Off Topic The Politics Thread

[Sooperhoop]

See kids
You don't need to get a real job
Nothing can stop you even being prime minister
Just study politics
Work for politicians


What was Jacinda Ardern's job history?

She joined the New Zealand Labour Party at the age of 17. After graduating from the University of Waikato in 2001, Ardern worked as a researcher in the office of then-New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark. She later worked in London as an adviser in the Cabinet Office during Tony Blair's premiership.

Same thing happens here, go to university, get a PPE degree, work as a Party researcher, get parachuted into a seat. Zero experience of the real world. There should be a rule that an MP must have had at least 10 years working outside politics to be eligible...

 

[Stroller]

If this prick is representative of Reform supporters, there's no hope.....

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[sb_73]

Freedom is slavery
Strength through joy
Smash the four olds
Peace through strength
Not a step back
Work makes you free

Good to see Starmer, borrowing the words of Ronald Reagan, joining the likes of Orwell (yes he was using it with irony) and the propaganda writers of Mao, Hitler and Stalin in coining a sinister but incoherent slogan. I’m sure he will grow into the role of war leader, now we have, apparently, a war economy.

I can imagine this complete nonentity parroting any of the above if he thinks it would make people like him more.

****ing terrifying. As is this rearming plan which depends on a basic competence absent from most government initiatives. Lots of the current military kit apparently doesn’t work, despite being impressively expensive, above budget and behind deadlines.

 

[kiwiqpr]

Russia threatens UK with nuclear apocalypse after Keir Starmer's defence warning
Kremlin propagandists Vladdimir Solovyov threatened Brits with "painful" radiation deaths and urged Welsh and Scottish people to declare independence from London before it was too late






The Putin regime is mocking Sir Keir Starmer over his "war footing" defence review warning of the Russian threat.


The Kremlin’s most prominent TV propaganda show warned of nuclear Armageddon facing Britain with “painful” radiation deaths. And the Kremlin-funded broadcast urged the Scots and Welsh to declare independence from London before it was too late. The Putin broadcast claimed that a “very pretty” woman standing beside Starmer at his defence review announcement showed - from her expressions - that many Britons doubted his strategy in making the UK “battle ready” to fight Russia.





Solovyov has regularly threatened the UK and other Western nations(Image: Rossiya 1/east2west news)
Leading Putin TV mouthpiece Vladimir Solovyov declared: “I can't understand why the British have gone mad [with the new UK defence review]. Where do they want to clash with us? At what point?

READ MORE:UK cities '90 minutes from being destroyed by missiles' warns former Army chief

“Or do they think that we have already landed, entered the Thames somewhere and are now storming Westminster Abbey….? We are moving to combat readiness, said Starmer.

“But considering how he boxes, I'm afraid to even imagine his combat readiness….” Solovyov claimed - offering no evidence - it was the British who had staged clandestine undercover operations against Russia.



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“Actually, the attack on Russia's cyber security system was carried out by the British,” he said. “Then, let me remind you that the water threat [to Russia] came from the British, when they were trying to figure out who Crimea belonged to.

Solovyov said Scottish people should "fight for your independence" (Image: Rossiya 1/east2west news)
“British reconnaissance aircraft are flying through our airspace.” Solovyov - decorated by Putin for his work as a propagandist - said: “Most importantly, I would like to say something separately to Starmer.”

A
Then he said, in English: “Scottish people, you have to fight for your independence.” Reverting to Russian, he told viewers across his country’s 11 time zones: “Scottish brothers, you must fight for your independence. Right?

“These English colonisers have no business on Scottish soil. And when your traitors end up in London and take up positions, chase them away.

“Starmer, you are not Scottish! You are just cattle.” Another propagandist - academic Dr Andrey Sidorov - said the Welsh should break free, too.
Solovyov warned of nuclear Armageddon facing Britain(Image: Rossiya 1/east2west news)
“The main thing is to remember that with a little bit of Poseidon [high speed underwater nuclear drone], this problem doesn't exist in principle,” said Solovyov. He frequently advocates using the untested Russian Poseidon unmanned submarine to sink Britain under a tidal wave.

Political scientist Dmitry Evstafiev told viewers: “Back to Starmer - there he is, standing there, with workers behind him, or rather, hired extras pretending to be workers. Well, there are a couple of real workers there, apparently.


“But they understand that if the plan for direct military confrontation with Russia, which he is talking about, is implemented, they will all be dead. Quickly and painfully, because death from radiation is not the best kind of death.

