Why The Americans Waited Nine Years To Bring Up Taking Our Eye Out Of The Five

Another article, published today, is doing the rounds about the prospect of NZ being booted out of the '5 Eyes' 'security' club, due to the alleged perforation of the heart of our politics by the People's Republic of China.

I've said it before and i'll say it again.

The problem the Americans have identified was *worse* under National. Yet for nine years the US did NOT seek to proffer this 'threat' at us.

The reason for this is quite simple.

They don't actually care nearly as much as they are pretending about the issue of Chinese 'infiltration'. They DO care, at least somewhat, if i) your governing party is "red" in its electoral material [regardless of its actual substance in practice], ii) it's not all that keen on supporting their general penchant for overseas military adventurism.

So therefore, National got a 'free pass' despite a Chinese intelligence agent in its Parliamentary Caucus, because it made the 'right noises' about wanting to have helped invade Iraq, etc. etc. and not rocking the boat with neoliberalism.

Meanwhile, the Labour/NZF/Greens Government can move to block Huawei from getting the contract for our 5G cellphone network upgrade, start rolling out a policy of attempting to *actively encourage* the US to engage in the Pacific to head off the PRC, and can even preside over the problem of PRC influence/infiltration actually being talked about even at a Parliamentary Select Committee inquiry ...

... and because it is 'convenient' to do so, because it lines up with other priorities, this smokescreen approach of "The Chinese are Puppeteering the Parliamentary Labour Party" gets rolled out.

Whether because the Americans are generally keen on 'disciplining' NZ for not being totally 100% in-line on various geopolitical fronts (and the prospect of trading with Russia may also be in mind here); or whether it is in a bid to surreptitiously 'influence' our domestic politics via the fostering of "Red Scare" style perceptions about the current incumbent Government so as to forment its subsequent replacement via more 'pliable' (by both Chinese *and* American foreign pressures, apparently) National-led administration.

National's Budget Pre-Game Is Double Standards All The Way Down

So let me get this straight:
1. the National Party somehow acquires Budget 2019 materials two days early;
2. Treasury reports it's been hacked and that they've referred the matter to the NZ Police's special cybercrime and security department.
3. National claims that it actually got the papers "lawfully"; Simon Bridges states that Grant Robertson should resign as Finance Minister because of National's receipt of them

Both stories can't be true. But what I found rather interesting was the quite drastic difference between how National's reacting to a potential hack of the Government (which has given them a temporary political advantage - it meant they had a big Distraction for their announcements of the outcomes of their internal review into bullying culture within National, and Alfred Ngaro's Tamaki-inspired backdown on setting up a sidecar support party with which to game MMP) ...

... and National's own screeching vituperation when it came to their *own* instances of themselves or their (Cetacean) subordinates/black-ops crew being hacked in years past. Then, it was quite a different tune - anybody even suspected of knowing who the hacker(s) might be finding themselves with sketchy police search sprees, bank service impairments "just in case", and the high hell-raising that some sort of massive attack upon the very political and social fabric of this country was immanently in progress. [by hackers exposing what National and its cronies had been up to, I mean - not, you see, by WhaleOil, the PM's office, et co, themselves. Funny how that works]

I know it's a truism to state, but it's almost like nobody actually cares about "the rules" over there, and that the only principle they hold dear to is the "Power Principle", the desire to "win" at all costs, and somehow make it look like their own leader isn't in a near constant state of Schrodinger's Resignation, via scalp-demanding from just about anyone and everyone else.

Meanwhile, I was also rather surprised to see the National Party attempting to attack the Government for an increase in Defence spending. I mean ... this is not what you'd expect from National - especially given their rather flagrant over-enthusiasm in years both past and present to deploy the NZDF in support of American military adventurism in the far-flung reaches of the world.

I thought the National Party were supposed to be at least somewhat keen on having a useable and fit-for-purpose Defence Force? But, then, I guess not. Looks like the only Defence they're really seriously interested in, is against the Government's incumbency, by any means necessary. Typical.

The overwhelming impression one gets when looking over the Nats' Budget pre-game, then, is very much the same as that which we've had by looking at them in Opposition these past eighteen months all up.

Namely - it's double-standards, all the way down.

Bridges' Claim On Crime Rates A "Serious Harm" To Causality

Everybody knows the old adage that when it comes to lies, there are three kinds: "lies, damned lies, and statistics". Political press releases, particularly from the National Party, often combine at least two out of the three in some sort of high art form. Yet as is a truth known to only fewer, the best and most persuasive lies are those that actually contain at their core or at least in their sheathing ... a hard element of fact.

