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6:00 am, November 15th, 2025 - 64 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 …
The Pagani way.
No criticism of the right wing for doing very little (just citing the advance of solar power – an opportunity created by China reducing the cost).
It could have been written by George Will praising Bill Gates, except he claimed that GW might only reduce GDP by 2% (an absurd lie).
https://www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/360886169/climate-crisis-needs-realism-not-miserabilism
Another article exposes her.
https://www.thepost.co.nz/world-news/360884458/gwynne-dyer-marking-time-cop-30
George Will's opine
https://wapo.st/3JU7g0r
Such an economic prospect is unlikely to spook intelligent rightists, but that category seems perpetually small. As a principled conservative, he ought to take the increase in chaos at the expense of order more seriously. Still, the prospect of insurance escalating to the point of unaffordability will impact property values in multiple regions destabilised by nature. That will be sufficient pressure for rationalists to feel the need to get their heads into real costs that are emerging currently…
We might just want to give humanity a break for actually achieving the largest deliberate policy shift in history, and right in the face of all of the largest financial and businesses interests that the world has. The Ozone thing is a very small cup of beans compared to the entire energy system turnaround.
Which part of humanity?
All those represented by countries who signed up to the Kyoto and Paris agreements.
we can all pat ourselves on the back as the climate collapses because we refused to do what was needed.
Or you can give hope and agency to people. You do you.
actually, I agree that hope and agency matter. In fact I think they're the only thing that matters now so long as they are centred in the kind of transition that will mitigate the climate crisis at the level of physics.
Hope outside of that is nice to make people feel better, but it won't stop the collapse. Hope and right action will.
and which shift?
Have you missed the global energy shift?
Have you missed the fact that the window for averting collapse is closing and we're still a long way from doing what is necessary.
Lots of really good things are being done, but surely you must understand that getting lots of people off the Titanic didn't stop it sinking. Faulty analogy, because there are no lifeboats. We can do all the things we think are good, but if they're not sufficient, they're not sufficient.
I can't get my head around why this is such a difficult concept, so my conclusion is that people either don't think the crisis is that bad, or they know how bad it is and are ok with buying some extra time before teh SHTF.
The analogy of the window or whatever is no use, nor the Tintanic.
Humans have faced far worse challenges than climate change and overcome them just fine. If you want a list of the scale of triumph: multiple ice ages, global famine, multiple global pandemics, destruction of vast empires from the Indus Valley to the Mayas to the Romans, multiple world wars, the full death toll of Marxism, most of patriarchy, and most of global poverty.
Sure, climate change is big. But we've faced worse and succeeded just fine.
Your pessimism is the accelerating cancer of the melancholic left.
Spaceship Earth is finite – human exceptionalism and hubris ain't.
"Overcome them just fine" understates the impact of the listed events. Some humans will live with (cf. overcome) the manifold challenges of ecological overshoot, but imho "just fine" is a stretch – time will tell.
We like the idea of sustainability – implementing it not so much. Like you, I will be "just fine", of course, but the idea that most humans will "overcome" the long-term effects of transgressing planetary houndaries seems a fanciful projection – future generations will face the worst fine mess by far that our now maladaptive behaviours have gotten us into.
That minefield metaphor is apt since trigger points are inherently indeterminate and quite few cluster around humanity's global development trajectory. Her overview contained no obvious flaws, but I agree with your account of evidence which points to it being inadequate as a representation of reality. She was a Labour activist, eh?
By 2040 … will we become a state of Oz? Just to get pay parity and have Oz help pay for the old people's super and modernise the infrastructure – like a poorer region in the EU.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360885587/dive-numbers-heres-nzs-migration-data-without-political-spin
A perfect bicentennial present.
If NACT are in government Maori would probably vote for it, if Oz offers a better deal on the Treaty.
Federation doesn't prevent New Zealand retaining the Treaty of Waitangi applying to domestic law. In fact I think it would be even more embedded as a result of Federation.
Peter Dunne is surprised that radical Maori have rescued the govt from the prospect of a dismal holiday season. Me too. https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/11/13/te-pati-maoris-unravelling-will-only-help-re-election-of-coalition-govt/
Almost verges on elegance. So the pan-tribal scheme is morphed into chimera, to provide an excellent illustration of the real/imaginal hinge in the psyche performing its switch function (shape-shifting). You thought it was real, now you know it wasn't.