Solovyov has positioned himself as a key ally of Vladimir Putin(Image: Kremlin/east2west news)
“Well, that is, if you die immediately, if you are at the epicentre, then it's okay. But if you die slowly, well, it's not like in some horror movie.

“It's much worse than that. But there was one person there who clearly understood this, and right behind him was a girl whose face showed a whole range of emotions.

“She was a very pretty girl, and as this man [Starmer] spoke, her face changed quite dramatically. So, in principle, Britain is not hopeless.

“There are a number of people there who understand what Britain…[faces in a war].” Solovyov said Starmer “has never served in the army - he had no basic military training at school.”

 

[kiwiqpr]

You must log in or register to see images

 

[Stroller]

Freedom is slavery
Strength through joy
Smash the four olds
Peace through strength
Not a step back
Work makes you free

Good to see Starmer, borrowing the words of Ronald Reagan, joining the likes of Orwell (yes he was using it with irony) and the propaganda writers of Mao, Hitler and Stalin in coining a sinister but incoherent slogan. I’m sure he will grow into the role of war leader, now we have, apparently, a war economy.

I can imagine this complete nonentity parroting any of the above if he thinks it would make people like him more.

****ing terrifying. As is this rearming plan which depends on a basic competence absent from most government initiatives. Lots of the current military kit apparently doesn’t work, despite being impressively expensive, above budget and behind deadlines.

It is terrifying, but Starmer, ever the pragmatist, sees rearmament as a route to economic growth and there's a horrible logic to it - spending on new armaments will create new jobs. The EU proposes spending €800 billion on rearming Europe and Starmer wants to attract a chunk of that to be spent with UK arms manufacturers. They can't all be ****, the Saudis and the Israelis seem happy enough to buy them.

 

[kiwiqpr]

Tim Stanley: Jacinda Ardern’s virtue-signalling memoir is like one long therapy session
Tim Stanley
Jun 3, 2025 • 9:31pm
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Play Video
1:16
Jacinda Ardern speaks about imposter syndrome
VIDEO CREDIT: ABC NEWS IN-DEPTH
OPINION: Don’t read this book. You won’t, anyway: it’s by Jacinda Ardern. But if I tell you that it’s a memoir dedicated to “the criers, worriers, and huggers,” you’ll have an idea of the nightmare you’ve dodged. A Different Kind of Power reads like a 350-page transcript of a therapy session: “My whole short life,” the author writes, “I had grappled with the idea that I was never quite good enough.”

Regrettably, she persisted, rising through the two or three ranks of New Zealand society to become prime minister at the age of 37, from 2017 to 2023. And yet the practicalities of the job don’t interest her: this book hinges on how everything felt. Large sections are dedicated to an uneventful youth in Murupara, a one-horse town on the North Island – the Māori name translates as “to wipe off mud” – where Ardern was born in 1980. Her father was a cop, her mother a school catering assistant. The Arderns were Mormons, a fact that threatens to make the author remotely interesting – until we learn that she lost her faith after watching a romcom, about a gay Mormon missionary who gives up God for love. Lucky Ardern didn’t watch Top Cat, or she might have embarked upon a life of crime.

In these passages, our impressionable hero regales us with fascinating accounts of grocery shopping; Nana’s funeral; her first job in a chippy (“There was always a steady routine to my Friday night shifts at the Golden Kiki”). As for what drew her into politics: was it Marx? Or Mahatma Gandhi? Well, one influence came early on: she saw a newspaper cartoon of a Tory stealing soup from children and thought, “that definitely didn’t feel right.”

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Burdened by a “constant compulsion to be ‘useful’”, Ardern concluded that “the world is so big and life could be fragile… but not so big that one person can’t do something to change it.” So, she completed a very useful degree in “Communication Studies”, joined Labour and entered Parliament in 2008. This utterly normal person seems to have done almost nothing outside of politics.




What about her greatest flaw, then? Probably that she cares too much. Ardern recalls, in those early days of the legislature, feeling overwhelmed by her emotions – and another MP saying, “Promise me you won’t try to toughen up, Jacinda. You feel things because you have empathy, and because you care.”

You and I might laugh, but the Kiwis seemed to love it: when Labour entered an unwinnable election in 2017, the party dropped its leader at the last minute and swapped in Ardern – whose nervous smile and boundless compassion, not hindered by having been photographed in Spanx, pushed Labour into office. She lost the popular vote but entered a coalition with a Right-wing party that had previously called her a “meatless hamburger”.

“Yes, I was the prime minister,” she writes. And yet: “I was also pregnant.” Plot twist!

