The Standard

A mate is at Starship at the moment with his boy. He was checking some blogs but ran into some bother with the free wi-fi…seems they are blocking some of the worst sites in the country.

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Matthew Hooton writes at NBR about the continued civil war within Labour’s activist base.

For some time, blogs have ceased to merely report grass-roots political activity: they are now where much grass-roots political activity actually occurs, with hundreds of different perspectives being put forward on various topics.

A generation ago, political reporters hung around dire regional conferences to get a sense of what the grassroots were feeling.

With little happening at today’s stage-managed conferences, it makes sense that they now observe the postings and comments on blogs such as Whaleoil, Kiwiblog and The Standard to get a sense of grass-roots opinion (noting, as always, that conference delegates and blog writers tend to be further to the extremes of the parties to which they purport allegiance).

Even with that proviso, the extreme language at The Standard about Mr Shearer is unprecedented, and it is again being ramped up.

A nickname for Mr Shearer has emerged: Captain Mumblefuck. His intelligence and admittedly poor diction are derided.  Read more »

Eddie’s kite flying at The Standard appears to have failed. Eddie wrote that the whispers were that David Shearer was going to put his leadership to the membership regardless of caucus.

Vernon Small however has scotched that pipe dream with his tweet this morning:

Stand easy Labour. Shearer says he will put leadership to caucus vote not straight to full electoral college.

— Vernon Small (@VernonSmall) January 22, 2013

Shearer was never going to fall for the kite flying of the disaffected, and his advisors…to a man are all Robertson loyalists and that certainly wouldn’t have helped their cause.  Read more »

Oh dear…Lynn Prentice, the guy with the girls name and the world’s best sysop is showing us the traffic over the Christmas break and explaining why he needs a multi-layered, industrial strength server set up for what is in reality a flea blog with flea traffic.

The primary server has been moved out into the offshore cloud far away from the expensive costs of having to pay for the costs of the Southern Cross cable monopoly. The ~5% of our traffic from human readers offshore wasn’t a problem. However the searchbots (most recently the bloody bingbot) and spambots causing us to exceed our “free” datacap on overseas traffic. This was $3/GB when we started on the old server and is now $1/GB.

However it has cost us thousands of dollars in variable per GB charges since I moved the server back to NZ in 2011. Does nasty things to the site’s operating budget. For instance in November it cost $103 extra because the Bing searchbot tried to read the entire site including every comment link. They nearly did a million page views in November and 600k in December. The really irritating thing is that we get very few incoming searches from Bing. I’ve now constrained Bing to a more limited diet.

Which is all mumbo-jumbo pseudo tech speak that says in reality, that “though I am the world’s greatest sysop I’ve managed to be tucked by smarter people than me into paying thousands extra in traffic charges because I knew best”….

And it isn’t as though the traffic warrants it.  Read more »

via ODT – Campers calling it quits after persistent bad weather

As regular readers will know, I belt out articles like a H&K MP-5, but for this one I actually sat here stunned for a while not knowing what to do.

Let me start at the end first:

This sort of thinking does my head in.

Very few, if any of us, are effectively neutral on any issue.  It’s why we have blogs that come at it from “left” or “right” or “green” angles.

But let me ask you a question:

Who would you blame for snow during the holiday period?

Who would you blame for people having to be moved from camp grounds due to swollen rivers?

Who would you blame for people not enjoying their Christmas holidays because it rained so much?

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Owen Glen used to be Labour’s go-to-guy when they wanted to win an election.  That’s before they threw him under the bus.  And if you think the above is a slight, check this out:

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In the tradition of a good old protest song, the Left often seem moved to express themselves by making up words to an existing tune.  As did People’s Power Ohariu at The Standard 2012 Worst Political Blog.

This is People’s Power Ohariu‘s anti-asset sales song.

Just one problem, and guess who was there to help out?  That nice Matthew Hooton:

