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6:00 am, February 12th, 2025 - 42 comments
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Open mike is your post.
For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose.
The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).
Step up to the mike …
Whakatane Mayor Victor Luca
Some top names…those who have been/are at the front as it were…
Mayor Luca. I'm liking what I read.
Anyone know of him?
Trump, having spent most of a lifetime developing real estate, thinks Gaza is a likely prospective development. Thus his stance as peacemaker supreme:
A king is just a piece on the regional chessboard. A player moves their king when the time is right. A king's inclination has marginal relevance in geopolitics nowadays. That said, we have yet to see the art of the deal…
Has anyone asked the Palestinians what they thnk of this plan?
No.
If you are in doubt about their feelings, just go back a couple of weeks and witness again, the jubilation and celebration with which Palestinians moved north to Gaza city en mass.
Asem Alnabih is an engineer with the Gaza city municipality. He is attempting to get the water flowing, rubbish collected and sewerage pumping. He is under no illusions about the enormity of the task but is adamant that ways will be found.
Palestinians, will not be moved. They live now in the place that is their home. They have the inalienable right to determine their own future. They absolutely dont give a flying one for anything that Trump thinks.
From the Electronic Intifada's youtube channel:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PqvkQKTlFyc
The Israeli regime's oppression of Palestinians proceeds on all fronts.
https://x.com/PalFest/status/1888799732832600148
They're sending their best….
https://xcancel.com/Acyn/status/1889409512073003214
Are we going to get the Minister of Immigration, or Justice, or of Labour, or of Economic Development, to comment on this huge Kiwifruit modern slavery bust today?
It's a biggie.
Jail NZs modern slavedrivers.
See 9 below.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360576922/mbie-swoops-kiwifruit-contractors-12-investigations-exploitation-underway
Small, spiteful actions to erase identity. Google removes Black History, Pride and other cultural events from its calendar.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/11/google-calendar-black-history-pride-month
The worst of these Project 2025 initiatives is the destruction of both culture (and with the defunding of science projects, both here and in the US, a throttling of the creative, inventive spirit.
Identity politics is bad! The only identities that matter are white and male, according to anti DEI actions.
All produced by democracy! Consequently advocates of democracy will be thrilled. Ain't it great to have a system with a built-in reset that people collectively trigger on schedule! Plus you can change the global wallpaper too:
Reality is hereby made selectable on a common-interest basis, where the commonality is nationalist. You can see why RNZ rebranded themselves RNZ National several years ago, eh? Some clever bugger in the hierarchy had a brain-wave & realised it could be rebranded RNZ Labour at any time. Better put a stop to that toot sweet!
I bet Seymour will seek to overturn Matariki Day once he ascends to Deputy Prime Minister in May.
He doesn't need to do much as the MSM is always keen to promote his every utterance.
So the 8% party gets a state of the nation platform….did Labour get one ?
Meh. Seymour is a good retail politician. Better at it than anything TPM or Greens are putting up. Even the PM can't touch him now.
He does have that quality as a minor-party leader. His particular brand of nerdy shock populism isn't really suited to the combination of government and the political big stage, though (he's too much of a fool to realise that), and it's only a matter of time before he crashes and burns. Outside talkback, nobody in the media likes him, and nobody in parliament outside of the Act party likes him. He is also, objectively speaking, a dickhead. His days are numbered.
Spot on.
He's also costing National support and causing Luxon some grief. Luxon got a solid dressing down at Onuku thanks to Seymore's efforts, rule one of corporate life, don't cause the boss grief, you don't last long. Coincidental that the Polkinghorne thing dropped the next day.
Yep, dead man walking.
Luxon could give Seymore, and probably ACT the flick and come out quite well, unlikely ACT would bring the government down and trigger an early election.
US Federal biomedical funding freeze. It's now all considered 'discretionary', as opposed to fundamental to national progress. Similar government attitude to research funding position in NZ.
Funnily enough the only "identities" that matter to Pride these days are "gender identities".
Pride was about being proud of who we were as lesbian women, gay men or bisexual people. Early Gay Liberation was all about telling young Gay people (and ourselves) that we should be proud of ourselves, just the way we were, to be happy in our sexual orientation.
Now – young gay people are being told that their bodies are wrong, that they will never be happy as they are, that they have to become something else and that there is no such thing as "same sex attraction".
It is not our 'Pride" any more.
An unsubstantiated opinion.
You obviously are unaware of the growth in "gender affirming care". This involves chemical castration with off brand medications (puberty blockers) followed by a lifetime dependency on wrong sex hormones and/or mutilating and sterilising surgeries. You might start by reading about the Cass Review.
and follow up with the numerous accounts online from detrans gay people.
You conflate such "gender ID" issues – children pre puberty – with telling gay youth their bodies are wrong.
🤷♀️
This is not based on any "gay identity".
that's right, it's based on trans identity, and some gay kids are getting caught up in that and being medicalised out of being gay. Hence visub's comment
This is not targeting of children for being "gay kids". Is "gay kids", even a thing?
depends on what you mean by kids, and I personally think there are social issues with attaching sexuality to primary school kids. But, there are adults that say they knew they were gay at that age.
