Just a thought: How about we stop shaming the poor for buying things that may not be essential, and start shaming the rich for making a profit off things that are essential?

Ah well, that's settled then. Luxon is our PM, with his whole caucus behind him, focused on the economy.

The media is to blame for anything else you might've heard.
#nzpol

It's all over now!

a black and white drawing of a grim reaper with a hood and skeleton arms and legs . ALT: a black and white drawing of a grim reaper with a hood and skeleton arms and legs .

YES LUXON is still PM!

Who are the corpses on the Caucus floor now?

Luxon attacks the media. Strong choice.

I wouldn't!

Imagine having to choose between Luxon and Willis as your figurehead.. #NzPol

Crikey. Whatever the actual goings on, doesn’t seem plausible they’ll be able to shrug it off as just a good chat, totally united, etc.

Fully assessing their optionality it seems

I agree that it's bad for National whatever the outcome 😀.

Why can't they object the FTA on its merit and not be racist AF?

#nzpol

Luxon must be "chunking it down" at the "decision gate" in the caucus room. #nzpol

The best CEO they can find.

I think they probably shouldn't; they should say it's just false. I am less attracted to a dialetheism which finds true contradictions all the way down than to one which finds them out on theedges, so to speak, of reality.

What if new data centers supplied solar panels on all homes with say 25 or thirty miles of the center to bring down the power costs instead of hogging the power and driving up electric costs for their neighbors? Wind mills too.

‘Dame Jane Goodall.’ #Painting by Wendy Barratt #art

They’d want to see our eclipse. They’d want to look through the Earth’s atmosphere with their own eyes and see the moon fit over the sun, watch the light fade down to almost nothing, listen to the animals nearby fall silent and feel with their own skins the sudden chill in the air that comes with totality. Even if they can’t survive in our atmosphere, even if they need a spacesuit to keep them alive, they’d still want to get as close as they possibly could to seeing it in the raw, in as close to natural conditions as it’s possible to arrange. They’d want to be here, amongst us, when the shadow passes. “So that’s where you look for aliens. In the course of an eclipse totality track. When everybody else is looking awestruck at the sky, you need to be looking round for anybody who looks weird or overdressed, or who isn’t coming out of their RV or their moored yacht with the heavily smoked glass."

Thanks to David Banks at the other place, who first alerted me to Ian Banks' reference to this face in his novel Transition, in which a character posits that if aliens exist on Earth, we'd find them watching an eclipse.

The subtext is that “they” are different from “us”, and there’s no problem with people like us hanging around because we aren’t inherently suspicious, unlike them

No state has a "right to exist".

The defeat of Orban has me, again, puzzling about the modish term "liberal democracy". What would an illiberal democracy be, by contrast?

The slow travel continues as we move on to the Costa Blamca. Train from Bilbao to Madrid today, hotel for the night, and then on to Alicante. Bilbao Abando station is beautiful. The first train winds through the mountains and we change at Miranda de Ebro.

I think it is, but I guess that’s kind of my own critical framework and not everyone’s on board.

"Conspiracy theory" is not an inherently pejorative term.

The hardline anti-religion line which seems to characterise a good deal of US liberalism is an active recruiting ground for MAGA. And vice versa. The solution is to turn the criticism of heaven into criticism of earth.

J R Lucas: time is “a necessary concomitant of the existence of a personal being".

Lucas thinks this consideration gives us reason to place God in time. But a theist who denies that #God is temporal would/should also deny that God is a "personal being".

Marxism is NOT a form of liberalism. Should I say it again?

In a just world it would be more than the market

This

Please make a submission, if you can.

I can see how this may not be immediately obvious to some people, but "I can't believe anything cool on the Internet is real anymore because AI slop is so common" is, itself, a concession to tech bro capitalism that we shouldn't be making. Don't surrender your sense of wonder and imagination.