Posts by Tom Semmens
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We can now all get the popcorn, because you can guarantee that the Tea Party faction of the Auckland National party (Slater/Brewer/Quax/Collins) will regard the NINA (National In Name Only) Future ticket as their true sworn enemies.
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If you read the internet then you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who isn't wildly exulting in the departure of Harper. But somebody must vote for him and his party.
What I am curious about is the roughly third of Canadians who voted for Harper; I’ve heard nothing about them or their demographics and beliefs and motivations beyond they are suburban and/or from the mid-west. Exactly what is the nature and make up of conservative support base in Canada, and why would they be motivated to support such a dangerous man as Harper?
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It seems to me the primary defense of a undemonstrative demeanour is that a laconic outlook is the mark of an egalitarian society, because in an egalitarian society it is your actions that do all the speaking you need for you. It seems to me that generally speaking, the more unequal the society, the more it approves of grandiloquent display. Australians, now frequently seen as a bunch of loud mouths in a wannabe US culture, were once legendary for laconic humour and O.E. Burton entitled his history of the NZ division in World War One “The Silent Division”. And of course, we have the home of laconic silence itself – the Spartans, for which we have the following anecdote of silent egalitarianism and respect:
“…An old man wandering around the Olympic Games looking for a seat was jeered at by the crowd until he reached the seats of the Spartans, whereupon every Spartan younger than him, and some that were older, stood up and offered him their seat. The crowd applauded and the old man turned to them with a sigh, saying “All Greeks know what is right, but only the Spartans do it…”
I guess once we were happy to be a undemonstrative society that looked after it’s old people, but nowadays we are happier to join the rest of blowhards. Being undemonstrative has it’s own heavy social costs but I think prefer the old school approach to all the child like capering about you see these days on the sports field.
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Shorter Tariana Turia: Better a Brown bro than a Rihanna hoe.
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I can't stand Veitch. Apart from anything else, he fawns in the most sickening way over sports stars and spends most of his time on air recounting his various soirées he attends to ingratiate himself with the grea and the good of NZ sport.
On a more personal level, I heard a friend of mine tell of her reasonably recent encounter with Veitch in a Ponsonby bar that was... interesting.
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Hard News: The positive option of Red Peak, in reply to Sacha,
I think eugenics has never strayed to far from core National party beliefs, it kinda went out of fashion after that unfortunate business in Europe in the 1940s but they’ve never really quite let it go.
Perhaps it's another area for fruitful cooperation with the Greens, after all they think there are to many humans. A nice bit of authoritarian population culling for the good of the planet and society. James Shaw will be all over it.
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Rob's unrepentant Blairism continues to believe in the tooth fairy - that the ideological state apparatuses of neoliberal capitalism will give the left a fair suck of the sav if we just get the tone right, if we are just a bit reasonable, if we just carefully tailor the appeal to hard working New Zealanders.
It's total bullshit dude. The gilded age is back, complete with the need to fight capitalism by every means at our disposal, no more appeasing the unappeasable greed of the boss class.
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A flag serves two functions, as an emotional statement of nationalistic identity and as a political statement of unity. It is amazing to me that so far in this “debate” we’ve managed to not once mention the primary role of flags as nationalist vehicles and/or political statements. No wonder we keep ending up with feeble corporate logos, anaemic designs befitting an anaemic debate.
A flag makes no sense as something to be concerned about unless you accept that it is a symbol of who and what we are and what the realities of our cultural and political values might be. That is why this debate is so hollow. No one is going to say out loud that the vast majority of NZers will not countenance any design with a heavy Maori influence because that would raise questions about the complete disconnect between the elite and the wider population on the matter of the place and importance or otherwise of Maori in a modern New Zealand. No one wants to say out loud they hate the silver fern black flag because they regard it as symbolic of a bunch of redneck ignoramuses who love rugby to much and they don’t want a bar of that NZ. And no one wants to say that stuff because no one can be bothered with the shit storm it’ll stir up if they do. Which tells me there is no real appetite for change.
So we end up with the curious amnesia of this hollow debate divorced from any sort of political or cultural context. If you want a metaphor for John Key, then I guess this ill-thought out, ego-driven, vacuous, and frivolously poll driven flag debate is as good as any.
The whole thing really is a grim joke.
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My view is the only flag popular enough to have stood a chance against the Blue ensign – the silver fern “black flag” – was disqualified for the most trivial reasons. None of the other designs have the same emotional ’ooomph” as the silver fern black flag.
Perhaps we need to step back a bit and adopt a suck-it-and-see strategy of adopting the silver ferm flag as an official alternative flag to the blue ensign when been flown as a jack on a RNZN warship and as a military flag (after all, the silver fern on black was first widely used to represent NZ troops in the Boer war) alternative to the blue ensign for armed forces use in general, much like the RN white ensign is exclusively a military flag or the (now discouraged) Japanese rising sun flag. That way, we get to use the silver fern black flag when we are feeling patriotic and proud (or xenophobic and disliking of all foreign devils according to taste) at sports fixtures or when our armed forces are in action against sundry enemies.
Over time, it will replace the blue ensign for more and more uses, or it will not and fall into disuse.
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Hard News: The positive option of Red Peak, in reply to Russell Brown,
Yes, but yours involves cutting up and repositioning various bits of a Union Jack to produce a rather sad looking version of a Swastika,
Wheres simply strategically placing four red peak flags produces a very clear swastika.
I never liked the red peak flag for the simple reason I dislike chevrons on anything except Heraldic devices and Spartan shields (actually a Lambda, for Lacedaemonian). This demonstrates why.