Jacinda Ardern’s downfall is the latest sign voters are finally starting to regret lockdown - "Jacinda Ardern is a career politician, though you’d never have guessed it from the coverage when she announced her resignation on Thursday. Tributes poured in as if a great moral teacher had perished. Typical was London’s inept mayor, Sadiq Khan... Neither Khan nor anyone else identified what her achievements were, but that didn’t staunch the paeans of praise – including from normally cynical journalists... To question her motives for quitting was seen as downright uncouth. Ardern said that it was because she no longer had “enough in the tank”, and everyone went along with her. “There’s the old Enoch Powell line that all political careers end in failure,” wrote Jon Sopel, who recently left our state broadcaster to launch a podcast. “This one hasn’t. Goes at a time of her own choosing, head held high.” Maybe. Most politicians have wanted to chuck it all in at one time or another. But might not the hard-bitten Sopel have reminded his followers that, as recently as September, Ardern had promised to carry on? Might he have noted that her mind changed when the opinion polls changed? Might he at least have raised the question of whether she was jumping before being pushed? Nope. It would be downright undignified to treat the Blessed Jacinda like a politician... What was it that Ardern had accomplished? Did she overthrow a dictatorship? Did she win a war? Did she suffer in prison for her beliefs? Of course not. New Zealand is as healthy, wealthy and comfortable as any country on Earth. Ardern inherited a golden economic legacy from the outgoing National Party in 2017. New Zealand had grown in 24 of the previous 25 quarters, its budget was in surplus and crime was low. Ardern did build more houses – though nowhere near enough to slow soaring prices – but she also presided over a rise in crime, an economic slowdown, and a measure of rural unrest as farmers struggled to meet her eco-targets. At the same time, she upset other Anglosphere governments by her readiness to cosy up to Beijing, even as the Chinese launched their economic war against Australia. All in all, not a great record, which is why Kiwis had more or less made up their minds to return to National. So why the fawning tone of foreign commentators? The depressing answer is that we live in a superficial age, an age that cares more about vibes than deeds. Ardern is young, green and woke. She had a baby while in office and gave that baby a partly Māori name. In a culture whose critical faculties have been turned to mush by Twitter (source of all the above quotations) these things matter more than hard achievements. The power of image over substance, of narrative over accomplishment, was especially pronounced during the first lockdown, when the global middle classes sat glued to their screens. During those pinched, petty, puritanical weeks, one story in particular rose to prominence. Female heads of government, we kept reading, were handling the pandemic better than their male counterparts. One of the many asymmetries of identity politics is that we are supposed to want more women in office because of their feminine qualities – empathy, risk-aversion, dislike of conflict – while simultaneously affecting to believe that there are no mental or emotional differences between the sexes. Ardern became the face of the touchy-feely global moment ushered in by the first lockdown. Not for her the supposedly cavalier insouciance of leaders like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Oh, no, she cared. Her warm-hearted instincts stretched out to embrace her entire archipelago, saving its people from the pandemic. Even at the time, that story didn’t quite stack up. Setting aside the bizarre implication that other leaders were happy to stand by and watch their voters die (even if you assume that all politicians are self-interested sleazebags, that would be an electorally unappealing approach), the dates don’t work. New Zealand locked down after the UK did. The policies of the two countries were, at first, almost identical. The difference was that New Zealand gets as many international flights in a day as Heathrow does in an hour, so isolation was a feasible policy there. With strict limitations on international travel, New Zealand was able to leave lockdown earlier than more interconnected countries, and it was that success that gave Ardern her landslide victory in the election of October 2020. But as isolation lingered, the mood soured. Ardern’s government was stunningly authoritarian when it came to vaccine mandates – public sector workers were sacked for declining shots – yet at the same time slow to purchase doses... Kiwis resemble Brits more than any other people in the world and, like us, they initially loved lockdowns. But as they watched other countries emerging from their chrysalises and drying their wings, they began to feel restless. Another lockdown in Auckland in late 2021 was, for many, the last straw. Ardern’s strict approach, which had at first chimed with the national mood, began to seem dictatorial. “We will continue to be your single source of truth,” she had said in 2020. “Unless you hear it from us it is not the truth.” At the time, no one much minded. But, by 2022, Kiwis were circulating that clip with a kind of horrified wonder that they had ever put up with it. Not just Kiwis. The world has learned a lot since 2020. First, and most obviously, we now see that there was almost no correlation between the severity of a lockdown and the overall death rate. Sweden, which avoided lockdown, had one of the lowest rates of excess mortality in Europe in 2020 and 2021. Second, contrary to everything we were led to believe at the time (other than in the Sunday columns of one fearless former MEP, modesty forbids, etc etc) vaccines were of no use when it came to preventing infections. Yes, they were good at keeping people out of hospital, and especially good at keeping vulnerable people alive. But they were no good at stopping transmission. Pause for a moment and consider the implications of that statement, which the World Health Organisation accepts. The whole edifice of vaccine mandates – the travel restrictions, the entry requirements, the closures – rested on the idea that inoculation protected other people. If all a vaccine did was protect the person who had been jabbed, then there was no case for state intervention. Because Ardern was more hardline than most leaders, she suffered a proportionate backlash. But similar things have been happening around the world. Incumbent governments could get re-elected at the height of the crisis in 2020. Now, though, we are experiencing the lockdown hangover – stagflation, mental health problems, deaths caused by delays in diagnosis and, worst of all, a growing sense that the whole bloody thing was an overreaction. There is an easy way to tell, by the way, if Ardern really did resign for family-based or other non-political reasons. The Davos crowd, who adore her, will doubtless want her to take some high-profile international job, perhaps at the United Nations. We’ll see then whether she has “enough in the tank”."
