Winston is worse than ever, he seems to have remodelled himself after Donald Trump and has gone for the anti-vax crowd. He's now on a mission to destroy trust in public journalism. The only redeeming thing about him is that having him in government screws National and ACT's plans to sell New Zealand off to the global mega-rich to build their Ayn Rand utopia in. If you guys weren't aware, the global mega-rich intend to make New Zealand their apocalypse bunker so they're quietly working to take the country off us, and our National and ACT politicians are as eager as used-car salesmen to flog it off to them.

I do support longer parliamentary terms - then we would have actually seen some more of the last government's reforms actually flow through - but I sure hope this so-called "coalition of cookers" collapses in fewer than three years.

I also learned a new word, it's from Australia. "Cookers" are basically Australian MAGAs.

I also thought Jacinda Ardern was too centrist and too concerned with trying to please all sides, but her government were actually doing a lot of good things quietly, and she's still the most hated woman in New Zealand regardless, so all that people-pleasing was for nothing - the right-wing still think she's worse than Hitler and she deserves to be gang-raped and so on.

Honestly I think she was right to resign when she did because as terrible as it is to say, misogyny is rampant, hating women is very much in style, and any female in a position of influence who isn't an avowed hard-right piece of shit is just a magnet for hate, abuse and threats right now.

Anthony Flack wrote: Sun Dec 03, 2023 4:16 pm I also thought Jacinda Ardern was too centrist and too concerned with trying to please all sides, but her government were actually doing a lot of good things quietly, and she's still the most hated woman in New Zealand regardless, so all that people-pleasing was for nothing - the right-wing still think she's worse than Hitler and she deserves to be gang-raped and so on.

Honestly I think she was right to resign when she did because as terrible as it is to say, misogyny is rampant, hating women is very much in style, and any female in a position of influence who isn't an avowed hard-right piece of shit is just a magnet for hate, abuse and threats right now.

See also, in the States: Hillary, the Squad and Elizabeth Warren.

InMySoul77 wrote: Sun Dec 03, 2023 4:23 pm

Anthony Flack wrote: Sun Dec 03, 2023 4:16 pm I also thought Jacinda Ardern was too centrist and too concerned with trying to please all sides, but her government were actually doing a lot of good things quietly, and she's still the most hated woman in New Zealand regardless, so all that people-pleasing was for nothing - the right-wing still think she's worse than Hitler and she deserves to be gang-raped and so on.

Honestly I think she was right to resign when she did because as terrible as it is to say, misogyny is rampant, hating women is very much in style, and any female in a position of influence who isn't an avowed hard-right piece of shit is just a magnet for hate, abuse and threats right now.

See also, in the States: Hillary, the Squad and Elizabeth Warren.

Did Ardern ever claim to be part Māori?

I don't recall her making any kind of gaffes or slip-ups that they could use to curb-stomp her with; the only "dirt" they ever dug up was that she was an intern in the UK Labour Party when Tony Blair was prime minister, which didn't really cause the desired level of outrage.

Doesn't matter 'cause she's still a rat-faced communist even if she didn't screw up, the bitch. That's her problem, she's too slick you see, too much of a PR person. She always chose her words so bastard carefully, and never said anything we could curb-stomp her with, which is WORSE.

Ardern handled the pandemic and the Christchurch mosque shootings unusually well. At the the time I thought, "Huh, so that's what actual leadership looks like."

Anthony Flack wrote: Sun Dec 03, 2023 4:16 pm I also thought Jacinda Ardern was too centrist and too concerned with trying to please all sides, but her government were actually doing a lot of good things quietly, and she's still the most hated woman in New Zealand regardless, so all that people-pleasing was for nothing - the right-wing still think she's worse than Hitler and she deserves to be gang-raped and so on.

Honestly I think she was right to resign when she did because as terrible as it is to say, misogyny is rampant, hating women is very much in style, and any female in a position of influence who isn't an avowed hard-right piece of shit is just a magnet for hate, abuse and threats right now.

