Clare Curran continues to show us why she is the Queen of New Zealand Political Social Media, by focusing ont he things that matter…like international kissing day:
Cactus Kate gave her something to forget that tweet though:
Clare Curran, once again proving that Twitter is never good news for politicians.
Cactus Kate must be really annoyed. She has completed two posts inside 24 hours. She raises some valid points about the last vestiges of any credibility The Standard might have had:
When a blog unsuccessfully attacks on a conspiracy basis Whaleoil and myself on the right and then to the left Mallard, Curran and Pagani – and we have all spent time successfully refuting all conspiracy theories as nonsensical.
You have to ask – do The Stranded have any credibility left as a blog?
The new leadership of Labour could do nothing better than to ensure that no Labour staffers are involved in authoring, associated with or handing information to such a rag tag discredited anonymous unaccountable blog. The only reason the posters are anonymous is to protect their employment. Lynn has been clear about this. Which is code for they all have political positions and shouldn’t be blogging in the first instance, least of all attacking their mates on the left.
The same goes for The Greens if Mallard’s claim as to the identity of Zetetic is correct. To do this both organizations will have to find out who is authoring the sort of posts above under anonymous pen names and staining the left with inaccuracy, conspiracy and attacking even their own with lies.
Kind of ironic really The Stranded takes so many pot shots at Red Alert.
Despite the attempts of the Maritime Union, Matt McCarten and also their union flunkies at The Standard, the Ports of Auckland have today confirmed the figures that Cactus Kate blogged for wharfie remuneration. Straight from the horses mouth so to speak. There cannot any longer be any doubt about the figure, we can all safely use the $91,000 pa figure.
Worse too, for the union, they did it on The Standard. In fact the same post where they defamed me and then had to retract their false claims:
Cactus Kate got a letter…from the Labour Party…they posted it all the way to Hongkong. It thanked her for her substantial support of labour at the last election and also went on the bludge for more and a call to become a member:
Seriously though if Labour wants to have Cactus Kate as a member they must be real low on membership but more importantly does this signal a return to their 1984-87 heyday by tantalising long time Act members with a resurgence.
There is only two ways to get Cactus Kate to do anything…offers of money or sex with hot men. Has Stuart Nash booked a flight for Hongkong?
I feel a song coming on:
Yesterday I posted about Domestic Violence and how I think silence isn’t an option anymore. Cactus Kate has also blogged about domestic violence and covered an aspect I hadn’t thought of, that of emotional violence which she says is far worse than physical violence:
Emotional abuse isn’t reported as is an horrific physical beating of a woman or kiddie with an instant death resulting. But it is definitely more prevalent and just as damaging. It isn’t a lower class, race or low incomed phenomenon either. Not all emotional abuse leads to physical poundings but all physical poundings seem to start with continuous emotional put-downs. It is statistically difficult to measure emotional abuse but we all can spot it when we see it in others.
It isn’t just men dishing out this abuse, women are capable of doing it as well. But the victims are almost always children and the weak who can’t stick up for themselves, whom more often than not are women.
Psychological and emotional manipulations cause lasting damage. Cactus suggest we have a zero tolerance attitude to emotional bullies:
The first and only time a boyfriend upset me with a derogatory comment I didn’t even talk back, I threw all his clothes off the fourth floor balcony at Princes Wharf into the street, waited til he went to retrieve them then chucked his cellphone at him gloriously hitting him smack in the middle of his head. I didn’t see the point of subsidising him to hang around if he was going to at least be pleasant.
This is the only appropriate response when you have such poison on your own team if they are family or not – cut them out of your life. A “no dickheads” rule. There’s too many external enemies trying to chop you down out there, having one living with you or purporting to be on your side cannot be tolerated. I don’t understand why there isn’t a zero tolerance policy towards emotional abuse.
Because at the end of the day it affects the children watching it far more than adults. Children can’t get up and leave. They’ve no choice in the matter. No adult related or not has the right to talk to a kid in an attempt of limiting their dreams or ambitions. Life will do that well enough for them eventually.
