Enjoy a full proper article this week as I turn and examine different aspects of China within New Zealand, break down why the debate was so bad for Biden and what (or who) comes next, and give a lengthy talk about the importance of premise to Star Wars as I recommend The Acolyte. Before all those, here’s your weekly “what country exports these?” puzzle, answer’s at the end as usual.
Before I get to Biden, I’d like to make the rounds over four articles painting four very different sides of the relationship between China and New Zealand. The first is a straightforward elucidation of the principles I was discussing the other day: immigrants bring a lot to our country (even if it’s a bit hackneyed to always fixate on food as the centre of that), and yet we put them through a lot of difficulty and don’t keep an ear open to what we can do for them. Indeed, to my knowledge, the largest group of illegal immigrants coming to New Zealand today are not Pasifika but Chinese.
It’s great in one sense that that doesn’t merit headlines because I’m sure things would get nasty, but I think that shows how badly racial stereotypes affect social awareness: China is so stereotyped as the home of the rich businessman that we overlook everyday strivers struggling to get by or even being exploited too. Indeed, as we see in the second article, Palmy North mayor Grant Smith lazily comments “If you’re dealing with the Chinese… you have to be pretty naive to think that you’re not dealing with the Chinese Communist Party.”
This could be a reasonable statement that powerful Chinese powerbrokers (i.e “the Chinese” businessmen from China) are probably connected to the totalitarian state, given it’s a wee bit hard to swim against the current and still succeed, or it could be bonkers racist nonsense. This is another example, like from my Swarbrick article the other day, where I continue to press the point that language genuinely matters not just because of sensitivities or wider normativities but because precision changes your point.
More broadly, I bring up that second article to illustrate a double-edged sword. On the one hand, greater awareness of foreign interference can only ever be a good thing. We need politicians to make good decisions for people, not bow to Beijing’s edicts that serve only a regime. Creating more defences against corruption and malign influence is a great idea.
On the other hand, I remain wary of descending into a McCarthyist frenzy that conflates Chineseness with inherent suspicion or mistrust, just the same as for any other ethnicity (like, as I explored in the Swarbrick article and elsewhere, treating Muslims or Jews as an internal enemy or fifth column). We have to proceed with healthy scepticism and evidence-based accusations and solutions, or else politicians looking to score points will make terrible blunders that hurt immigrants - especially given, to be frank, how many racists can’t tell Chinese New Zealanders apart from other East Asians.
Speaking of ethnic differences! The third article points to another troubling issue - that where some Chinese businessmen, diplomats etc. in NZ are trying to advance the CCP’s interests, others are actively hurt and targeted by those interests. Respecting Chinese people and Han culture can’t be conflated with enabling China’s nationalist agenda to subsume other Chinese cultures into the majority. This is a great example both of the value of understanding cultural differences even on a practical realpolitik/IR level, and how subjects often dismissed like cultural appropriation can be very real and meaningful for an entire community’s identity. Sharing and celebrating culture is great; theft as part of a wider oppression and cleansing is not!
The fourth and final example highlights why I point to scepticism over salaciousness as the way forward. Jami-Lee Ross, in quick succession, betrayed the National Party over petty and frankly delusional personal ambition, was exposed as a manipulative exploiter of women using mental health as a shield, and cynically threw his lot in with conspiracy theorists not only peddling lies but undermining public health measures during a pandemic. Tova O’Brien eviscerating him was supposed to be the last the world ever saw of him. He’s like New Zealand’s Trump if he sucked at politics.
Instead he reemerged last year as a pimp allegedly hurting his own employees, and now Stuff’s interviewing him as part of their already well-resourced and overdue The Long Game project, with barely a cursory mention of half of this history? What the fuck?? Just read this - “He’s talking to Stuff Circuit about it because, he says, he personally has nothing left to lose. He’ll never be on a ballot paper again, so no longer has to worry what voters think.” How are you journalists this unbelievably gullible and one-dimensional! He strung out titillating political lies for you when he had a political career to lose, why on earth would this narcissist in the truest sense not do it now for attention? The internalised misogyny in interviewing a danger to women to write “There’s no women’s mag material then, which is fine” makes my skin crawl.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m perfectly willing to believe a lot of these claims and I think it’s a worthwhile interview. You should read this for the information about how CCP influence spreads, and given his description of Botany, I continue to find it intriguing without a clear angle that an electorate once bandied about as the potential ground zero for a Christian conservative party is now represented by the Prime Minister. (This is not a conspiracy theorist take that minorities are puppeteering him, I just mean that Botany is unusual and could generate interesting outcomes in the future.)