Don’t get me wrong: it’s good to be reminded that politicians are human beings, and healthy that a modern woman can both have a baby and run New Zealand. But between all the paragraphs on childrearing and pump-sterilising – “I expected breastfeeding to be a lot more straightforward than it was” – one gets the impression that there was little else to do.

You must log in or register to see images

Jacinda Ardern's book - A Different Kind of Power.SUPPLIED
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During her time as leader, New Zealand saw a natural disaster and a terror attack, both of which brought out Ardern’s best: authoritative and sensitive, she has a fine temperament. But so much ink is given to relationship talk and cake baking – she wants us to know, too, that she replied to every child who wrote to her – that it starts to feel as though the author’s self-doubt lies not in her leadership skills, but in a fear that people can’t see how nice she really is. As she embraced a volcano victim in 2019, she heard the cameras click and imagined cynics saying it was all for show: “That’s fine, I thought, as I hugged [them] tight… I would rather be criticised than stop being human.”

The author’s virtue may be signalled brightly enough to be seen from the moon – and yet this empathy curiously doesn’t extend to every critic of her Covid policy. You’ll recall that when the pandemic began, New Zealand cut off the outside world: the obvious, and easy, thing to do when your country sits in the middle of nowhere. Restrictions and mandates were applied off and on, sometimes severely, through to early 2022.

Ardern acknowledges the psychological effects of lockdown via a letter from a woman who “couldn’t see her daughter’s body after she died in a farm[ing] accident” – but this happens to be a citizen who “understood why we had the rules we had, no matter how hard they felt.” How convenient for the author. By contrast, the anti-lockdown crowd Ardern describes protesting outside New Zealand’s Parliament, wore “literal tinfoil hats”, flew “swastikas” and “Trump flags”.

This is exactly how centrist dads (and mums) subtly vilify their opponents: set a perfect example and imply a comparison. I am so kind that anyone who disagrees with me must be nasty; so reasonable that my critics must be nuts. Yet despite the impression here that Ardern merely emoted throughout her time in office, as though manning the phones at the Samaritans, she implemented real, controversial policies that ended in a property bust, bad finances and a crime wave. And in a move that showed almost zero compassion to her colleagues, she quit office before they were due to be judged in a general election – thus avoiding the worst defeat for an incumbent government in decades.

Post-office, Ardern became a fellow at Harvard University, teaching a course in… you guessed it: “empathetic leadership”. The principle that the world would be a better place if we just empathised with each other is nice in theory, but codswallop in practice. How does that work with Vladimir Putin or the boys in Hamas? On the contrary, true leadership is about making tough judgments, guided by sound philosophy: St Jacinda bungled the former, lacked the latter. By reducing all government to thoughts and prayers, she transformed humility into vanity – a softly photographed carnival of her own emotions.

But there is one wonderful moment of zen. It comes when Ardern meets the late Queen in 2018, and asks whether she has any advice on raising children. “You just get on with it,” said the monarch. It must have been a put-down; it sounds like a put-down – and yet Ardern is too naive to notice.

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Social media might create echo chambers. Good journalism should not.

Our policy is that our own journalists rarely write opinion pieces. Most of our commentary is from freelance writers or specialists. You can read more about Stuff's policy on managing opinion here.

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[Star of David Bardsley]

Tim Stanley: Jacinda Ardern’s virtue-signalling memoir is like one long therapy session
Tim Stanley
Jun 3, 2025 • 9:31pm
Share

You must log in or register to see images

Play Video
1:16
Jacinda Ardern speaks about imposter syndrome
VIDEO CREDIT: ABC NEWS IN-DEPTH
OPINION: Don’t read this book. You won’t, anyway: it’s by Jacinda Ardern. But if I tell you that it’s a memoir dedicated to “the criers, worriers, and huggers,” you’ll have an idea of the nightmare you’ve dodged. A Different Kind of Power reads like a 350-page transcript of a therapy session: “My whole short life,” the author writes, “I had grappled with the idea that I was never quite good enough.”

Regrettably, she persisted, rising through the two or three ranks of New Zealand society to become prime minister at the age of 37, from 2017 to 2023. And yet the practicalities of the job don’t interest her: this book hinges on how everything felt. Large sections are dedicated to an uneventful youth in Murupara, a one-horse town on the North Island – the Māori name translates as “to wipe off mud” – where Ardern was born in 1980. Her father was a cop, her mother a school catering assistant. The Arderns were Mormons, a fact that threatens to make the author remotely interesting – until we learn that she lost her faith after watching a romcom, about a gay Mormon missionary who gives up God for love. Lucky Ardern didn’t watch Top Cat, or she might have embarked upon a life of crime.