A child will then normalise the abusive behaviour in terms of men talking to women the same despicable way their father does, or women blackmailing men the way their mother does. They treate their weaker siblings with the same contempt. The cycle never gets broken.
The emotional abuse needs to stop:
If there is to be handwringing concern over physical violence on a select few kiddies of the feral heaving pathetic underclass, there should be far more concern about the emotional health of a far larger subset of kiddies subjected to continual negative emotional abuse as discussed here. And that of men and women in these emotionally abusive relationships.
Too many teens are taking depression meds these days or receiving counselling for depression. How many of these children are not actually ill requiring these meds but have instead “just” been subjected to a lifetime growing up of emotional abuse leading to tragic outcomes such as attempted suicides? Or worse?
Once again it is a matter of individual responsibility not to be in an emotionally abusive relationship and therefore enabling another to be able to carry out this abuse.
On Red Alert, in a post by Trevor Mallard, where he disingenuously suggests without mentioning it that Labour may look at rethinking the welfare state.
Cactus Kate leaps in and passes comment which in turn attracts more comments particularly one from SPG who suggests:
The poor must exist to either provide votes or cheap services to their betters.
SPC they do, in third world countries providing cheap goods and services to NZs poor. Most earn less working 60 hrs a week than NZ beneficiaries do by sitting on the couch. That’s why even the left in the UK admits they have to look at welfare. It’s not working.
Which brings me to this image which was sent through the tipline:
It is the Emma Maersk, the largest ship in the world. By way of comparison the Emma Maersk is rated at 14,770 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) and the MV Rena which is currently aground the Astrolabe Reef off Tauranga is only 3,351 TEU. There are eight of these ships. They are so large that they cannot go through the Panama canal.
This ship is bigger than an aircraft carrier, and only has 13 crew. An aircraft carrier has more than 5000!
Anyway, I post this to show that Cactus Kate has a better idea about international trade, poverty and the realities of life than some book taught socialist commentator at Red Alert, or indeed the fool administrator who posted the article from the Guardian in the first place. It is a magnificent example of man’s conquest of nature, design and physics. Unfortunately people like SPG and Trevor Mallard would have us believe this represents the free market gone bad.
It matters not a bit that Trevor cut/pastes some thoughts of a leftwing journalist in a left wing newspaper about an irrelevant Labour party in the UK. Labour here will have to do more than wring their hands about welfare, as Cactus Kate noted in an earlier comment:
I thought you’d had an ephihany and we’re going to tell us all how Labour planned to stop welfare for families (who don’t need it), remove long term beneficiaries from eligibility and cut the welfare spend vote so it could be spent on more deserving areas.
We need to have a slightly different voting method here. Because of the large choice and the fact that blogs do cover things slightly differently you may vote for two blogs.
Pick your top 2.
Nominations were from the comments, plus my own picks of Red Alert and Bryce Edward’s blog Liberation.
Best Political Blog
Total Voters: 477
Loading ...Cactus Kate has given out her Prick Awards.
My award to her is 1000 demerits from the VRWC.
Giving dirty pinkos the top award is beyond the pale. I won an award:
The Loudest Prick Award for Blatant Continual Shit Stirring – Whaleoil
There is too much material to list here. No one on the internet in New Zealand politics is louder, ruder or often more tongue in cheek hypocritical than the Whale. Only Whaleoil can hurl abuse at the Labour Party then call them “nasty” when they hurl shit and abuse back. Between breaking many stories this year and being the cause of Union strikes, Whale has exceeded expectations from even his friends and allies for being completely and utterly outrageous in the wooden spooning of shit.
The Disappearing Prick Award for blogging underachievement – David Farrar
David? Where art thou David? If your face was full up in a pile of muff we may have forgiven you but you have been largely absent this year with other stuff on your mind. We end the year with pictures from Safari in Africa. By far David’s best series of posts of the year after some short spurts post election. A much larger effort is required in 2012 from our Jedi Grand Master Yoga.
