Shame on who?
This image is attached to the Stuff story on the death of a protester during the G20 protests in London: (Screenshot) I know I’m not alone in noticing that since Stuff remodeled itself on the SMH that...
View ArticleKissing babies
… or in this case, trying to brainwash them. Ali Ikram’s Political Week in Review includes a clip of John Key at a rally against the Waterview decision telling a wee kid in a stylish National-Blue...
View ArticleChosŏn Realism
(This and the last are posts I’ve been meaning to put up all week, having been prevented by a migraine and a deadline.) This week seems an opportune time to link to a small but superb collection of...
View ArticleDrifting toward a surveillance culture
As a propaganda geek, I’m concerned (some might say paranoid) about surveillance and its growing use as a means of social control, or as a tool to gather information used to justify and enact other...
View ArticleWinner does not take all
Peter Shirtcliffe is furious (audio), and well he might be, because the government’s plans for electoral reform are eminently sensible, subject to wide bipartisan support, and most critically, not at...
View ArticleDreams and realities
This morning at The Standard, vto* questioned how anyone can figure that the TVNZ7 ad featuring Bill English could be political advertising, since it doesn’t contain any baldly partisan political...
View Article‘Blue collars, red necks’: triply flawed
In the coming years, core tenets of socialist and indigenist faith will be tested. Labour, with its recently-adopted ‘blue collars, red necks’ strategy, has struck out along a path which requires a...
View ArticleYours, not mines
Labour’s campaign against mining Schedule 4 land looks strong, especially at the iconographic level. The slogan and to an extent the photo frames the issue as a matter of identity, echoing Phil Goff’s...
View ArticleThoughts about Key’s Afghan PR Exercise.
I have seen and read the reports of John Key’s much anticipated “secret” trip to Afghanistan. I must say that it is one of the more amateurish, cringe worthy attempts at symbolic politics I have seen...
View ArticleShameless Self-Promotion Alert.
For those who may be interested, I am interviewed on the TVNZ news analysis show fronted by Russell Brown, Media 7, tonight on the subject of wikileaks. Although only parts of the interview will be...
View Article‘Come back Helen Clark, all is forgiven’
Thus spake John Ansell, who’s back with another cracking demonstration that he’s the nation’s pre-eminent racial fearmonger. He really is peerless in this regard. And there’s plenty more where that...
View ArticleComing this Fall: the Battle for America’s Soul
Imagine that title in scary-movie-narrator-voice. Via Pascal’s Bookie, a simply magnificent piece of propaganda from Personhood USA. This two-minute ad is superbly done. It frames Colorado’s 1967...
View ArticleOn a lighter note: Machine of Death
On 26 October 2010, the guy who writes the marvelous Dinosaur Comics and a bunch of others self-published a book (because nobody would publish it for them) of short stories based around the idea of a...
View ArticleOne man’s terrorist…
Via Thomas Beagle, the following astonishing story: In Libya, an unlikely hero of a youth-led revolution BENGHAZI, LIBYA – Mehdi Mohammed Zeyo was the most unlikely of revolutionary heroes. The...
View ArticleShame on the Herald
… for trying to run game on New Zealand, scaremongering the Foreshore and Seabed hīkoi: That was on page four of the dead tree edition, and online here, under the headline “Opponents put up roadblocks...
View ArticleOff the hook
On Red Alert, Clare Curran has a hapless pro-forma whinge about the standard of media coverage in New Zealand vis-a-vis in the UK, where a quarter million people are presently engaging in running...
View ArticleTurning Negatives into Positives.
One of the more vexing problems in politics is to turn opposition to something into a virtue. Being anti-something is reactive and defensive rather than a path with which to move forward. It is the...
View ArticleThe disappointment of Atlas Shrugged Part I
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged isn’t a work with universal appeal, but it interests me as a work of propaganda. It is a powerful text, and one that has had an enduring influence on Western politics. While...
View ArticleKnow your enemy
The image above is “scientifically formulated to enhance [women's] perception of men who drink Molson [...] a perfectly tuned combination of words and images designed by trained professionals. Women...
View ArticleWhose Team New Zealand?
As much as anybody I enjoy sports and competition, so much so that I enjoy watching top level competition in sports that I am unfamiliar with. I have therefore enjoyed watching the America’s Cup...
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