What went wrong for Jacinda Arden? How the New Zealand PM's popularity plummeted - "Jacina Ardern promised a new era of kinder, more progressive politics but will be remembered for imposing one of the world’s harshest lockdowns. For her critics, Ms Ardern epitomised the worst of woke politics, but even her supporters on the Left will now look back on her leadership as an era of missed opportunity... her failed zero Covid policy badly hurt her standing at home and doubtless contributed to her shock decision to quit. At first, her Labour party was hugely popular for its handling of the pandemic but as the country clung to its draconian restrictions even in the face of increasingly thin returns, people began to chafe under the draconian restrictions. Stories about New Zealanders being locked out of their own country didn't help. One such example was Charlotte Bellis, a pregnant woman forced to resort to going to Afghanistan, the only other country she had a visa for. New Zealanders eventually took to the streets in defiance of her coronavirus restrictions and a stay-at-home order. A three-week anti-vaccine protest on parliament grounds last year ended in violent clashes with police in scenes of discord not usually seen in New Zealand. This time last year, many were already saying she "had to go". Despite sealing New Zealand’s borders for almost two years, she failed to stop the spread of the Delta variant and the once-praised zero Covid policy was abandoned. New Zealanders stranded abroad were finally able to return home to a country that lagged behind other developed nations in vaccination rates. Ms Ardern’s popularity took a battering from which it has never recovered. In October last year, right-wing parties surged ahead in local elections. Conservative candidates in Auckland, Christchurch, Invercargill and Rotorua all elected conservative mayors. The economic consequences of zero Covid are now being exacerbated by a cost-of-living crisis brought about by the highest inflation in three decades, with some parents saying they now struggle to put food on the table for their children. That is seen as a much bigger priority that climate change, for example, something that the government has targeted with controversial policies such as taxing cow and sheep burps. New Zealand is also in the grips of a housing crisis with many unable to afford new homes after her five years in power. Ms Ardern promised that her flagship policy - ‘KiwiBuild’ - would solve the country’s housing crisis. But just as of last year, just 1,366 homes had been built out of the 100,000 promised, with the policy being described as an "abject failure". Despite child poverty being one of the core issues she stressed for her getting into politics in 2017, figures show the rate has barely changed since then... she has failed to stop a rise in violent crime that has rocked New Zealand. A wave of ram raids around the country led to accusations she was soft on crime, which only grew louder after a shop owner was stabbed to death during a raid in November last year. More than 515 vehicular smash-and-grabs took place in 2022, the equivalent of 6,500 incidents taking place in a country like Britain. That type of crime was virtually unheard in New Zealand five years ago. The Right-wing opposition’s promises to crack down on crime have proved popular with voters, with support growing for National party leader Christopher Luxon. Meanwhile, support for Ms Arden and New Zealand’s Labour party has dropped to its lowest level since she came to power in 2017. Ms Arden, only the second world leader to ever give birth in office, said she simply did not have the energy to contest elections in October and deliver the fresh start her supporters had dreamed of. “I no longer have enough in the tank to do the job justice,” she explained. But many will think she decided to jump before she was pushed out of office at the ballot box."