Yet history is littered with “whistleblowers” who, alongside true heroic whistleblowers, basically wanted attention or revenge or otherwise had reasons to spread dirt. We should rightly be deeply sceptical of the CCP and other regimes like Iran and seek out sources, but that needs to be done for the common good of New Zealanders and particularly our minority communities here who deserve the same freedom and security as the rest of us. Not to create a spiralling incentive structure where politicians and journalists seek out clicks while the reliability of the truth slowly corrodes.
I was a few minutes late to the Biden-Trump debate, but from the moment I laid eyes on them, I could tell something was terribly wrong. Biden warmed up from the evening, but only from calamitous to lukewarm. I do not mean to stigmatise stuttering or any other speech or thought impediments that are certainly present in people our age, not just the elderly in decline. However, given the threat that Trump poses to everything from American democracy to Ukrainian sovereignty and security, there is an overwhelming responsibility to beat Trump rather than to protect Biden, a career politician consumed by ambition.
Trump dipped a bit and was never very good, but I stand by my usual adage about Trump, which is that almost everybody knows him and very little can shift the dial around him. Some people ding the moderators for not fact checking Trump live, but I’m not sure how CNN are supposed to change voters’ minds or come off as but I need to hear more about what that model of debate looks like in practice. You could credit Trump for being more disciplined than the last time, but I think that owes more to the excellent format and moderation completely averting any kind of ugly spat - the tone of the debate was harshly negative at times, but the speakers let each other be hostile.
You can say the comparison is unfair - Trump is quite bad and Biden has had a lot of good policies, so why ding Biden for meaningless presentational stuff? - but this is precisely why it’s unacceptable. If Trump were up against a standard candidate without many standout and distracting moments, then almost all of the headlines getting through to undecided and low-information voters would be critical of Trump. Instead, it’s about 50% “Biden bad”, 30% “barbs traded negative debate”, and 20% “Trump lied too”. That’s a terrible outcome for Democrats! And for democracy!
Everything Biden did played into the worst stereotype of him and the biggest concern voters have about him: that he is too old to serve for another four years. (It’s not the first time, either! Voters worried about Reagan running for reelection at 73, have worried for years about Trump in his 70s, and even Hillary Clinton under 70. Biden well outpaces all of these in signs of age and actual age.) His staring into space, losing the train of thought and forgetting points in his lists made him look like he’s not all there: like, behind the scenes in the White House, when officials try to talk to him, they simply cannot reach him and get decisions or insight out of him.
And the way he stumbled through many questions was downright incoherent: he actually cannot communicate basic Democratic talking points and policies. Biden’s evident disgust at Trump and claims to a certain kind of moral decency some soft Republicans care about were there, but not much else to write home about, and the cope from some Democrats isn’t helping. The wheel has decisively turned: any attempt now by surrogates to defend Biden looks like propping up a puppet, not a sincere faith.
The element I think Biden’s defenders are especially struggling to connect with is the very personal one, from everybody who is old or familiar with old people they care about, like parents or grandparents. It seems gobsmacking to consider working hard at that age, never mind bearing the presidency - the energy just isn’t there and the ailments pile up. More than that, there’s something almost heartless and sociopathic about propelling forward a very old man who feels like he can’t do the job.
I don’t think most of this actually holds true, and clearly neither do most of the Democrats who work with Biden or we’d hear more leaks about the subject. Yet the narrative is now set for the election. Crucially, Biden has no more chances to redeem his image before it’s too late: this debate was set for extremely early in the year compared to the usual schedule, with the next and last debate being set for over two months away. When the age issue really started to set in earlier in the year, his vigorous SOTU address dispelled the doubters. This time, he was found wanting. There is no high profile opportunity waiting, short of an unexpected crisis demanding an Oval Office address, for Biden to repair his reputation. Coverage of him from now until election day will be stalked by the age issue. His next chance would be a speech at the Democratic National Convention, six weeks from now…
…which raises the question of whether the delegates should replace him. That’s an unlikely outcome, to be sure. The party has been terrified for the past half-decade of rolling the dice on change, sleepwalking down the default path against Trump because nobody wants to be responsible for Trump winning again, even if inertia is more dangerous. A coordinated coup would require a lot of discipline to avoid leaks, and, crucially, very likely require Biden’s assent. His personal narrative and that of his inner circle of advisers and Jill Biden is crafted around him bouncing back from resilience and proving the doubters wrong. This is the exact kind of crisis that will compel him to dig his heels in.
