Things might be a little quieter around here as I’ve started a new job and those first few weeks always demand a lot of your focus and energy. But here are the posts you liked last month to tide you over.
This got a lot of attention as a comment on the Andrew Tidball story broken by The Spinoff. Content note: discussion of sexual abuse and harassment.
Being a good progressive person isn’t a one-off achievement. It’s a never-ending personal struggle. It means not just taking the easy road of criticising the despised. We have to be open to criticising ourselves – and our friends.
Nicola Young’s scary “solution” to people begging in Wellington
The core of Nicola Young’s campaign is convincing people she’s not a nasty Tory, which is why she says things like “the council already helps people with genuine homelessness issues”. She’s trying to draw a line around certain “undesirable” people – people whom surely no one would stand up for – in the same way the right always talk about “the working poor” (not those lazy bludgers) or “genuine hardship” (not those families who live in a car because it builds character).
The worst game strategy guide ever is a masterpiece of writing
For some reason this post from May 2015 got a lot of views this month, and damned if WordPress will tell me where they came from.
I salute the poor lost comms souls who sacrificed who knows how many hours of their lives to the FFIX strategy guide.
It’s not personal, it’s just business
On the extremely dodgy-looking case of the Niuean resort, international aid funding, and the mega-rich National Party donor:
… the powers that be don’t have to be openly corrupt to get things done the way they want. They’re the powers that be, after all. You don’t have to cheat when you write the rules.
I don’t think this conversation’s going to die down any time soon.
We are not entitled to anyone’s vote. And if we aren’t giving people a reason to vote for us, it’s not their fault. It’s ours. This applies as much to Hillary having to go into a contested convention as it does to the UK Labour Party’s routing in Scotland or the continued “missing million” thorn in the side of the New Zealand left or any number of other examples.
If you believe in democracy, you do not fear a fairly contested election. So if you’re a (d)emocrat and you’re advocating that Bernie should just give up now, I have one question: what are you afraid of?
I also wrote about Kim Kardashian and the capitalist apocalypse, a post I’m still slightly in love with, plugged some recommended reading on the Panama papers and did a wee thought experiment on why some US progressives may actually vote Trump over Clinton.
Stephanie Rodgers 
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