Posts by Tom Semmens
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Oh and we’ve found a distant relation twice removed in Dunners, so the road trip to watch Italy-Ireland is back on. The fact that we are somewhere between eight and ten in number and are merely allocated floor space in the lounge for our blow up mattresses is neither here nor there, it is a roof and it keeps us off the streets.
Do they have electricity in Dunedin for domestic use?
And a German friend of mine here for the cup just got back from Wellington. he used “compact”, “quaint” and “little” in his glowing description of the capital, words I encouraged him to use often and loudly when talking to locals whilst he is down there for some matches.
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this should be a good, hard-hitting affair and that will just be in the crowd.
Edited for truth.
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I don’t get the relentless negativity, I really don’t.
We’ve organised to fly to Queenstown and see a friend who has relocated there, then head over to check out the new stadium in Dunedin with five friends from Ireland to watch the game between Ireland and Italy.
Big mistake. We can’t anywhere to stay that isn’t angling to price gouge to the max. If that is Dunedin, then all I can think is the accommodation sector in this country has the mentality of greedy small town shopkeeper and is in the grip of a collective madness brought on by a short sighted greed. Visitors to our country – our guests – are going to get to behold an opportunist freeding frenzy at their expense every bit as disgusting and short sighted as the madness that gripped the London rioters, only without the excuse of desperation.
We’ve cancelled the whole Dunedin thing. We’ll all stay with our friend in Queenstown and watch it on the telly. Fuck getting ripped off by a bunch of tossers who think price gouging is not just acceptable, but something to be proud of. The foreign press is going to eat our hospitality sector alive for all the base greed and ripping off that will be going on in front of their eyes, and hopefully we will get the decade in the tourism wilderness we seem intent on richly deserving.
So yeah, hard to get excited about it when the moment you do, you are confronted by an orgy of greed.
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Is arguing about social media really that important when your spy agencies are now going to be engaged in using their huge powers on domestic criminal acts, with seemingly nary a batting of an eyelid by anyone?
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Coming from Hawke's Bay I've yet to see a proper cracking frost in Auckland, so I am still waiting for it to get REALLY cold up here.
but i did light the fire last night.
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basically, the government paying private providers to “look after” beneficiaries, instead of paying the beneficiaries directly.
The government can the cut funding to the private provider, thus freeing up funding for more tax cuts for the rich. The private provider will then be “incentivised” to get people off the benefit. The private provider (inevitably run by government cronies – either John Keys or Tariana Turias, the effect will be the same) can then aggressively cut people from benefits, and, like some medaieval tax farmer, pocket the difference as “profit”.
the private provider is immune from OIA requests, the government gets to slash social spending, there is a wealth transfer from taxpayers to government cronies, and they get claim beneficiary numbers are dropping at the same time as a bonus.
Lots of Tory love all round.
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The problem with arguing over the best method of repression is the riots are over. The discussion isn't about the best policing method to deal with such guerilla rioting. Short of martial law and shutting down the mobile phone networks nothing could have stopped the rioting in real time. It is about the how a temporarily impotent state expresses it's rage at it's impotency to do much about these riots and about how it extracts the maximum revenge.
I am sure David Cameron would, if he thought it possible, clone Judge Jeffreys in a trice. After all, he of the bloody assizes had no "fake concerns" about human rights.
The abject terror engendered in the middle class and the political elites by this rioting by the filthly virmin in their midst explains for us today the conditions that led to transportation for stealing a loaf of bread or hanging for pinching a monogrammed hankerchief.
Thus have the toffs and the middle class always responded to the violence of the mob.
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It’s a sodding journal article, so I can’t get the full paper, but the abstract is extremely interesting
The good folks at Lenin's tomb have got there already!
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The right wing establishment in Britain clearly now feels it has carte blanche to unleash a rampage of vengeance. Rubber bullets, water cannon, summary police execution - Cameron is not going to let any "fake concerns" about human rights get between him and his Mosley moment in the sun. Increased repression of the marginalised in their London barrios is now the crisp order of the day. Britain is already a reflexive surveillance state - that much the government response to these riots confirm. Cameron's rhetoric indicates that a frightened elite is sliding towards the dictatorship model offered by Argentina and Chile in the 1970s as the next step.
At the moment, the world's economy since 2008 is mirroring the collapse that followed the great slump of 1929 with a frightening symmetry, and that great crisis almost swept away social democracy. The reaction of Cameron, aided and abetted by the deliberate obscuring of the truth by an almost hysterically right wing yellow press, says to me that the we may be heading into a dark valley every bit as frightening as that of the 1930s.
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Over at kiwipolitico, Pablo nails it 100%