This afternoon David Shearer will announce his front bench. It is supposedly going to be resplendent with fresh new ‘talent’. David Farrar’s picks are already out of date after Carmel Sepuloni exited after the judicial recount in Waitakere.
Cactus Kate looks at the choices and is left underwhelmed:
Being named on Labour’s front bench however is kind of like climbing your way to the top of the class but in the bottom stream of Auckland Grammar. Made worse now because all the older kids have been ruled ineligible to compete. I doubt any female will be given a grunty portfolio either requiring any real application.
Ouch!
Shearer will be racking his brain right now trying to get the balance right, knowing full well that King, Dyson, Street and Dalziel are light years more capable in any portfolio he gives them than any of the “talent” emerging under the Labour renewal process. Leaving them in the Backbenches may very well be his downfall.
National have a caucus of 59, a huge Backbench of their own and many MP’s bored enough to deem heckling the hapless newbies a competitive sport.
It is going to be very embarrassing for Labour when the likes of King, Dyson, Street, Dalziel, Mallard, Goff and maybe even Cunliffe have to step up and save those who replaced them from making tits of themselves in the House and in their portfolios knowing they are all still better than the newbies. A few of those named will serve their final years in long careers hand holding inferior replacements knowing they were actually only one seat away from victory and a place opposite where they are now, sitting in a Cabinet reliving their glory days under Clark.
Seeing how Mr Peacekeeper deals with keeping the oldies happy enough to babysit their replacements for three years, spinning recycled hacks above them as “renewal” and handles the classic pinko gender and race balance issues in his rankings will be the best show in town this week.
With a talent pool as shallow as a carpark puddle it is hard to see how Shearer is going to deliver on his promises. In just few hours we will know.
Cactus Kate tells it how it is on the state of lawyering in New Zealand.
If you can’t score a job at a “large firm” you are looking at a graduate at teachers wages aren’t you? Hell even an unqualified stevedore earns $91,480 with five weeks annual leave, free medical insurance for their whole family and limited hours to sometimes just 26 hours for the 40 hours paid.
Heh, POAL stevedores get more than lawyers. So do teachers…that is so funny:
And before I get a rash of comments surrounding how “high” these wages are, lawyers were the smartest kids in your class next to the ones that ended up at medical school. The teachers told the smartest kids in the class they should be lawyers. Lawyers are by definition more responsible than other members of society not having bar admission and rules and regulations thrust upon them. Yes, in other words, we should be paid more than most of you in salaried jobs but I bet if these figures are to go by that in terms of professions, law is mid-range in income.
The low pay rates I hazard a guess are attributable to law schools flooding themselves with graduates creating what Whaleoil calls unaffectionately ”flea lawyers”. While I don’t often agree with whom he is giving the tag to, (among them QC’s and poor old blogger MickeySavage), flea lawyers are sub-lawyers in the profession who might as well refer their clients on to howtolaw.co.nz such is the quality of their advice or more importantly, their advocacy skills and mongrel to actually win for their clients.
Demand and supply has pushed the prices down to affordable levels. However even Partners seem to not be making the cream on the top if the average equity partner (as in has their own money and risk in the firm’s success) doesn’t even get near $200k per annum.
I mean even a backbench MPÂ with no qualifications, life experience or straight out of University with just a BA having never read a statute in their life earns $141,800+a tax free allowance of $16,100 which puts them ahead of the majority of equity partners, all those in the private practice with 10+ years experience and all lawyers who responded with 1-9 years experience.
Little wonder so many lawyers want to become MP’s – the MP’s earn more money.Something is amiss as to why lawyers aren’t getting paid or earning the sort of money they deserve or indeed require to live reasonable debt-free lifestyles.
As is usual, Cactus Kate takes 2000 words to get down to the real reason why New Zealand is infested with flea lawyers:
I suggest New Zealand lawyers are just tits at negotiating their pay rates or their clients are New Zealand firms too small to pay decent charge-out rates in the first place. Or is it something else?
I don’t think she is missing anything at all.
