Helen Clark and Labour lost the election on 8 November 2008. The country has changed for the better.

“Our thanks for this was to be spat on by Helen Clark and Sue Bradford and their respective parties for being “uncaring fundamentalists who want to beat children.”
If you are claiming you were literally spat on, then you shouldn’t lie. Do you want to beat children? If so, why? I was terribly ashamed of all the churches who opposed the so-called “anti-smacking” bill, which of course was nothing of the sort.

Sorry, I couldn’t agree less! Christianity is socialist (or should be.) Socialism is about providing equal outcomes for everyone, and so is Christianity. God doesn’t favour the rich – God doesn’t favour anybody.
Palin is a crazy and a complete disaster for reasons far other than her Christianity. She knows a lot about money, and guns, and money and hunting and money, but she knows less about foreigh policy than my violet plant on the kitchen windowsill. Thank God Obama won!

Vicky

“On something else that you have raised, it does really give me the irrates that most left wing organisations are so anti Christian. Churches are an easy target as they don’t usually fight back. On the flip side I find the term Right Wing Christian as hypocritical as the rest of the popular oxymorons. How do ‘Right Wing Christians’ reconcile with the Bible when it clearly states the rich man will not make heaven (ie. It’s easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle).”
As a Christian, I find Right Wing Christians make me irate! Really, they make the media think that Christian and fascist go together. They don’t, and it’s a disgrace. Left wing Christians rule!
Vicky

“Time for the Nat’s to hit back at dear corrupt maggot leader.

Despite the urgings of middle aged men such as myself they should not go nasty on Clark as it apparently turns off the stupid Shelia voters.”
Oh, mate! I bet you’re divorced, or maybe just a life-long single. The 85-year-old virgin, eh? You can’t get a woman if you hate them, they can smell it on you, you know.
Speaking as one of the Shelias” (sic.)

“As I have said many times THE REVOLUTION is UPON US We must storm the Bastille and remove their heads from their necks”
Idiocy, sheer idiocy and possibly actionable.

October 21st, 2008 at 1:36 pm
“And you never know Steve, Clark might fake an assassination attempt in order to garner sympathy votes. We are, apparently, playing in that league…”
Yeah, as if! Hilarious, or it would be if I didn’t fear that you mean it… Where on earth do you boys get off with your shrill insults against her? You’re “playing the (wo)man and not the ball” as I believe the NZ expression is.

Vicky

“The fact is we of the center right have pointed out for years the vicious and vindictive nature of the left axis in NZ. It probably makes headlines because this viciousness is starting to bounce on them. They can dish it but not take it.”
Center right? (sic)…
Far right as far as I’ve seen so far…

The HuffPo story is based on the Foreign Policy article, which is a rather thin piece of work. I’m not sure what could be “rank propaganda” about that observation, but carry on in your own reality if you wish.

Shorthand for “dictatorial” is exactly what DPF was aiming for, as opposed to “shorthand for mass murderer” as some shrill voices from the left seem to disingenuously claim.

Rex:

Firstly, thanks for the info about quotes.

Secondly though, I’m not so sure it’s disengenuous. I mean you stick up a picture of someone who is primarily known as a murdererous dictator, then people are going to associate that image with ‘murdererous dictator’. I mean, you could stick up a picture of Hitler with the intention of referring to the fact that he brought in laws that were undemocratic upon gaining power. But people don’t primarily associate him with that.

If you’re going to use an image, you have to be prepared to deal with the major connotations of that image. David’s real or imagined ‘intention’ has nothing to do with it. The actual *effect* is the issue.

Hahhahahah.. get outta here you sap… only a rank propagandist would have the utter gall to try something so transparently false. The Huffington Post is a partisan rag produced by tin foil hat leftists. If it ran a story saying Sarah Palin was an alien in a human body it would do its reputation no harm at all.

No, it wasn’t them.

