Monday, June 29, 2020



Removing a hateful symbol

The US state of Mississippi has finally voted to remove the Confederate emblem from its state flag. Good. Its appalling that it was put there in the first place, but even more appalling that it took so long to remove it. Its basicly as if a German Länder still had the Nazi swastika on its flag. and that's just unacceptable.

But while we're talking about removing hateful symbols, its long past time New Zealand got rid of the union jack. Its the flag of the empire which built and profited from the slave trade, which colonised, exploited, and committed horrific crimes across half the world, which invented concentration camps to keep its uncoperative colonial subjects under control, and which is entirely unapologetic about any of that. We had a chance to get rid of that symbol in 2015, and (thanks to shit design choices by the government) we blew it. Its time we had another go.