Which is pretty much exactly what we saw with yesterday's Herald piece quoting Simon Bridges, Mark Mitchell et co expressing their bewailing concern that there'd been a 25% increase in cases of "serious harm" before the courts - and therefore, that "crime [has been] increasing" since the change-over to the Labour/NZF/Greens Government in October of 2017.

Now watch the 'bait and switch'.

Yes, absolutely, there does appear to be an increase - even quite a notable one - in "serious harm" cases before the courts over the past year and a half.

But that doesn't mean that crime is actually increasing. Not by itself, anyway. I mean, it may very well be that it is. I'm not sure. These stats aren't on the rate of criminal offending experienced by ordinary New Zealanders. Instead, they're simply and exclusively on the raw amount of criminal offending in certain categories that winds up in front of a judge.

And how does an (alleged) criminal find themselves before the Courts?

Well, first they'd have to be apprehended, wouldn't they. For the most part, anyway - some do hand themselves in.

So what do we actually see reflected in these stats which National's publicized? Not evidence of more crime all up. Just evidence of more criminals being dealt with through the justice system.

Which would surely be a good thing?

Now there is, to be sure, some potential merit in something else Bridges said - that the increase in cases before the courts may also be a result of courts taking longer to deal with cases than has previously been the case. And that does deserve to be looked at. Both victims and (alleged) offenders (particularly where it turns out that they're actually innocent) have rights to the speedy dispensation of justice without undue delay. Although this does have to be balanced against the quality of deliberation available - and I'd certainly hope that most would agree with the sentiment that a well-thought-out proceeding which gets a better outcome is superior to a more slap-dash approach designed to have speed as its most significant priority.

But if the increase in numbers of cases is resultant from a slower moving progress through the Justice system, then this suggests that the increase is not - or at least, not entirely - due to changes in crime rates or criminal apprehension. It may be a situation of "both rather than either", and in fact it probably is; yet I can't help but feel that National is pontificating at cross-purposes with its own previously advanced reasoning here.

In any case, that comment around 'apprehension rates' is absolutely key here. As I suggested above, the main vector via which potential offenders wind up in front of a judge, is through hard work by the New Zealand Police. It therefore stands to reason that if the numbers are up for cases in court, that this will be at least somewhat to do with their efforts. And, as you may recall, both Labour and NZF promised significant increases in police numbers at the last Election. The jury's still out on just how well they're going in achieving that, but it does seem there's been som reasonable progress in this area - with the number of sworn officers apparently reaching a record high of 9,506 last month, as a start.

So if there's been a notable increase in the number of "serious harm" cases before the courts, maybe that's at least part of the reason why? The Coalition Government living up to some of its campaign promises, boosting police numbers; therefore leading to more crime being responded to, more (alleged) offenders apprehended, and hopefully, more matters of these types being resolved.

Now, it's difficult to actually verify this prospective claim in the absence of different data-sets - dealing with the actual numbers on crimes committed/experienced and crimes reported (which are not always, themselves, the same for a variety of reasons), incidents responded to, and presumptive offenders then dealt with. And I find it rather curious that National didn't choose to release something much more comprehensive, touchng upon all of those indicators if it were actually serious in its endeavour to convince us that we're 25% more unsafe than we were in mid-late 2017 when they last ruled.

But, then, maybe National doesn't trust those sorts of statistics to do the talking for them.

After all, it is a well-known fact that when National was last in power, and Judith Collins was Police Minister, policing statistics appeared to mysteriously be altered in ways that happened to make the then-incumbent Government look good. I'm sure it was entirely coincidental that Collins' own Papakura electorate seemed to be a particular beneficiary of this sudden and magical sans-crime wave, and that this had nothing whatsoever to do with her decision not to investigate the situation when informed of it as a Minister.

So I guess what I'm saying is - I can see why National might not be keen to use police stats for these matters, given their own previous flagrant mis-use and manipulation of them in the past. And regardless of the changes in stat collection and verification that have since been undertaken by the Police in response to that episode.

But attempting to 'sub in' the figures for cases before the courts in this manner as a substitute for crime-rates, is not exactly any more truthful - even though it doesn't directly entail any actual distortion of statistics for polemical, psephological gain. Just what they might happen to actually represent.

I shall be interested to see if and whether Andrew Little's [and/or Stuart Nash's] office responds by putting out further stats, in areas actually relevant to Bridges' core claim, that enable to assess whether National's contention has much in the way of merit.

