D is for

Kim Dotcom plans to launch his iNternet Party today.

He has money, though some of it is owed to creditors.

He doesn’t have any of the 500 members he’ll need to register the party. Given he’s launching an app to encourage people to sign up for a very small sum, it might not be hard to recruit them.

But it takes a lot more than money and members who pay pennies to win voter support.

Vernon Small writes that D is for Dotcom, desperate and dateless:

. . . Despite Kim Dotcom’s schmoozing of MPs from most Opposition parties at his mega-mansion, the last chance for a significant tie-up – at least with a party that can be confident of holding a seat after September 20 – seems to have faded to black.

Without that, the Internet Party is facing the reality of its pledge to fold the tent and endorse another party if it is not polling more than the 5 per cent threshold before the election campaign.

Would it be too cruel to mark a party’s death on the day it is born? . . .

Hone Harawira won’t do anything unless Dotcom refuses to entertain any deal with National and has several other reasons to stay clear of the dotbomb party:

They don’t have a real membership base.

They don’t have clear policies.

They don’t have recognisable political leaders.

They don’t have any candidates.

Time is short to prepare for the election and to organise the campaign.

Asking members to put election prep on hold “while we wait for the Internet Party to decide what they stand for is just not an option”.

If that’s not bad enough Whaleoil has allegations about Dotcom’s admiration for Hitler.

If that’s true then let’s hope D is also for doomed and the Internet Party will follow many others that fail.

 

 

 

 

The mana of mana

The French like to keep their language pure and aren’t keen on borrowing words from others.

Speakers of English aren’t so fussy, taking words from many other languages because often there isn’t one which expresses what we want to in our mother tongue.

One such word is mana. The closest I’ve come to finding a single word to express something close to what it means is honorificabilitudinitatibus .

It’s defined as with honour, characterised by honour, deserving respect. But honorificabilitudinitatibus is  far too much of a mouthful to use when mana expresses the meaning at least as well and far more simply, at least to those of us familiar with the New Zealand vernacular.

Given it’s meaning I wonder about how appropriate it is to use mana as the name for a political party. Hone Harawira’s new vehicle for radical Maori and left wing ideology isn’t the first  Mana Party. Mat Rata formed Mana Motuhake when he left Labour in 1980 and I think there’s been at least one other party calling itself Mana.

It’s a name that behoves the members of a party which uses it to keep to high standards and so far those associated with the newest one haven’t done that.

Hone Harawira started by lying to Duncan Garner about his intention to call a by-election and although he apologised for that, it wasn’t a good first step.

He then got hyperbolic in comparing Act leader Don Brash to Hitler and followed that by praising Osama bin Laden as a freedom fighter. He apologised for that as well but too late to prevent the impression he hasn’t got the very necessary attribute for leaders of engaging his brain before opening his mouth.

Then his mother and sister demonstrated that they fall well short of the standards acceptable for anyone who might be said to have mana with their prolonged shouting and swearing at Saturday’s Maori party hui.

Richard put it well in a comment on yesterday’s post:

The lack of respect will be noted if not explicitly commented on- that is not the way its done.

So far almost everything the party and its front people have done hasn’t been the way it should be done and has been the opposite of anything which might be considered worthy of the word mana.