lets talk about the elections in new zealand

please elaborate.

i would also like to piont out that that interview on TV3 with helen clark and john campbell was completely fucked. i feel really embarassed for john campbell - but i think he thinks he was being some kind of hero.

No doubt this'll have some effect on labour's vote, what with GE being the only bloody issue everyone seems to be bothered about (health and education seeming to rank somewhere down the list), but hopefully not enough to have an English/Peters/Prebble treble act (no pun intended).

do tv media people want the greens to be dogged by a luddite image or -?

*(She wrote a song I really like - Hold me Now which I would like to know was that a hit in britain or australia? hey they weren't really twins right? I mean her name at least wasn't thompson)

Isn't it nice that the lovely Alannah & all her posh/monied mother-y friends want to clasp us to their collective bosom & tell us how to live. Marvellous!

I saw these two (minus, of course, Toshimaru Nakamura) at the Wunderbar in Lyttelton in early January. Bruce's set, of course, was tape loop, oscillator, random keyboard key madness, while Greg did something really interesting, whereby he somehow lodged a piece of wood in the end of his guitar, then played the wood with a violin bow, or something. Beautiful!

Bruce's cafe is awesome! I'm not really down w/ prices and the like for coffee in NZ (being an Aussie...) but it does, depending on who you get to make it, the best coffee in the ChristChurch area (aside from this weird homewears store in a weird, quasi industrial area not far from Lyttelton, which was its equal in coffee, but not ambience... as far as I could see.)

Plus, they make an amazing brownie, which have pictures of bees stencilled on in them in icing sugar!

Also: I hope that 'bourgeois' part of your comment was some kind of ironic joke?

Sounds about right. Boring, 'grind-y kind of music (coupled with a dull 'arty' comment on the nature of performance, I imagine in that it was) played from behind a curtain. I only caught the tail end of his set, but I was, er, underwhelmed.

As I understand it, he has a Masters in Marxist Philosophy or something, so...

yes you do. you just sell heaps of your records first.

What's the story w/ The Trillionaires? Isn't the drummer ex of some quite well known Dunedin band like The Bats, or The Verlaines or something like that?

Absolutely. Saw them play New Years at the Wunderbar and they ripped.

the elections are today!! yay!! i can't wait to watch the results. (go greens!!)

the dairy two doors along sells Sanrio-tack My Melody hair bands, and there's a good chinese vegan cafe thingo in the same block. and interestinglooking bookshops which v rudely weren't open at 9pm or whatever it was when i stumbled upon it.

i realised i'd been staring intently at the scrolling party-vote results for an hr and went and had a bath instead. how did the Greens fare in the end?

there's a good chinese vegan cafe thingo in [...]

oh my is addington being gentrified?

does anyone understand the rationale behind not voting? i mean i get the whole anarchy thing but umm do people who don't vote believe in some kind of non-voting revolution (rather than a gradual breakdown of the state)?

some do. theres also the idea that you are ethically obliged to obey the laws that are being maintained or created by people you've voted for. And that elections bring about the worst in politicans and you legitimising the process by participating in it. And that elections are such a small part of living in a democracy but its the only part that the establishment wants you to partake in.

from what I have gathered they are like National but with more FAMILY VALUES & COMMON SENSE POLICY, heh.

the only difference i can see between National and United Future is that National can't work with Labour. This whole family values thing is pretty offensive to anyone who anyone agree with their 19th century morality (we must all be anti-families...)

why is winston peters such a racist?

this is why:
New Zealand First Party 13

my fingers are crossed. when are the special votes finalised?

http://lollers.netfirms.com/rolleyes.jpgx1000.

To pick a perhaps well-worn example, China has a thriving export market, making all manner of clothing and consumer goods for the 'Western' markets. This doesn't mean that it's a thriving economic superpower; a climate of subcontracting and outsourcing means that winning a tender can come at the expense of factory-floor workers getting paid a reasonable living wage. Even if they do [it's not all NoLogo sweatshop complexes], the socio-economic conditions - crowding, industrial pollution, female infantacide [esp in rural communities] - cannot be dismissed in simple economic terms.

The principle is Triple Bottom Line Economics and thankfully, it's beginning to achieve recognition, if not acceptance. You're smart and switched on, you should look into it.

Don't be fooled by the centre-rightists that the GE issue is pure irrational hysterics, either. It's very much an economic issue, and Fitzsimmons' policy [if not its application in the election campaign] is cautious and pragmatic. Despite what MAdGE might think, genetically altered foods are probably not going to kill you or make you grow another limb. They will, however, be harder to export. I think it's Sri Lanka that's placed a ban on importing engineered foods, including those that are merely suspected 'contaminated'. Our economy still relies on agricultural exports, helped in no small part by the perceived Clean and Green image. No concrete-floored cattle feedlots or Roundup-Ready crops so heavily doused in the pesticide the un- engineered weeds develop immunity.

