Simon Wilson in the Herald neatly skewers suggestions that Donald Brash is a free speech warrior and raises important issues about the interplay between free speech and attacks on “political correctness” also known as tolerance and respect.
Originally posted on Nick Kelly Blog
Hand in hand with “compassionate liberalism”.
Ahead in the polls and with the Tory Government on the Brexit rack, the UK Labour Party should be prepping for victory at the next election. Instead, the party and leader Jeremy Corbyn are under attack for perceived bigotry. Do Labour have a case to answer?
In the United Kingdom Theresa May is facing a confidence threatening Brexit crisis, the organisers of the Vote Leave campaign are facing prosecution, and an opinion poll suggests that a significant proportion of the electorate are willing to shift right to achieve a hard Brexit.
Something beginning with…wtf?!
Whodunnit?
As though politicians with a social democratic bent don’t have enough to contend with…
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In the space of a week England has lost in its goal of winning the world cup, had three senior ministers resign over May’s “soft” BREXIT proposal and now Donald Trump has effectively called for Theresa May to be replaced by Boris Johnson.
And then there was five.
The aftermath of Douma chemical attacks and Skripal poisonings…
If we can’t see the wood for the trees, shouldn’t we simply step back a bit and look again?
Quietly mulling on the difference between foreign interference (malign) and influence (benign).
One Nation has made an appearance in Aotearoa New Zealand, complete with all the nuttiness of its Australian counterpart, some Donald Trump insanity and some support for the hard right in the United Kingdom.
Oops. Was this desire meant to be in the script?
The BBC thinks that depicting Jeremy Corbyn as a Russian stooge is sound news judgment.
2018 marks several anniversaries of Karl Marx whose significance for the critique of capitalist society is hard to diminish. But what now for his beliefs?
By Nick Kelly – Upper Hutt boy in London.
Thoughts on a resurgent left and a collapsing centre.
Democracy’s permanence is not inevitable. Its imagining is not beyond imagining. And New Zealand is one of the shrinking number of democracies who really have it.
The Independent’s Robert Fisk reports from Douma, where he interviewed one of the clinic doctors who said that the images that outraged Trump, May and Macron were real, but the cause was oxygen starvation from dust, not poisonous gas. Could it be that misleading images started a bombing war? What might this say about Western values?
May claimed she couldn’t wait until Monday before unleashing compassion on Syria on Friday night. Which brought a line from this to mind….
Jacinda Ardern has accepted the US, UK and French response to the Syrian crisis. Should she have instead condemned it?
Apparently “this lot” really do care about people.
It’s really easy to get cranky right now and believe the world is retreating into to a sad Cold War binary in which Russia and its allies are always in high tension with the United States and its allies. A new Cold War.
Remember two weeks ago when Jacinda Ardern’s handling of the Russian poisoning scandal was considered to be a major misstep? Well with the benefit of hindsight it appears to have been a very balanced nuanced response to an incident that is not as clear cut as it was presented.
In the second stage of a false flag attack, facts go out the window and the sole issue becomes “are you for us or against us.” Our media and National Party politicians are well into this stage in the Skripal affair. But as questions mount and skeptics proliferate from all sides, Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters may well be wiser than media advisers by not following blindly the western herd. 26 countries is not the whole world. Update: Porton Down unable to establish Novichok of Russian origin.
A whistleblower, Christopher Wyllie, has explained how Cambridge Analytica managed to secure the data of 50 million Americans and how it was used in the last US Presidential election.
When elite’s tussle, shouldn’t we look after us and ours?
The possible poisoning of Sergei Skripal and the consequent hysteria have all the signs of another false flag operation, as we saw before the second American invasion of Iraq. The chain of circumstantial evidence has more holes in it than a swiss cheese, and while attempted murder (if that is what it is) is a criminal act Winston Peters and Jeremy Corbyn are sane voices calling for evidence before any attribution still less action.
It is time to regulate the power of cyber criminals and cyber monopolies.
The Lord Mayor of the City of London is visiting New Zealand. Its not Sadiq Khan, Charles Bowman is a PwC partner leading London’s financial centre lobby. He’s here to talk to business and regulators. He’ll no doubt be talking up more deregulation.
A little on the (predictable) fallout from Emily Thornberry’s BBC Radio 4 interview.
Scottish Labour leadership election concludes. And kangaroos.
Robert Peston in the Spectator has analysed the social media performance of the two big parties in the United Kingdom and has concluded that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour had a significant advantage over Theresa May’s conservatives.