I remember when covid hystericists claimed zero covid was a good idea because you could reopen your economy faster
Why Boris bashers like Jacinda Ardern | The Spectator - "‘Women are better leaders – the pandemic proves it’, says CNN, with a pic of Ardern, naturally. ‘The secret weapon in the fight against coronavirus [is] women’, declares a writer for the Guardian. Ardern is a ‘world leader in combating the virus’, the Guardian says. Funny that so few of these Women-vs-Covid pieces mention Sophie Wilmes, the prime minister of Belgium, which has the worst death rate (per capita) in the world... The naivety in all of this is staggering. Of course Covid hasn’t moved through New Zealand in the same way it has through the UK, because, erm, New Zealand and the UK are unbelievably different countries... London is a global hub. It’s a financial, political, migrating hub in a way that Christchurch and Auckland aren’t. Even in terms of tourism, where NZ does well, the UK has up to 40m visitors a year, where New Zealand has around three million... the deeply cynical apportioning of culpability, where Boris is held personally responsible for Covid deaths, is not anything like a reasoned inquiry into the state’s failings. Instead it stinks of infantile Tory-bashing, and even worse – using the deaths of 30,000 people as little more than sticks with which to beat politicians some lefties don’t like... Just as Trudeau’s dancing at Pride marches and wearing of ‘Eid Mubarak’ socks got the virtue-signalling set hot under the collar, so Ardern’s compassionate style and clever use of Instagram makes them wish she was in charge over here."
Jacinda Ardern is now the West’s woke weak link - "Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s tiresomely woke prime minister, often complains that one of the biggest challenges her country faces in promoting its interests overseas is that, owing to its remote geographical location, it sometimes finds itself left off maps of the world. Now, thanks to Wellington’s naive decision to prioritise trade with China over its membership of the elite Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, Ms Ardern can expect her country’s isolation to deepen further as New Zealand faces the very real prospect of expulsion from the alliance over its pro-Beijing stance. The New Zealand Labour leader’s preference for cosying up to China’s communist rulers comes at a time when the consensus among the world’s leading democracies is that Beijing poses the greatest threat to their long-term well-being and prosperity. It is for this reason that leaders of the other members of the Five Eyes alliance – Britain, the US, Canada and Australia – have been pressing for the group to issue a joint communique denouncing Beijing’s suppression of liberty in Hong Kong, as well as its repression of the Uyghur Muslims... Wellington’s willingness to ally itself more closely with Beijing has also resulted in accusations that New Zealand is not fulfilling its obligations to protect smaller nations in the Pacific, which have been the target of Beijing’s expansionist designs in the region... Ms Ardern can also expect her pro-human rights credentials to come under closer scrutiny. Previously, Ms Ardern has declared her support for “the values of human rights, social justice, equality, democracy and the role of communities”. How this squares with her aspiration to befriend a Chinese regime that is persisting with its crackdown on Hong Kong’s democracy movement by detaining and imprisoning activists is for the New Zealand electorate to decide."
From 2021. Wokeness is really just hating the West and white people
New Zealand Prime Minister Calls For A Global Censorship System - "Ardern lashed out at “disinformation” and called for a global coalition to control speech. After nodding toward free speech, she proceeded to lay out a plan for its demise through government regulation"
Meme - "There is no bigger heartbreak than when your work bestie hands in their resignation..."
dez @_desireeong: "coworker relationships are so bittersweet. U spend months telling each other little stories bout each other and u don't even realize how close you've gotten until one of u leaves to move on in life and ur thinking when ur ever really gonna see them again"
Meme - Deer: "I think we have a pretty good chance this season. The average hunter is getting older and millennials are just not interested anymore."
An alternate version says: "Millennials think meat come from stores"
Meme - Kat @eeveeluti0n: "I am not ok So you know my sister is a veterinary student. She said a little girl brought her hamster in bc it hadn't moved for 3 days and was just sat at the side of the cage and wouldn't eat or drink or anything. So she asked her if anything had happened that may have caused it, the girl says yeah he escaped for a bit but we found him under the fridge. So they have a look at this hamster, put him on the table and he's walking round, eating & drinking etc. All fine. Which is really weird. Then they notice there's something in his cheek pouch. So they look inside, and find a fridge magnet. Turns out the only thing wrong with this hamster is that it had a fridge magnet in his cheek pouch and was stuck to his metal cage"
Nene - "Her: I don't know how I can pay my rent... *unbuttons blouse*
Him: Oh I think there's a way... "takes off shirt*
Everyone else playing Monopoly:"
Liu Wen-cheng’s manager says he faked news of reclusive singer’s death to stop comeback requests - "Reclusive Taiwanese singer Liu Wen-cheng, who was reported to have died in November, is alive. His good friend and agent Hsia Yu-shun had announced that Liu had died of a heart attack, but has since confirmed to Taiwanese entertainment portal ETtoday that Liu, 70, had told him to fake his death."
