Posts by Tom Semmens
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Hard News: Switched on Gardener: to what…, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Some of the most ignorant stupid people I know have the most monies.
“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” ― Dorothy Parker
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this government has no interest in going there.
I suppose the law of unintended consequences would see THC laced softdrinks being hawked by major breweries at every corner dairy, on the grounds they don’t need a liquor license, while the National government pretended there wasn’t a problem with that.
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You talk about drugs with serving cops? Would you light-heartedly joke about how you are able to rig the bill to your advantage in Italian restaurants in New Jersey with low level mafia hoodlums as well?
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I wonder if the disconnect between the draconian consequences of being convicted of participation in an organised criminal group and the actual facts of what the accused have got up to is leading to juries simply refusing to convict?
But I don’t know why anyone who watches reality TV police shows would really be surprised at the pointless waste of taxpayers’ dollars the switched on gardener case represents. Waging war on drugs? You might as well try and wage war on liquorice allsorts.
I watch those police/border reality shows from here and Australia, and all the sanctimonious lecturing of the voice overs can’t disguise the utter futility of the amount of time the police and customs spend busting small time drug dealers. The cost to the taxpayer must be prodigious, surely far more than treating it as a medical problem and employing more doctors and nurses and councillors would ever cost. Yet what does all that massive use of authoritarian power mostly net? Old ladies trying to make the pension go a bit further, louts looking for a quick buck, larrikins caught with a tiny or a baggie in their car, a stoner dude supplementing his minimum wage job in a gardening centre, a couple of teenagers at a music festival – that is who the police mostly catch. None of the nickel and dime stuff really justifies the loss of our liberties, invasions of our privacy and draconian sentences that in its impotent fury the state imposes on us all. The futility of the body armour and the assault weapons and the helicopters and the lavish use of manpower without regard to cost is really what these reality TV shows present to a thinking viewer.
But these shows, like the switched on gardener case, do tell us the cops are as addicted to illegal drugs as any dead beat street addict, because without drugs the need for all those flash undercover operations, the guns, the helicopters, indeed the very centrality of the current importance of the police as a state agency, would pretty much vanish as well.
And that I suspect is really the answer to the question “to what purpose….?”
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Oooh a climate change debate…
Having an opinion on Kyoto is quite different from being a climate change denier. My 2c worth is we are all dreaming if we think we will stop global warming by politely asking people to cut their standard of living and stop producing so many greenhouse gasses. Technology got us into this pickle, and the only way we'll save ourselves from a catastrophe is via technology. Carbon sequestration, space umbrellas, we had better start inventing them now.
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According to the Herald editorial:
"...Dr Joy told the newspaper that although this country promoted itself as "100 per cent Pure New Zealand", the reality came nowhere close to matching this. "We don't deserve 100 per cent Pure, we are nowhere near the best in the world, we are not even in the top half of countries in the world when it comes to clean and green," he said..."
Except anyone who reads the NY Times story will nowhere see Dr. Joy quoted as saying that. The Herald editorial writer either didn't actually read the story in the NY Times or simply made the quote up to suit their agenda.
No wonder Tim Murphy won't front.
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The Standard actually terrifies me. They appear to be about as reality-based as the US Republicans.
Where did you get that line from? Trevor Mallard via Jane Clifton?
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Why the hell do political journalists continually turn to...
...ex-ACT MP Richard Prebble to comment on Labour, a party he hasn't represented for two decades and one which he is now a bitter enemy of?
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It’s grossly unfair to tag Goff with the neoliberal do nothing brush
Goff was a cabinet minister in the fourth Labour government. Any conversion from hard line neo-liberalism he may have professed to have undergone between 2008-2011 was to little, to late and came with a massive credibility problem.
by the same token they’d hardly be the first party to shoot themselves in the foot by the membership being totally out of sink with the public they need to win over.
I think it is important to pause and consider what the principles and objectives of the New Zealand Labour party actually are.
I dislike this idea that you have to appeal to some nebulous “middle”. Nowhere in those principles and objectives is “getting elected for the sake of it”. A social democratic party needs to put forward social democratic policies and sell those to the electorate because that is what they believe in. If the electorate disagrees, they won’t win. If the electorate wants to give you a go, then you have a mandate for change. The idea that you get elected by appealing to the centre and not scaring the middle class horses is either a recipe for doing nothing significant to the underlying neo-liberal capitalist settings (Helen Clark 1999-2008) or an invitation to engage in duplicitous and lying behaviour, to adopt the hidden agenda to be enacted once elected (Key and English 2008-present). The Pagani principle, the concept that a political party is a self-justifying institution by merely existing for almost 100 years and of it being little more than a brand vehicle for ambitious egotists and political operatives, I reject totally.
I have a different take on Trevor having, briefly, worked for him.
I used to have plenty of time for him, every party needs a Mallard. But he’s been taking the piss for four or five years now. It seems that as far as he is concerned the NZLP exists to ensure he keeps a job with a six figure salary, all the perks and plenty of time to train on his fucking bike. He should have retired to the back benches in 2008 and announced his retirement in 2014 long ago. The trouble is, like the chimpanzees in the zoo tea party he is so thoroughly institutionalised he doesn’t think he could cope out in the wild.
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Labour will lose the next election if Mallard and co are re-selected for the party or are kept on in any important role. While everyone is concentrating on Cunliffe and Shearer, they are just figureheads in a fight to the finish between the rump of leftover neo-liberal do nothings and a membership which now has no memory of the gutting of the party by the traitors Douglas and Prebble but do know about the GFC and want to hear about smashing the neo-liberal consensus. The membership has again moved considerably to the left of the caucus, and it will simply not turn up to help get out the vote or do anything for the party as long as the neo-liberal rump remains in positions of influence and in a postion to ensure neo-liberalism continues as business as usual in this country.
It seems that in the last four years the only thing that has energised Mallard to get of his arse and work the media. get on message etc has been saving his own fat cat salary for doing nothing. If only Goff, King, Hipkins and Mallard had put the effort they’ve put into the last week into opposing National over the last four years!
The membership, particularly in Auckland, seems implacable in its desire to see the party purged of the hangovers of the Douglas/neo-liberal era. In turn, those hangovers clearly now consider themselves more important than the party and sitting pretty, impregnable and untouchable in their two vote caucus majority that at the moment prevents the party getting a say in the leadership.
Unfortunately, this battle isn’t over.