Who knows. This may turn into yet another instance of Bridges providing a stirling opportunity for the Government to show that their approach is actually working.

US-Saudi-Israeli State Sponsors Of Errorism Against Iran

USA: designates Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a 'Terrorist Organization'.

Iran: designates US CENTCOM [the American military command responsible for, amongst other things, the Middle Eastern theatre ] as a Terrorist Organization.

I'll address why this has happened in the next portion; but for the moment - like I say in the image accompanying ... I'm pretty sure that if *anybody's* guilty of the whole aiding and abetting "terrorism as a tool of statecraft", and generally being a "state sponsor of terror", it'd be the Americans.

Also the Saudis (identified by British intelligence services as the lead sponsor of extremist activity in the UK; and openly identified by any number of Western officials as being active facilitators of terrorism and insurgency activity in a half a dozen active hotspots across the rest of the globe) - and Israelis, for that matter (one of the more recent and egregious examples being their active assistance to Al-Nusra in the context of the Syrian Civil War)

If actions that "are fundamentally different from those of other governments " in these areas are grounds for international sanction, as Trump's press-release appears to say - somebody *please* line up Saudi-Israeliya, and the Americans, and start censuring the exceptionalists, accordingly.

But that won't happen. Because none of this is actually about "terrorism". Or, rather, as I'll briefly detail in the next post .. it *is* at least partially about terrorism - namely, the fact that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has been a pretty solid force *against* the Sunni-Wahhabi, Israeli, and American-backed groups of extremists marauding the Arabian peninsula and further afield ... and the Anglosphere's "friends" are sick of losing their shadow/dirty war so're switching over to one of the few fields wherein they actually *do* have some form of dominance - the economic slash international talking-shop arenas of injustice.




Right, so here's Iran's Foreign Minister briefly providing a bit of perspective upon what's gone on here with the US's designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a "terrorist organization".

And while the Israeli election is definitely a part of it, the more interesting element is what he's alluding to with the "quagmire [...] consequences for US forces in the region".

See, here's the thing a lot of people don't know: the US has actually had rather successful military co-operation with the Iranians, and specifically the Iranian Revolutionary Guard over the past few years.

This might seem like some sort of bizarre aberration, but actually - if you go back to the opening year or so of the War on Terror, when the main combat theater was Afghanistan, it was the default norm (in part due to 'shared enemies' - the Taliban & Al Qaeda were *not* fans of the Shi'ite Iranian state; and in part because Iran was rather keen to get out of its decades of relative international isolation by being a 'good global citizen' and helping the West tackle a prime vector for terror), a pattern that *would* likely have continued, but for George W. Bush making a rather knee-jerk "AXIS OF EVIL" designation of them, which overnight scuppered the whole exercise.

Now, as the War on Terror, and its derivatives, shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq, with the Invasion in 2003 and subsequent er .. occupation, things changed once again. In *theory*, the Iranians and Americans had had a common enemy in Saddam - it's just that in practice, the Americans probably weren't counting on the Iranians "winning" the peace in much of Northern Iraq - and basically being set to extend the Iranian sphere of influence closer to the Mediterranean than it had been at any point in the past one and a half thousand years [seriously - I actually went back and checked this], as a result.

This created an effective situation of I suppose you might say a 'Cold War' style scenario. The Americans weren't keen on the Iranians merilly marionetting their way through a reasonable swathe of Iraq, yet were not able to do anything serious about it, precisely because the Iranians were a helluvalot better at working in/through/with local Iraqi communities than the US was.

This leads to a hilarious episode of Major General Qassem Soleimani basically IRL trolling his American counterpart with a series of personally written notes taunting the guy about his effective utter inability to do anything about the Iranian influence if not outright control of the area, but I digress.

If we flash forward a few years towards the present, we see the situation change *again*, with the entry into several initially national/insurgency level conflicts simultaneously of *surprisingly* well-funded and supported Sunni/Wahhabist extremist militias.

Now, just *who* was arming, supplyinig, and otherwise supporting these outfits in order to facilitate their shocking early gains, is another matter for another piece; but suffice to say that *somebody* [or, more accurately, *somebodies* from the neocon foreign policy/defence/espionage establishments of at least three countries] quite accurately viewed the immense destabilization potential of these vectors as a very potent weapon against both the Iranians, and also anybody else who might be "problematic" - such as the Assad government in Syria [which, at this stage, was still rather lukewarm about the Iranians, if I recall ] .