I can name two dynamics. One is conservative parents who would rather their gay child was trans, and thus support/push transition. That's pretty easy to find examples of online.
The other is girls growing up in a culture that hates women and by the time they are exposed to trans culture pre-teen or teen, it's more attractive to them to be a trans boy than a girl. The ones that end up not coping end up with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, and on the medicalisation pathway. Hence the Cass Review.
you seem to be saying there is no pressure on pre-teens and teens to transition. That's just not true. Some of those are gay kids. I guess you could say it's not intentional to target them because they're gay, but I think society still has hefty issues around homosexuality despite the tolerances you described earlier, and the medical system transing gay kids is a form of institutional homophobia.
the change made to the BBC style guide in 2021
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/academy/collegeofjournalism/news/bbc_news_style_guide_searchable_version.docx
For clarity, the word gender there doesn't mean sex. It means gender identity. So being gay can be a man identifying as a woman attracted to women (ie a heterosexual man) calling himself a lesbian.
This and the other points visubversa makes have been extensively covered everywhere except in liberal left circles where active denial runs strong. There are so many examples, including on TS, that I'm perplexed by your statement that it's unsubstantiated opinion.
Conflating "gender ID" issues – children pre puberty – with telling gay youth their bodies are wrong is why it is unsubstantiated opinion.
how so?
Once upon a time, heterosexual society had a problem with (public) acceptance of homosexuality within it.
Now their heterosexual children are raised up in a society alongside gay youth, and same sex attraction is acknowledged in schools, as the future for some of its pupils, including marriage.
Society is clearly on side with there being a real same sex attraction.
So to claim that there is also some campaign going on to target gay children under the age of puberty, is just plain wrong.
Those who would, the conservative right, have no time for gender ID.
And most adult gays and lesbians had no knowledge of this, pre puberty.
With pre puberty minors, I note at least 3 categories, those who are not seen to conform to gender stereotype, those who do not feel they fit (may or may not be gender) and those with other issues (which during and post puberty extend to body dysmorphia).
Conflating the health practice as per minors and the right word with lesbian – "sex or gender attraction", with a threat to the acceptance of same sex attraction is nonsense.
It might be to women's safety and some rights of association (lesbian same sex for example – so LGB separate from the gender ID progressives).
That LGB might feel compelled to separate from LGBQT+ over gender ID (and safe spaces for women), but that is no reason to accuse them of seeking to convert gay youth to transgender status, at most it is to have them use gender ID, rather than sex based ID.
belated grammarly edit
That LGB might feel compelled to separate from LGBQT+ over gender ID (and safe spaces for women),
but thatis no reason to accuse them of seeking to convert gay youth to transgender status, at most it is to have them (and others) use gender ID, rather than sex based ID.how many detrans people have you been listening to? Because they are saying loud and clear that they were either pressured or misled into transitioning, sometimes when young. And a big chunk of those are lesbian and gay.
I think you might be misunderstanding the politics and social dynamics.
There is social pressure on young lesbians to transition. And once transitioned to not detransition once they realise they are not in fact trans men but are lesbian.
Further, pathologising and medicalisation of humans is nothing new. Women know a lot about this. Now it's happening to kids, and they are having serious hormones and later surgeries, experimental imo both in terms of the surgeries and the transition. Like visub said, read the Cass review.
you know what the lesson is here? Stop treating neoliberal gains as human rights gains. See how easily things can be removed? That's because it was a sop from the parts of society that don't actually care but needed liberals and the left to accept neoliberalism.
I'll just repost this,
One of the best explanations I've seen about the shift from leftist class based analysis and action, to liberal identity politics (and the implications of that shift),
https://tewharewhero.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-slippery-slope-into-barbarism.html
and to be very clear, that's leftist, feminist analysis from someone that cares about the wellbeing of people of colour, LGBT etc. And guess what, women.
Heavy irony. Even the Guardian could mention women, in their first sentence,
That's not the first time I've seen a liberal commenting on US political attacks on marginalised people and somehow leaving how that women are being attacked too. Won't be the last.
BHN pat and Spiderhoof deconstruct Luxon's latest tv interview. Start at 60 min. On ‘golden shower’ visas and his poor polling.
Spiderhoof thinks Luxon's been at PM boot camp, because his go-to phrase of the month is now 'green shoots', away from 'what I will tell you it is about growth'
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/541645/removing-teacher-requirements-could-be-devastating-teaching-council-says
Yet another reason ECE should be brought under Min of Ed control.
All the angst over NCEA results would mostly be alleviated, in the longer term, if there was enough money spent on childrens' education years 3-10.
The hand of the Wright family 'wishlist' in evidence.
The privatisation of early childhood education is working as well as the other privatisations.
Why is anyone surprised?
War between business and media in court.
The players Talley's vs TVNZ.
A common tale – the business (Talley's) want to see the evidence and (TVNZ) the media won't compromise sources.
https://archive.li/lHi88
The Talley family are true anti-worker scum. Well attested human rights violators dating back decades.
Missed this earlier
Heinz trashing the Watties name.