We're a small nation. We're not an especially wealthy nation. We < i>are, however, a unique nation with a powerful point of marketing difference. It would simply be foolish to take the Life Science Network approach to 'take on' America head-on in this technology race. Cultivating, exploiting and intelligently marketing the Clean and Green reputation we already have is a very sensible niche-marketing strategy.

ok, cute the footage of the folk-dancing now.

That paragraph didn't say much, but I believe it is important. While I agree with you that it is not only economic indicators that are important, I am concerned that the greens seem think that it is only the socio-economic indicators that are important. I pointed that out merely as an example that they don't really have too much of our economy in mind.
And hey, our standard of living isn't faring too well under the sluggish growth either: we're what, 40,50-something? where we used to be 2nd-3rd, meanwhile countries that have been successful economically (Ireland, Australia etc) seem to be jumping up the ranks, suggesting that there maybe is a link between economic growth and the individual standard of living. After all, increase expenditure > increase tax > increase govt spending, does it not?

With regards to GE, in the long term you could turn out to be correct. You could also turn out to be very, very wrong. If the world (or most of it, at least) has a head start on GE, and it doesn't turn out that it makes us an army of the undead, our competitive advantage as an agricultural/horticultural-producing nation is gone. What countries will want to import our apples that are sprayed in pesticides when they can get shinier ones that don't have to be sprayed from America, at half the price? I mean, most of the time the GE plant will probably be healthier for you than the pesticide infested "natural" one. How will this help our "clean and green" image?
But what's to stop us keeping that competitive advantage exactly? We have all the naturally occuring resources that countries like America doesn't, and if we keep up with the technology, we will have the technology plus the resources, vs just the technology. I still think that's a pretty hefty advantage, yo.
And yes, there is the organic niche market, but I am skeptical of a) how many consumers around the globe actually care; and b) how organic our "organic" produce really is (witness the huge number of organic orchards getting spray drift from neighbouring ones).

This is to say nothing of the medical uses for ge, that the greens are putting horribly behind schedule in this country. They've already backed down over products for diabetics I believe, but I think they're going to do a hell of a lot more than that if they want to convert this policy to anything but a luddite hippyfest, IMO.
(Just had to fill the quota of stereotypes. Hey, you did it too.)

Also, this is filled with a bunch of crap you already said. I'm tired, and I just finished doing two hours of economics. sue me.

'Keep It In The Lab' meant just that - allow scientists to fully explore possibilities of this new technology in the controlled environment of the scientific laboratory. Allowing, even encouraging, the use of GE technology and techniques in such matters as insulin production is well in keeping with this policy.

This is another thing too, there have been huge amounts of studys on the effects of marijuana on people's bodies too, but they still don't know with a huge amount of certainty what it does. And yet they're fine with legalising that... que?

I'm not condemning the law (as a sidenote I support decriminalisation, I'm not sure if I'd go all the way to legalisation though), I am simply pointing out the inconsistencies of the reasonings by the green party.

Indeed.

shrug.

i dunno it was about nine days after the election last time. They recount all the other votes too because the votes counted on the night were counted by exhausted workers who had worked 14 hour days and just wanted to go home and never see another ballot paper ever again.

They[the Greens]'ve already backed down over products for diabetics

No they haven't. The Greens have never had a policy banning GE diabetic medicine.

This is another thing too, there have been huge amounts of studys on the effects of marijuana on people's bodies too, but they still don't know with a huge amount of certainty what it does. And yet they're fine with legalising that...

i though the difference between releasing GE organisms into the ecosystem and people smoking pot was obvious; the pot smoker is only affecting the person choosing to smoke it and the people choosing to be in the same room as them, not an entire ecosystem. You may have noticed that the Greens are not trying to ban deep-fried Mars bars either.

I am simply pointing out the inconsistencies of the reasonings by the green party.

Theres heaps of them as a result of their uber-democratic policy process; you'll just have to try harder.

The cautiously advocating decriminalisation party would be labour.

Labour have never had a policy on marijuana and most likely never will.

So making it R18 and also reducing the pot=illegal=REBELLIOUS mystique may even curb youth usage.

yeah but it probably won't. Green activists have been saying for ages that their dope policy will decrease the amount of pot smoked, which is either incredibly naive or plain lies.

thats good, because its my "bottom line". if they did try to ban them, i would "hold the government to ransom".

In any case, I would argue that someone smoking pot affects not only themselves but "society" as an overall health level. But I'm just a management student that doesn't know the REAL truth about shady coverups and scandals. THE WOOL IS OVER MY EYES! SAVE ME NICKY HAGER, FOR YOUR TINFOIL HAT PROVIDES AMPLE PROTECTION.
(this isn't aimed at anyone, i just don't like nicky hager)

We're through the looking glass here people.

. . .