cloventt

Found this wee dude chilling on my daughter’s face after she had some play time in the sandpit.

Actually I think it would be better in c/NZ to be honest. Off topic is intended for shitposting and discussion of topics not related to NZ.

Great initiative!

Lol Jeff I’m a greenie and I talk about ridiculous zoning and regulations all the time. You aren’t alone or crazy for wanting to fight this fight.

You shouldn’t need a car to live in a city. That’s a symptom of decades of woeful city planning modelled on America, where car company lobbyists call the shots. Endless car-dependent urban sprawl is locking young people out of stable housing options close to where they work. “Intensification” in the world of our new CEO Mr Luxon and his landlord mates means cramming more beds into already over-crowded flats and boarding houses and building 2-story seven-figure 80m2 luxury shoeboxes, rather than building the 10-story buildings with stacks of self-contained apartments that a proper central-city needs to have.

Here’s how I would fix it:

• relax resource consent requirements for 10-story buildings around key urban areas such as malls and inside the four aves; also relax rules on three-storey intensification projects to build self-contained semi-detached townhouses
• encourage mixed-use buildings — ground floor is retail/food (there’s your laundromat), next one or two floors are commercial office space (there’s your job) and the next three to seven stories are self-contained one-or-two bedroom residential apartments (there’s your home with your own kitchen)
• start doubling rates annually on undeveloped land in the central city - including gravel pit parking lots - to get some movement on finally transforming these into places for people to live and work in this city
• deeper local government investment in social housing with targeted rates on unaffordable housing projects - ie if the project does not make some honest effort to provide ongoing affordable housing they get slapped with a special rate that goes towards funding social housing for those in need
• adopt 15-minute city principles (no, they aren’t a globalist conspiracy) so that getting into a car is not a rewuired part of your daily routine - you can just walk/bike to the doctor, school, movies, pub, maccas, supermarket, library, etc. That also means improving cycling infrastructure and public transport availability.

Some of these are things our Green-aligned city councillors have been pushing consistently for years, and recently they’ve been having increasing success. You are welcome to come join us in this fight, we need your help.

Also, yearning for more fossil fuel investment right now is a bit like building a horse barn in 1912. Even leaving aside the environmental impact (which is massive, and real, and something we all should all be working to fix), green options are already becoming cheaper to implement, and they hugely reduce our dependence on the international oil market which is famously a controlled cartel market and not in our favour as a tiny island nation with low productivity.

Yeah that last point is fascinating.

Have you heard about the saga of the water bottling plant in Christchurch? Iwi involvement was one of the reasons the international export of our water was stopped in that situation. Indigenous representation in governance of our water resources is one of our best tools to protect it from global corporate interests.

There's a saying on the left that if you sit down at a table with a nazi, there are now two nazis at the table. I don't completely agree with that logic, but the far-right are a sizable influence in those protest groups. Sure you get the crunchy hippy vegan wellness-mummas who are only there because they're anti-vax or anti-fluoride or whatever, but they have seemed pretty alarmingly willing to jump on the anti-trans hate train recently. Anger at the system does seem to be the main uniting value, you're right, and personally I think that anger is something that needs to be healed through civil discourse and maybe politics. But that anger is currently being hijacked by the far-right to bolster their cause, and that worries me.

I don’t believe that all these middle age women at the protests are blaming Jews for the vaccine

I don't believe they are either, but I think some of the people supporting and pushing these movements absolutely are. For a movement that is hyper-aware of "agendas" and "narratives" the people in these protest movements seem pretty oblivious to the possibility their own movement is influenced in exactly that type of way.

The only term that I identify with is pro-russian.

Which is honestly unsurprising. Western intelligence groups have been sounding alarm bells about Russian attempts to interfere in the politics of western democracies for a decade or so now, as you likely know well. In my time on Telegram I've noticed a constant low-level hum of spam in major channels that has all the fingerprints of state-sponsored propaganda, likely out of Russia. Telegram itself has such intimate links to the Kremlin it may as well be a state asset at this point. Whatever your personal reasons for being pro-Russia, you have to recognise they have a clear interest in sowing disharmony in western nations, and they have the capability to do it. If I were in their shoes, these anti-government fringe movements would be the perfect tool for the job. Have you really not considered the possibility that you've bought into the propaganda platform of an increasingly hostile foreign government?