However, the trouble with these various prongs of 'anti-Iranian' insurgency/irregular efforts was, in part, that they were "too successful" , insofar as they posed a serious danger of overrunning actual official American satrapies/"friends" in the region [for example - the fear that ISIS might actually manage to topple Iraq itself]. And while it's not *quite* true to state that they were effectively "uncontrollable" [ISIS did, after all, profusely apologize for accidentally attacking Israel], their penchant for causing 'unanticipated [at least officially] occurrences' [c.f the outcomes of McCain's whole "arm the moderates" approach .. which uh .. did arm *somebody*...], and the escalating pileup of optics problems attendant in their ongoing exigencies, meant that eventually, *something* had to be done.

So in a manner not entirely reminiscent of the Dr Seuss book about the kingdom which attempts to get rid of its mice-problem by importing a whole lot of cats ... then attempts to get rid of its cat problem by importing dogs .. then eventually, at the other end of the story, attempts to get rid of its elephant problem by bringing back the mice in something approaching a fruitful co-operation ... the Americans [pointedly *not* the Saudis, the Israelis etc.] found themselves having to once more work with the Iranians, in order to try and corral, constrain, and calceate the cavalcade of decidedly *un*moderate rebels who'd taken up residence and de facto "statehood" in the ruins of what were formerly the Middle East's two leading secular states [i.e. the Ba'athist ones].

This actually worked out rather well, as can be seen by the escalating collapses on all fronts of these various movements - a situation considerably availed by Russian air power and other military contributions, as applies Syria ... although occasionally hampered by both Israeli and curiously enough *American* air-power over the same country.

Now, as vaguely alluded to in the previous paragraph, the Americans never seem to have had a 'monolithic' policy about all of this. At the same time that they were fighting on the same side as the Iranians (and Hezbollah, which I have forgotten to distinctively mention previously, etc. etc. ) against Sunni extremists in the northern Levant ... American forces were actually working *with* Al Qaeda and other such decidedly dastardly "friends of a friend" [that 'friend' being Saudi Arabia] in the *southern* Arabian Peninsula against popular forces *there*.

And at the same time as they were fighting to drive ISIS *out* of Iraq, they were attempting to provide 'red lines' and de facto 'safe zones' for ISIS in eastern Syria to continue operating and regroup in the face of Syrian Army (and Iranian, etc.) offensives intended to drive the Caliphate into the dust.

But I digress.

Nobody has ever accused the Americans of having a comprehensive, cogent Middle Eastern policy that actually makes any sort of sense and which will actually likely achieve the increasingly notional objectives it sets out in pursuit of .... so the aforementioned SNAFUs all the way down, is probably just about to be expected of them.

What's got the Neocons behind this recent Trumplosion all hot and bothered, is the fact that the Iranians have once again managed to go from being "on the hoof" a few years back, to standing astride a pretty much uninterrupted corridor extending from their own border right out to the Mediterranean via Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. And with neither Turks nor "totally not *our* terrorists" able to meaningfully break it. *And*, not to put too fine a point upon it, with the Israeli Air Force now ... rather more circumspect about running *too* much active interdiction, lest they accidentally once more run afoul of the Russians, etc.

Now, to be sure, this is a pretty fragile situation, as far as it goes. The events from the birth of ISIS up until a year or so ago show that if you can create enough chaos via ongoing insurgencies and irregular-warfare (as well as regular warfare, for that matter) efforts along that corridor, that the Iranian influence-pathway is disruptable.

Except the main things, right now, keeping a *lid* on that are, in Syria at least and in no particular order, the Russian military, the Syrian army, and a patchwork of Iranian and Iranian-allied forces. This last set also being pretty active across the border in northern Iraq - occasionally, as noted above, in co-operation with the Americans and American associates.

So if you want to *disrupt* this situation, and do your darndest to try and *prevent* the otherwise surprisingly inexorable march of Iran back to 'normal' relations with much of the outside world ... you've effectively got to turn them, somehow, into "The Enemy".

Both to disrupt their ability to work with others against* these extremist insurgency efforts [and their state-level (pay)pasters], and more directly, to just blatantly have the Iranians 'subbed in' *as* the 'terrorists' or whatever in the first place.

Hence, you put some pressure upon some people in the American government to actually listen to that Bolton guy ... and nek minnit, the very forces which have *taken the lead* fighting the often American-augmented *actual* terrorist/extremist adversaries of the ordinary man ... now suddenly *are* [for official purposes, at any rate], the direst villains imaginable and condemnable with far more force than was put into most of the years of actions against Saudi-Israeliyan associates anywhere in the Arabian peninsula.