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The blog started Saturday by having a look at a number of Christchurch people taking pictures up women’s skirts at malls.  And wouldn’t you know it?  A teacher was arrested as well.  Iain Lees-Galloway shows he is a slimy git by opening a Burger King and then refusing to take a bite, preferring to preach sensible food choices.  Cam then called for nominations for Worst Political Journalist, and Barry Soper and John Campbell appeared hot favourites.   Next we had a vote on Best Political Journalist, which Larry Williams took out with a massive 47% of the vote.  Graham McCready withdrew litigation against John Banks because it made no sense to anyone – as in – they couldn’t understand what it said.  Whale then claims a win on his Hekia Parata predictions and wonders why Key has let this train wreck happen.  We raise our eyebrows about Nelson looking for a scooter riding bottom pincher and then watch a video of what happens to a pig at the bottom of the sea over 7 days.  Next a post where Greens are fighting Greens over the Google solar plant.  On the one side: solar energy.  On the other? Turtles.   Charles Krauthammer explains why gun control alone isn’t the solution to mass shootings.   A MENSA spokesperson calls people with low IQs carrots and the BBC feels they have to apologise.  There is a property for sale next to Kim Dotcom‘s place.  Cam suggests the GCSB or the US should have bought it to set up spying operations.   WOBH is calling for The Whale Army to send in their holiday snaps, in a new feature called Snapped!  Cam takes a brief look at who will enter parliament if Tim Groser leaves for the WTO.  To close the day, a WhaleTech post looks at a the cull-de-sac that’s the QII roll-up keyboard. Read more »

At the 2012 Worst Political Blog, Mike Smith is being told how disconnected loyal labour voters feel from what’s left of their party.

Molly Polly pours her heart out:

You see Mike, many Labour Party members and potential supporters are currently despairing of Labour.

Take my family gathering at Christmas for instance.

My extended whanau are on the whole favourable to Labour. I myself am a long serving LP member. Even had a crack as a candidate in a National stronghold many years back. There was no hope of winning but at least Labour supporters had someone to vote for! My kids (now adults) were brought up delivering LP pamphlets, helping at fundraising events and taking turns working on LP stalls at the markets.

That’s dyed-in-the-wool Labour, right there.

At Christmas lunch the talk turned to politics. There has been a noticeable shift in my once staunch LP family members. Those under 40 are now Green Party members or supporters. Some voted that way at the last election or split their vote. My adult kids stood behind Labour, but they were faltering until Phil Goff lifted his game in the last few weeks and his heroic push at the end persuaded them to give both their votes to Labour.

Without exception, their support for Labour has now waned. They feel more in tune with the Greens and particularly their Leaders, Turei and Norman. They like their policies, they like what the Greens stand for. I doubt they will ever come back to Labour. Just like many of the friends.

It looks like there is a vacuum on the left for disaffected Labour voters to find a new home.  In the absence of the “Real Labour”, the Greens are the next best fit.

Those over 40 at our family gathering said they were increasingly despondent with Labour. One of them over dinner said, “It feels like Labour is a train wreck about to happen, albeit in slow motion, and there is nothing we can do to stop it!”

He went on to say, ” We had Goff slowly inching his way to disaster in the last election…and now it feels like history is repeating itself. For Goff it was going to be a hard task to win as Key was still basking in undeserved public glory. But today the general public are beginning to see through Mr Nice Guy, and the Government, is in fact, a fucking train wreck. A perfect opportunity for Labour. But what do we have? A boring, uninspiring, insipid, bumbling Leader, who so far, is unable to display much confidence in Labour winning in 2014.”

So, what is a loyal Labour supporter activist to do?

So as you can see Mike, many of my whanau have lost faith in Labour. The younger ones of course have already departed, but for those of us who remain, we are struggling. We feel so dispirited that we can’t even face going to LEC meetings. When we do it feels like a charade…everyone pretending to be positive about Labour and the direction it is taking, but never a mention of the elephant in the room. We know we should attend more and speak our minds, but that is difficult to do when one’s MP is close to the Leader and is part of the ABC group.

For many of us it has got to the stage that even that person is not likely to get our vote at the next election, let alone the Party.

(I can’t believe I have actually written that last sentence…)

So many to choose from…here are a few ideas

The Standard Lynn Prentice’s Hate Speech Blog: Quite possibly the worst, mainly for their sanctimonious accusations of any other blog being a sewer without for a moment having a look at their own comments and commenters.

Tumeke: Martyn Bradbuy‘s frothing hate speech rant, with occaisonal delusions from Tim Selwyn. The only decent blogger there, Phoebe Fletcher, stays away, probably out of shame.

Pundit: Tim Watkins “blog”…where it is mostly the musings of unemployed old journalists and assorted pinkos.

Red Alert: Pretty dire and a boring these days… Trevor’s great social media experiment rots like a soviet naval base.

Then there are the also ran…while not bad per se they simply don;t get any traffic to warrant speaking about….but hey..if there is a bad one out there you think needs adding to the list then by all means comment away.

Then there are the bunny boilers and p freaks who blog, with their sanctimonious enablers.

Plenty to choose from.