There is never a better fight to settle down and watch explode on Twitter than a fight between schisms.
Watching TERFs wage war on Transgender activists, middle class identity politics feminists vs class advocates, militant vegans vs zealous vegetarians, superiority complex surfers vs bitter bodyboarders, cross fitters vs the world.
Nothing cuts to the bone with the viciousness of a good old fashioned schism.
Which helps explain the extraordinarily awful column written by one of NZs leading elite Twitteratti cosmopolitans, Ben Mack, who has poison penned an hilariously damning indictment of the New Government as a dangerous shadow of far right hate mongering.
I’m not kidding. They open their column with, “A shadow is poisoning Middle-earth”.
Ben Mack prefer’s ‘they’ because they aren’t gender binary and runs Lizzie Marvelly’s feminist blog ‘Villianesse’.
Here is a photo.
That image and that bio tells you all you need to know about the identity politics cultural bubble Ben Mack wraps themselves in.
Watching the usual Twitteratti suspects splutter into their Twitter feeds at the Grade A bullshit that Mack has served up to the Washington Post is almost as amusing as reading the column itself.
Duncan Grieve has ‘charged’ to the defence of NZs new Government but hilariously doesn’t mention Ben Mack once.
Which is telling in of itself.
The Twitterrati enjoy a social media pile on more than most and with all the virtue signalling possible from the outrage Olympics that is Twitter, no one is allowed to ever disagree with them unless they too wish to face a social media crucification of Garner and Plunkett proportions.
Which is why in a 1500 word response to this article, Duncan is too frightened to even mention Ben once.
To do so is a Twitter atrocity which allows the Patriarchy to blah blah blah.
You get the picture.
In the radical fringe world of Twitter Identity Politics, binary gender and immigration controls are hate crimes, militant veganism is the only dietary option, polyamorous coupling is the only ethical sex and masculinity is a disease ranked somewhere between cancer and ebola. Now that would be fine if it was a personal belief structure, but with the new found power of social media (in particular Twitter) they have gained the ability to demand these values are universally bought into.
The hastily amended Green Party immigration policy which read like an ISIS hostage video was shaped by this elite cosmopolitanism call out culture.
This schism on the left is where National should focus if they want to take back 2020.
Most left wing and progressive voters would vomit after reading Ben Mack’s ridiculous cosmopolitan elite appraisal of the new Government and that’s where National (if they were smart) should strike.
Just follow half of these Twitter Elites from Wellington and screen shot the stuff they say and then frame it as the new Governments values.
Most NZers would be happy to accept transgender people for how they wish to identify, but being told they can’t identify pink to a girl or blue to a boy and to do so is evil is so far outside the comfort zone of middle New Zealand they’ll run screaming back to National.
Voters being told that their concerns over mass immigration is somehow racist is another cultural fault line that the Identity Politics Twitter Clique can’t help themselves but alienate with. Most of the Identity Politics Twitter Clique have social media skills that are internationally transferable so migrant rights are economic rights for them, hence their die in the ditch for open borders mentality.
These identity politics activists might think they’re being terribly clever and ahead of the cultural curve ball, but National could use their own words to cause more damage on the left than a months worth of Parliamentary first day stuff ups could achieve.
It is the culture war where National could appeal to voters who are alienated beyond comprehension by this kind of politics even if economically the new Government helps them more.
For the Ben Mack’s of NZ, paid parental leave, free education and 100 000 more new houses are pitiful facades that hides the new Government’s true hatred of immigrants.
Ben Mack is National’s greatest recruiter for middle New Zealand.
It’s worth noting that the eponymous Mr Mack, as well as being a complete idiot, is an American.
Good column by Bomber.
Labour’s fate in 2020 will be determined by how well it understands its mandate.
Labour, IMO, has a mandate to deal to poverty in our own back yard, to deal to housing and health and other areas that have been left a shambles by the previous administration.
It does NOT have a mandate to indulge in rabidly globalist virtue signalling cultural Marxism / bourgeois identity politics / regressive leftism, Antifa-style victim narratives – call it what you will. Going near this poisonous, narrative-over-fact divisive dogmatism would be electoral suicide, and hopefully Jacinda gets that.
Yes yes yes yes – and excellent profile name by the way. Pre-Blairite DC Thompson comics were fucking ace.
It should also be noted that all first term governments get a boost in the polls come the next elections because of the whole need to pass as many pieces of legislation early in the term or risk being thrown out for failing to make good on election promises. And that’s something the Greens run the risk of as the junior member of the coalition government. But this says nothing about Trevor Mallard being Speaker of the house. The guy is as safe as house in his electorate, not because he does anything great, but because he plays the game as good, if not better than Winston. When I say the game I mean dog whistles to people’s heart strings. The guys been doing it his whole political career so let’s not down play his influence in parliament. This should set a solid foundation for what some call the blitzkrieg of policy so getting as many election promises through as possible. And that’s pretty much the best response for a government fighting an opposition using bluffs and tantrums.
It was always going to be fools gold thinking the media would ever give any sort of combination Labour could put together to form government. So you do get a sense for the difference in political power. National get to hide behind press release and Labour has to front press releases. And casually sitting back, you know? Hoping that every one will come to the same realisations that Labour hold in that National are economically illiterate doesn’t get the cut through when most media say the opposite, that Labour might be economically challenged. And that’s not true. Just got to tell them, all of them that deny progress. That they’ve had it way to good. National and its financial donors plus spin merchants have had it way to good. And that Jacinda has been sent to parliament to destroy your privileges. And rebuild the kiwi dream. And this must be owned on the 9th floor. And we must hear coming from the 9th floor. Just to give the governments supporters something to rally around.