"Alchemy" may be an Arabic word, but I don't think anybody ever anticipated such a shameless transmogrification as has taken here in the language's traditional heartland.

The "Quagmire" comment from Minister Zarif, then, is not (just) what it first appears to be - a threat, of sorts, from the IRGC to American forces.

Instead, it is actually a *warning*.

That if the Americans continue to go down this path, then they shall find themselves in exactly the same situation as they faced in Afghanistan after they spurned Iranian assistance *there* in favour of some twenty-year-old blinkered bile-oculars approach.

A long-running effort of erosion against them that *nobody* other than the vultures ... and the vultures which don't have sizeable oil reserves or an election presently in progress ... will actually win.

There is 'food for thought' midst *that* carrion.

On Bolsonaro's Ahistorical Naziism

Several days ago, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro made headlines for his visit to a Holocaust memorial in Israel. Not so much for the visit itself, of course - it's the sort of thing that is almost de rigueur for newly minted world leaders heading to that particular country on political pilgrimages.

But rather, for his ensuing statement upon exiting the remembrance center, about those archetypal villains of the narrative of the 20th Century, the Nazis. Namely, that they were of the "left".

Now, for what it's worth - I actually do not necessarily disagree with Bolsonaro saying that Naziism was born out of a 'left wing' movement.

There are some important caveats to that statement, including the fact that 'left and right' mean something different today to how the terms were used thirty years ago - and that the German political milieu and tradition in the 1920s and 30s is ... not something that maps very easily onto Anglosphere 'sports-team politics' of the Neoliberal era (I mean - where do you put Bismarck, for instance? Rolled out some of the most left-wing economic policy of his age ... but with a conservative agenda in mind).

And, of course, the fact that the Nazi Party's ideology shifted rather dramatically between its insurgent first decade and its becoming and/or reaching a reasonably cosy accomodation with 'The Establishment' in its second.

But what occurred to me, upon seeing his statement, is that the state of Israel, which he is so emphatically keen upon .. is *also* the product of a 'left wing' movement. There are good reasons why David Ben-Gurion, a key founding figure of Israel along with its first Prime Minister, was of their Labour Party [funnily enough, he actually apparently had a quite positive friendship with Ho-Chi Minh], why 'Mapai' played such a role in the 'setting up' of what would become Israel in the two decades before its declaration of Independence, and why Zionism has always had a pretty strong representation on and from 'the left'.

Now, I do not say any of this, at all, to try and talk *up* Naziism, or to talk down the vague concept of "Left" in (modern-ish) politics. Or with a specific goal in mind when it comes to the reader's perceptions about Israel being good or bad.

I simply state it because it annoys me when politicians or would-be leaders simply make up things, distort the meanings of terms and the history to which they are affixed, in pursuit of increasingly petty gains for some escalatingly delusory world view.

If Bolsonaro wants to be virulently against anything that is allegedly "left wing" by patrimony ... then I suppose that is his right.

If he wants to be vociferously against "Nazis" [whether real or imagined], then that is also within the bounds of his personal proclivity.

But to be against Nazis only insofar as you think of them as "left wing", seems odious.

And to decide that you *stop* being against anything and everything "left wing" in origin, only when it comes to Israel ... seems a decidedly un-angelic gavotte upon the head of a pin, indeed.

Then again, for men such as Bolsonaro, History is not some sort of sacrosanct set of scriptures which spell out actual truths - the story of how we really got here. Nor is it, as is the more commonly held view, a span of broadly agreed upon facts and their customary interpretation.

Rather, it is merely an exercise in creative (re-)writing, a convenient tool to be used and abused and discarded almost at will. And disparaged with a caustic venom whenever it should so happen to pose a threat to the immanentized manifestation of one's preferred vision for the world, and egoic place within it.

Bolsonaro's purpose in visiting Israel at this time was, assumedly, to endeavour to assist Netanyahu's re-election prospects.

It would appear, then, that he was in 'good' company.

From 'End Of History' To 'End Of Democracy' - Why Fukuyama Et Co Now Like China

In the past week, comments have surfaced from Francis Fukuyama - aka the man who propheceyed that the perceived ascendency of 'liberalism' in the late 80s and early 90s meant history was now 'over' - claiming Chinese system is a "real alternative" to 'Western democracy'
I am SHOCKED, SHOCKED I TELL YOU , that the man who thought Neoliberal Technocracy had 'won' history ... is keen to endorse a Neoliberal Technocracy.

