The Labour Party and Green Party Leadership – boldly going where no one is following
Hello?
Labour Party, Green Party.
Hello?
Is there anyone awake? At all?
If the Greens could perhaps stop self mutilating the launch of their new candidate and if Labour could possibly stop picking fights with one of NZs most respected TV Journalists, Professor Richard Dawkins is on the phone…
Richard Dawkins: NZ could be Trump-era ‘Athens’
A world-famous thinker says New Zealand could be the “Athens of the modern world” in a post-election love letter urging our country to gobble up the globe’s brightest minds amid fallout from the US election and Brexit.
Writing for Scientific American alongside other prominent scientists in a piece reacting to Donald Trump’s election win this week, Richard Dawkins wrote our “deeply civilised small nation” should try to lure top scientists from the UK and US eager to escape their countries.
The British ethologist and author of the book The God Delusion wrote how “the two largest nations in the English-speaking world have just suffered catastrophes at the hands of voters – in both cases the uneducated, anti-intellectual portion of voters”.
…as I fucking type, the Greens and Labour should be immediately working on a reply to Dawkins saying, “Dear Professor, thank you for your thoughts, if elected in 2017, the Greens and Labour Party wish to implement this plan of yours and we will offer citizenship to every top scientist in the world citizenship. Could you please help us spread the word”.
That’s what the Greens and Labour SHOULD be doing.
Sadly they are quietly rocking in darkened rooms after Trumps unthinkable victory whispering to themselves, ‘What do you mean identity politics won’t win us the election? What do you mean identity politics won’t win us the election? What do you mean identity politics won’t win us the election?”
If Labour and the Greens could rouse themselves from their collective shock that the white working classes who are being failed by their acquiescence to neoliberalism would vote for the right, they could gain from taking up Dawkins offer and looking modern and forward thinking with real opportunities for those working classes rather than look utterly flat footed and out of touch.
If Labour and the Greens won’t do this, Gareth Morgan sure as hell will.
‘Is there anyone awake? At all?’
No.
No one in ANY political party is awake. And only about 0.1% of the populace is awake:
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/mlo_two_years.png
Labour and the Greens have been asleep for a while now. The one with the most to offer in that photo is the Gull.
I truly believe MSM doesn’t help. Here is a prime example of this .Every piece by Tevett has an anti-opposition slant but all pieces are about opposition, not one on National.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11581013
NZ’s msm are saboteurs of Labour and the opposition. I am wondering if the anger that we are seeing in a number of articles is to do with political jealousy and a worry over Mana. Maori party sold out to the Nats again, this time with the RMA.
Right, and how will that make housing affordable, Bomber? More foreign property purchasers? Do you care about NZers shut out of the property market? What’s your plan, exactly?
Well said, and please don’t get angry with me becasue i agree with you.
No. Reply in, 3, 2, 1………. Loading
My reply must have gotten lost in the filter
I wake up angry. I have a plan. You won’t like it, but it is going to happen regardless…
Lol fair enough, at least this time you didn’t give me a bollocking for agreeing with you.
I’m firmly of the opinion that most Labour MPs don’t give a fat rat’s arse about whether or not they ever get into power or not .
They’ve all got good pay packets … they can sit in opposition for decades and never suffer .
Their continued hearty support for Neo-Liberal policies tells me everything .
Speaking with a group of friends last night ..someone who takes no notice of, or interest in, politics, piped up and said ” I dunno why Labour and National don’t just join together , they’re so similar – they could pick the best of each party and ….” ( about then my eyes glazed over ).
Hone..GIVE IT UP LABOUR – you’re an effing disgrace – grab your pensions and fuck off will ya ?
Marama Davidson should become the new Green’s co-leader, for a start, to change the spirit, I think. Metiria has looked a bit tired and short of ideas for a while, and James seems to think going into Parliament is just another day at the office.
Andrew may need a bit more media training, and most certainly could Labour do with some good, new candidates, who bring in new ideas and motivation.
It worried me much, when I heard, they intend to go into the election only with a small set of policies.
We can do with some bright and talented from places like the UK and the US, and making this country a new base for top scientists sounds like a damned good idea.
We are more likely to be overrun by rich ,corrupt Democrats escaping the USA .
Dawkins is dead wrong about us being a deeply civilised small nation. Where the hell did he get that idea? Deeply civilised…. what a bloody joke.
I normally like Martyn’s posts but this one seems a bit bizarre. IMHO Labour are still floundering a bit, but the Greens ‘self-mutilating’? What?