Ben Mack left-wing? Pull the other one… he’s a screaming neo-fascist and a colonist to boot.
It’s weird that he started writing under a different name when he moved to New Zealand and dramatically changed his appearance.
Also, they – Benjamin S. Mack – had that past conception of himself scrubbed from the internet.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150315073032/http://www.galomagazine.com/author/benjamin-s-mack/
Whoa man, you man themself – not himself! See, you can’t even get a grammatically correct custom pronoun. It just shows how chauvinistic the English language is.
Yeah it’s interesting though that trading the normie image for the Oscar-Wilde-meets-Willy-Wonka thing seems to have led in relatively short order for this column at the BrainWashington Post – the paper which is known for basically being the US Deep State’s version of Wikileaks.
And surprise surprise, what looks like some kind of SJW antithesis of Milo Yiannopolous is now using his Deep State sanctioned platform to equate an anti-globalist, pro-sovereignty party opposed to mass immigration and dodgy trade deals as being literally alt-right.
Witting or unwitting foreign agent? Let’s deport him! Wait, am I allowed to joke about that?
Ben Mack seems to be a genuine guy. He is an immigrant on a temporary visa and wants to stay here long term. Obviously has left-wing sympathies but he is reacting against policies that want to kick him out. Understandable and has my empathy.
NZF is the party most like Le Pens National Front. I think far-right is meaningless anyway. Those labelled as far-right, probably label themselves just as righteous.
Far-right…possible definition: nativist/Xenophobic, protectionist, for strong-state control.
I would like to see what people’s definition of far right means. It’s definitely not laisezz faire capitalism, if Nazi and Le pen meet the definition. They were both against free markets.
I suspect people’s definition of Far-left or right just means they want to far away from those policies as possible. If that’s is the case Ben Mack’s political labelling is just as valid as anybody elses.
This anti-anti-immagration thing completely mystifies me. If we haven’t got enough houses in the country for the people who are already here, doesn’t it make sense to stop importing even more people?
Identity politics has bought some important changes to our culture but some people seem to be treating it as a religion. I completely understand why right wingers like winding these sort of people up – I’m finding it hard to resist myself 🙂
Never stopped winding them up myself. Progress is the best defence.
You know I’m all in so far as that’s concerned!
mmmm…. sounds like this Mr Ben Mack would be an ideal candidate for Jim Mora’s ‘The Panel’ – there to provide a fair and balanced ‘left wing’ view – or rather a platform to exercise his ego. These days I only listen to it when there’s a locum, so perhaps he’s already provided us with his words of wisdom.
Put Ben Mack in the same room and Stephen Franks. They deserve each other.
When you write and publish items like this, I almost feel a brief glow of hope for the left. But then I see what else is written and published, and it snuffs right back out again.
What a clown. When I read Mack’s article, my suspicion was that the guy is either a closet neo-reactionary, in the Mencious Goldbug style (https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-moldbug-variations-pein). Of course, he could also be a stooge, naively doing the neo-reactionaries’ dirty work for them, but the photo above only strengthened my initial suspicion.
Like Goldbug, Peter Thiel, and the rest of the Hilarati, Mack’s essay uses a 20th century concept of “far right” that no longer makes any sense, to whip up fear of working class , anti-corporate populism among the chattering classes, and conveniently deflects criticism from the real 21st century far right (neo-liberal corporatism). Mack is either so naive, or so complicit in this agenda, he pointedly ignores that the real Fourth Reich is the replacement of both sovereign democracies *and* competitive markets with global corporate Stalinism, a model Peter Thiel described in glowing terms in this essay he wrote for the Wall St Journal:
http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f/497CapStone/Peter%20Thiel_%20Competition%20Is%20for%20Losers%20-%20WSJ.pdf
Funny you mention Peter Thiel. That was the first person I thought of too when I read Mack’s polemical piece telling other Americans how horrifying “Middle Earth” was for doing anything which could potentially limit access to us for their fellow Americans.
Neocolonialism at its finest – and by coincidence or design a Maori man is Mack’s whipping boy…
I don’t understand your argument – how can National benefit when it’s Labour being criticised for implementing these reduced (“anti”) immigration polices, that National opposed! So National in effect is aligned with the likes of Ben Macks in this case. Even in this era of double think and fake news it would be hard for the public to buy into a scenario that the looney left is in power, based on a looney left chap who has criticised the Government as being ultra right. I just don’t see this as a workable strategy for National.
But then again, Bridges did just lie to Labour about supporting Mallard and criticise Labour for trying to implement the 96 member select committee scenario, that he had led the design and consultation of, which he neglected to mention, so I guess, I should allow that anything is possible!!!
Having read Mack’s piece on the Washington Post website, I started wondering if I really was living in New Zealand – or some kind of weird alien computer facsimile… Because nothing that guy wrote bore any semblance to reality as I seem to be experiencing it.
The truly troubling thing is that uninformed Americans will read his rubbish and assume it to be true and bomb us back to the stone-age, for fear we have become the Fourth Reich of the South Pacific…
I kid you not.
That’s how awful his fantastical diatribe was.
The irony though is that while Mack complained that “the far right have seized power” in this country – some of our Aussie cuzzies are shitting their Y-fronts that we have become a “resurgent socialist republic” – https://thewest.com.au/opinion/opinion-why-the-new-zealand-poll-experiment-matters-to-australia-ng-b88638521z
So, I’m confused. Which Parallel Universe am I living in?
And how many different styles of government do we actually have?
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