I'm living in a crowded boarding house and it isn't fun. Especially when 1 room has a couple with a child. Lots of screaming, banging on walls and crap like that. It still costs half my wage and I can't use the facilities most of the time. The hot water usually doesn't work between 9am and 8pm.
I'd like to step up and start a discussion group or political movement, since there are NIMBY elements still trying to slow down density. Would anyone care to meet up in Christchurch? It can be a pub or pizza at first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A99tzzochvY
For more:https://news.cgtn.com/news/2022-08-20/CGTN-documentary-Remote-Killing-released-1cE7t7RD104/index.htmlIn the five years between January 2015 and Jan...
I believe that bandwagon politics has ruined any chance of progress here in New Zealand.
What do I mean?
Binary concepts, defending Parliament, defending democracy, defending the media when they lie about someone, just because you might not like the person being lied about...
NZ ideology is that we must defend politicians and parliament and the media... because if we don't stick up for those poor lads and lassies in Parliament, then the Russians or the Chinese will come in, and pollute our pure democracy (fear of foreign interference drives us to support corrupt idiots)
I owe nothing to these MPs who have betrayed my generation, I'll never say anything good about this Parliament building or the people in it. They've done nothing to help me.
It's often said that if you don't vote for anyone, you have no right to complain, or by not voting you are automatically supporting the status quo. I argue the opposite - if you vote for these people, you are defending the status quo. If you want to elect Raf Manji then great, but where is the grass roots movement? What happens when a person becomes corrupted after you helped elect them? Do you just place unlimited faith in voting every 3 years?
What will it take for people to make a grass-roots movement that's not controlled by experienced thieves, such as the ones we keep electing? Some of these MPs have been in Parliament for over 10 years now. Faith in democracy keeps them in power.
The election cycle is bandwagon politics and I don't give a s*** about voting for the lesser evil. To understand how I got here, I recommend talking to Muslims or Jehovah's witnesses, they're the only people who seem to get it.
Morality and honesty, is not a feature of politics...
In 2015 I worked with a convert to Islam who was Ukrainian/Russian (he's from the Russian side, but near to Ukraine's border, but I digress!) People often asked him whether he supported Putin, and he didn't like this question. He'd say "I have no nation brother, I am a muslim. There is only the umma, we muslims are all one body. Yes I am from Russia, that doesn't mean I support the government".
If you talk to muslims you will find some pretty liberal muslims, but equally, you will find muslims like Omar Nabi who are highly sceptical about politics. He doesn't like some stuff that America does in the world, but he also doesn't like the taliban either. So what's his position? He doesn't give a s*** about politics, because it's the work of the devil.
The 5 Stages Of The Soul Leaving The Body | Friday Khutbah | Abu Bakr Zoud
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jnpnnEOoTc
My former colleague said that people like Vladimir Putin will burn in the hellfire for destroying Grozny and killing so many muslims. Not to mention Chechen War part II and also the war in Syria which ISIS and the American-backed groups lost.
The same comment about hellfire could be said of our western politicians too. Australia is spending billions of dollars on submarines to d*** swing against China. Where's the public benefit? What's in it for Australian people? $80 billion dollars down the drain as far as I'm concerned. It doesn't help make housing cheaper, or let people keep more of their wage.
Trump allowed us to understand this fake political dynamic when he talked about the pressure he faced. There was a Russian ship off the American coast a few years back, I remember Trump telling the media "the best thing I could possibly do, is blow that ship out of the water". Because that's what makes a U.S. President become... "presidential". The last thing the ruling elite and media want, is someone like Robert F. Kennedy, because he'd be no good at starting a war with a rival nuclear power. God forbid, he might even care about students or workers or families.
New Zealanders are naive about politics, but other countries aren't so charitable. I read a book by a journalist who'd interviewed coal miners in Donbass. These guys were so worried about Viktor Yanukovych being overthrown, because it was Yanukovych who guaranteed a pension (including free coal) to the retired miners. Under a pro-European Union government, they could take it away and make heating more expensive. So, the miners said "all politicians are bandits, but Yanukovych is our bandit".
You'll never hear a New Zealander say this. There's no landlord who's like, yeah Luxon wants to pave over productive farmland, but he's our bandit. Without him, rents would go down and my tenants would find better deals when higher density housing is built. The evil intensification must be stopped!!!!!!1
Crap government theory...
Everything that a government touches turns to s***. The media was talking about the cost of living back in 2015 and 2016, regarding cleaner's work at Parliament. Remember that? What has changed since then, many of us are still poor. Things have either not changed, or they've got worse.
