As we spin on this tiny rock completing another circle around a medium sized sun at the arse end of the Milky Way Galaxy, these are insignificant ramblings trying to fish up some meaning for a 12 month period where nothing seemed to matter in the face of climate change while simultaneously everything managed to offend huge swathes of people you’ll never meet.
2018 has been the year of the Woke Left & Alt Right, fringes of identity politics fuckwittery that have managed to infect the political debate and turn it in on itself in a never ending cycle of social media outrage olympics and the narcism of tiny difference.
The commercial media market in NZ is at saturation point with right wing pundits and Radio Live never offered an alternative to that and ended up trying to compete for ZB listeners using bait that was not as right wing as ZB could produce.
HAVE YOU EVER wondered what the enormous popularity of reality television reveals about contemporary New Zealand culture? Understandably, the nation’s cultural elites do not consider this to be an important question. What the lower orders choose to pollute their minds with is hardly worthy of serious consideration. The only social significance attachable to reality television is the extent to which it uses up space and resources that could, much more profitably, be devoted to genuine cultural production.
It’s like Stuff keep threatening to gut journalism while yelling ‘what a shame that will be for democracy’ and democracy is too busy sharing a white supremacist explanation for why 9/11 was an inside job that includes aliens and fluoridation in water on Facebook and just mumbles over its shoulder, ‘well off you go then’.
After shaking my head at the total lack of a media plan to boost the invisibility of the Green Party Welfare reforms, Marama has appeared on the AM Show and given a trainwreck of an interview.
What a joyful journalistic juxtaposition.
Honestly, this is seconds away from becoming a Taxpayer Union press release.
Duncan Garner was on the failing AM Show ranting like lunatic about Jacinda Ardern turning down Donald Trump’s invitation to join his new phase of the War on Drugs.
You would think after retweeting fake news that France was legalising underage sex that Judith Collins would work hard to be less of a malicious pus pit of scumbaggery on Twitter.
You would be wrong.