Outrage of sedition - where are the other parties?

Now I don’t agree with Tim Selwyn, I am glad he was prosecuted for vandalism. However, his prosecution for sedition is an outrage. Not PC and No Right Turn have both covered this verdict in some detail, showing that some on the liberal end of the SOCIAL spectrum (if not economic) understand freedom. David Farrar to his credit has also opposed sedition laws, but… and a big but it is... there has simply been silence from the major political parties. Find other issues where those people will agree, and agree with Geoffrey Palmer.
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The Labour Party, once the proud home of the socially liberal, is now the home of the petty bullies. The born to rule, “I’m a victim of my success as a popular and competent Prime Minister” arrogance. How many of YOU lot would also be convicted of sedition had the government of the day brought it upon you when you were in some protest march in the 60s, 70s or even 80s? Wankers.
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The National Party – supposed believers in freedom, much prefer to keep quiet. ACT – the liberal party, also keeping quiet. No point defending an “uppity Maori who convicted vandalism” because of principle? After all, majority of the public probably think “good job”. Much as the majority in Alabama thought “good job” when a black woman was arrested for sitting in the whites only section of the bus, much as the majority of Germans sat back and let Hitler destroy democracy in Germany after he was elected. Sanctimonious fence sitters. I again searched the National website for the word sedition and got this.
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The Green Party, often claims to be the defender of civil liberties, has said nothing either (until today). It would rather wank on excitedly about more subsidised buses in Hamilton. Frogblog also lacks anything on it. UPDATE - Green press release out, see below.

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NZ First is a party of authoritarians so no surprises there, and United Future once claimed to be liberal, but is anything but that.
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I’ve also seen nothing from the Maori Party, but then it has always had slow websites that are rarely up to date (last press release on there is 16 May).
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There are times when politicians have a responsibility – a responsibility to stand up for freedoms for people that most of us would not agree with, to stare through the prejudice and the popularity polls and say – Tim Selwyn should be the last person ever to face a charge of sedition – the law should be scrapped. So will Rodney Hide take a break from dancing and do this? Or is ACT as useless in defending fundamental freedoms as some libertarians have always accused it of?

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Prove me wrong - prove to me that ACT has just been slow, and isn't refusing to defend Tim Selwyn's right to circulate that leaflet because he'd be one of the last to vote for them, and because their voters would be the last to support his views. Fundamentally - neither matter.

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UPDATE 1- Green's have produced a press release on this, calling for a review of the law. About time, Keith has woken up. He said "New Zealand has an honourable tradition of civil disobedience against injustice, most notably during the Springbok tour of 1981. Thankfully the sedition laws weren’t used at that time, but the police now seemed prepared to prosecute anyone advocating such resistance. “Next thing we might see farmers facing charges for encouraging others not to get their dogs micro-chipped. “There is a big difference between inciting the immediate commission a specific criminal act, already covered by Sections 66 and 311 of the Crimes Act, and generalized calls for civil disobedience, which the sedition laws target." Spot on Keith, good for you - you can hold your head high. Labour, National and ACT, you all still an utter disgrace as parties in a liberal democracy.

Help in using the tube

At summertime some special advice is needed to use the London underground. This handy tips are for regular and occasional users, and apply mostly to men.

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Before you attempt to use the tube follow these steps:

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1. Have a shower or bath in the morning. Use soap or a soap related product, and at least shampoo (if not condition). Spend at least 10 minutes under it, focusing on the face and underarms. The water shortage does not apply to showers or baths, and you'll find the majority of others already do this.

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2. Apply deodorant to your underarms and anywhere else that sweats a lot. This product is available at convenience stores and supermarkets throughout Greater London and is cheap. It need not have any aroma, just apply it liberally. Here are several brands you might try:

Lynx

Rexona

Crystal

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There are many others! You'll be amazed!

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3. Brush your teeth, with toothpaste and mouthwash preferably. Gargle. Make sure you use a toothbrush you bought sometime in the last 2-3 months, and you expectorate (spit out).

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4. Put on clean clothes (clothes you didn’t wear the previous day without having been laundered. Get someone to show you how to wash clothes or get them washed if you don’t understand this). (OPTIONAL - Wear good cologne/eau de toilette/aftershave. I mean GOOD. Not the same stuff you got where you got the deodorant. This will cost money and use it sparingly. Small amounts of good cologne cannot be replaced by drenching yourself in eau de £2 - that just covers your filthy disgusting sweaty BO with noxious disgusting radiator cleaner)

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5. Ride tube.

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Now riding the tube itself is not without its hazard. Here is some advice to avoid abuse:

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1. Don't pick your nose, particularly not if it is a snack or a hobby. Wait till you get home.

2. Move out of the way for people getting off (and I mean disembarking, not masturbating - you shouldn't do that either).

3. Move down the carriage if it is busy. You'll be allowed off at your stop, don't worry.

4. Don't stop in the middle of busy areas in front of people who will then walk over you, make sure you figure out where you are going before you leave.

5. Don't ride between 7.30am and 9am, or between 5pm and 6.30pm weekdays - it will make my life a little bit more pleasant, and those are the busiest times. TfL is too stupid to increase the price for the evening peak to keep you off it, so do it for the rest of us.