The people ‘self-mutilating’ are the majority of middle New Zealand who still somehow believe in perpetual ‘economic growth’ despite increasingly clear limitations on sustainable energy sources, strategic minerals, clean water, healthy soil, fish stocks, and above all a stable climate. These limitations will not go away despite the fond myths we keep telling ourselves. Have any political commentators ever heard of the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Time to get acquainted… At least the Greens sort of ‘get’ the limitations we are going to have to live within if we plan to have a liveable future.
I detect some sour grapes again. How do you know Lab/Greens won’t once in government? IMO it is about time Labour challenged the lies by msm. Andrea Vance deserved to be pulled up, she purposely mislead after being fully briefed, and look at Trevett jumping on Vance’s coat tails to grab a headline for herself. Anything that Labour and the opposition says or tries to do is pulled apart by the media.
What is it with the Gareth Morgan nonsense? Morgan is not going to address housing or immigration (newsflash… wanting to change our immigration policy does not necessarily make one racist, xenophobic or anti-immigration… neo-colonial levels of immigration WILL lead to civil war… what’s “progressive” about the latter? NOTHING). Watch Mt. Roskill…
At the risk of repeating myself.
NZ is an agricultural economy. It is, right? Agricultural yea? A scant few NZ’ers grow foods and harvest wool, trees and fishes etc too. On a pretty big scale also, all things considered.
Invented refrigerated shipping etc to reach out to a winter bound northern hemisphere.
NZ also climbed a very steep hill first, cultivated a group of grown men to be the very best in the world at running over other grown men enthusiastically with a pointy ball, split the atom and has a unique indigenous culture which can, without the written word, explain to this writer the very essence of creation, birth, life and death in such a way that I have been preaching my new learning to every ear I can find. Maori ‘ get it’ white people. Fuck church! Maori will tell you things that you will find enormously comforting in your times of need and when your death is closing in.
But all that. All that knowledge, culture and achievements mean nothing at all if you’re hungry. If you’re hungry, you lose interest in your new BMW. If you’re hungry you could care less about The Block. If you’re hungry you don’t care for sexy times with your sweetie. All you care about is how hungry you are.
The world is going to get hungry very, very soon.
To recap.
What do we do best?
Who is going to be what very , very soon?
I know.
Two trick questions.
Perhaps wall to wall intellectuals here can help you with the maths. ( Yes, I know. Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. )
Here’s what this humble old waffler thinks.
Labour, National, The Green Party and the others, including your well intended self @ Martyn Bradbury, have no idea as to which conversation pathway you should take. Such is the brilliance of the swindle and its effect it’s had on the hearts and minds of Kiwis. You’re so blinkered by bull shit and hype you can’t see the simplicity for the faux complexity you’ve been sold.
Labour know that. They just can’t summon up the courage to broach the subject. The Truth is so awful in its realisation and yet would be so beautiful in its effect.
You can have your intellectuals. I want to keep the company of a fellow who can grow a spud, kill and hang a pig, catch a fish, can make a clean kill at 1000 m and can tell a joke.
I have a joke for you. It’s not mine. It was in a film I saw recently. ‘ Violet and Daisy. ‘
It’s not verbatim.
A Dr was talking to his best friend and confided that he’d been sleeping with his patients.
” Oh my God ! How many ” Asked the friend.
” Five or six ” replied the contrite Dr.
” Jesus ! You must stop that altogether ! What you’re doing is… is… reprehensible ! Awful ! A terrible breach of trust just to have sex ! Oh my God ! I’m your friend and I’m telling you, you must stop at once. ”
The Dr looked down at his shoes and said ” I know. I feel awful. It’s just that…. I can’t help myself. Something comes over me… There’s the seduction, the yearning… my heart pounds, I get breathless at the thought of the conquest… ! Just thinking about it makes me feel ….. Alive ! ”
The patient and understanding friend relaxed and nodded his head in understanding just to be kind then reminded the Dr, that there was that added complication.
” You are a vet remember. ”
All jokes aside. We’re primarily an agricultural economy. It’d pay to remember that too.
NZ has been subjected to decades of anti-intellectualism and anti-scientific rhetoric, and is now effectively a nation of moronic consumers who haven’t got a clue about anything of significance and whose opinions are determined by the propaganda delivered to them by the mainstream media.
Further to my comment about ALL political parties carrying out continuous sabotage of the next generation by promoting the continued burning of fossil fuels, we should note that, at 403 ppm, atmospheric CO2 is the highest ever [in human history] for the time of year by a big margin, and that the Arctic ice cover is the lowest ever [in human history] for this time of year by a huge margin:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
When atmospheric CO2 breaks through 410 ppm (maybe even breaks through 412 ppm) next Northern Hemisphere spring we should expect the accelerating planetary meltdown to accelerate a little more.