I mean, leaving aside the argument that this is actually a dialectical situation in and of itself - the PRC in its present state representing a 'continuance', a 'furtherance' of the developmental trajectory that Fukuyama mistakenly assumed would end with a 'Whiggian' victory, rather than a 'merger' with something that had previously been 'beaten' ...

I suspect that this position, all-up, is going to become an increasingly common one within the circles of those who, twenty to thirty years ago (or even, in some parts, five years ago) were the most ardent defenders of "Liberal Democracy" [uber or unter alles].

The reasoning for this is quite simple. Democracy, when actually practiced, is "messy". It features arguments, debates. The clash of ideas at its finest .. the clashes of print-barons at its lowest .. and the clash of 'mobs', variously motivated, at some (all?) points in between.

It throws up potentially 'unpredictable' outcomes - the recent #Brexit referendum result, for example. Or Trump. Or the referendum and more recently poll results in the now-former Soviet Bloc and Russia respectively about preserving/resurrecting the USSR.

Here in New Zealand, it threw up blatantly predictable outcomes, in 1990 say, when it came to opposing and thence rolling back the Neoliberal Revolution here. Which could not be allowed to stand, by the neoliberal technocrats of their (our :( ) day.

And that's actually at the heart of each one of those 'unpredictable' outcomes I just cited two paragraphs up. They were all arguably "predictable". If not in their precise minutiae nor actual scale of achievement - then at the very least, in the large-scale and shouted from the rooftops and across the town square volume of their systemic discontent with the extant (and "unchallengeable") status quo.

This, you see, is why the Technocrat both fears and loathes Democracy.

Because not only do they find themselves confronted by a patently superior power, insofar as it is 'unmanageable' except on the broadest possible terms - like poking and prodding some great and ineffable beast, hoping it'll go in the right direction rather than kick back against the goad-wielder ... but because, as part and parcel of this, that, it refuses to just lie down and submit to the "superior logic" of whichever teleological fad-ridden moribund die-deology we find ourselves confronted with today.

Hence the ongoing efforts at every possible turn to try and neuter it, to invert it. To insist that "some things are too important to be left to the people" [so can, will, and must be left to the unelected economists and policy-wonks instead].

Now, it is a curious thing - in the mid-late 1990s, and more especially earlier, "Liberal Democracy" was conceived of as being ... if not the "antidote" to Democracy, then at the very least, as a worthwhile 'salve' for its wilder potential impulses. You could corall and constrain and thence restrain and 'restructure' [a gloriously internally contradictory Neoliberal term to effectively mean to "destroy" something whilst simultaneously pretencing at maintenance of its key elements of integrity] Democracy - the actual, untrammelled popular will - and thus straight-up subvert it with the material trappings of the late Capitalist mid Neoliberalist Age.

The idea, then, was that people would not willingly nor knowingly vote to preserve their own voices, or the Post-War Economic Consensus, etc, provided you dangled enough shiny in their faces. Whether the pyrite of "prosperity" [selectively trickluar - both in the sense of 'trickle'-down, but more directively, a "trick"], or the understandable, yet often equally illusory promises of the most recent generations of "rights".

Except it didn't quite work out that way.

And now, nearly three decades on, the very structures that were supposed to provide some sort of bulwark against the Hearing of the People Sing - indeed, against the People stirring to Song in the first place - have proven repeatedly to have failed at this very endeavour.

There are still anti-democratic forces and structural conceits in play, of course - and one only has to look at exactly what happened to Greece around its own referendum on Austerity some years ago, to see just this sort of thing in motion.

But overwhelmingly, the sense is that this "Democracy" thing ... produces loud, uncouth, and "I refuse to accept that what you're telling me is The Only Way" approaches that won't just lay down and go with the fundamental paradigm of endless wars of 'humanitarian intervention', of ever-tighter state budgets yet ever looser financial controls, and some sort of inexorable doom-march back to the darkest reaches of the 1920s drug-capitalism [by which I don't directly mean alcohol-running: I mean quite directly "This Is your Economy On Drugs", in terms of its shaping and essential performative/irrationalizing characteristics. Some sort of delusory, dissociative, and fundamentally health-wrecking, life-ending concoction of the bath-salts of the bastargeoise, one presumes] .

So what do we get instead? The casting about to find an 'alternative paradigm'. One that still combines the vague glitzyness of "proven economic success", yet without that 'troublesome', quarrelsome "Democracy" thing to upset whomever's carefully laid get-rich-long-term scheme. [Like a "Pyramid Scheme", except it's actually an Aztec Ziggurat ... replete with the "trickle down" of the blood of young "necessary casualties", required to keep the whole thing lubricated and in sun-raising 'running' order]

Where's got this? The People's Republic of China, apparently.