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Let me note that most offenders are men, and there is no racial profiling - there are equal proportions of vile men from different ethnic origins. Your man sweat may arouse your woman, man, dog, sheep - but to the rest of us don't like your bodily fluids.

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A minority of you fail to take these steps, particularly the first and second before boarding. If it were up to me, I’d ban you from the tube for health and safety reasons – the health of other passengers (because you fucking stink you revolting filthy man), and your safety – because I’d want to slap you about for being a dirty filthy stinking sweaty testosterone dripping revolting Neanderthal.

Today in history - Israel acted admirably

UN Security Council Resolution 487 called on Israel to put its nuclear programme under IAEA safeguards. Israel is not a signatory to the IAEA, nor has it any incentive to be - it is surrounded by enemies to this day. Today in 1981, Israel acted where the world ignored it. France and Italy were supplying Iraq with equipment for it to develop a nuclear reactor - which would have been capable of producing plutonium. Now, Iraq has about as much need for a nuclear reactor for power as Iran does, given its oil reserves.
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The Israeli statement condemned the French and Italian sale of equipment to Iraq saying:
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"We again call upon them to desist from this horrifying, inhuman deed. Under no circumstances will we allow an enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction against our people."
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So Israel bombed Iraq, and destroyed Iraq's nuclear programme in Operation Opera. A wholly moral act of pre-emptive self defence.
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Indeed, if only it were as simple against Iran. The BBC carries the video of then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin explaining why the attack was carried out. The BBC reports that the news about the bombing was released by Israel, Saddam Hussein having been too embarrassed that Israeli fighter jets could penetrate deep into Iraqi territory, destroy a target and return.
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Jacques Chirac led the condemnation of this attack – grande merde! What an enormous great parasitical worm.
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Iran of course is the next threat - but I am sure that if Israel is ever attacked by an Iranian nuclear weapons - that the George Galloways and the Annette Sykes say it was Israel's fault, and give little regard to the victims. How dare they exist.

Time for Jim, Peter and Peters to retire

Three of the eight parties in Parliament exist because of three men – Winston Peters, Peter Dunne and Jim Anderton. They are all of a similar generation, and all of them should retire in 2008. The parties they lead are, by and large, built around those personalities. Most would struggle to name more than 1 other MP from NZ First, United Future and, well, Jim Anderton’s Progressive Party is just that. All had political careers because they were MPs with either National or Labour and split off to form their own parties (Jim Anderton has been in three, Peter Dunne in three or four, Winston has always had his own personality cult) – and it is about time Parliament was cleaned out and these half-baked parties of individuals were gone.
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Winston is losing the plot, he is propping up a lameduck Labour government that is barely hanging onto power, he lost his electorate seat, and only manages to get elected because the greedy grey grizzlers, the deluded Maori groupies and the conspiracy slobbering talkback idiots like him, until he gets into power. The greedy grey grizzlers are slowly dying off, and by 2008 should mean NZ First gets less than 5%. Meanwhile, Winston can enjoy his baubles. He left National for principled reasons - it broke election promises - but he ran a party that is solely about tapping into the redneck conservative anti-intellectual talkback mob, Rob Muldoon's lot. The people of Tauranga have tired of their former hero, he wont be the first Maori Prime Minister of New Zealand - and he ought to go off and have fun in retirement.

Peter Dunne leads a motley bunch of conservative liberal Christian urban power lusting middle of the road nobodies. His party has been Labour’s most faithful coalition/confidence and supply partner now since 2002, and besides voting against any socially liberal legislation (but keeping Labour in power), worshipping the Transmission Gully cargo cult and cozying up to the Christian right, it is a party that is meaningless. It is a testament to Labour that it can even look at this bigoted bunch of narrow-minded busybodies to stay in power, and a testament to United Future that it hooks up with Labour – regularly. Peter Dunne’s Ohariu-Belmont electorate love him, for some unfathomable reason (he hangs around there a lot). When he retires this will become a swing seat, going National/Labour according to the national mood. Peter Dunne left Labour because "Labour left him", which is true. The Maoist coup conducted by Helen Clark, Maryanne Street and Heather Simpson against Mike Moore, and the leftward swing of Labour alienated Dunne, and he tried to woo the Labour right to form a centrist coalition partner for National and Labour. That failed miserably, and so he wooed the Christian right, and alienated the centre. The Christian right went National last time - Peter Dunne ought to cut his losses and move up to Kapiti, where he can sit waiting for Transmission Gully for at least the next ten years.