Trump or no Trump, Clinton or no Clinton, Morgan or no Morgan, Labour, Greens, National, NZ First…….none of them will make one iota of difference to where we are headed as a species (extinction in a few decades) because they all promote the burning of fossil fuels and the accelerating planetary meltdown which is an inevitable consequence of that insanity.
‘It is a vision of a future so apocalyptic that it is hard to even imagine.
But, if leading scientists writing in one of the most respected academic journals are right, planet Earth could be on course for global warming of more than seven degrees Celsius within a lifetime.’
‘According to the current best estimate, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if humans carry on with a “business as usual” approach using large amounts of fossil fuels, the Earth’s average temperature will rise by between 2.6 and 4.8 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
However new research by an international team of experts who looked into how the Earth’s climate has reacted over nearly 800,000 years warns this could be a major under-estimate.’
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/climate-change-game-over-global-warming-climate-sensitivity-seven-degrees-a7407881.html
And I doubt any of the aforementioned will make any difference [politically] to where NZ is headed as a fascistic police state, since they all pretend NZ is not a fascistic police state.
Well one good thing that Trump has just shown us is that the field is wide open for someone with a bit of grit, a bit of outsider status, to capture popular opinion and if the left don’t do it then the right will. National are tired and ready to be picked off. But that person needs some attitude and the ability to go past NZ’ers nicely nicely facade – Key and Joyce do this often. Need someone who is prepared to call Hosking a boof-head priveleged prick and a useless journalist to his face. And Gower.
So if you can find that person there are so many hot buttons they can focus on along the theme of one set of rules for the rich pricks and another set for the rest of us, and that NZ is losing what made us great in the past. Get jobs in there somehow.
Those buttons include; AK/WN/CH house prices (high CGT on 3+ houses – let people buy 1 extra house for the kids, restrictions on foreign non-resident ownership), water pollution – use nostalgia of the good old days, raise tax rates for high incomes and shut down foreign tax havens & loopholes, “managed” immigration (yes, have to be careful here), stop the trade deals that disadvantage NZ’ers, etc. etc.
This should be easy – but would be a very different tack from Lab/Greens and they probably aren’t capable of it. Needs to be someone more jarring, tougher, less PC. But the left has been so docile for so long…as I say, the space is open, but who will take it?
Oh dear. With his comments about “the uneducated, anti-intellectual portion of voters”, Dworkins simply reveals his middle class biases. Describing NZ as a “deeply civilised small nation” reveals his complete ignorance of politics beyond the corporate media narrative, where politics is a horse race between two competing styles of neo-liberalism.
The US election wasn’t a landslide win for Trump, who only got about 25% of the vote. It was a resounding defeat for Clinton, and the war-mongering, neo-liberal, TPP-thumping hegemony she represents. The vote to leave the EU wasn’t a victory for UKIP, it was a resounding defeat for the UK “liberal class” (to quote Pilger), the Cameronite tories and the Blairites “centre”. To see either of these results as defeats for the left requires buying into the delusions that neo-liberals like Blair and Clinton are part of the left.
If there are no genuine left candidates for the anti-neo-liberal voters to rally around, corporate-funded astroturf campaigns will pretend to oppose neo-liberalism to soak up those votes. This is why Trump won. Not because the US has magically transformed into a racist, sexist country, but because Trump made the right anti-TPP, pro-jobs noises in the Rust Belt states, and Clinton had so little to offer that she couldn’t beat 25% of the vote. Jonathon Pie got it bang on, and Dworkins can go back to his ivory tower and mind his own business.
“”wasn’t a landslide win for Trump, who only got about 25% of the vote. It was a resounding defeat for Clinton””..+100
This is it. It’s that simple. The sooner ‘we’ stop babbling on about Trump supporters being the problem, or (apparently) slack arse young feminists being the problem (according to the Guardian), the sooner progressives/Lefties can get on with presenting the voter with a positive genuine vision, the sooner we can avoid descending into some sort of fascist dystopia.
what does one expect after all queen annie king declared the zombie little in charge of being the media front person, meanwhile in greenland the party is suffering from the withdrawal of its ozzy brain trust
+100 Good Post…Martyn Bradbury
In a time of critical need, that being the quakes, i thank fuck that the above retards, who whose to get photographed between seagulls, are not in charge.
Somehow, I don’t think you live in Canterbury…
But what would these scientists do?
I do live in Canterbury as it happens and have personal experience with EQC after my house was written off and was in the position of assisting many others with their issues. Some people simply had unrealistic expectations and will never be happy. Those that applied a bid of logic to their situation, made some reasonable decisions and chose to get on with life have in the main come out ok. Without doubt the process has taken too long for some and a bit of a cluster for others. Given the Given the circumstances I hate think what a mess someone other that the present government would have made of it.
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