He uses an "average house price" of $893,639. That is being massively skewed upwards by urban centres. Rural houses are still relatively affordable - a quick search on Trademe finds perfectly acceptable houses in small towns like Ashburton for $300k, and if you get out into rural areas it gets even cheaper. He's also assuming that farmhand would have bought an "average-price" house back in the 90s - in fact rural houses were cheaper back then just as they are today.

Using the Westpac Mortgage calculator he used, a couple each on the median income of $61k ($29 an hour) could afford a property at $809,687 with a 20% deposit. To give him credit, that is still pretty much unaffordable for most people and something we should all be appalled by, but it is nowhere near as terrible as the picture he is painting.

I know nothing about them.

Vince has some extremely questionable views on things like culture, race, history and politics. According to him, ultimately a lot of things come back to "the Jews". He is a contributor to the far-right fringe disinformation outlet Counterspin Media.

Sorry Jeff but I have to disagree with you on some of what you wrote.

crazed notion that middle age women who oppose vaccination are somehow crypto-fascists ... [is] a Reddit fantasy

Your description of their beliefs isn't quite complete, you're missing some of the most critical stuff off the list of things they oppose:

• "globalists", (eg bankers, politicians, corporations, academics, "the ruling elite", yadayada)
• "gender ideology"

I've spent some time observing and talking to people in these movements and for the most part these two terms are usually dog-whistles for:

• Jews
• gays

Personally I wouldn't bother putting the "crypto-" in front. It's hard to spend any time in these communities without beginning to notice some of the really major similarities between their ideologies and the early stages of European fascism in the start of the 20th century. Those middle-aged women may not personally identify with the labels of "fascist", "racist", "anti-Semitic" or "homophobic", but the things they say align pretty well with those labels. Yeah I agree the terms of fascist, nazi etc are thrown around a little too freely by the online left, but sometimes you just have to call a spade a spade. For us on the left, "fascist" is shorthand for "authoritarian far-right" (in the same way "communist" can be shorthand for "authoritarian far-left"), and based on the things I've seen you and others associated with that movement write online, I am absolutely comfortable giving you the label of "authoritarian far-right".

There are people on Reddit who think that Carl Bromley and Lee Williams are Nazis.

Based off the many things he has said in his Youtube videos I am quite happy to call Lee authoritarian far-right, as well as a racist and a homophobe. If some people online shorthand that to "nazi" I won't lose any sleep over that. Carl on the other hand strikes me as a bit of a clown by comparison, though I haven't followed him as closely.

[...] claims that far-right groups in NZ are preparing terrorist attacks [...]

You may recall this actually did happen in New Zealand's very-recent history, and it is something kiwis are (rightly) alert to, and are (rightly) unwilling to let happen again.

Kyle Chapman was arrested for owning a gun, but he’s not even a part of any far-right group...

[...] claim that the Rob Gray Life Centre is a [right-wing] terrorist training hub.

Kyle has expressed some quite extreme beliefs on topics like race, culture, and has convictions for violence related to those views. Let's be 100% clear here, "far-right" and "terrorist" are labels that fit Kyle pretty well from his track-record, even if he has softened up a bit in the last few decades. He is absolutely not the kind of person who should be in possession of weapons, let alone firearms - I'm actually really curious to know what his justification for being in possession of them was. And he's running "survivalist" training courses at RGLC - Rangi is hyperbolic but he has a point.

To be fair I've never met you in person, or Kyle, or anyone else at RGLC - I can only go off the things I've seen you say online. In fact I agree with you on some issues - for example you personally are 100% correct to be angry about the state of housing and income inequality in this country - I'm angry about those same issues. However I don't think the solution to these problems involves racism, or homophobia, or hate in any form - it's just a pointless non-productive waste of your emotional energy.

If I've got the wrong end of the stick about you as an individual, by all means let me know. But I'm pretty comfortable to call the movement you're defending in this comment far-right and authoritarian.

Given that Vince is so wrong about so many things, it isn't surprising to find that also extends to finance, economics and maths.

Daily drive a 9500 on latest Fedora. Only thing that doesn’t work is the fingerprint scanner and honestly I don’t care in the slightest.

Please don’t let these clowns into government. They actively want to make life worse for everyone who isn’t wealthy.

Good.