TWITTER WATCH: Why is a secular Government agency talking to me about a weather God?
What on earth is this?
Who is Tāwhirimātea?
Hey, Metservice, you are a Secular Government Agency, I look to you for weather, I don’t expect to find gods.
I’m not expecting ‘Thor says stay home’ or ‘Noah has his evacuation plan ready’.
Look, this is a liberal progressive democracy, you can believe in as many flying magical invisible wizards as you like and Māori certainly have a deeper cosmology than most Pakeha and we should respect those myths and stories the same way we respect the make believe stories we tell kids about The Easter Bunny, the Ark and Santa, but I sure as fuck don’t expect to see a Government agency who has to inform us during weather emergencies to have spiritual bullshit.
What’s next Metservice, Gaia farting to explain global warming?
Thoughts and prayers instead of weather reports?
Sacrificing animals to explore their entrails to predict the next storm? Actually this might be better than your current service.
Again, you can believe in whatever magical fairies you like, but including them in emergency weather messaging?
WTF!
While we are on Metservice, they receive over $20million each year from the Ministry of Transport for public safety forecasting services, but they also have a side hustle called ‘MetOcean Solutions’, where they provide detailed marine weather forecasting for their corporate clients. Is there a difference between the open source forecasting they provide the public and the far more detailed one they provide corporate clients, and if so does that need investigating?
Let’s have less ghosts and more critical analysis of Metservice thanks.
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This reveals just how anti-socialist the “woke” demagogues really are — and how their underlying philosophy is actually deeply conservative.
The Poststructuralists behind liberal particularism are constantly railing against the scientific method and the ideals of the Enlightenment (as they are open irrationalists and relativists).
As a result, their fake plan for “liberation” ends up promoting a retreat into mysticism and backwardness, all in the name of ‘decolonisation’.
Woke Demagogues are definitely not socialist or even left wing. Has anyone noticed yet how being woke gives you have an excuse to hate working class people?
I hate the using the word “woke” because it is so loaded these days but this group of people are socially liberal members of the established order – the people who used to vote for liberal parties before the labour movement entered parliament. They’ve managed to turn the Labour parties in most countries back into middle class liberal organisations and now hold the line against economic moves that would genuinely benefit the working class.
@Aaron I sympathise with your position but woke is absolutely left wing. It arises from left wing ‘culture’ politics rather than left wing ‘economic’ politics. Specifically neomarxism and postmodernism – a contradiction in terms if there ever was one.
The lack of an economic critique that isn’t downstream of identity gives rise to a kind of anti-politics where advancing anyone who is not white/male/straight/cis/neurotypical/right-handed/called-mike, feels highly progressive but does nothing to challenge underlying systems of power. This mean it is it very easy to game the system such as virtue theatre.
Unsurprisingly it has been embraced by neoliberal elites as a means of preserving and maintaining (economic) privilege while claiming to fight injustice.
It is a marriage of convenience and ‘wokeness’ will become unfashionable as soon as it becomes a liability to neoliberal interests. in the meantime it is the perfect distraction and channeling of activist energy post occupy wall street.
100% This is not what stressed-out weather casualties want to hear. They want facts, not clobberings from deities or deranged government agencies.
Go woke, go broke
100% Martyn. This is bullshit. This is what you get when you decolonize the public service. It f..g woke bullshit.
Make it stop….please
What if they had said Thor the thunder god?
I figure that if that were the case then we’d all just take it as a twenty-something year old leader writer trying to be clever.
Relax folks, your nerves are frayed.
Oh battered congregants we pray you live in elevated subdivisions, lord protect thou luxury beachfront properties from depreciation, and give us now online prayer vigil alongside weather reports, and we remember these words, just another ten months till summer.
I’m largely in agreement with the Listener letter re keeping folklore out of empirical science education (although hat tips and references may be appropriate from time to time, think aspirin and willow bark or marine navigation etc).
However crying ‘wokeness’ could be an overreaction here as this is an attempt at lay-public communication not education. Would we have the same response to NASA showing the path of Santa Claus on Christmas eve or references to Santa and the Easter bunny during light hearted met reports? (Which have both happened).
You could argue that this isn’t comparing apples with apples. That a light hearted spin on reports is not appropriate for the severity of the current situation. However one major cornerstone of wokeness is ubiquitous bad-faith interpretation. While hypersensitivity to wokeness is completely understandable I’d caution the mirroring bad-faith interpretation without any margin for giving benefit of the doubt.
How many christians believe santa cums down the chimney, jesus died at cross then came to life again, Noahs flood, parting of red sea, second cumming, etc ????????? Or Maori came to Aotearoa on the back of a whale or a bird.
I do – as there is an interpretation for each event,