And I would be very surprised if their ongoing Soft Power offensive at providing various incentives to people to Say Nice Things About Them, had absolutely nothing to do with Fukuyama's remarks now entering the public arena.

My point is: I understand why it was that these sorts were so keen on "Liberal Democracy" twenty to thirty years ago. Just as I understand why they're already so keen on what they perceive to be its antithesis [see?There's that Dialectic again!] today, and just as they seemed to be so enthusiastic about the fruits of "Illiberal Democracy" [think Singapore] perhaps five to fifteen years ago.

It's because, deep down, they want "control". And they don't want to have to "waste time" explaining to the people being controlled as to why whatever counter-intuitive, counter-productive, counter-cosmological contrivance they've pledged undying allegiance to this time is actually a Really Good Idea despite all available lived experience evidence to the contrary.

For this, the "Chinese Model", is a spectacularly immanent success.

On The National Party's "Emotional" Indecision As To Migration Pact Petition In The Wake Of Christchurch

> December 2018: National Party comes out swinging against UN Migration Pact it probably would have signed up to anyway, had it been in Government; sets up petition to oppose it
> Friday Night: National Party, perhaps feeling sensitive to the day's events, removes said petition from its website
> Sunday: Somebody asks National what's happened with its petition; Bridges claims it was taken down weeks ago - "well before any of the recent tragic events in Christchurch" - as part of "normal web maintenance" .
> Monday: It's pointed out that the page was still up on Friday afternoon ... so no, no that wasn't what happened
> Tuesday: National shifts to claiming that the petition was removed on Friday night by an "emotional junior staffer". Insists it wasn't lying about its previous stance.

Now, in terms of my own thoughts about the above ... whatever one thinks about immigration, and from wherever slash of whomever - the National Party's claimed opposition to the UN Migration Pact has always rung so hollow, you could creatively refer to it as having achieved Nirvana [ok, well .. Sunyata; but there's definitely no lights on inside, i'll put it that way].

This is a party which, after all, presided over back-to-back-to-back record high immigration figures, while consciously tamping down proposals even from within its own membership to lower them [c.f. Bill English announcing such a policy .. and then walking it back a short while afterwards due to opposition from some farmers and employers] ... and which had such a lackadaisical approach to the "protection of national sovereignty" and lawmaking ability which it *claimed* were core parts of its reasoning for opposing the UN Migration Pact - that it thought the ISDS provisions in the *original* #TPPA were a *good idea*. [They're *still* not a good idea in the revised CPTPP agreement, but that is another story for another time, as best told by Professor Jane Kelsey].

Or, in other words, the Nats do not and have never really cared about the issues they purported to raise by pushing that petition.

They were doing it for mere "populist points". Because apparently, the party which militantly blocked its own ears against the Voice of the People on, say, asset sales in the course of *that* referendum campaign ... was all of a sudden going to be the People's Microphone on a rather obscure piece of intergovernmental values-statement of little actual legal effect.

Or, to phrase it another way - this wasn't really about "listening to New Zealanders". it was about putting out a "YOU SHOULD BE REALLY CONCERNED ABOUT THIS" line into the polis, and then using that to try and make the Government of the day look scary, unrepresentative, and even more incredibly Globalist than the Nats themselves were for the previous nine years.

However, the risk with putting out emotive political content into the electorate ... is that occasionally it comes back to bite you in the hand and/or posterior.

And that's pretty much exactly what's happened here.

Now I'm NOT saying that National's stance on the Migration Pact had much, if anything, to do with Friday's atrocity. Because it probably didn't. The terrorist in question claimed he had a thousand years or more of history to Wikipedia his way through and/or visit in person during his European jaunt to (mis)inform his views - with the obvious implication that no help from any New Zealand politician was required.

Had National *not* attempted to oppose the Migration Pact, I cannot see how anything would have really changed.

Yet someone in National was plainly aware that the 'optics' of the matter ... were not going to look particularly good, in the blood-tinged aftermath of our worst-ever terrorist attack. And so - whether motivated by a sense of compassion (or, as Bridges put it today, the result of being both "emotional" and possibly also "junior"), or simply a desire to limit the potential finger-pointing post-facto from a PR perspective ... somebody chose to remove the petition from public view.