Meme - MoonPie @MoonPie: "MoonPie - yes
Moon Pie - no
Sun Pie - stop
Dad - sure
Mrudahņ - do not speak this name"
"Are you ok Moon Pie"
"Absolutely not thank you"
Meme - "Lessons learned from re-watching GOT:
1: you can be a rapist pedophile and women will still love you as long as you're hot.
2. You can literally be the most evil person alive and still be hailed as a hero of "female empowerment" as long as you make a snarky retweetable comment every now and then. something about "being a queen or a whore" or something. (then she literally whores herself out for some boats 10 seconds after making that comment)
3. showrunners really need to quit while theyre ahead."
Meme - Kenny Akers @KeneAkers: "This brings happy tears to my eyes passing on some of our ancestors traditions and wisdom. Did you know, Rice; was braided into the hair of African women to serve as sustenance on their way to enslavement. The hairstyle- cornrows-hid rice and even seeds as they traveled with no..."
They look like large lice eggs
Trolls just want to have fun - "In two online studies (total N = 1215), respondents completed personality inventories and a survey of their Internet commenting styles. Overall, strong positive associations emerged among online commenting frequency, trolling enjoyment, and troll identity, pointing to a common construct underlying the measures. Both studies revealed similar patterns of relations between trolling and the Dark Tetrad of personality: trolling correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, using both enjoyment ratings and identity scores. Of all personality measures, sadism showed the most robust associations with trolling and, importantly, the relationship was specific to trolling behavior. Enjoyment of other online activities, such as chatting and debating, was unrelated to sadism. Thus cyber-trolling appears to be an Internet manifestation of everyday sadism."
Meme - "What ever happened to flashing truck drivers?"
Meme - "deanbiard. 42, Guildford"
"Hi im dean the perfect gentleman warm and passionate can we chat"
"No"
"Cunt"
Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Outliers’ Says Redshirting Is Integral to a Child’s Success—But New Research Raises Questions About the Practice - The Atlantic - "If you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, you probably remember the argument he makes in the book’s first chapter: In competitive situations, a person who’s relatively older than the others will probably be the one who wins... There are scholars who echo Gladwell’s conclusions, arguing, for example, that relatively young students are disproportionately diagnosed with learning disabilities or more likely to underperform on standardized tests. Yet there are other scholars who contend that relatively older students are more likely to drop out of high school or commit a felony offense by age 19 or that they tend to have slightly lower overall educational attainment. One study, meanwhile, found that age diversity in kindergarten classrooms is beneficial in itself; relatively young students, it suggested, have better outcomes when they’re learning alongside relatively older peers. A new study published in the journal Contemporary Economic Policy offers perhaps the latest piece of evidence that redshirting is little more than a silly fad—or, as one pair of economists put it in 2009, a “suburban legend.” The new study, by Cornell’s Kevin Kniffin and Ohio State’s Andrew Hanks, looks at whether redshirting influences the likelihood that a child will eventually obtain a Ph.D. The fact that this degree is held by less than 2 percent of the U.S. population makes it a meaningful metric, the researchers say, because it reflects an exceptional combination of academic achievement and ambition; its exclusivity also makes it somewhat comparable to Gladwell’s hockey-selection data. The study found that redshirting has virtually no impact on Ph.D. attainment. What’s more, it could even undermine a future Ph.D.’s potential lifetime earnings. Based on their analysis of approximately 14,500 freshly minted Ph.D. recipients, the researchers conclude that a student who isn’t redshirted could end up earning $138,000 more over the course of his or her lifetime than someone who is. Assuming redshirted students get their doctorates a year later than they would’ve had they not had their schooling delayed, they get a year’s head start on their salaries, which for a first-year Ph.D. recipient averages about $58,000. “The compounding effect” of that $58,000, namely annual inflation over 30 years, causes that difference to accumulate... despite the cost of an extra year of childcare and the muddled research on its merits, parents continue to redshirt “as a voluntary act to gain a comparative advantage,” write Kniffin and Hanks, while others even time pregnancies to ensure their kids are relatively older than their peers... the new research might help spur the socially conscious parent to resist the temptation to redshirt—on the grounds that doing so is not only unnecessary but can put educational attainment further out of reach for the child’s less-fortunate peers"
Police avoid criminal charges in Tennessee sex scandal - "The Tennessee cops involved in the Girls Gone Wild hot tub party and office sex scandal will not be criminally charged - after the department fired nearly 10 percent of its staff. Maegan Hall, 26, was at the forefront of the investigation that unraveled in December when it was revealed she performed oral sex on several of her colleagues and ripped her top off at a family boat party... While most of the acts played out while the officers were on night duty, they also transgressed in hotel rooms and outdoors."
