The Daily Blog Open Mic – 25th July 2024

By
The Daily Blog
-
9
67

Announce protest actions, general chit chat or give your opinion on issues we haven’t covered for the day.

The Editor doesn’t moderate this blog,  3 volunteers do, they are very lenient to provide you a free speech space but if it’s just deranged abuse or putting words in bloggers mouths to have a pointless argument, we don’t bother publishing.

All in all, TDB gives punters a very, very, very wide space to comment in but we won’t bother with out right lies or gleeful malice. We leave that to the Herald comment section.

EDITORS NOTE: – By the way, here’s a list of shit that will get your comment dumped. Sexist abuse, homophobic abuse, racist abuse, anti-muslim abuse, transphobic abuse, Chemtrails, 9/11 truthers, Qanon lunacy, climate deniers, anti-fluoride fanatics, anti-vaxxer lunatics, 5G conspiracy theories, the virus is a bioweapon, some weird bullshit about the UN taking over the world  and ANYONE that links to fucking infowar.

- Sponsor Promotion -

9 COMMENTS

  2. Reading some stuff on Machiavelli, deeper than is understood.   And in the preface some interesting thoughts and references.  This one touching on fear.

    ‘Political scientist Corey Robin, the author of a major book in 2004, FEAR;  THE HISTORY OF A POLITICAL IDEA.  “One day” he wrote “the war on terrorism will come to an end.  All wars do.  And when it does, we will find ourselves still living in fear; not of terrorism or radical Islam\, but of the domestic rulers that fear has left behind.”  Our discussion, which led to the publication in 2015 to [from French], ‘Spreading fear: the political uses of an emotion), asked whether the American way of fear might be exported around the world.’…

    There is at the end of consideration this thought.  “What will…happen to the republic?  This question inevitably arises when anxiety is felt about democracy, because the republic loses its stability when it no longer reflects a pacified equilibrium between the different fears that divide it.”  This refers to USA I think but could be France, and I think we could see it applying to us in NZ/AO.
    Patrick Bouchron
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Boucheron

    Patrick Boucheron has been a professor at the Collège de France, holding the Histoire des pouvoirs en Europe occidentale, XIIIe-XVIe siècle chair, since 2015. He has formulated concepts such as political fictions and political experiences, around which he seeks to reconfigure a history of power since the Middle Ages.
    Patrick Boucheron | LUMA Live
    LUMA Arles  https://www.luma.org › live › people~Luma~P~PA~PA…

  3. Patrick Bouchron – in English –
    Boucheron, Patrick (2020). Machiavelli. The Man Who Taught the People What They Have to Fear. New York: Other Press. ISBN 9781590519523.

  4. Antonio Gramsci was not a professional philosopher. His intellect was refreshingly situated within an inherent bias towards the common people, the ‘subaltern’ classes, particularly the working class.

    He argued that all people are essentially intellectuals, in the sense that all people possess the intellectual faculties for rational thinking and deduction, though “not all men have in society the function of intellectuals”.

    Thus, intellectualism should not exist for its own sake, but as a direct response to the collective needs of society.

    In the same way that change in society is driven by class struggles, intellectuals are also involved in similar struggles, which are intrinsically linked to the cultural, ideological or political spheres.
    https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2407/S00047/dear-west-your-age-of-monsters-has-begun.htm

  5. Today;s funny in Kiwiland.
    https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/523054/why-electric-kiwi-is-closing-to-new-customers-and-why-it-matters
    here is a warning that high wholesale power prices could push more small electricity retailers out of business – and hit businesses and households in the pocket.

    Electric Kiwi said this week it would not accept any new customers for the time being. Chief executive Luke Blincoe said the wholesale market had “completely blown up” and wholesale prices were now above retail prices.
    While the company had hedging – a sort of insurance against future price rises – that helped to spread the impact of that for its existing customers, it could not afford the cost of taking on new hedging arrangements for new customers.

    “When we made the decision a week ago the wholesale market had gone up 48 percent in six months, it’s probably gone up by another quarter in the last week so there’s no viable retail competition we can offer.”

    The Electricity Authority blames “tight supply conditions” for the high prices. The hydro lakes were lower than they normally would be at this time of year, so hydro generators were conserving storage to get through winter demand, it said.

    But we have water to sell by overseas marketers and pour onto dairy farms. Is there a problem with our business systems for the country???

  6. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/523056/opt-out-clause-used-to-justify-lack-of-procurement-process-for-gumboot-friday-funding
    Government has been trapped with its feet in concrete boots? Well sort of, having made stupid rules for how to behave as everything has to be offered first to business ie the people it hopes to make good friends with for the future. When it wants to do something of an initiative for itself, gummint is strapped for cash and bound in barbed wire. Didn’t we make barbed comments about this supposed breakthrough to preferring the private sector? We are being strangled now – how do we get rid of the ties that bind us to our loving government and its remora feeders, they aren’t even leeches which can be used for remedial purposes?

Comments are closed.