13 Comments

Enjoying a bit of guilty schadenfreude right now but yes I do worry about the tariffs and how they could affect NZ.

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No person, save Adolf Hitler, has more persistently frustrated the cultural and political elite than the womanising, draft dodger, real estate developer and game show host from Queens.

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If other countries can't get their stuff cheaply into the US, won't that potentially benefit us? They might consider NZ a much more desirable trading partner?

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Despite the rhetoric I struggle to see any real light between the two sides. Kamala represents the neo-conservative/war mongering status quo and Trump pretends he's different but the oligarchs and lobbies have US democracy by the balls - it's become a total sideshow to distract the proletariat. The rest of the west are only a few years behind.

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And this one: “But a wholesale retreat from trade would do more harm than good and much more countries that rely on access to international buyers.”

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"But a wholesale retreat from trade would do more harm than good and much more countries that rely on access to international buyers."

This suggests that if a country were to entirely withdraw from participating in international trade, it would likely cause significant negative consequences. The phrasing "much more countries that rely on access to international buyers" is a bit unclear, but it means that such a retreat would especially hurt smaller or trade-dependent countries that depend heavily on international markets for their economic stability.

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OK, but again, the wording simply does not make sense in any normal reading. I thought maybe some words had got missed out or accidentally deleted during copy-and-pasting or something. I am sorry to perhaps seem pedantic, but mixed-up sentences seem to be very prevalent in the media generally lately. Almost every article from RNZ, Stuff, NewstalkZB, WateaNews, Spinoff, etc, has mis-spellings, wrong word usages, or mixtures of two different languages. It seems that subeditors and editors have disappeared from the system. If writers think they have something to say, they should say it clearly and accurately, so that readers don’t have to ponder for a while to consider what the writer actually meant. It is commendable if writing is thought-provoking - but we shouldn’t first have to wonder what on earth the writer means in the first place.

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No refunds!

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Liam, what does this sentence mean? “There is a lot of ruin in a country, but much less in a smaller country on the fringes than the world’s hegemonic superpower.”

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"There is a lot of ruin in a country, but much less in a smaller country on the fringes than the world’s hegemonic superpower."

This sentence means that large, powerful nations can withstand significant economic or social challenges ("a lot of ruin") before their overall stability is threatened. By contrast, a smaller country that is not as central to global power structures ("on the fringes") have fewer resources or less resilience to cope with ruin. Essentially, powerful nations can absorb more damage compared to smaller or less influential ones.

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OK. But the phrase “There is a lot of ruin in a country” seems not to be meaningful English, at least not to me. Is English not your first language? Serious question - not intended to be flippant.

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Great article. Well articulated.

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