Posts by Tom Semmens
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I refuse to watch it because it breaks my heart to see the people on the bottom of the heap being kept there.
I actually felt sorry for the guy who got stoned and turned himself in to the cops just so he could get a trip out of his house.
-
No one seemed willing to say on Drug Bust how much that helicopter operation cost. It was very excitingly portrayed though...
I think a lot of people who watched this show drew conclusions that were not necessarily the intended ones.
I thought it is a funny country where we think nothing of cost-no-object funding for extensive use of the air force helicopters (on internal policing, surely using the military in such a way is a bad idea in principle), two pilots, a winchman, and dozens of cops to pull out a few hundred dope plants, yet we can't find $700,000 to maintain current funding of women's refuges.
-
When assessing how I feel about the death of Bin Laden, I note that Osama Bin Laden would have happily killed me and anyone on this forum by cutting our heads off with a stanley knife, if given half a chance. Therefore on the news of his death, I returned the cheery favour by cracking open a celebratory beer and toasting the US Navy SEALS who did him in. He was a dangerous, violent and downright bad man who has met an appropriately Wagnerian end at the hands of his sworn enemies.
In terms of being a large scale threat, Al Qaeda was finished years ago. The ability of fundamentalist terror networks to orgainse large scale atrocities has long been smashed, and they are reduced to random acts by localised lone wolves. These lone wolves might perhaps be capable of murderous outrages that kill a handful of people at most, or maybe bringing down an airliner once in a decade if really, really lucky, but that is all. With the death of Bin Laden, the material defeat of Al Qaeda has been now accompanied by a total psychological defeat as well.
As a candidate, during the 2008 election campaign Obama repeatedly vowed: “We will kill Osama bin Laden.” And so it has come to pass. Palin and the Tea Party critics of the “Kenyan Muslim traitor” can suck dick now. Obama will be returned as president in 2012, because by fufilling his campaign promise of killing Bin Laden – even if it meant violating the sovereignty of another country, which he has done – he has shut up every right wing attack meme. Forever. No wonder he was having such a jolly old time eviscerating Trump at the press club dinner, knowing what he knew.
From a practical point of view, hopefully this final crushing of Al Qaeda, along with the Arab spring and it’s explicit rejection of Islamist values and embracing of Western values of freedom, free speech, and democratic reforms, will mark the end of the era of “big terror” and a rolling back in the western powers of the state surveillance powers introduced under the umbrella excuse of the “war on terror”.
-
The country has moved on from the rather grotesque assembly of old men that now form the ACT party, and I think the electoral appeal of the day before yesterday's man Don Brash is being wildly over-estimated.
Don Brash is seventy. John Banks is sixty five. Roger Douglas is seventy five. Paul Holmes is sixty one. I pretty sure John Armstrong and Audrey Young long ago bid farewell to fifty. This whole thing is one bunch of geriatrics talking up up another bunch of geriatrics as if nothing has changed from their salad days of the 1980s.
-
It is quite hard to work out his actual politics.
I would have thought they were quite easy to work out? He is a BOMP – Bitter Old Man Party – supporter. I imagine there is a failed business or marriage in the mix as well – Redbaiter’s politics are infused with projected excuses for personal failure
-
The key to Goff's stuff-up over Darren Hughes is his deep loyalty and personal friendship to Hughes. Some people find comfort in this - Goff most certainly got it wrong, but for all the most laudable reasons. But to me, Goff's over-weaning loyalty to his sexually louche lieutenant is simply yet another monumental piece of self-indulgent political decadence from one career politician to another.
A left wing political party is, at its heart, an agent of ideological change. This drive for ideological change ultimately coalesces into the form of the party leadership, a person or persons who are meant to symbolise the fears, hopes, values and ideals of those who support their party. The ultimate aim is always an urgent desire for political power, because only power allows you to achieve improvements in the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable. A strong Labour leader should always be impatient in his or her desire to get back into power, for there is much to be done and there should be much hunger to get started. Judged by this standard, Goff's caterwauling about allowing his loyalty to Hughes to cloud his judgement sounds weak and pathetic. An impatient leader would not allow self-indulgent emotion to derail the need to get rid of these Tory bastards at the earliest possible opportunity.
MMP's biggest unintended and regrettable consequence has been the creation of this class of permanent career list-politicians and a whole new phenomena of people who simply see politics as another career option - the mother of the complainant in this affair said her son's ambition was to enter politics and become a politician, for God's sake! On current polling no one in the current Labour caucus will be set to lose their seats. even at an infamous, Bill English like result of 22% the top twenty-eight odd senior politicians in the Labour caucus would still have by dint of the party list their fat salaries, deferential staff and nice perks come November 27th. Why, exactly, should they take a risk now? What is the upside for them? No matter what happens, they've got the job for life under MMP. The consequences of this accumulation of decadent careerist politicians is obvious now in the National party, where the warmed over policy turds of Shipley is all they have offered by way of ideas. The first solution, as far as I can see, is to introduce term limits for MPs, to clean out the careerists and ensure that politicians no longer just think of themselves – as Phil Goff firmly reminded Andrew Little – as a caucus of mutually self-interested professionals, but go back to representing a party and a political movement with a job to do.
-
"I appreciate that some defendants and counsel are guilty of abusing the system but, on balance, the judiciary is not persuaded that this provides good reason for the departure from basic principle, which is involved in any requirement for advance disclosure of an intended defence," she said in her submission.
Sanctions would also be ineffective and impractical because of "uncertainty about whether the abuse of the system is the fault of the defendant or of counsel", she said.
Closest a judge can actually get to saying they'll effectively ignore the will of parliament - fighting talk indeed.
-
If David Farrar strains any harder to ignore this he's going to do himself an injury.
[DPF don't be stupid this my site and I am never, ever a hypocrite so don't ever even give me a chance to engage in pyschological projection - 20,000 demerits, which as Jeremy Corbett would say, is the same amount I billed the National Party last week]
-
What is the difference between a loan and a deferred payment?
-
Well yes, it does. Otherwise we couldn’t afford things like this… $43m lifeline to TV3 owner
Well knock me over and fuck me to a gentle rumba beat. National gives it’s right wing hate radio supporters a $43 million taxpayer bailout to keep up the good work?
Oh, and didn’t the current minister of communications once own this company? Corruption, is thine name Steven Joyce?