The hits keep coming

Tara Te Heke has been reading from the Ayn Rand playbook with her idea of a DPB party. Classic troll, and devastatingly effective. There are some truly vile things being said there, and in amongst it, the earnest lunacy of a 3,000-word biblical anti-sermon apparently intended as a sort of Turing test. There’s so much baying on the thread that I’m not sure if anyone has come up with the quote about democracy being two cannibals and a vegetarian voting on what to have for dinner, but it can’t be far off.

The thing I can’t wait for is DPF getting back and answering his doubters, haters and watchers. Whatever else it is, this guest post experiment has been wonderful theatre.

L

DPF pulls pin, leaves town

… and the resulting explosion is nothing short of spectacular.

Tara Te Heke is one of David’s four guest posters holding the reins while he’s on holiday. She is a single mum on the DPB who had three kids with a violent partner who left her in the lurch. Her story illuminates one of the problems with the bootstraps bootstraps bootstraps ideology commonly espoused on David’s side of the fence: not everyone can be on the top of the pile. Achieving the status Paula Bennett has may be something to strive toward, but those who fail to achieve such status aren’t necessarily failures – after all, there are only a few hundred such jobs in the country. Holding Paula up as an example is one thing; it’s quite another to say ‘Paula did it – there’s no reason you can’t too’. It just isn’t so. Markets are stratified by nature: there are some to whom the whole market is open; many more who may only access the lower reaches.

Perhaps it’s Tara’s awareness of the KBR culture, her status as an outsider to it, and her ironic adoption of the its lexicon (‘rorting the taxpayer’ to describe her drawing the DPB, etc) which has stimulated responses from the laudatory to the self-congratulatory, to the defensive, the typically heartless to the genuinely compassionate and understanding, and even questioning whether she’s a Hone Carter-esque ringer. It’s a rare beast, the second thread, and worth reading in its crazy two-hundred-plus-comment entirety.

Update: But wait, there’s more! Watch, as (when they don’t suit your argument) stereotypes are declared, well, stereotypical. Or just plain made up.

L