In these passages, our impressionable hero regales us with fascinating accounts of grocery shopping; Nana’s funeral; her first job in a chippy (“There was always a steady routine to my Friday night shifts at the Golden Kiki”). As for what drew her into politics: was it Marx? Or Mahatma Gandhi? Well, one influence came early on: she saw a newspaper cartoon of a Tory stealing soup from children and thought, “that definitely didn’t feel right.”

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISE WITH STUFF
Burdened by a “constant compulsion to be ‘useful’”, Ardern concluded that “the world is so big and life could be fragile… but not so big that one person can’t do something to change it.” So, she completed a very useful degree in “Communication Studies”, joined Labour and entered Parliament in 2008. This utterly normal person seems to have done almost nothing outside of politics.




What about her greatest flaw, then? Probably that she cares too much. Ardern recalls, in those early days of the legislature, feeling overwhelmed by her emotions – and another MP saying, “Promise me you won’t try to toughen up, Jacinda. You feel things because you have empathy, and because you care.”

You and I might laugh, but the Kiwis seemed to love it: when Labour entered an unwinnable election in 2017, the party dropped its leader at the last minute and swapped in Ardern – whose nervous smile and boundless compassion, not hindered by having been photographed in Spanx, pushed Labour into office. She lost the popular vote but entered a coalition with a Right-wing party that had previously called her a “meatless hamburger”.

“Yes, I was the prime minister,” she writes. And yet: “I was also pregnant.” Plot twist!

Don’t get me wrong: it’s good to be reminded that politicians are human beings, and healthy that a modern woman can both have a baby and run New Zealand. But between all the paragraphs on childrearing and pump-sterilising – “I expected breastfeeding to be a lot more straightforward than it was” – one gets the impression that there was little else to do.

You must log in or register to see images

Jacinda Ardern's book - A Different Kind of Power.SUPPLIED
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISE WITH STUFF
During her time as leader, New Zealand saw a natural disaster and a terror attack, both of which brought out Ardern’s best: authoritative and sensitive, she has a fine temperament. But so much ink is given to relationship talk and cake baking – she wants us to know, too, that she replied to every child who wrote to her – that it starts to feel as though the author’s self-doubt lies not in her leadership skills, but in a fear that people can’t see how nice she really is. As she embraced a volcano victim in 2019, she heard the cameras click and imagined cynics saying it was all for show: “That’s fine, I thought, as I hugged [them] tight… I would rather be criticised than stop being human.”

The author’s virtue may be signalled brightly enough to be seen from the moon – and yet this empathy curiously doesn’t extend to every critic of her Covid policy. You’ll recall that when the pandemic began, New Zealand cut off the outside world: the obvious, and easy, thing to do when your country sits in the middle of nowhere. Restrictions and mandates were applied off and on, sometimes severely, through to early 2022.

Ardern acknowledges the psychological effects of lockdown via a letter from a woman who “couldn’t see her daughter’s body after she died in a farm[ing] accident” – but this happens to be a citizen who “understood why we had the rules we had, no matter how hard they felt.” How convenient for the author. By contrast, the anti-lockdown crowd Ardern describes protesting outside New Zealand’s Parliament, wore “literal tinfoil hats”, flew “swastikas” and “Trump flags”.

This is exactly how centrist dads (and mums) subtly vilify their opponents: set a perfect example and imply a comparison. I am so kind that anyone who disagrees with me must be nasty; so reasonable that my critics must be nuts. Yet despite the impression here that Ardern merely emoted throughout her time in office, as though manning the phones at the Samaritans, she implemented real, controversial policies that ended in a property bust, bad finances and a crime wave. And in a move that showed almost zero compassion to her colleagues, she quit office before they were due to be judged in a general election – thus avoiding the worst defeat for an incumbent government in decades.

Post-office, Ardern became a fellow at Harvard University, teaching a course in… you guessed it: “empathetic leadership”. The principle that the world would be a better place if we just empathised with each other is nice in theory, but codswallop in practice. How does that work with Vladimir Putin or the boys in Hamas? On the contrary, true leadership is about making tough judgments, guided by sound philosophy: St Jacinda bungled the former, lacked the latter. By reducing all government to thoughts and prayers, she transformed humility into vanity – a softly photographed carnival of her own emotions.