Hey, don't freak out, this shit has always happened naturally. Dec 7 TMP will gather to thrash it out. They have an opportunity to switch back to pan-tribalism. Are they opportunistic enough? That's the darwinian test, courtesy of the minor deity known as necessity that the ancient Greeks used to name a feature of critical situations.
Yeah nah. It just makes it more likely that we will have a very similar 2017 coalition of Labour and NZFirst, with Greens supplying an occasional grovel.
The price however would likely be Winston gets PM this time.
An 81-84 year old as PM?
The swing to NZF from National to prevent a Labour-Green government will be interesting though.
And with some from National to ACT they could end up under 30%.
Bernie is 84 and would have been a whole heap better than the US shitshow.
Lee Kuan Yew retired from Cabinet at 87.
And Peters would I think be a competent PM here.
Peters would I think be a competent PM here.
Once upon a time I wrote to Winston suggesting he use a scenario of working with the Greens to become PM. I was a wee bit worried he was giving up on the dream. The parental choice of name is a powerful motivator.
I think I succeeded in swinging him into the Arden collaboration but one is ever only a player in the game, so outcomes derive from the nexus of most influential players. It's an interactive thingy best engaged with mentally via holism.
Peters will never be PM. There's no precedent, and it would present a constitutional issue where a very small portion of the party vote got to lead the country.
Granted not likely.
But it's just a majority of Cabinet vote. The Deputy PM role didn't have precedent either.
Significant difference between DPM and PM roles.
Can you really imagine the Labour Cabinet voting for that?
Yes really easily after Shearer got rolled by Ardern's crew with weeks to go in 2017, and Chippie and King quite openly killed off Cunliffe in the 2014 campaign.
Shearer the Mayor for Wellington?
He walked off because of the polls.
Who lead the ABC team in 2014?
AI Overview
NACT's future budgets are predicated on asset sale revenues – their policy platforms will be fraudulent as NZF will not agree.
They will be unelectable.
Māori don't owe Pākehā this. TPM are there to represent Māori, let Māori sort it out in their own way, without layers of nonsense centred on Pākehā ideas and needs around parliament.
Maori already have the Maori seats which is why TMP are in there at all.
Te Pati Maori members can certainly sort themselves out, and they don't need to be in Parliament to do that at all.
TPM are a chaotic corrupt mess and should never be anywhere near a lever of power.
I wouldn't vote for them atm on the basis of the chaos (or maybe on the basis of Tamihere), but I'm not Māori. Māori politics don't track like non-Māori politics, and too much commentary tries to shoehorn them into Pākehā frameworks, which just leads to more misunderstanding of what is going on.
You've made the same argument before about the special inscrutible Greens and it has the same zero use or truth.
Weka is right. Pākehā media think they already have it all done and dusted and we are history. I'm a member of Te Pāti Māori and we have been getting weekly updates (the media pilloried the Party for sending the first out – what on earth is wrong with telling your members the truth?) and I don't believe so. Does it sound reasonable that 3 or 4 bad apples can ruin a container load of at least 200,000?
Last week's video update from Rawiri had 56,000 viewers. The support is still there.
TPM is organised from the grass roots up an accord with "the six -tangas" (pages 4-7 of its Constitution here
https://assets.nationbuilder.com/maoriparty/pages/2691/attachments/original/1688526705/Te_P%C4%81ti_M%C4%81ori_-_Rules_and_Constitution-2023_FINAL_VERSION.pdf?1688526705
and big decisions must always be taken back to the people for ratification. Very likely that will be done via the national hui due to be held next month.
There's an old whakatauki:
"Te toa o tēnei ra, he toa takitini."
The strength of this era is distributed among many.
Unlike Coalition parties where it seems less than a dozen people call the shots.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1291530156110366&set=a.523294829600573
Facebook has lotsa schools saying to govt stuff you on your treaty demands for school.
Good, be interesting to see how and if the Govt responds
Bomber wields a triad against public busybody org: https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2025/11/15/mediawatch-madness-of-latest-trans-terf-war-at-the-human-rights-review-tribunal/
He got a bite from an on-the-ball commentator… "So if these folk started an underground movement would it be called magma?"
Did you call lesbian organisation LAVA, who've been activists since Bomber was a child, public busybodies?
Do you even know what the case is about, or are you just spamming TS with meaningless reckons?
