What a load of absolute nonsense!
wrote investment dude Troy Bowker on LinkedIn,
Another example of European NZers not being proud of their own ancestors and sucking up to the left Māori loving agenda. FFS. Wake up NZ.
This school lunch thing is so pathetic,
wrote plastic toy dude Nick Mowbray on X,
this country is made up of so many whiners and losers with their hands out.
Developer dude Matthew Horncastle, who likes to call people like Jacinda Ardern and Chlöe Swarbrick losers, told the Herald in a might-this-rich-guy-fancy-being-PMstory:
If government debt increases, if bureaucracies increase in size, if the state keeps getting bigger and bigger, taking on more and more debt, reducing the freedom of individuals more and more. That’s when I would run, to do what I believe is saving my country from socialism and communism.
We’re very fond of Tony, said Antoinette, the nurse at the home where they look after our Dad around the clock. It was just one of a dozen very affecting and reassuring things she said as we sat with her for an hour this week in the empty room where Mum and Dad had spent the last months of their life together.
Mum would not have thought too much of Troy or Matthew or Nick. She would have loved to have heard Antoinette.
It was a meeting to talk about a lesion and a different drug regime, although we did also wonder if, because my brother had told them Karren and I were coming down to visit, they might be wanting to talk about his greater needs as the memory loss gets more pronounced. They have another home for patients deeper into the fog.
But no. She reassured us that they would much rather disrupt him as little as possible and they wouldn’t be moving him, but she did have questions to do with care as things go on from here.
In particular, despite their best efforts to protect him from his independent spirit, at this stage a fall could be a matter of life and death because the surgery it can entail could be too much. She explained steadily, reassuringly and warmly: if we prefer, and it’s what he wants, we can alternatively not go the surgical route to mend the break, but rather use pain relief and go on without mending.
There were other things to talk over along these lines; she carefully and comprehensively and warmly and compassionately took us through it all.
If you ever should find yourself in such a quiet sun-filled room talking your way through such things, I wish you a nurse as thoughtful and thorough and kind as Antoinette.
That evening we were staying with my brother and on his enthusiastic endorsement, watching Prime Minister, a reminder of what we went through and how admirable and capable and reassuring her leadership was, and how enraging it was to see the brain-dead bot-driven mania of the occupation tear it all down.
Somewhere in there you see her saying words to the effect of: kindness is not weakness.
Here is what I find so misguided, so arrogant and so unwelcome about the sort of things we are hearing from various wealthy people who have decided Things Need Sorting Out.
At the head of this table sit such scarcely-human billionaires as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg whose distaste for democracy, plurality verges on the psychopathic. But give any egotist or misanthrope enough loot and you’ll see some of them lustily singing from the same song sheet that betrays a pig-ignorance of history, philosophy, and political thought.
Get a load of what Troy Bowker had to say about Patrick Smellie’s BusinessDesk, which, let us remind ourselves, is the creation of Patrick Smellie, not Troy Bowker.
He contended that BusinessDesk is a business news subscription site and should not be engaging in social commentary with a left political bias. Subscribers to BusinessDesk are paying for good quality business news, not poor quality bias opinion pieces.
Then don’t subscribe, ya nimrod! And if everyone else unsubscribes maybe you will have read their expectations correctly. And if they don’t, maybe that might be a clue too.
Get, also, a load of Horncastle gamely swimming against the tide of media bias to get his views heard: I see no difference in values between Adolf Hitler and the political left.Other things he has deemed bad include taxes, beneficiaries, net-zero carbon targets, fluoride, and mentally ill left-wing voters.
NZME investor Jim Grenon executes similar convictions through corporate manoeuvre and legal funding. His perceived demons are: co-governance bad, climate consensus suspect, vaccines contested, media captured by the left, the right voices are not being heard.
There seems to be an implicit underpinning to all this: I’m rich so I’m obviously right.
But how much weight does this actually merit?
Mowbray’s mythology is a bootstraps story: $20,000 from mum and dad, sleeping in the Hong Kong airport, etc. But his Zuru billions run through Chinese manufacturing infrastructure built by state investment, American retail chains subsidised by US road and logistics networks, IP protection enforced by courts funded by taxpayers, and tariff structures negotiated by governments he had no hand in. The solo genius narrative requires you to make all of that invisible.
Horncastle’s seems to be: I built my business myself with no money from my family, which is impressive, but also only works for you if many other things are going in your favour. For example, a property market shaped entirely by planning laws, zoning decisions, infrastructure spending, and the tax treatment of capital gains that successive governments chose not to reform.
Elizabeth Warren has rebutted this best of anyone: no matter what you’ve created yourself, so many others helped to create this system that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges; the workers who moved your goods, the police who protected your factory, the public schools that educated your employees were all in this together.
The further drum these rich dudes beat is the free speech one. It is very much free speech for me but not for thee.
Grenon bankrolls defamation cases against TVNZ and disinformation researchers. Horncastle wants to jail former prime ministers for their Covid decisions.
This is not the fostering of debate; this is the deployment of legal and financial leverage to narrow it. You will not hear anything from them in defence of the speech rights of Māori journalists, climate scientists, or disinformation researchers being sued into silence.
We are living now amongst the full flowering of a lionising of managerialism and the free markets and enterprise for its own sake.
These people are not seeking to advance the common good, for that they would first have to grasp the concept, let alone embrace it.
It is a meagre prospect.
And so you turn away from that and you look around.
You find a quiet nurse showing the compassion that so many people show every day, happy to play their part in something larger than themselves, glad to do as much as they can to care for another.
It was worth driving hours and hours to hear it.