But there is one wonderful moment of zen. It comes when Ardern meets the late Queen in 2018, and asks whether she has any advice on raising children. “You just get on with it,” said the monarch. It must have been a put-down; it sounds like a put-down – and yet Ardern is too naive to notice.

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISE WITH STUFF
Stuff looks to publish a diverse range of opinions. Sometimes we'll publish opinions you disagree with. That's healthy.

Social media might create echo chambers. Good journalism should not.

Our policy is that our own journalists rarely write opinion pieces. Most of our commentary is from freelance writers or specialists. You can read more about Stuff's policy on managing opinion here.

- The Telegraph
Share

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193 Rapaura Road, Rapaura, Marlborough

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Not enough detail here. Do you have a link to a longer version of the article?

 

[kiwiqpr]

Don't want to give out too many things

Buy the book

 

[Sooperhoop]

Don't want to give out too many things

Buy the book

Jacinda and sheep, life's so exciting in NZ...

 

[Steelmonkey]

Jacinda and sheep, life's so exciting in NZ...

Why do you think they like throwing themselves off bridges with a rubber band around their ankles? Gotta get your kicks somehow!

 

[Stroller]

Freedom is slavery
Strength through joy
Smash the four olds
Peace through strength
Not a step back
Work makes you free

Good to see Starmer, borrowing the words of Ronald Reagan, joining the likes of Orwell (yes he was using it with irony) and the propaganda writers of Mao, Hitler and Stalin in coining a sinister but incoherent slogan. I’m sure he will grow into the role of war leader, now we have, apparently, a war economy.

I can imagine this complete nonentity parroting any of the above if he thinks it would make people like him more.

****ing terrifying. As is this rearming plan which depends on a basic competence absent from most government initiatives. Lots of the current military kit apparently doesn’t work, despite being impressively expensive, above budget and behind deadlines.

You must log in or register to see media

'We're arming for peace me boys, between the wars'.

 

[Stroller]

Musk ****ting on Trump is reminiscent of Cummings and Johnson. Let's hope there's a similar outcome.

Meanwhile, how long before Trump's travel bans extend to countries involved in next year's World Cup?

No need to ban me Donnie - I wouldn't dream of setting foot in the US whilst you're in charge.

 

[WBA2_QPR3]

Musk ****ting on Trump is reminiscent of Cummings and Johnson. Let's hope there's a similar outcome.

Meanwhile, how long before Trump's travel bans extend to countries involved in next year's World Cup?

No need to ban me Donnie - I wouldn't dream of setting foot in the US whilst you're in charge.

Some of the players appearing in Gianni's summer circus are from countries Trump has now banned - apparently there is an exemption for the Olympics and WC next year but not this summer's sideshow

 

[Stroller]

The US is fast on the way to becoming a police state under Trump.

 

[Stroller]

You must log in or register to see media

 

[WBA2_QPR3]

I watched the movie Civil War recently, it seems far fetched but nowadays resembles modern America

 

[Stroller]

I watched the movie Civil War recently, it seems far fetched but nowadays resembles modern America

Five steps towards a police state as indentified by Robert Reich....

(1) declaring an emergency on the basis of a so-called “rebellion”, “insurrection”, or “invasion”;

(2) using that “emergency” to justify bringing in federal agents with a monopoly on the use of force (Ice, the FBI, DEA, and the national guard) against civilians inside the country;

(3) allowing those militarized agents to make dragnet abductions and warrantless arrests, and detain people without due process;

(4) creating additional prison space and detention camps for those detained, and

(5) eventually, as the situation escalates, declaring martial law.

Once martial law is declared he could dispense with elections.

There are 'No Kings' anti-Trump demonstrations planned across the US on June 14th, the same day that Trump is holding a military parade to celebrate his birthday.

No Kings

Hopefully not, but could turn nasty.

 

[Stroller]

Fair play to this fella....

https://bsky.app/profile/iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social/post/3lr6mo4vgcc2f

 

[kiwiqpr]

Marines deployed to provide 'adequate numbers of forces,' statement sayspublished at 10:08
10:08
We've just reported that 700 Marines have been activated to the Los Angeles area to "provide continuous coverage of the area".

The statement confirming the deployment, external says the Marines will "seamlessly integrate" with forces on the ground who are protecting "federal personnel and federal property in the greater Los Angeles area".

The activation is to provide "adequate numbers of forces to provide continuous coverage" of the area "in support of the lead federal agency".

Task Force 51 - which comprises of 2,100 National Guard soldiers and 700 Marines - are trained in "de-escalation, crowd control, and standing rules for the use of force," the statement adds.