Whether he does just that and the party elites try to push him out anyway, or he agrees to go but the resulting transition is mismanaged, the worst of all worlds is a contested convention, where no one candidate is settled upon and different names throw their hats in the ring. That’d be one thing - the losers would surely unite around the victor - except that this risks exposing divisions in the party and repeating contested conventions of years past (D-68, R-76, D-80), all of which saw their party lose.
In particular, while the left of the party have been relatively mollified since Biden beat Bernie in 2020, the killings of thousands of Palestinians is an incredibly compelling issue for many young activists. While they won’t be able to force the party to change direction, they may be able to stage a repeat of the 1968 anti-war protests outside and even spilling into the Convention: a noble cause that came to represent chaos and riots, helping to elect an even more dangerous president. If you think the Republican attack machine is mendacious now, just wait until they have the appearance of a left-centre schism to rip into. The charge of socialism didn’t stick against Biden in 2020, but it might to whoever wins such a convention.
Presuming, then, that the most powerful actors involved will avoid such an outcome and only move to replace Biden if they can assure a smooth transition, who do they pick? This brings us to the Harris issue, the first of our possible candidates. The problem that has plagued Biden for years is that he selected a vice-president primarily for coalition-building purposes - in this case, repaying black voters who decisively carried him to the nomination. This is a common wisdom to do with vice-presidents, but there’s little intelligence to this wisdom: vice-presidents usually help only marginally in winning elections.
Instead, some presidential candidates make the smarter choice of picking vice presidents with competence and experience, who can complement their faults and are ready for the unlikely but enormously important danger that threatens any president: needing to step into the most powerful role in the world at a moment’s notice. Picks like this include Nelson Rockefeller in 1974, George Bush Sr. in 1980, Dick Cheney in 2000, and…Joe Biden in 2008! Who, granted, was there more to give the illusion of reassurance to the voters than to genuinely take a guiding role in the Obama administration. Yet if something had befallen Obama, Biden would clearly have been ready then to step up.
Harris has a decent amount of experience but has been given little to do as vice-president - a baffling and dated approach in the modern era made all the more egregious by handing her the challenge of the Southern border. Her 2020 presidential campaign flamed out as indecisive and mismanaged, even though she proved a strong debater. And, critically, the public don’t see her as ready to step into the Oval Office - her unfavourable ratings are lower than Trump or Biden’s.
Which is absolutely unbelievable, right? A slice of Americans outside the loyal party bases look at Donald Trump - the worst - or at Joe Biden - as established above, looking unfit for the office - and say “yeah, I’m a fan”. Then, they look at Kamala Harris, a pretty standard and frankly quite jovial Democrat, and say “ooh, she’s no good”??? Because she laughs too much????? (The Harris laugh is a great bit, as somebody who wasn’t a fan of her during the 2020 primary I’ve bought fully into her meme now.)
It’s this bizarre cycle where everybody says “she’s too unpopular” but nobody explains why she’s unpopular. In situations like that, the trusty analytical fallback is simple: some Americans are racists or misogynists, and they will give a fair hearing to Biden or Trump and invent their own reasons or trust their own gut that Harris just could never be president. This seems probably true, and speaks to the ineffable daftness of the Democratic Party that they will give the oldest president ever, who won the primary due to racial and gendered “electability politics”, an unelectable vice-president because of their commitment to diversity, then do nothing whatsoever to try to improve the electability of a diverse candidate. Bloody hell.
The most charitable possible reasoning, given how little Americans know about Kamala Harris, is that she’s a California liberal tied to the administration’s faults, so just a worse version of Biden. So, therefore, the reasoning goes that instead of turning to the obvious option of handing power over to the vice-president, we should elevate…California Governor Gavin Newsom. You are not serious people.
He’s done a great job elevating his profile and punching at Republicans, but naked ambition is not a good reason to elevate somebody. I’m sure he could be the president, but if incumbency is bad enough right now, wait until you have to combat the popular imagination of California as a land that loves homeless people and drug addicts. (Can you imagine being nice and trying to solve serious problems? Not that California actually is, but Overton Window et cetera et cetera.)
Newsom should not be in consideration; he is probably the worst candidate out of the viable pool that Democrats could pick. Not to mention that, as a Californian, the Constitution would prohibit him from keeping Harris on as veep. Not only would that make for a more chaotic transition as he has to search for a running mate, but that incentivises Harris to do everything possible to stop him, short of a 50sesque swap deal straight out of prestige TV.