There's nothing useful on Bomber's post apart from reinforcing that he's anti-terf. Which is funny given his past tirades against identity politics, but not so funny when we consider that terfs are feminists who want to retain women's sex based rights. In this case the rights of lesbians to not be discriminated against because they are homosexual.
If anyone wants to understand what this Human Rights Review Tribunal case is about, why a group of lesbian activists took Wellington Pride to court, here's some reading
8 Part series by feminist writer Garwhoungle, covers the background to the case, and what happened during the various hearings, including the ban on reporting by people deemed not proper journalists.
https://theministryhasfallen.substack.com/t/the-curious-case
LAVA's own website explainer. Lesbian Action Visibility Aotearoa believe that only women can be lesbians, that lesbianism is same sex attraction, that trans-identified males aren't lesbians.
https://www.lava.nz/our-case
Plus, LAVA's history:
He appeared to have written a critique of the tribunal. I wouldn't go so far as to call it meaningless. He usually seems to mean well. I guess one could argue that those busybodies in that tribunal also mean well.
His triad of elements of criticism are worth analysis perhaps. The first is the right of WP to decide who to include in their festival – I suspect only wokeists would object to that, due to an innate propensity toward exclusion themselves. One could call it exclusionary politics (an arena highly competitive nowadays).
His second is the right of the do-gooders to ban media selectively. That's long been a wet-dream recycled by leftists and rightists but it has never been realistic and often forms the opposite impression in the public mind than the one intended.
His third point seems to be that rich capitalists who own news media ought not to tell their employees what to do. As a moral stance, I'm inclined to sympathise, but realpolitik always seems to prevent leftist politicians using it in real life.
Well, given that I don't see anything to show that Bradbury went to the tribunal, and there was a reporting ban during the trial, plus, the fact that the MSM is very skewed to the current trans ideology.
The trans lobby is very powerful and well funded. The LAVA group has been all crowd funded.
LAVA was developed because the Labour Party did not support protecting lesbian rights in law. Eventually it was National that did that.
The trans lawyers/witnesses stated that LAVA was anti-trans. The LAVA lawyer/complainants pointed out that LAVA has been supportive of trans(sexuals/vestities) since way back, long before the rise of the current trans ideology.
But transactivists, and their allies, as well as a lot of the MSM keep repeating the lie that those of us who support female sex-based rights and provisions are anti-trans. If that's the case, then the trans lobby is anti-female/women.
I didn't know that. Was that the Lange government? What was their problem?
Yes, the Lange govt brought in the Homosexual Law Reform in 1986 – for men. The 2nd anti-discrimination part of the Bill was defeated.
From a LAVA submission with their position statement -pdf
? Labour acted to decriminalise same sex male acts. There was no law against same sex acts between females.
There was no law protecting same sex males or females from discrimination until the Bill of Rights Act/Human Rights Act era.
read Karolyn's comment above.
Question
What Human Rights Act existed before 1993?
Google AI Overview
Indeed. But it was the 2nd part of the Bill proposing protection against discrimination that was the issue. It took a campaign to get lesbians explicitly protected.
Discrimination against lesbians tends to take a different form than that against gay men. The name LAVA stands for Lesbian Action for Visibility in Aotearoa.
'invisibility' has been a big issue for us lesbians internationally since when I was involved in lesbian politics in the 70s-80s in the UK.
When people talked about 'homosexuals' too often they were thinking only of gay men. And within the gay liberation movement in the UK, lesbians tended to have secondary status.
If you look up thread to my quote from LAVA's 1980s campaign, you'll see 'invisibility' is a part of what they were campaigning against.
We are long used to having our rights ignored, or given secondary status to that of males in LGBT movements, and too often on the left as well.
The current LAVA case is a repeat of the specific ways lesbians are undermined, with heterosexual males self-IDing as 'lesbian' now having precedence over actual lesbians – ie women who are same sex attracted. So het males now claim discrimination if they are excluded from lesbian activities, dating sites, etc. And that's happening within a now quite powerful movement that includes the L in their string of letters.
Then next time, do some actual analysis.
so you disagree with Bradbury's position?
Do you have any idea what the HRRT did and why? Or why another journalist attending wasn't allowed to take notes?
No, he's saying that the Herald is covering the case because it's owned by a politically alt right billionaire. Subtext: good people wouldn't give the evil terfs the publicity. Which other women do you and Bradbury think should be allowed normal media coverage? Why has the case not been covered generally in the MSM?
