Posts by Tom Semmens
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Angela Merkel (who's far too nice to refugees for the American right's liking)
Merkel is in serious political trouble on the refugee issue and a majority of German public opinion has shifted decisively against her refugee policies. It seems she is far to nice to refugees for many Germans taste as well, especially in the old GDR.
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History is not something which should bind us in it's predictions for the future, but if history is to be our guide the European reaction to the irritant of minority religious fanaticism and/or ethnic minorities has always eventually been the ghetto, ethnic cleansing, and mass expulsions.
I expect President Le Pen will start taking the first steps along this path in 2017.
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Amy Adams (who increasingly sounds like she went to a home counties public school, yearning for the mother country I guess) was wound up set off to do the clockwork constant repetition of the rapist murders etc etc thing this morning. Farrar is running the same dishonest line. So it seems the government got it's strategy into place after a bit of urgent overnight polling/focus groups by Curia.
The biggest winner will be be David Farrar, who can now probably afford to upgrade from a Gnu to an Elephant for his trophy on his next safari.
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Here’s the Stuff story which probably sums up the view from and for Middle New Zealand.
Two stories which neatly illustrate the Australian & NZ deep state attempt at controlling the narrative vs. actual verifiable stories of real people. It pays to bear in mind the Australian government has total news control from Christmas Island. I don’t believe a single word they say, especially when that controlled narrative – parroted in the Aussie press – is punctured by compelling phone calls from the facility and interviews with families that are replayed on NZ media. One of the media stories here is how complaint and complicit the MSM is on this issue in Australia – they are part of the bi-partisan political lockstep over there that means this issue is not discussed.
Let’s get real here. Australia is running concentration camps on these islands, designed to break the will of the inmates with brutal, lawless repression and indefinite detention. Like previous owners of concentration camps they’ll have you believe the happy faces of the orchestra playing at the railway station is representative, and when asked of reports of chimney smoke they’ll deny there is even a fire.
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TV3 lost it's audience ages ago. The channel is now the mouthpiece of Key sycophants. Gower is irrelevant.
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Here is what gets under my skin as a sixth generation, part Maori New Zealander.
A rich, middle aged Pakeha calling a Maori MP "son". An old, rich Pakeha guy condescendingly talking down to a Maori women MP. And a white settler PM and his white settler speaker siding with white settler racists in Australia against their own people.
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Also, I don't think the dead cat strategy will work. This government has been desperate to keep a potentially explosive confrontation with Australia over their multiple human right violations of New Zealand citizens in their concentration camps out of the news and away from being an issue. This has exploded the issue onto the front page here (the Aussie media is still obediently playing their role in the state ideological apparatus on this issue) and given New Zealanders an opportunity to express their growing anger at Australia's racist treatment of us.
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Key and his entourage of goons performance are of a man dangerously arrogant, one who has now completed confused the difference between him and the government.
Key was rattled by Davis, and his response has been to lose his temper and lash out like an insolent bully.
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As some of the posts here demonstrate, the Balkanised thinking of so many Aucklanders is going to take longer than one mayor and two terms to overcome. People who mourn Waitakere city or the North Shore or the ARC need to understand they were eventually anachronisms, small town solutions to a city sized problem. There is no point whinging about what is gone. People should focus on ensuring the left when it returns to government reforms the worst aspects of the dog’s breakfast created by Rodney Hide. In particular, the CCOs are egregious abuses of democracy which seem primarily designed for rapid privatisation.
Having friends at the council to me Brown’s primary achievement is the entirely mundane. His council seamlessly kept the lights on, the trains (more-or-less) on time and ran all the other myriad services without the public noticing the changes. That normality is a mighty achievement.
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I wonder if National has realized what a blunder the super city was for them...
Central government in Wellington has not exactly covered itself in glory with it's thrashing around trying to work out what to do about the beast of the north. Generally speaking, I think what the authoritarian state central bureaucracy fear most is irrelevance in the face of a semi-independent city state, especially if that city state's governance then starts showing signs of independent thinking. After all, what is the point of being the ministers secretary if the Aucklanders don't stand when you enter the room?