This is why I kept my criticism of her at nil during her time. The sexism was grotesque and I wasn’t going to feed that from the left.

New Zealand’s descent since 2008 has been grim. When I left Clark was in charge, it wasn’t the paradise many NZers convinced themselves it was but it still felt like a country relatively at ease. Most people got on, and there wasn’t a loony fringe on the right. Even ACT was just dull libertarian party and Peters was “The Māori your nana voted for.”

I’m not sure what to make of New Zealand now, but my kids won’t be growing up there, which says a lot.

Fight back has begin. Protests all over the country. I feel like a lot of people have been galvanised by this.

kokorodoko wrote: Sun Dec 03, 2023 2:15 pmIf you don't mind (Gramsci), what are some more specific ways in which you think attention is spent on what you consider distracting things, in such a way that it gives undue importance to relatively unimportant things, or shifts attention away from where it is needed?

In the meantime, here's a story that might interest you (and others):

Right now, in Sweden (where I live), a month-long strike is raging against Tesla. Employees at Tesla workshops have been trying to unionize since 2018. Tesla have, in regular fashion, refused. In this ongoing strike, the recurrent message from Tesla is that they do not intend to sign any agreement whatever, and that orders from above forbids them to do so.

At the center of the strike is the factory workers' union IF Metall, but the effort has successively spread to other sectors. Dock workers and truck drivers are blocking imports, electricians are shutting down service stations, and so on.

Tesla have been responding to each step with counter-tactics like rerouting import lines, and reports say some workshops still operate as usual. So far it is not clear that the strike has had significant economic effect. Neither is Sweden an important location for Tesla globally. One suggested plausible outcome of this strike is that Tesla will simply pack up and leave, which would not cause much disturbance either for Tesla itself or for the Swedish labour market. The main importance - which is an importance - is symbolic.


Some background:
Labour relations are normally handled between unions and employers, with relatively little involvement from the state. The vast majority of workers are employed under a collective agreement, specifying wages and hours according to agreed standards, and prohibiting workers from striking unless to uphold the agreement. The telos of nearly every labour struggle is a collective agreement. Since the settlement of 1938, this is the spiritual ideal of the Swedish labour market - locally known as the "Swedish Model", of which a lot can be said.


So the aim of this struggle, too, is a collective agreement. And there's where it stops, which is a problem. From the perspective of the union leadership, it appears this conflict is nothing more than the familiar, albeit on a large scale. In their outward communication, IF Metall are ridiculously conciliatory, rendering the conflict as one between business partners, making appeals to good legal order and national interest, with the standpoint of the workers very subdued. The union, by all appearances, do not recognize the special character of Tesla, or the fact that this conflict has significance beyond these national borders, and therefore the framing is consistently parochial - the aim is to preserve "our model", one which we supposedly can continue to take comfort in.

The symbolic importance of this conflict, then, is that if Tesla wins this, it's a signal that (1) even extensive, combined efforts of organized labour cannot sway a committed capitalist, and that (2) the "model" is if not worthless, severely dimished in value. I'm not closely familiar with the normal patterns of labour struggles and the behaviour of employers, but I'm not used to seeing this kind of ruthlessness from an employer on the Swedish labour market. If it is true that the economic importance here is relatively slight, then Tesla too are aiming for the political and symbolic victory.

Another possibility is that Tesla would do like Amazon and run its operations here through a subcontractor which signs an agreement with the union. But if the union continue to have their eyes confined to the domestic sphere, this too looks like a false security.

Spotify tried the same and eventually backed down.

I don’t think Tesla can “win” this. Sympathy strikes are legal in Sweden and now Tesla faces multiple refusals to handle their secondary goods and services like license plates delivery etc. It also spread to Norway last week.

Fuck Tesla, shitty, cheap looking cars, owned by a grade A Charlatan.