Meme - *Fork in the road*
*Maegan Hall*
*Caroline Ellison*
Meme - "TRAINS: 2023 CALENDAR
JANUARY *Maegan Hall*
FEBRUARY *Ohio train derailment*"
Meme - "Everywhere go... I see her face... *Maegan Hall*"
Meme - "I EAT ASS"
Maegan Hall: "You know why I pulled you over?"
Meme - "Courtney Buchanan is with Adam Lipin.
Donna Lynch @GeekLioness: I go home with a coworker every shift. Anyone making a fuss over the cop who banged a bunch of her co-workers has clearly never worked in the bar/ restaurant industry.
Howard Barcliff: Nice are you hiring"
Cop-gone-wild Maegan Hall disciplined twice before police sex scandal - "The bed-hopping Tennessee cop fired for having sex with six of her police colleagues was threatened with termination just months earlier – for repeatedly crashing her patrol car. Maegan Hall was booted off the La Vergne PD last month when an internal probe revealed she had performed oral sex while on duty, whipped off her bikini top at a 'girls gone wild' hot tub party and pestered another officer for a 'three way' with his wife... the shameless siren, 26, was already on her last warning after she cost her bosses thousands of dollars in damage and even landed herself in the hospital in a series of 'preventable' car accidents... The raft of firings and disciplinary measures meant that La Vergne – a town of 39,000 people 20 miles south east of Nashville – lost around 12 percent of its police manpower overnight"
Husband of Tennessee cop fired over sex with 4 officers didn't agree that marriage was open - "The Tennessee cop who was fired for having sex with her colleagues claimed she was in an open marriage, but her park ranger husband did not agree... Hall appeared to keep her sexual relationships a secret from her husband and asked other officers to borrow money to book hotels... Hall initially denied having a sexual relationship with all the men except for Holladay, which she insisted was only at his house or in hotels. But she admitted to 'sending nude images to other officers on shift including Holladay, Magliocco, and Officer Schoeberl.' She later backtracked and confessed about Magliocco but denied being involved with his wife."
The people trying to defend her claim it's misogyny if you only mock her and not them. Ignoring the fact that she was the common element (the others only had sex with one colleague - her - while she had sex with all of them), this is surely pertinent. Not to mention how she lied during the investigations (those who lied got fired, and the others only got suspended)
Meme - "Lemon pie *breasts*
Apple pie *big breasts*
Cream Pie *Maegan Hall*"
Former officer Meagan Hall files lawsuit, claims she was “groomed” by fellow officers - "The former Tennessee police officer who was forced off the department in disgrace after it was discovered she slept with over 60% of the force has filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint against the city she once protected. Meagan Hall, who became internationally known earlier this year for her outrageous sex scandal, claims the Hostile working conditions at the La Vergne Police Department led her to eventually sleep with multiple men at the department... The former officer also claims that the chief of the police department, Chip Davis, was condoning such grooming. Additionally, Hall claimed that Davis asked her to dance for him in his office."
Women are allergic to accountability
Joseph Mullins on Twitter - "Today, nobody showed up to my 8.15am class. 0 students of about 40. Sitting in the empty room, I email them, trying to disguise my hurt feelings. 2 mins later, I get a reply: "Professor, we think you might be in the wrong room." So anyway off I go to live in a hole forever.
My wife really wants me to mention that I was sleep deprived because I got up at 4am to play Dungeons and Dragons with my friends in Australia."
Meme - "me: I hate watching movies with subtitles
friend: but why?
*subtitles covering Daenerys Targaryen's breasts*
This is why"
Iranian man who beheaded 17-year-old wife jailed for eight years - "A man who beheaded his 17-year-old wife has been sentenced to eight years in prison in Iran, the judiciary says. Images of Sajjad Heydari carrying Mona's severed head in Ahvaz after the so-called "honour killing" last year caused widespread outrage. A judiciary spokesman said the leniency of the sentence was due to Mona's parents having "pardoned" him for the murder rather than seeking retribution. Her father previously said that he had not given his consent for the killing. Mona had been married to her husband since the age of 12 and had given birth to their son when she was only 14. Local media reported that she had fled to Turkey after allegedly being subjected to domestic violence by her husband, who had refused her requests for a divorce. She had returned to Iran a few days before her murder last February because she had reportedly received assurances from her family that she would be safe... In 2020, there was similar outrage after 14-year-old Romina Ashrafi was beheaded by her father after she reportedly ran away from home with her boyfriend. The father, who had consulted a lawyer to find out what punishment he could face for the crime before he killed her, was sentenced to nine years in prison - one less than the maximum allowed under the law."
Feminists: *silence*