Realpolitik
February 11, 2022
By NZB3
I don’t know how long this has been going on, this current form of politics. 15 or 20 Years? That’s also when a ‘debate’ stopped being a debate but instead a point-scoring game taught at our universities. I know, I was there. Debate Society at the University of Canterbury was all about disingenuous interjections and insincere questions; Not to inform or participate but to jam speech. This is also what contemporary people mean by ‘communication’ when they say, for example, that Jacinda Ardern is a “great communicator.” However, according to the definitions in my communication texts and tertiary papers what Ardern does is the antithesis of communicating. She doesn’t convey an idea from mind to mind, she disrupts ideas and implants false ideas and spreads confusion. By the mainstream definition of communication a squid is communicating when it squirts ink to confuse others and make a fast get-away! Perception and feelings matter here not facts or logic. Feels over Reals.
“In the clamour against Labour’s proposed unemployment insurance scheme something odd has happened. The detractors are praising the existing welfare system as effective and well-functioning. I’ve heard business commentator Phil O’Reilly doing this and now Roger Partridge, from the NZ Initiative, in today’s NZ Herald,….I’d strongly disagree that our welfare system is well-functioning.” – Our welfare system is not functioning well, Lindsay Mitchell (Feb 2022)
These Think Tank guys pushing back against the new Labour 6.0 scam are not speaking truth. They’re simply taking the strongest ‘debate’ argument they can to undermine what they’re against. They don’t care how they win the debate game to undermine their opponent and, besides, nobody else will remember how either. The New Zealand Initiative used to be the Business Roundtable but they re-branded because they surrendered the term ‘business’ as a dirty word. I consider that as cowardly as the Auckland Chamber of Commerce doing the same thing by re-branding as The Auckland Chamber. By abandoning moral values embodied by noble and essential things, commerce and business, they are doing their enemies work for them at the meta level; Losing a war to win a battle.
Good example in the Parnell Rose Gardens protest at the moment up in Auckland. It was an upper-class white protest up to last year and it was failing. They have now re-branded as a Maori protest with all the right lingo and blessings and brown faces on social media. They saw that it worked at Ihumatao.
We’re a polity now that cares more about the result than the process. Same mentality as criminals willing to steal if justified by gaining the loot. It undermines our social fabric and our self-esteem but those things count for little in current era. What matters is winning the ‘debate’ or starting or stopping your project. Certainly it’s not about making sense or being good! It will cost us in the long run before it stops and a decent society returns. Meanwhile, read the news with this in mind. It’s also called ‘realpolitik.’
—
Image ref. Roger from the NZ Initiative
Like Comment Share