Which other women do you and Bradbury think should be allowed normal media coverage? Why has the case not been covered generally in the MSM?
I can't answer for Bomber & the MSM and dunno why you think I might, but I'm happy to acknowledge that I believe all women ought to get media coverage on a common-interest basis, via chose reps. Nor do I have a problem with those who lack a common-interest basis getting coverage similarly, in whatever cliques or mutual-interest groups they choose to use politically.
btw, if you want to run anti-feminist lines here, you'd better have a bloody good argument. No way is that kind of copypasta slop appropriate. If I see it again, on any topic, I will ban you again. We're getting closer to election year and there will be no tolerance for FB-esque commenting that is lazy and designed to be a wind up.
I've never been anti-feminist. I have no idea why you formed that impression. I started supporting females in solidarity with how guys were treating them in 1964 when I was in the 4th form, and have never changed since. That was 6 years before the word feminism first show up as a cultural trend…
[I will comment with my mod hat off unbolded, and all mod comments will be bolded, just so it’s clear. The warning from me as a mod was to stop posting copypasta slop on any topic. This isn’t twitface, we are a political blog, you have to bring coherent political arguments, not just post random slop.
You have a history of this and of not understanding moderation, so I did you the courtesy of pointing out where we are heading. If you don’t understand what I am talking about here, you can ask for clarification. – weka]
mod note above.
If you want to know why you come across as sexist, you approvingly posted a link to an anti-feminist piece. And you have twice called feminist activists 'busy bodies'.
you have twice called feminist activists 'busy bodies'
Not intentionally, but if you are implying that the tribunal are feminist activists, and if you are correct about that, I plead ignorance. I withdraw any imputation that they fit the old social category. I agree they have every right to be doing their principled thing, whatever it is, and I would probably support it…
I think I get it. My motive was to flag the issue as worthy of analysis. I don't feel that I know enough about it to go any further at this stage. I regret you saw it as lacking import since I was hoping you would be one of those who would clarify the nuances involved. One of Aotearoa's most influential leftist bloggers saw that 3-pronged framing as the essence of his critique.
Human rights remains vital. We all need optimal clarity of whatever shit is going down at the leading edge currently. I know you do your bit on that well, so I regret having inadvertently upset you by being too brief. I should have asked.
Honestly just let the internecine contest just play out. It really doesn't matter.
Cracking metaphor.
https://neighborhoodview.org/2025/11/13/digital-future-or-risk-to-critical-thinking-skills-5-takeaways-as-malden-drafts-ai-strategy-for-schools/
People fearful of progress often hallucinate potential futures of harm, and try to share paranoia on that basis. We've seen onsite here how the gizmo is handy for summarising the essential factors in a topic or situation. When a tool works well in personal experience, people naturally want to use it, so I doubt these protestors will get traction.
If I were a teacher I'd challenge the kids to examine the downside of usage though, to encourage them to improve their critical faculties. I'm currently reading https://www.penguin.co.nz/books/empire-of-ai-9780241678923 and will report any feasible grounds for paranoia that she uncovers. See also her chapter titles here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_AI
There's money to be made, too.
/
https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/get-me-a-radium-highball-new-york-and-the-radium-craze
A new wave of apps is attempting to create a hotline to heaven for users who are interested in strengthening their religious faith.
The app Text With Jesus uses artificial intelligence and chatbots to offer spiritual guidance to users who are looking to connect with a higher power.
Text with Jesus is part of a rising trend of faith-based digital technologies that Axios calls a "digital awakening" and it's in good company with apps such as bible.ai and desktop options like EpiscoBot.
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/tech/religious-chatbot-apps/4302361/
I learnt somewhat of the psychology of marketing just by experiencing the creativity of ad agency folk, and being their paid servant as crafter of product.
Seems to work via enchantment. The imagery plus story casts a spell on the mind of the viewer. Just wait till AI fronts with a mix of image and text…
"…the gizmo is handy for summarising the essential factors in a topic or situation."
Or falsely summarising things it just made up. If we could tell which was which without having to do all the fact-checking ourselves, it might be a useful product.
Correct. In that respect it's functionally equivalent to a human, right? Well, maybe an academic would be a better match. I did post evidence of AI faking it onsite here a while back the only time I have caught it out so far…