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Jim Anderton is a died in the wool socialist and central planner, who has enjoyed dishing out millions of your money to businesses and mad schemes like a strategy to bolster the forestry sector in Gisborne/Wairoa. Jim thought thousands of jobs would be created by pouring millions into roads and training in those districts – and nothing much has come of it. He has become more sensible over the years, Cabinet has helped to moderate his mad views on economics, and he basically is an appendage of Labour, while having old fashioned conservative leftwing views on social issues like drugs and alcohol. Once he retires, his Wigram seat will go back to Labour. His party will fade away even more than the Alliance, which still stands for something (which doesn’t even exist in eastern Europe anymore). New Labour and the Alliance are history, as Labour has marched sufficiently to the left to make enough voters happy, without being the card carrying socialists of the Norman Kirk variety that old Labour supporters wanted. Time magazine was wrong - Jim Anderton wont be Prime Minister. Jim Anderton and his family have paid a high personal price for his busy career, and he doesn't need the income of a Cabinet Minister to survive - time for
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So I want all three to go, and their parties from Parliament. It would clear out some history and some parties that don't really stand for much at all. NZ First stands for populist nationalism, but sways and swings according to how Winston thinks the grass the growing. United Future stands for nothing at all, as long as it is about families and commonsense, and has undercurrents of stopping all those queers from running things, and Jim Anderton is a virtual member of the Labour Party.

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Oh and will the end of those parties make it harder for Labour or National to govern, losing these three potential coalition partners? Of course it does – it means Labour is forced to resort to the Greens and Maori party, and National resorts to ACT. National might worry, but then it never really understood MMP as well as Labour has. Its strategy of decimating ACT demonstrates that. Then the minor parties in Parliament will be ones that actually subscribe to different political ideologies - ecological socialism, ethno-nationalism and neo-liberalism.

Tiananmen Square remembered

One piece of history I have neglected to comment on is Tiananmen Square. Not PC has a great review of commemorations worldwide and commentary. Of course I do remember is, it’s hard to forget – it happened on my birthday. I remember seeing the coverage on television, I was a student at the time. I have always wondered if I had been a Chinese student in Beijing whether I would have been there, whether I would have survived and how I’d feel now about it.
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The USSR and eastern Europe were in the throes of optimism due to glasnost and perestroika. Freedom of speech and the ability to criticise government was becoming the norm in the “second world” (communist bloc), and Mikhail Gorbachev had come to visit China. This was part of a successful effort to normalise relations between China and the USSR, after over 30 years of Cold War enmity after Khrushchev criticised Stalin, and Mao became the leader of the completely mad murderous Marxist-Leninists of the world (the USSR wasn’t mad, just murderous to a lesser degree after Stalin).
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The death of reformist former Secretary General of the Communist Party, Hu Yaobang prompted the demonstrations. He died on Kim Il Sung’s birthday 15 April 1989, and had called for rapid reform, condemning the excesses of the Maoist era. The protests initially were motivated by mourning for Hu Yaobang, who had been stripped of his title two years previously for not cracking down on other student protests. The protestors called for political reform, the addressing of corruption and more openness and transparency in government. A split in the Communist Party leadership saw General Secretary Zhao Ziyang support a soft approach, and Premier Li Peng a hardline. Eventually martial law was declared on 20 May and in the early hours of 4 June, the 27th and 38th armies of the People’s Liberation Army (commanded by President Yang Shangkun, unlike earlier units which were locally based and not inspired to attack those who could include family) turned on the people. Between 2,000 and 3,000 were killed, and the state media in China called it an “anti-government riot”.
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China’s state media is widely considered to have been a mouthpiece for the communist party, but at least one outlet had reason to be proud, before the individuals concerned were themselves arrested. Radio Beijing’s English language service (China’s international shortwave radio station) broadcast the following message:
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"Please remember June the Third, 1989. The most tragic event happened in
the Chinese Capital, Beijing. Thousands of people, most of them innocent
civilians, were killed by fully-armed soldiers when they forced their way
into city. Among the killed are our colleagues at Radio Beijing. The
soldiers were riding on armored vehicles and used machine guns against
thousands of local residents and students who tried to block their way.
When the army conveys made the breakthrough, soldiers continued to spray
their bullets indiscriminately at crowds in the street. Eyewitnesses say
some armored vehicles even crushed foot soldiers who hesitated in front of
the resisting civilians. [The] Radio Beijing English Department deeply
mourns those who died in the tragic incident and appeals to all its
listeners to join our protest for the gross violation of human rights and
the most barbarous suppression of the people.”
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Radio Beijing’s name changed a few years later to China Radio International. Unfortunately, China Radio International is today a disgrace – it whitewashes the murder carried out against its own staff. It broadcasts a lot of news and interesting cultural programmes, has cooking shows and other programmes that are quite good - but is also a propaganda engine par excellence. What is telling is what it doesn’t discuss, it rarely broadcasts the sort of blatant ideological invectives that characterised it during the Maoist era. However, try it out yourself.

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You can still listen to it in English around the world on shortwave and the internet. It’s website is here, and it broadcasts to New Zealand with strong signals in English on shortwave between 9-11pm and then again after 1am, but you can also hear it online. This is the worldwide shortwave broadcast schedule (turn off your computer before listening, and put the radio near a window with the aerial fully extended) and the website audio feed.

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The Tiananmen Square massacre will always be remembered, the current Communist Party leadership can't destroy the photos, videos, audio, transcripts and other reports of what happened. All they do is persuade Google to censor the images for them, which you can get here. More recently a documentary on BBC4 has sought to find the man who stood in front of the tank in the famous footage clip seen above. The conclusion was, nobody can confirm what has happened to him or what his name was, despite the claims on wikipedia.