Posts by Tom Semmens
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Labour Day, 2010 style...
Peter Jackson: "Build me a Hobbit House"
Samuel Parnell: "I will do my best, but I must make this condition, Mr. Jackson, that on the job the hours shall only be eight for the day … There are twenty-four hours per day given us; eight of these should be for work, eight for sleep, and the remaining eight for recreation and in which for men to do what little things they want for themselves. I am ready to start to-morrow morning at eight o’clock, but it must be on these terms or none at all."
Peter Jackson: "How dare you question my genius! I'll get it made in England."
Samuel Parnell: "My brother carpenters in England have agreed to not build a house for you until you agree to my conditions."
Peter Jackson & British Builders Association: "Wah wah wah! This unrepresentative little working class socialist shit fresh off the boat from England is trying to tell us hard working Kiwi pioneers how to run our business! Look, there are 500 of my hard working Kiwi peasants rallying in our support! The government must change the law to make sure he has no rights except that which we grant him, or we shall shift all house production to America!"
John Key: "Consider it done, and here is several million pounds for us upsetting you, you poor wee morsels!"
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Lovely to see the middle class celebrating our descent into feudalism. Still, it is all good as long as the noblisse oblige of Lord Jackson ensures there are presents for Timmy this Christmas, eh?
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Tom, your habitual contempt for those who do not share your views has never been as evident as it is now.
Contempt for those who don't share my views? Looked in a mirror lately? The dripping, politically correct sanctimony of PA is a standing joke outside your own little echo chamber.
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Well, well. Divide and rule, eh? A angry mob of technicians march on the union HQ. A bunch of self-centred and self-interested actors want to split from Actors Equity. Solidarity is clearly something that happened in Poland.
And lo! The government may take the opportunity to further strip rights from all NZ workers.
No class war? Useful idiots indeed.
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Just keep on believing that, Tom.
The Fran and Phillipa whine fest on RNZ just now includes such quotes as New Zealand does not provide "certainty and stability in the workforce" and is now an "unsafe place to shoot".
Well fuck them. New Zealand workers are fine as long as they are compliant and grateful? Fran and Philla, why don't you fuck off and turn your screen writing skills to the ACT party industrial relations policy, because that is clearly your home.
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We used to be the cheapest and most compliant. Now we are neither, Randolph Hurst II has thrown his toys out his Waiarapa cot and is moving the movie offshore.
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Just to remind people, Bill English worked for Treasury at the height of it's new-right agenda and was a member of the Bolger cabinet and a committed acolyte of Ruth Richardson's brand of neo-liberalism. Nothing he has said since then indicates he has substantively recanted these extremist views, and he is now minister of finance operating in an environment of zero political oversight from his nominal boss.
He was and remains a small minded man from a small town with the mindset of a small town Tory shopkeeper. The only thing surprising about his discredited, Herbert Hoover like, economic prescriptions for the recession (budget austerity, cuts for the poor and in services, tax cuts for the rich with faith in the trickle down effect) is that anyone is surprised at his actions. They are the utterly predictable actions of a dogmatic fool who has learnt absolutely nothing from the GFC - least of all the lesson that it signalled the final and period failure of his economic religion.
The eerie similarity of the graphs detailing our faltering economic performance under the slash and burn of another conservative dim-wit rural minister of finance (Bill Birch) post the Asian financial crisis and now again under English post(?) the GFC means New Zealand now finds itself in a remarkable economic groundhog day.
Birch and Brash prolonged the recession of the 1990's and sacrificed our working class on the alter of their doctrinaire monetarism. They left our country wallowing in feeble or zero growth when the rest of the world powered on to strong post-recession growth in the 1990's. They presided over the collapse of wage growth and we saw the Australian wage gap emerge.
All this Bill English seems to determined to repeat, while his lazy boss complains about how hard his job is before taking another vacation in Hawaii.
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Hmmm, the fundy married father of two from Papakura who I work with just switched his vote back to Labour over this.
The thing that has struck me about this debate though is how BRAINWASHED by neo-liberal orthodoxy large parts of the population has become, where the efficiency of the tax system and purity of the economic model is now the dominant consideration in thinking about taxation. -
I suppose this is a start, but if you really wanted to lower food prices you'd set up government run supermarkets that offered produce at fair cost plus running expenses only to the public.
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There are a lot of high functioning pot smokers out there who do not advertise their presence, just as with the great mass of highly functioning alcoholic professionals we have in New Zealand.
In terms of abuse, equating functioning pot smokers with alcoholics isn't such a good idea! Of course, getting completely nailed from shooting up with heroin twice a day doesn't stop people holding down good jobs - it is paying for the stuff that does. It doesn't sound like a particularly fun way of spending your life, but drinking two bottles of wine a night cos you are trapped in a job you hate and marriage you'd rather not be in is a pretty depressing prospect as well.
Cheap heroin would probably mean heroin addicts would at least keep payingtheir taxes.
I do take your point, but one of the core conumdrums of the drug debate is that articulate middle class supporters of legalisation have a very bad habit of extrapolating from their (very privileged and untypical) particular to the general, without having the foggiest idea of bleakness that is the wider drug abuse scene. That is when they collide head long into enforcement and health agencies, whose familiarity with the downside of drugs usually makes these frontline agencies strong advocates of continuing prohibition.
I am in favour of legalisation not because I have any hippy illusions about the world being a better place for mind altering experiences, but because I think the utilitarian argument is overwealmingly in favour of legalisation.