ACT cuddles up to the antivaxxers

Since the anti-vax plague camp was set up on Parliament's lawn last week, complete with nooses and death threats, I've been wondering how long it would take for the right to start cuddling up to it. And today, predictably, ACT's David Seymour did:

ACT leader David Seymour has met with a Parliament protest "intermediary" to deliver conditions to be met for dialogue with lawmakers.

Seymour said on Wednesday he had met with the unnamed intermediary out the back of the Backbencher, a pub across the road from Parliament forced to close due to the week-long protest which has blocked traffic in the surrounding area of central Wellington.

In case anyone has forgotten, this protest has included assaults on local residents, multiple threats to lynch MPs, a convicted white supremacist threatening to execute politicians, and calls for the military to stage a coup to overthrow the elected government. But clearly, Seymour doesn't have a problem with any of that (neither, sadly, do "Wellington business leaders"). And we should judge him and his party for that at the next election.

Naylor's cossacks

In Wellington, the city council uses an "alternative giving" campaign in an effort to sweep away the human reminders of economic failure. In Palmerston North, the mayor wants to threaten them with rugby players:

Rugby players have been suggested as a better deterrent than a bylaw in discouraging begging in Palmerston North.

Mayor Jono Naylor said rather than spend about $10,000 making a bylaw that would achieve "zip", he would rather give the money to the Kia Toa Rugby Club to get players out on Broadway Ave to discourage beggars.

"If we could get them to shadow these people around the streets, we would have it solved by Christmas."

So, his preferred way of dealing with economic distress is thuggery and intimidation. I'm very glad I didn't vote for him.

[Thanks to @SirWB for the post title]

A special pit of vileness

The internet can be a pretty vile place, particularly for women. But one of our local sewer blogs (no link as it is well beyond the cordon sanitaire) has managed to find its own special pit of vileness in suggesting that a female blogger it politically disagrees with should be "fixed" by being raped.

Clint Heine linked to my post about The Australian Labor Party. The post and comments are almost entirely made up of personal insults, which is unsurprising. But one commenter, James, said (about me):

Nothing a big black dildo won't fix......

Clint replied:

James.....!!! Nice suggestion, go over there and tell her that :)

Insults go with the territory, I have no problem with people calling me a thieving, parasite dog. But James wants to hold me down and stick an object in my vagina (or mouth, or anus), and Clint thinks this is a good idea.

As Maia points out, Heine blogs under his own name, and previously was the ACT party's youth president. And yet he thinks that threats of sexual violence are perfectly acceptable (and indeed, something to be encouraged rather than condemned). They're not - and we should all be ashamed to have a sorry little creep like this in our midst.

But no doubt he and the other sewer-dwellers will accuse Maia of being "oversensitive" and claim that he was "only joking"...