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5:30 pm, July 9th, 2026 - 14 comments
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Daily review is also your post.
This provides Standardistas the opportunity to review events of the day.
The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).
Don’t forget to be kind to each other …
Latest poll, opportunists will be glum: https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/361004406/hipkins-overtakes-luxon-coalition-hangs-hair-latest-poll
Reading this selection of results like tea leaves, I get the impression of an attempt by the Nats to steer clear of the ice-berg – as if rearranging the deckchairs ain't enough. Dunno if such radicalism will catch on though.
Marx has some interesting takes, but truths are enternal.
My Conversation With Karl Marx About Donald Trump
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/07/08/my-conversation-with-karl-marx-about-donald-trump/
NS: Trump is a voraciously narcissistic capitalist, but he’s also flagrantly racist and misogynist.
KM: Of course, capitalism functions to oppress and divide the working class. Systems of racism mean more profits for the few. Likewise, women are exploited and underpaid for their labor. I wrote about this extensively.
NS: Well, right now the historical event that keeps happening often seems to be dominated one way or another by Donald Trump.
KM: Even if it seems that way, the main propellant of a current event can often look obvious while unfolding as optical illusion. As I noted back in 1843, “The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.” Never forget that a few live in obscene luxury while billions live in immiseration and billions of others are barely able to scrape together the essentials of life. The struggle between classes might seem an antiquated concept, but nonetheless it is the main factor that undergirds history, past, present and future.
NS: Some people complain that’s what you always say.
KM: That’s because it’s always true.
Gambler's desperate for cryptomachines may be thrilled, moralists peeved:
She seems to be using the mastermind thesis: faith that a bureaucrat can be found who is so clever he can design an operating system that yokes a fake money machine into servicing the state. She could market the notion wearing a Texan hat and shit-kicker boots eh? Faith that God will provide the right person is an applied form of magical thinking, so I hope it works for her. Now she'll need to get someone onto market research. Hint: most avid users being homeless or almost, real money may be conspicuous by it's absence for most would-be players. Bit of a conceptual challenge for financial finaglers, but goers & good keen men love such challenges & may help out…
[Link required. Third time you omitting linking your copypasta. Do you want to take a triad of days off? – Incognito]
Mod note
Okay, will do. Here's the link: https://www.1news.co.nz/2026/07/09/government-withdraws-crypto-atm-ban-in-favour-of-targeted-rules/
Thanks.
I’m not asking you to take 3 days off. I’m asking you to consistently link, which is a simple longstanding house rule here, as you full-well know. If you want to take time off voluntarily, that’s fine with me. Next time, I won’t ask though.
If anyone was wondering Chris Trotter has fallen down a very very very deep rabbit hole……poor bugger…….
Don't even need (or would want to) to know Trotts sold out many years back.
A sorry sad sack of a man….
Dunno why he's so afraid. I get no sense of looming leftist threats in Aotearoa. Does explain why he does leftist cheerleader no more tho, & his blog has languished since late last year. Oughta get high for a change. World ain't that bad…
He seems to have drunk Winston's anti Maori kool aid……which says a lot cos why is Winston even anti Maori……nothing has made sense in politics since Big Norm left the room……well having said that at least Helen and Michael managed a shitty situation as good as anyone could……Jacinda tried but her light shone too bright for some……
Could Trotter be ‘concerned’ that 'looming leftists' are coming for the proceeds of his very early lottery wins in life? Can't see why he would have much to fear from a Hipkins-led Labour coalition government – with any luck time will tell.
If the nACTf CoC ('govt' buy and for the sorted) isn't defeated in Nov, then CEO Luxon and deputy CEOs Peters and Seymour they will continue their wrecking ways – selling off NZ Aotearoa for parts – private capital is ever hungry for lucrativce investment opportunities.
https://yeehawtheboys.substack.com/p/the-fight-against-the-conservation
The left wing has curmudgeons too.
These define the Chris Trotter of recent years.
https://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-pakeha-quest.html
(No sense of perspective, such as our changing demographics, seeps through to disturb the narrative that the universal values out of European civilisation of his time and place* should dominate the local environment on and on – as if the post 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Aotearoa culture evolved too much for his Pavlova Paradise world view to cope).
His own little Englander, Brexit populism.
https://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com/2024/11/no-cheers-for-democracy.html
https://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com/2023/11/whos-driving-right-wing-bus.html
https://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com/2025/11/a-different-world-laurie-les-ageing.html
That he fears the election of a Hipkins led government because of woke liberalism despite his awareness of the destruction of government capacity (to deliver the well-being of many of the people and protect the environment) indicates that a form of innate conservatism came to dominate his leftist sensibilities.
I asked AI to expand on the comment
AI
The Psychological Pivot
As it says on the Petone foreshore, old age is a shipwreck.
Where is Bowalley Road? Or why is old age a shipwreck?
The retreat is from the future, that was neither the nostalgia of his youth, nor the idealism of the left of his time and place.
They were against racism, really they were – end injustice to the Maori they agreed. Thus the Treaty of Waitangi Act, iwi settlements & Maori language TV/radio. But at some point came realisation this might lead to loss of white colonial settler power to determine for the other (a minority) came into play. Thus the boomer fled from the concept of Maori as indigenous people within the global universalism concept of UNDRIP (a world and universalism larger than the one his European heritage & culture prepared him for). He became Don Brash, sans the neo-liberalism.
They decided he would call this a conservative, left and right together common cause, defence of the universal values inherent in the English language version of the Treaty. Principles.
So like those of the UK Brexit and the post Obama USA white demographic cause ilk, they defend their European civilisation from the EU/UN world.
Populist nativism, the boomer demographic refuge of the colonial oligarchs as they march onto an AI technocracy supremacy.
And our hero buys into it and sells out his cause.
Shame. Christian feel the burn. Guilt. It is manifest destiny, that it would be so. A generation of such size to decide elections has to own responsibility for their legacy in the world.
Old age is a shipwreck.
In the north closest to 20 degrees north is Taiwan and Hawaii where James Cook died. His ship was later sunk at Newport Rhode Island in 1778.
In our brave new world, Auckland will one day have a majority of its population as Polynesian (including Maori) and Asian.
Not so Petone and Wellington and certainly not the South Island where Bowalley Road is.
Many Pakeha now flee urban Auckland. For places they can afford 1/4 acre sections (and where they and Maori would remain a majority). Eventually many of the migrants will do the same and then vehemently defend the environment of this land – if this coalition government does not sell us out first.
Peters responds by proposing limiting the vote to citizens, a compromise would be to restrict the vote to permanent residents living here and otherwise citizens (including those abroad). Maybe we should let Maori decide that one …