It seems to be drawn exclusively from two stories by Colin Espiner on Stuff: ‘Parties accuse each other of dirty tricks’ and ‘Minnows lash out at campaign launches’, which provides both the Peters quotes and the supposed justification for the claim that “third-party politicians, whose support is usually required to form a governing coalition, have been responsible for much of the campaign’s vitriol.”

It actually reflects very poorly on FP, which trades on its rep for insight and research.

That said I don;t see too many of our candidates being charged with associating with terrorists etc.

That would be the Greens and the Maori party. Remember “Urewera 17- otherwise known as “Te Qaeda”?

Shorthand for “dictatorial” is exactly what DPF was aiming for, as opposed to “shorthand for mass murderer” as some shrill voices from the left seem to disingenuously claim.

Thanks for your response to my query. Much appreciated. I’m only a self educated redneck from northern Florida, and I need to take some to digest your response, but I think I get the gist of what your saying.

[quote]Mugabe didn’t start out shooting people. In fact he did well for Zimbabwe in the beginning and was widely admired. Then when his grip on power became tenuous he started making it incrementally harder for those who opposed him to exercise their rights.[/quote]

I don’t think 99.9% of people would ever take the billboard’s argument as being that sophisticated frankly. The linking was pretty clearly done for an emotional factor of Mugabe as shorthand of ‘bad guy military dictator’.

( dammit, can’t get the quotes to work :/ )

In a number of democracies political pacts have been reached governing the basic rules of the game. These pacts are not contracts because they are not exogenously enforced. Instead they are more akin to political compacts or compromises, in that they do not have the status of law and are endogenously enforced. Their importance lies in that they are mutually and voluntarily binding and establish the procedural rules in which substantive debate about and competition over policy can occur. In some countries emerging from authoritarianism (e.g. Chile 1989, Uruguay 1985, Spain 1973, Venezuela 1958 or Costa Rica 1948), these arrangements came to be known as “foundational pacts” for the obvious reason that they set the ground rules for future political competition (the Venezuelan pact broke down in the 1990s and resulted in the rise of Hugo Chavez. He rules without a pact). In mature democracies the nature of pacts varies, and is often limited to particular issue areas (although there have been a number of occasions in Europe where substantive pacts on things like wage/price ratios have been negotiated). But the most successful pacts tend to be those that are procedural rather than substantive, because the mutually agreed upon rules allow political parties (and other political actors) to use their respective resources and skills in the effort to influence, if not dominate the policy debates of the time. Within the established rules, to the winner go the spoils.

In NZ what is needed is a “pact of civility” in which all political parties agree to the basic rules of political competition and debate. This might involve the rejection of any personal attacks or references to personal behaviour that does not directly impact on the discharge of political office and duties. Thus, personal misbehaviour in office (say corruption) is fair game, but sexual preference is not. Obviously criminal behavior would not be covered by such a pact, but the pact might limit the use of politically-motivated laying of criminal charges. The pact could cover issues of campaign financing etc. The point is that the parties themselves could negotiate the terms, which then become self-enforcing.

I will not comment upon the EFB except to note that,as alluded to above, this might have been one area on which such a pact might have worked (the operative term being “might”).

As in cases of all pact-making, the key to success is that the actors involved have a sincere and principled, as opposed to tactical or opportunistic interest in reaching such an agreement. That presupposes a level of integrity and mutual interest on the part of those involved.

I cannot say if the decline in political civility in NZ is related to a general decline in Western civilization. Perhaps it is. But it could just be a product of globalisation, in the sense that the amount of cultural-political overlap between Western and non-Western countries leads to a “lowest common denominator” effect in politics as well as popular culture. On the other hand, as the recent quote in Peter Creswell’s blog noted, “what is wrong with decadence,” especially if decadence is an expression of freedom? I am being slightly facetious here, as it is views like this that lead me to believe that libertarians sometimes have difficulty dealing with complex reality. My specific opinion is that so long as the voting public tolerate the “Americanisation” of NZ politics as I outlined in the previous post, they will get what they deserve.