Bear's Blog New Zealand (Beta)

Politician and politician ...

If we are here to talking about the format, I liked the "two johns" ad,  it's like a variation of National's 2005 red and blue billboards, simple, clear and precise.

But I just keep feeling creepy every time this ad appears on TV. Last line of the ad reads something like "...you know you can trust Helen Clark and Labour." I don't know whether it's just me feeling this way, is this some kind of brainwashing ad with a hidden subliminal message "you should trust Helen Clark"?

I mean the wording of the last line is bit strange. How come they know that I know Helen Clark is more trustworthy? It made me quite scared that they may possess some kind of mind reading secret technique.

But if not,  then don't tell me what I suppose to or not to know. I know (well, everybody knows) Auntie Clarkie signed paintings which were done by someone else.

"trust" and "politician" are just two very incompatible words and I think Clark is quite stupid to set the tone of the election in this way. The ad itself also played a very stupid logic game: any fully minded person should know that an "untrustworthy John" does not logically equal to the statement "Labour is trustworthy".

BTW ... here's a story about two Helens ...

A NZ political quiz

Pundit have published a nice online NZ political quiz that tells you which party shares most of your beliefs earlier today. It's quite short so should not take you long to do it, I just tried itself, and the result is quite similar to what I expected:

1. The Green Party - 73%
2. The Progressive Party - 73%
3. The Labour Party - 72%
4. The United Future Party - 70%
5. New Zealand First Party - 62%
6. The National Party - 55%
7. The Act Party - 35%

Except Rodney Hide's far right Act Party, I was quite amazed that the difference between National and Labour is just about 20% - I guess that's the down side of a short quiz - there's not enough questions to fully separate the beliefs held by each party.

But despite of that, the quiz also got an amazing level of details. It is capable to tell you the similarity between you and each political party for each issue, like this:

NZ political quiz

It's a nice quiz, recommended to everyone.

Bear's no blog for little longer ...

Whoo! It's half way through the last week of the semister before exam and I'm already terribly out of shape. Three consecutive days of work from 5 - 10, I mean 5am to 10pm, I'm really lucky that I can still breath.

In fact I'm even luckier than I thought. At least I had the chance to go home and sleep on my bed. For some degrees I understand it's quite normal that most people simply moved their home to university, and made couches as their beds.

That's not because my laziness during the semester, I worked harder than everyone else. It's just because the final assignment really requires that amount of time to finish it.

So ... I'll try to restart this blog after the exams...

A note to myself

Note - I didn't win that 30 millions jackpot so I still need to go to work tomorrow.

Nah that's just joking, the real note is ...

While most of the contents in this blog are about politics, I actually prefer to remain as apolitical as possible in my real life. That's one of the reasons why I did not promote my blogs to my friends.

The reason's quite simple. I've always found very difficult to have any real discussion or debate on political issues with some people, especially my fellow countrymen. If you oppose their views, the trend is, they will try to win the debate by putting all sorts of labels on you. In that way they would feel like they are on the moral high ground, or what we Chinese call Ah Q - well in fact, I feel quite sorry for them.

But the even sadder thing is, some searches have found that personal ideology to overrules facts is more like a fact of life, and we may just have to live with them.

So I'll still remain as apolitical as possible in my life.

I'll be back, soon

Please read the title in Austrian accent, haha.

Well Christmas is fast approaching, but before that it's also the busiest time of the year, again. I need to take some time away from this blog to do my own stuffs, so I won't update this blog as frequently as before.

I hope to end all  works and to start thinking about Christmas no later than November 21st. I'm currently considering whether I should have my holiday in China this year. If this travel plan goes ahead, I'll definitely visit the area devastated by the Sichuan Earthquake happened in may this year, maybe volunteering some works.

If you feel that you need to read something from me(I sincerely hope no one does), you can subscribe to my daily digest. It's a collection of best and most interesting articles in my subscription list(as you may know, I monitor a large amount of blogs and news sources), and is updated daily - read others' blog is far more easier than to write my own :)

The only down side is, the content is a mix of Chinese and English articles, so if you read English only ...

Just one quick point

Environment is an important issue to me. After seeing the debate tonight, I just got one question: "if we don't have an environment that is able to sustain our life, will we still be there to enjoy the economic development?"

New Zealanders are always proud of their progressive, sometimes radical social values. They are part of our nation's identity. We cannot compete in economy with countries like USA, but we can lead the world in social issues.

We did not seek a balance between rugby matches and our value, we also shouldn't do like what Mr Key said, "a balance between environment and economic development". Mr Key also should not be hesitate to answer the question on the 1981 Springboks tour, I agree the past has no value in order to help us solve our current issues, but Mr Key's personal values are  important though, for me, to assess whether he's the right man. His hesitation to answer that question, shows me that he got no social value at all - that was the defining moment of our country and yet you have no opinion on that?

For that reason, National is definitely off my list for now - if we lose our identity, New Zealand will no longer be New Zealand.

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In terms of the debate itself, both did fine. But clearly John Key is more energic and won the debate. After 9 years of Helen Clark, you can even tell what she's going to say before she actually says it.

And it's quite weird that John Key didn't mention the phrase "national party" a lot in the debate ...probably only once or twice.