Past those two names most often mentioned, you can dispense of a few well-known names with ease. Bernie is older than Joe Biden. My cracked 5D chess take of Elizabeth Warren is clearly a non-starter. Michelle Obama, Oprah and all the rest are not serious presidential options, nor do they want the job. Barack can’t do it again because of the 22nd Amendment, otherwise he’d surely be getting lined up for the job right now. America’s Jami-Lee Rosses, like Eric Adams or John Fetterman, would rip the Democrat coalition apart.
The only other Democrat with a high profile is Pete Buttigieg. As scathing of a critic of his as I’ve been over the years, I genuinely think he is their best choice right now, assuming you can guarantee a safe and clean coup, which you can’t. His greatest 2020 weakness of experience is solved: partisans can argue about his performance at the Department of Transportation, but he has now governed the country. He’s been tested extensively on the campaign trail and, unlike Harris, he thrived within the Democratic Party. He has a good story to sell to moderate swing voters, particularly those annoying “common sense” soft Republican types, and little to put them off.
Above all, replacing a geriatric with a man half his age is Jacindamania on steroids: the refresh, and the contrast with Donald Trump, could not be more clear. If ever Buttigieg has a chance of becoming president, I think now is the time, before he has to face a field of reasonably-aged candidates in 2028. He should be doing everything possible to get on TV and say the phrase “new ideas” as many times as possible…in contrast with Republicans, of course. And, as a white guy, there’s no problem presented to Democrat coalition-building if he promises Harris another four years in the veep slot. She’ll be term-limited out in 2028 while Buttigieg runs for his second term, but she can go back to California then and run for governor!
The rest of the candidates available share a problem. Governors Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro and Wes Moore (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Maryland) and Senator Raphael Warnock (Georgia) all seem like fundamentally decent (by American political standards), quite normal human beings who are good at winning elections and doing their jobs. I’m a big Shapiro and Warnock booster in particular, while Whitmer clearly leads this pack - she was the most viable white veep candidate for Biden in 2020.
The problem is that they are still early in their careers, without much experience, and, crucially, they haven’t been tested much on the national stage. Any one of these, under the bright lights and facing Trump in a debate, might well crumble and we just don’t know it yet. What skeletons lie in their closets? Who’s to say! They haven’t come under that kind of scrutiny.
And, crucially, I’ve already established how the Democratic Party is a lumbering juggernaut that hates risk and change. It’s one thing to ask them to roll the dice on a rising star…but how do you convince them to pick one of these over the others? Sometimes you have to just make an arbitrary choice and stick with it, and I think party elites will really struggle with that question of finding a clear frontrunner amongst them. Any kind of interview process runs that risk of leaks and infighting, particularly if it becomes clear several Democrats are jockeying to take over from Biden behind the scenes, risking that collapse of party unity.
This leads us back to the central problem at the heart of everything I’ve talked about today. If there were a clear miracle candidate like Obama, then I think the decision would be easy and Democratic elites would probably make it. Yet, just as in the 2020 primaries, that person simply hasn't proved themselves yet, if they even exist. I think they could amongst those rising stars, but nobody has managed to become the unity pick for the party as an alternative to Biden. Given the choice between Biden and the looming, unknown void? I think Biden is going to stay for the next six weeks, and once that convention’s over, you know the brakes are broken: he is headed for Election Day come hell, high water, or that ominous second debate looming in September.
I don't know if The Acolyte would be that interesting to anybody not into Star Wars, but it requires no prior knowledge, so feel free to go for it if you like; we're only five episodes into its first season, after all. I'll get to spoilers later, but you'll have a clear warning. The show is nonetheless coming as my weekly recommendation because, even though I'm not over the moon loving it by any means, nothing is putting me off of it and it's an easy watch.
The show looks good - an underrated relief after some of the mid visuals of Kenobi and especially of The Book of Boba Fett - and the characters are endearing, with lots of strong little performances and designs making them stand out and stick in the memory. Unfortunately some Star Wars fans can't stop being weird about Star Wars no longer being a whites-only neighbourhood - seriously, this feels like the co-leading storyline about every new Star Wars (alongside bad writing, which...no comment) - so I'm going to go in the opposite direction and say weirdly it's actually a relief to see a show that feels comfortable and confident just casting the best actors for the job without feeling pressure to affirmative action in white actors.
A great example of this is Princess and the Frog (2008), which wanted the credit for introducing the first black-led Disney Princess story while turning her into a frog and inexplicably giving screen time to the white best friend and John Goodman doing "Home on the Range but not evil". It's just not a pleasant thing to know that at the same time that me and lots of other fans just enjoy or don't enjoy Star Wars shows on their own merits, there's these weird racialised and otherwise bigoted viewings going on that dominate so much of the social media response - not only in carpeting YouTube but also driving frustrated responses in the discourse. Like, I'm able to enjoy Star Wars as much as ever, but I don't really get to see other people enjoying it, you know? That's a shame.
