori Affairs portfolio. Along with prompting the hapless Brash on the parliamentary requirements of when to sit, stand and genuflect, that empathetic son of the soil Gerry Brownlee also found time to revive the quaint notion of the white man's burden by shouldering the Maori Affairs portfolio.
The Foreshore and Seabed Act was Clark's solution to having drawn the short straw in the deliberately poisoned post-election race relations atmosphere. The resulting fallout ensured that no political party would attempt such a blatant post-colonial asset grab again in the foreseeable.
Clark may have been sidelined by history on that score, but so were those who put Brash up to the Orewa speech. Both they and Clark misread the mood of the electorate. One could argue that Clark's parental condescension towards Maori might have been a lesser evil than the cynical appeal to the worst in people that was channeled through poor old Brash. Claiming some kind of moral high ground by pretending that Bolger was part of a similar paternalistic tradition shows that you've learnt nothing from the debacle.
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Hard News: On the Clark candidacy, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But the refusal to endorse Ms Clark came from a political party that would like to be seen as representing ALL Maori.
And Ms Clark, whose work experience outside of academia consists pretty much of a holiday job in Jim Anderton's dairy, led the Labour party to multiple victories. Should we be invoking the Fair Trading Act to protect the terminally credulous?
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Hard News: DNC 2016: Beyond weird, most…, in reply to BenWilson,
Riding shirtless on a horse with his buddy Vlad, perhaps.
The Australian Financial Review's David Rowe has done a nice take on that.
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Polity: Australian election: Dust and Diesel, in reply to Moz,
In Australia that leads to excitement as different factions/parties make and break deals with each other over who gets to be the mayor and for how long.
I once lived in Leichardt, when card-carrying Trotskyite Nick Origlass was Mayor. There were no purges of intellectuals or the bourgeoisie, and no deaths could be directly attributed to his holding the office.
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to Lilith __,
...then load them on a ship and send them for vast distances across the ocean to India and China. How is that even viable?!
Economists know things that physicists and climate scientists don't. For example, in India and China there are these magic chimneys. Whatever travels up those somehow manages to emerge with zero emissions.
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Speaker: Darkness in New York, in reply to Sacha,
5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win
Yeah right. Old song Michael.
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Speaker: Darkness in New York, in reply to Sacha,
Oops
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Hard News: RNC 2016: A literal shitshow, in reply to william blake,
A.Eger Leintz 1902.
Thanks for the picture ID. It's an image that's stayed with me since it featured in an article in US Penthouse in the early 80s on the rise of the then-new American fundamentalist right. Can't recall the author, only that the striking image was copyright credited to an Austrian state art gallery.
