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notices and features - Date published:
6:00 am, December 16th, 2025 - 22 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 …
Version 2.0 of Ol' Spud Bolger's Decent Society (which it never was..) as NAct1 update the Descent Society
As Minister Tama Potaka opines (IMO not taking them seriously ..at all : (
Do they know its christmas time…in NAct1? Short answer : NO.
Fight back Kick NAct1 out 2026 !
And on that note…implode/explode/self eviscerate/immolate…leave them to it!
And to paraphrase Ol' Wily Winnie? NO to any NZFist within Labour.
What a breath of fresh air although it isn't that fresh, it's traditional.
Helmet Modlik speaking to Catherine Ryan on rnz this morning I will post a link when it comes up.
From reimbursement of two cents to the dollar for the land that was stolen they are setting up multi generational housing and many health initiatives.
I have long said what is good for Maori is good for all of us and what a contrast. An iwi approach as opposed to this dollar worshiping ideal of getting back to surplus
Essayist points to conology as the real doctrinal force driving the coalition:
I have yet to see anyone actually worshipping a road cone, but maybe I've been paying insufficient attention. Bureaucratic deployment in recent decades has become so extensive that one naturally expects bureaucrats to have invested heavily in cone manufacturing corporates a la public/private partnering ethos.
Bish has gallantly adopted Don Quixote mode to tilt at this Deep State windmill. His heroic endeavour ought to be made into a reality-tv thing like LOTR, since there are ample local & regional infestations to simulate hordes of foreign invaders.
What an eye-opener that is, conology is the name of the syndrome. I see it all now but how to get other people to share the diagnosis? Any ideas? Posters? Spray it on fences, (but watch out for deadly retaliation).
Link to Helmut Modlik interview as promised above.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2019017127/the-surging-maori-economy
And these people walk among us.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/media/16-12-2025/billionaire-nzme-director-jim-grenon-funding-defamation-lawsuit-against-tvnz-court-told
”Under further questioning from Salmon, Batchelor said he was not a racist and disagreed with Nazism and right-wing extremism. He repeatedly stated that he believed Māori had fundamental character flaws. “It’s the lack of character inside Māori that I believe is the issue,” he said. “If Māori don’t address the issue of character, then the culture and the language might as well die a natural death.”
He told the court that he believed Māori were not indigenous to New Zealand and that a race of fair-skinned, ginger-haired people had settled the land before Māori arrived.”
Is that racist or stupidly ignorant?
Seems to me character flaws are human nature so yeah, the guy comes across as racist.
That genetic view seems supported by local Maori history down south ever since Barry Brailsford popularised it back around 1990 or thereabouts, and normalised amongst cognoscenti. Anyone interested ought to check out Waitaha mythos, etc..
So he's not stupidly ignorant. More like being informed by deep south legend. Not that I want to be seen defending a billionaire, mind you, just being fair to him.
Watch out, DF at the gesture of being fair to the foul. One can only be fair when the contest is chivalrous – but that doesn't apply at present.
Pablo putting Bondi into perspective.
https://www.kiwipolitico.com/2025/12/addressing-unspoken-truths/
“While digesting the stock pap that passes for NZ local “expert” commentary on the Hanukkah attacks I found myself thinking about the broader tone of Western media coverage and the implicit biases reflected in it. Let me start with a few small points of order and then speak to what is left largely unsaid in mass media coverage.”
He uses a definitional triad framing:
When someone lists all essential elements of a set, the diagnosis often gets framed as key features of a situation or phenomenon. This is metaphysical, due to being subliminal most of the time. I read scientific books, often, wherein the author distills science into simple concepts for public consumption. Keywords capture the essence too, which is why they feature online to make algorithms contagious.
Still amuses me how academics are so big on implicitly signalling the integer archetypes while being still brainwashed into believing they are merely numbers. Pythagoras was right that they make the world happen (as influential parts); Plato & Aristotle were both too stupid to transmit that gnosis, and western civilisation has been on the wrong track ever since. Clueless dork syndrome has a long history!
You sir, are wanna-be "intellectual" high school level philosophy (Romans! Greeks!) and grammatical gobbley-gooked obsessed thin-bladed tool basically talking keyboard sh*t. Real analysts are far more serious and practical when they approach this issue.that involves a cost in lives. You are to them what an onanist is to a serious counter-terrorism person. Flog on!
Thank God I'm not the only one! Always so hard to tell what DF actually means underneath all the pseudo-intellectual verbiage.
I agree with the core of your analysis. The definitional discipline around terrorism vs hate crime is the useful part here, and most NZ “expert” commentary really does slide straight past it.
The only thing I’d add is that this feels like yet another example of how even ostensibly local or regional conflicts now have an unavoidable global dimension. Narratives travel in real time, get reinterpreted and repurposed across borders, and can raise the background probability of copycat or “sequel” violence in places with no direct operational connection to the originating conflict.