SPOILERS FOR THE ACOLYTE START HERE
The best thing I can say about the show is, even if I think the execution's a bit clunky - some camera cuts are weird, I'm not sure about the chronological structure, and Manny Jacinto (best known for The Good Place) is the only one hitting it out the park performance-wise - I actually think the premise is the best that has been cooked under Disney Star Wars. Period. Yes, I said it. The Acolyte is in sync with the prequels, which also had a great story to tell but just somewhat fumbled getting it out the door in practice. By contrast, A New Hope ("what if fantasy/pulp but in space") and The Empire Strikes Back ("what if the bad guys had you on the back foot the whole time") came up with great ideas and stuck the landing, while ROTJ is a more formulaic ending even though I love it.
There have been good watches under Disney - Rebels and the Last Jedi both have their highs, The Clone Wars finale was powerful, Rogue One is solid and Andor is 10/10 - but most of their concepts feel so dull and uninspired. To name those I've seen (i.e I haven't played the games):
Rebels doesn't really get the most out of its era and is more interested in its found family, though Kanan Jarrus is one of the best Jedi ever written
The final season of the Clone Wars was 2/3rds "why is this here" and 1/3rd an expected ending
The Bad Batch is a great idea well executed =)
What were they thinking with Tales of the Jedi and of the Empire? They explored almost none of the potential
Solo didn't need his own movie
Kenobi didn't need his own show
Andor has phenomenal writing, but are you really going to look me in the eye and tell me the story of how a supporting character changed from a drifter to a spy is that big of a draw on paper? Would "Antilles" or "Dodonna" or "Tallon" make for mega-hype announcements?
Rogue One didn't need to be shown
The Mandalorian has deservedly the best cultural cut through of any Disney Star Wars by throwing back to Star Wars's origins of classic pulp with a twist
The Book of Boba Fett definitely didn't need to exist
Ahsoka is just setup and tying up loose ends
Please don't make me watch more Resistance the art style hurts my soul
You take my point, right? Star Wars has lots of cool stuff going on, but very rarely do Disney seem to commission stories that storytellers with a commanding vision truly want to tell, rather than projects that can attract profits. The Acolyte, on the other hand, is an unbelievably inspired idea. Doing a story of twins who went down separate good and evil paths to tell your Jedi vs. Sith conflict is one thing, but I wasn't interested in seeing the old Jedi or the earlier Sith. I came into this show with no hype.
Doing that against the backdrop of questions around whether the Jedi should get to snatch and raise children, in juxtaposition against a witch coven who are evil not because they have a grand plan but because they just like doing their own thing, epitomised in them creating life once for very different reasons to why the Sith did it once? And their desire for autonomy is unusually close to the philosophy of the current living Sith, given the typical Sith predilection for grand evil plans? All to come burning down in a Wacoesque government versus cult nightmare that provides the original trauma driving the conflict and hints that the government aren't telling the whole truth? Further complicated because one of the twins has already walked away from the government but remains attached to the one who led here there, and the other keeps being dragged back to fixating on the individuals who personified that government intervention? Oh my god, that's amazing!
Are they getting the most out of that story? No, though I liked the lightsaber battle and it's therapeutic to see others share the pain I felt trying to deal with shadowtroopers and that stupid Admiral Fyyar boss battle. Yet do I absolutely love just thinking about this concept in my own time, and that is I think what Star Wars has been missing for a while. Peak fandom is often people sticking their heads in the clouds and dreaming about what a beautiful idea could look like, more than anything that a Hollywood production can show us on screen. Kudos to the writers' room that pitched and crafted this idea, and kudos to whoever on their team is so obviously obsessed with 90s movies. The Men in Black joke was one thing, but deciding your karate and slow-mo driven action style will be introduced through Carrie-Anne Moss? I love that.
SPOILERS FOR THE ACOLYTE END HERE
The answer to the export puzzle is Tanzania! Yeah, I would never have gotten that. This illustrates a couple of interesting trends, like how very valuable goods like gold can play a huge part in exports even though there’s very little gold in the world because a lot of money is paid for it, compared to less money for more stuff when it comes to other goods. Also worth noting is how the UAE controls much of the global importation of gold, and India’s commanding role in trade in the…Indian Ocean. Big surprise there. Nothing exciting to share about Tanzania itself - don’t get me wrong, great country, I just have nothing to say, save that the East African Federation idea always seems close to fruition and never quite arrives.
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