We invaded Afghanistan and stayed there for 20 years, to bring education to girls. What of it? I read on the BBC last week that some women are killing themselves, because they're not allowed to study now. The Taliban are still in power. Billions spent, and Afghanistan is the same as when we invaded. No infrastructure, opium addicts everywhere, and Al Qaeda still lurking in caves. Boeing, General Electric and Raytheon did awesome on the stock market though, perhaps that was the real reason for staying 20 years? By 2010 we knew it was almost certainly futile, but the media covered it up.
Remember the last doctor in Aleppo, and all those other stupid American "humanitarian" propaganda messages about how evil Assad was? Just in the last few weeks, Syria made friends with Saudi Arabia, and Assad has negotiated Syria back into the Arab League. As a politician, you can shoot protesters like it's Tropico 5, and still be respected by other politicians. It's all about your timing, and what gestures and signals you make to other politicians.
All this talk about bloody-thirsty dictators, and them being held to account by peace-loving democracies. All these people are the same to me. They can say "kia ora" and pretend to care about the poor, but NZ politicians are in the gutter as far as I'm concerned. They exist at the same moral level as Bashar Al-Assad, Xi Jin-Ping or Vladimir Putin.
The world is being split into two blocs, partly due to the crap diplomacy of our puts on an imperialist british accent traditional allies. Meanwhile, you get to have 1 or 0 children, and live in a tiny townhouse with a 30 year mortgage. But because you live in a democracy, you can complain online about it and feel better. Plus Australia will eventually get nuclear submarines, and our bandit politicians can protect you from wars started by rival bandits.
I don't mean to blackpill people, I just want some of you to wake up and realise that the political system is morally bankrupt, and doesn't care about us. If you want a good government then you have to get rid of all existing MPs and start over with a less-easily-bribed group of people. Current MPs only care about power politics. They are living on another planet from us, I swear. I talked to Megan Woods in person and she's just as delusional as any common "public servant" in Wellington, who get reality checks from other so-called public servants every day.
Please stop defending Parliament and politicians. Just admit that nothing will change, and start doing something about it (other than voting for more bandits)
Across the hall and one door down, there was a convicted arsonist but he was alright. The biggest problem I had was the bed bugs. Nobody seemed to care about that except me. I guess if you smoke 'P' every day, you're scratching and itching all the time, and would probably think it was normal to have itchy skin. So the bed bugs were fully grown. Nobody asked to have their room sprayed, I had to complain constantly until the useless landlord finally got tired of hearing about bed bugs every day (landlord isn't on site, and may have lived in another city). As I left, they were spraying some of the rooms to reduce the bed bug population.
I was bitten in the night by very small ones and it's bloody concerning that they were in my bedding. Around the time I left, there were large bed bugs crawling across my floor, from the room above or below me. I'm lucky that they didn't move on my belongings and contaminate my next rental! Once they make themselves at home it's impossible to 100% remove them, unless you can heat an entire building complex to around 55 Celsius. Which means lost profit for the landlords of course, lol. They can get into any gap, so your PC, laptop and phone have to be thrown away if it's contaminated with bed bug eggs.
Once I walked down the hallway and a guy came out of a door ahead of me, from the left side of the hall. He looked to his right and saw me, then he walked left, the same way I was going. This guy reeked like P.
Some of these tenants had been to prison before, because a couple of them were obsessed with rules. I went to the lounge one evening to see what channels they had. When I picked up the remote and changed the channel, some guys near the entrance way told me that I couldn't do that. I didn't realise they were watching because they were off to the side, not really in the room. They waited for me to touch the remote and then they spoke. Maybe they're not allowed food in the lounge, except for on the table near the entry hall where they sat? Anyway, these guys seemed to take the rules rather seriously than what I'd normally expect. They must have learned this in prison with the lockup times etc.
One time I got a newsletter from the lodge in which they said that a tenant had died. I later found out he had hanged himself in the cupboard. Some tenants were so poor that they washed their clothes in the communal kitchen sinks.
This place is 15 Sioux Avenue, Wigram, Christchurch and it shouldn't exist.
I have a flyer design (PDF) that was made by a student at Auckland University. If anyone wants to print it out and delivery it, just write on here and I can arrange it. Maybe there's a Free Software Foundation website where I can host the PDF, instead of using Google/Microsoft.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2023/06/rnz-investigating-how-it-published-pro-russia-edited-version-of-reuters-story-about-ukraine.html
@jeff
@lemmy.nz