Yeah, it’s a Lefty Substack site, which is why it’s in the “Left” section – on the right of the page (MUHAHAHAHAHA). Being part of the Substack online world means that the articles are in-depth in a way most blogs are not – and the authors may even see some money from it.

But unlike The Standard or The Daily Blog (TDB) it’s not filled with rage-filled fanatics chanting the latest mantra about the “Hard Right Racist Romper Stomper Government” (H/T The Screaming Beard) and unlike Kiwi Politico it doesn’t refer to bland, ordinary politicians like Luxon and Seymour as “human offal”“

 I was going to use the term “scum” to refer to Seymour and Luxon but decided on offal because scum has some beneficial purpose while offal is rapidly rotting waste. Seymour in particular is a misogynist, racist incel-adjacent creep. Luxon is just another bullet-headed corporate Xtian neofascist with zero new ideas and presentation skills. Maybe the new PR lady will polish his policy pitch, if not his dome, but that is like polishing a turd. Yes, I do despise them.

Given that Chris Trotters reserved support of Israel in their fight against the human demons of Hamas has resulted in him effectively leaving TDB, it’s also a good way of catching up with his measured Lefty take on things, such as Where The People Walk:

WHAT PASSES for “Left” commentary these days insists that New Zealand is living under a “hard-right” government. Clearly, these commentators are unfamiliar with what constitutes a hard-right government. Equally clearly, they know next to nothing about New Zealand political history. Compared to the governments of Bill Massey, George Forbes, Sid Holland and Rob Muldoon, the coalition government of Christopher Luxon is a decidedly mild affair. The Left has mistaken a moderate and well-signalled political course correction for a reactionary reversal of progressive fortunes.

You can read The Screaming Beard’s counterblast here:(“The Democracy Project’s resident NZ First apologist, Chris Trotter….LINO incrementalists”….. RHEEEEEE….). Suffice to say that it is very much the opposite of Trotter’s and as unhinged as every other post Bomber has made in the last few months, although I recognise that he thinks he’s being merely passionate so as to encourage the Toiling Masses to revolt.

I’m also pleased to see that Danyl McLauchlan is writing for them, and his pieces are always thoughtful, such as Notes towards an alt-centrist manifesto (great pic BTW, which is why I’ve nicked it for my post):

My contention is that this government was simultaneously too centrist and not centrist enough and I predict the next government will be the same. Instead of an economy that is built around either an interventionist state or free markets we have a hybrid of private and public sector solutions that never seem to solve anything; they deliver little value to the public, vast profits to private sector providers and high salaries to the senior public servants provisioning them, who seem to be completely unaccountable – no matter how dire their performance. There aren’t traditional left-wing or right-wing solutions to this. 

I really do wish he would return to the satire he wrote on his personal blog, The DimPost, for a decade or more in the 2010’s, especially given that one of them was a poke at Trotter:

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Millions of years ago when the working class astronomer Charles Darwin discovered New Zealand and founded the Workers Collective of Auckland the waterfront was a taonga that Maori were forbidden to visit and they respected that and knew their place. It was the radical right-wing feminist government of William Massey that spread open the labile pink floodgates of change and swept away the egalitarian order in a wave of capitalist frenzy, separatist Maori entitlement and so-called-women who threaten to press charges because that is what their liberal puppetmasters at our elitist universities have brainwashed them to do.

See also the DimPost classics:

Oh, BTW, before clicking on that site you should be aware that (DUN…. DUN….. DAAAAAHHH), some wanker called Jonathan Katz at The Atlantic has declared that there’s a “Nazi problem” on Substack. Click the link to see what a well-known Substack writer thinks of that shit, which is just more of the US Democrat/Leftist tribalist meltdown in the wake of Musk’s takeover of X-Twitter.