That doesn’t make outcomes any more predictable, but it does make them less surprising.
Which poses a genuinely grim challenge for liberal states: how do you square freedom of expression and association with a rising baseline risk of stochastic, hard-to-predict violence without sliding into blanket surveillance, overreach, or policing thought rather than acts?
Funny how males revert to schoolboy abuse when out of their depth, eh? As if the behaviour became permanent lodged deep within long ago and seeks to escape for a run around the park whenever possible.
Fwiw, I basically agreed with your analysis – as I often have in the past without bothering to comment. That comment merely reflected the bit that I thought most significant. It was not intended to be disrespectful! I try to give the shallow leftist view more depth by grounding it in the deep green outlook. Anchoring it within nature adds value by warping it in the direction of credibility…
There's a usually a gap between what a commenter intends and how it's read.
In some cases a very large gap.
And that's one of the most profound points ever made onsite here. Neuroscience trends in recent decades have explored the gap, with quite a lot of elucidation, but interpreting the views of others will always be subjective.
Objectivity got discredited by physicists long ago but relative objectivity remains useful in generating some consensus. It seems to function in the medial realm between the extremes of subject and object. In folk parlance it gets called common sense and suchlike. Users access it by trying to transcend their knee-jerk stance and taking the views of others into account…
Decode
1.academics use a systematic approach and have agreed use of terms/definitions.
2.the use of the terms, phenomenon, metaphysical and subliminal, is for the appearance of a semblance of sophistry (before the public audience – that is those out of its depth in any academic discourse).
3.tracking the measurement of an angle (positions of academics in the media on matters before the public) and Descartes (comparisons of expression of thinking and feeling, graph plot points).
If you want supremacy as to knowledge of the direction of such things, I'd not go with anyone in particular.
One of the daughters of the Winter Queen, corresponding with Rene, noted that the unmarried one was lacking in three dimensional life actuality and was thus a virtual sister in the making.
The married one had a descendant who sat on a mock throne chair in the Vatican City – the chaplain of his mother for decades became a Catholic convert before she died.
Man invented their God and want to be seen as loyal to it, such is the human bargaining with their fate.
SPC: My approach is less academic (I stopped being an academic in 2011) and more informed by my experiences doing counter-terrorism analysis and planning for the US government back in the day and later in my current role as a geopolitical risk consultant. For analysts the objective is to establish a chain of causality using conceptual and methodological tools in order to do the analytic equivalent of reverse engineering of an event. That can lead to broader connections , capabilities, planning and even motivations using network analysis and other research tools. It is not about using "big" words willy-nilly without fully distinguishing their specific or precise meaning.
Sadly, in some societies where anti-intellectualism is rife, intellectual poseurs crop up who take advantage of public ignorance in order to throw out pseudo-intellectual claptrap, filling the void with "big" "academic" words lacking in conceptual depth or precision. That has seeped into media coverage, where charged words are used loosely in order to generate clicks and put eyeballs on screens. To paraphrase Steve Bannon, they are flooding the zone with sh*t.
The simplest and most pertinent of details so far – the Sydney cleric whose agent recruited teens to the IS ideology, including the 24 year old (at age 17), was particularly anti-Jewish (c2018 pre Gaza). This informing the nature of the IS action on their part.
Niccinoboats has a degree in English literature!
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And while nominal GDP has recovered, real GDP hasn’t returned to levels forecast at the budget update in May. Over the forecast period, net core Crown debt increased by $72bn. It’s predicted to peak at 46.9% of GDP in the year to June 2028, rather than the 46% previously predicted. New Zealand Superannuation continues to be the largest driver of core Crown expenses, increasing to $8.6bn in 2024/25 – more than housing ($1.4bn) and education ($6.6bn) combined. Rennie said the number of people receiving super will rise from 928,000 this year to 1.1 million in the forecast period.
If you ask finance minister Nicola Willis, the big picture story is all good news. “With fresh air in its lungs, the economy is picking up,” Willis promised the crowd at Treasury’s Hyefu release. She lauded the government’s saving of $11bn yearly, though recognised Treasury’s previous forecasts had been “far too optimistic, and some of the assumptions made at the time have since been unwound”.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/16-12-2025/hyefu-2025-economic-recovery-i-barely-knew-ye
Ruth doesn't do circuses…….only guillotining……
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/ruth-richardson-backs-out-of-debate-with-nicola-willis/B6IYD7JG2ZGELLR3AIKBO2M3NY/
So, what went wrong in 2025 – year 2 with the CoC ('govt' by and for the sorted) in charge?
The answer, of course, is 'Not a thing.' The sorted are just fine – NAct1 is simply a machine for the relentless upwards redistribution of wealth – everything is going to plan.