Posts by Alex Coleman
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jesus wept.
Just listened to the podcast of 'Willie and JT' I'm not going to link to it, but All the trigger warnings.
How the hell do we even start fixing this when broadcasters seem to think that the interview technique appropriate with a friend of a victim would be something like that of a defense lawyer.
Angry as fuck. If JT gets a party candidacy ever again, that a party will never get my vote. Never. I don't care what else he does that is 'good work'. Or how many votes he can pull.
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Idiot Savant,
TV3 just mentioned that one of the alleged rapists is the son of a police officer.
Even more pissed off about the 'bravery' comments now.
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This seems like a genuinely heartfelt statement, from someone who did some volunteer work on Palino's campaign:
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I think one way of looking at what's happening on the right is via a comparison with the US.
It's not the same of course, and I don't think that the National party is in any danger of going full GOP, but I do think that what Whale is doing is roughly analogous to things that have happened in the US right, and that he is taking strategic cues from there.
It's tempting for NZers to look at Cameron Slater and what he's doing and assume it must be and 'internal National party shit fight' type thing. I think that's wrong. I think a better way of understanding him is to compare him to Andrew Breitbart, (a comparison I also suspect he'd relish).
Breitbart was primarily about the media rather than the GOP. He set out to get a market for his output, and to change a bunch of things. Yes, he had a definite political agenda with regard to the GOP (he didn't want 'RINOS', and wanted a particularly aggressive approach to destroying liberalism), but his main efforts were about building a base of viewers that made him unignorable.
He spoke to hard core partisans who felt that the media didn't serve them, and gave them exactly what they wanted. His output was largely shit, but it was shit 'journalism' only in the sense that it was unethical by various standards of journalism that we are used to at the moment. It very much did what it set out to do.
But it's not a new thing. It's just bog standard yellow journalism, an update of the type that we can find easily enough in Papers Past here in NZ, and shit loads of it in US media history.
It's a journalism that is rife with contradictions, but they are contradictions that the viewers of it seek. When your voice has been absent from the media, someone calling the media shit for ignoring you is going to be lapped up. And that media's claims that they are the objective truth tellers calling out the bias of the MSM are going to be golden.
WOs readers and commenters are loyal as hell, they are dismissing all aspects of the story other than WO's line as 'clear agenda driven bias'. I see no reason to think they are being disingenuous about that. Certainly many of them believe it. Cam speaks directly to their world view about the media as well as to their political views.
Not all his readers believe the whole package, and nor does whale as far as I know, bu he speaks to, and gives a safe place for, a community on the right that thinks a whole bunch of things are going wrong both within NZ and in the National party which is either blind to the things that are going wrong, or has factions that are complicit, inasmuch that they won't confront it.
The things they believe are stuff like:
The greens are a communist plot (watermelons) aiming at worldwide global government (NWO).
Islamofascist threats.
Cultural marxism. The idea that teachers and journalists are inculcated in the universities with theories that are aimed at destroying the fabric of society and bringing about either communism or the NWO.
That everything the Labour Party does can basically be traced back to unions and socialism. All education policy, for example, is about protecting the teachers.
All welfare policy is about making citizens reliant on the Labour party.
There's heaps more, and it all links together to form a pretty solid worldview that doesn't get a look in to the MSM; who are thus seen as complicit in it. When the National party ignores this, it's frustrating for them, so people like whale can feed off those frustrations to build both a readership and potentially a powerblock.
Question is this: If they had pulled this Brown thing off, and got him to resign without their fingerprints being so publically all over it in such a manipulative way, what would have that meant for Slater's clout within National?
Now these are just my reckons of course, and I have no contacts with anyone at all. But I think it's worth noting that similar things to what Whaleoil is doing is also happening in the US. It's a model of journalism/political activism that is an updated version of journalism before various journalistic codes evolved. It's a journalism for a segment of society that speaks purely to them, and serves its purposes.
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Hard News: Everybody's Machiavelli, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I never said it was a good US tv Drama. ;)
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However, Ms Chuang claims she and Mr Palino discussed revealing to Mr Brown information about the affair and whether he might resign, claiming poor health. (He suffered a major heart attack in May 2008.)
"This would give him an opportunity to be a hero and assured that ... he did not lose any face, and yet allow him to move on to bigger and better political agendas," she saidIn a carpark meeting no less. If he's gonna act like he's in a US tv drama, then I guess that meeting would result in someone talking about 'conspiracy to commit blackmail'.
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The right wing blogs are building themselves quite the little epistemic bubble. WO has reminded me of the whole Breitbart thing in the states for quite a while, which hasn't worked out too well for the GOP really.
And the first comment on DPF's post about the latest this morning:
Brown has no mana left now and has to go. He is a laughing stock
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Hard News: Everybody's Machiavelli, in reply to martinb,
If every man and his dog are allowed to come out and say ‘oh his poor wife and children, he must resign’ they certainly are allowed to put their view out there. And good on them.
Thanks martin. Nailed it.
Garner, today, had me bloody livid when I read his piece saying that 'Brown couldn't have it both ways', an argument floated on whaleoil and spreading fast.
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Craig, while I agree that shots at Slater snr (or jnr) about their family relationship are completely out of order, I also think rudman makes a fair point. Albiet in a brutal fashion.
John Slater was the campaign manager. If a campaign activist was planning to drop this bomb he ought to have known. Any activist ought to have felt that doing this solo would be the end of their activism. Cameron also should have known that doing this as a black op would be an appalling thing.
And yet John Slater says he didn't know. If that is true, then John Slater wasn't doing his job of running a tight campaign in which nuclear bomb level black ops might explode via campaign activists feeling they could set them off. freestyle.
So we take John Slater at his word, and he's running a campaign in which all this went down without his knowledge.
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DPF responds to this post by objecting that it isn't about something else, namely, the thing that everyone else has been talking about everywhere else:
In a similar vein, Russell Brown has devoted an entire column to the Len Brown issue. Except in his 1,32 words on the issue he spends 1,181 words on the the so called centre-right people involved and just 51 words on the role of Len Brown. That is almost hysterically comical. The most Russell could muster was to say it was poor judgement to bonk at work and he can no longer play the family-man card!
Meanwhile, in his post on this morning's revelations about the story, this is what manages to muster about the ethics of whaleoil:
It’s ironic that Whale Oil demanded a higher level of proof than many in the media would have.