Now, I'm not sure quite what to make of National's changing story on the matter. It is at least possible that the conflicting statements are simply the result of an 'evolving informational picture'. That is to say, somebody at National HQ not understanding that "unlisted" and "not viewable to the public" are not actually the same thing. It happens.

Yet it was Bridges' response to a question asked earlier today, as to whether actually removing the petition was the right thing to do (you know, making reality finally accord with what National thought had been the case for a few weeks now, apparently - per their earlier statement, anyway... ) - "I think the reality is we're not going to be critical of it because, as I say it's a junior staff member, [who was] very emotional" - that caused me to wonder if this were really the case.

That implies that otherwise, they *would* be critical of it. But also states that they *aren't* critical of it. It is, so to speak, a bob each way - with an emphasis upon "Emotionally affected Kiwis" getting a bit of slack given recent events.

And that, I think, is very, very deliberate play from National.

They're as-yet uncertain which way both a) public opinion in general, but also b) the rather more specific sectors of opinion in various parts of the electorate which they either claim to represent or really want to win off at least one party in particular (you know, the one you would have *thought* would perhaps be opposing said UN Migration Pact were *it* not in Government) ... which way those are going to go over the coming weeks and months as we head towards the next Election Year.

They *don't* want to make it suddenly seem like they're bowing to "PC", or that they've suddenly stopped faux-caring about national sovereignty or immigration policy settings. That'd lose them the Talkback Brigade, and suchlike.

But they're *also* acutely conscious that, for a pretty appreciably broad swathe of "Middle New Zealand" [often, but not always, where elections are actually won and lost - in those instances wherein they aren't won by tactically nuking NZ First and/or other support parties] - Friday's events represent something of a watershed in which the previously not-entirely-un-acceptable approach to speaking with perhaps outright concern about "Islam" , may now wind up being looked at with very different eyes, indeed.

About the only thing that *everybody* can agree upon, is that Friday's literally atrocious events, have represented a considerable shock and emotive impact to both the collective and individual psyches of New Zealanders.

So any 'inconsistency' on National's part .. well, "we'll just chalk it up to that, then."

In a curious bit of irony, that's probably the closest thing we're likely to see to empathy from Simon Bridges in a press conference, during the entirety of his (remaining) run as National Party Leader.

But I digress.

The point, I suppose, is that we have known for a long time now that National (and, to be fair, other parties too, especially when consigned to the relative discomforting boredom of Opposition), have long ago ceased in believing in acting as a genuine conveyor of polis opinion unto the corridors of power. Instead, they've "outsourced" that, to PR companies, lobbyists, and focus-groups. Which is rather like presuming that an elevator-muzak or cellphone ringtone version of a great opera is much the same thing, at best.

And often, instead, seems to be exactly the other way around to "representing public opinion"; rather becoming far more actively interested in "representing [often pre-formed] elite opinion to the public".

Hence why you need the PR companies involved. And the lobbyists, to make sure you know just *which* 'elites' you should be listening to the loudest.

Now, there's no "script" for what's going on at the moment in New Zealand politics. Not really. I mean, there's general platitudes, and there's an array of foreign case-studies that are being cited about the place [the Howard Government in Australia pushing through firearms controls being Exhibit A upon everybody's lips, it would seem] .... but just four days after the Atrocity in question, it's *far* too soon to tell how things are likely to unfold.

Hell, there hasn't even been time to start focus-grouping or whatever it is that the Nats do when they're trying to figure out which way to arc a long-term policy/political trajectory on something potentially divisive. Or what colour ties Simon Bridges should wear. Or how long Judith Collins should spend outside of Cabinet following a corruption-tinged teacup-milk-scandal. Or the precise differential value of an Indian MP versus a Chinese MP for the sake of donation soliciting purposes. Etc. ETc. Etc.

So in the absence of anything hard or reliable [inasmuch as political opinion about anything ever actually is] to go upon, they've instead adopted a creative non-stance that *might look like* something else, in at least two directions. And which endeavours to hit the mid-point of the intersecting Venn Diagram with an 'emotive' impact, regardless.

Very clever, in its own way. I wonder who wrote that for 'em.

As applies National actually deciding which way it's going to go upon this, and quite a number of other somewhat related issues ... I suspect we're going to be left wondering for awhile yet. The dust takes time to clear on these things, which is what is required in order to perceive the best "optics" for the situation.

The National party are not, by instinct, these days "leaders" - they are "managers".

Which is, one could argue, exactly the wrong set of priorities and proclivities, for an emergent and paradigm-reshaping [at least here in NZ politics] event such as this.