Look, I don’t think these alt-right polemicists should gain access to council venues either, just as I wouldn’t want ISIS recruitment seminars in the Town Hall, KKK monthly meet & greets in Council Chambers or Man love Boy Association annual sing alongs at Silo Park, but I still support them appearing if they find a private venue, just as I am prepared to protest their appearing!
Where I would accept the use of Council venues is if it were a debate. If these far right protagonists want to come to NZ to just demand a pulpit to preach from, there’s the door, but if they were prepared to debate their views under debate rules, step on up, let’s have the debate because here’s the real problem for us on the Left and the progressive side of politics, this isn’t going away.
So technically, NZ is less environmental than Al Qaeda?!? If you add the pointlessness of being carbon neutral by 2050 when the polar caps will be melted by 2030, our generations ‘nuclear moment’, as proclaimed by Jacinda is not exactly, “I can smell the Uranium on your breath from here’ moral certainty and more, “I can smell the garlic down wind from you at an all you can eat garlic festival” undistinguishable passiveness.
Supermarkets and retail outlets have moved an inch toward addressing the hundreds of millions of plastic bags usually in a one-way journey to the landfill, by phasing out single-use check out carry bags at various outlets.
But the pervasiveness of plastic in our lives and in the environment show both market failure, and government failure, to adequately deal with the forces of production creating pollution problems way bigger than free bags at the till.
Farrar needs to claim the media are left wing all of a sudden to delegitimise wider debate and new voices joining that debate.
…Hoots is correct to hold up Trump as a risk to everything, but it’s not the destruction he’ll do to the neoliberal hegemony that’s the issue, it’s that the neoliberal hegemony empowered Trump in the first place.
Of course far right polemicists have the right to speak in NZ – what they don’t have a right to is community funded space to speak in – but nothing is solved by banning this toxicity – if the left can’t argue the far right and win, we’ve lost, not them
The surprise over LottoBuild that allows well paid IT millennials who read the Spinoff to own a little slice of Jacinda’s aspiration shows Phil knows how to manage expectations.
So much for New Zealand’s independent foreign policy. The Strategic Defence Policy Statement, released today, puts New Zealand firmly in the American camp. It portrays China as a threat, warning of China’s “ability to quickly deploy a range of additional capabilities in and around key international shipping lanes.”