Pete Sime | A Personal Blog

When Trump was elected last year I promised myself that I wouldn’t concentrate on international politics that much this time around. While yes, I am no longer on Twitter or TikTok any more and barely on Facebook, it’s hard to ignore the collapse of a superpower into authoritarianism. It’s the kind of thing that invites comment.

My boycott is going well. I don’t miss Amazon, Adobe is slated to end next month and I don’t subscribe to Amazon Prime any more.

For New Zealand I think the rubber is going to meet the road on 2 April (3 April our time). Trump is calling it “Liberation Day”. That’s when the Trump administration is announcing global tariffs on a country-by-country basis. Even in the absence of a free trade agreement, the United States is our second largest export partner. A smidge ahead of Australia and a fair way behind China.

The risk is severe enough that in February Minter Ellison Rudd Watts outlined steps NZ exporters should take and Winston Peters returns from a diplomatic mission to the United States today.

Tariffs there will hurt us. And I don’t know whether Luxon and the rest of the government have the mettle to retaliate in a reciprocal manner should they be applied. Trump considers value added taxes like GST as a form of tariff and I fear his administration will act to that effect.

I guess we’ll find out in two weeks. But I think we need to brace ourselves for our exports to take a hit. At least we won’t be alone in it.

Almost every day it’s like “idiot government does idiot thing”, but this really takes the cake. The proposal for a four year term in New Zealand is a retrograde step that is not healthy for our democracy.

I was against this when Labour floated it and I’m against it now that National is advancing legislation for a referendum.

Efficiency shouldn’t be the primary motivator. After all, the most efficient government would be a dictatorship.

I don’t want my opportunities for democratic participation to be reduced. This proposal would do that. It is at its core anti-democratic.

We don’t have a system of checks and balances in place in New Zealand. There is no veto option for a head of state, there is no upper chamber, there is no supreme law the courts can apply to strike down unjust laws.

Parliament’s rule is absolute and it can already bypass normal processes under urgency to enact its programmes.

Elections every three years serve as a good safeguard against complacency and bad law in an otherwise fairly lax constitutional environment.

If there were other safeguards in place, I’d reconsider. But given how powerful Parliament is in New Zealand’s system I am strongly against this measure.

I’d like to take a moment to declare that I am a secular pluralist. Secularism – at least in my understanding of it – is the practice that excludes religious influence from civil administration. This is because there are so many diverging positions when it comes to religion that when a civil government imposes the precepts of one religion on the population as a whole it is oppressive to many within that society.

Pluralism is the practice that society accommodates a diversity of religious beliefs. In order for it to do so, religious adherents should not seek to force their beliefs and practices on others. While they can campaign, lobby and protest just as much as anyone else they must accept that their religion is only practiced through their personal conduct. Not through the intervention of the state or other civil powers on their behalf.

This brings us to Brian Tamaki and the Destiny Church, elements of which over the weekend invaded a library, disrupted a drag-king event and are alleged to have carried out acts of assault.

Leave aside for the moment that it is an error to conflate drag performers with transsexuals. The Venn diagram does overlap, but it is not a perfect circle (see for example Dame Edna, Monty Python and The Rocky Horror Picture Show). But that’s beside the point. Tamaki and his followers have taken to performing a number of provocative and escalating acts against the LGBTQ+ community in New Zealand. Mountain Tui has a good rundown here.

Certain evangelical types like to revel in the false idea that they are persecuted. They point to the Sermon on the Mount:

(Matthew 5:11) Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you (falsely) because of me.

But my source of condemnation is not due to their faith in Jesus. It is due to the betrayal of his teachings. If they have faith in Christ, they have an odd way of demonstrating it.

It’s time for the justice system to take off its kid gloves and protect the rainbow community from the brutal and cruel thuggery of Tamaki and his gang. They’re welcome to believe what they want to believe and protest what they want to protest, but intimidation and violence is where we as a civil society must draw the line.

After a stern show of resistance from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Donald Trump has caved – for a month – and won’t institute his proposed 25% tariff against Canadian and Mexican goods.

He is of course claiming victory, seizing on previously announced Canadian and Mexican border programmes as concessions. But I think we can expect some kind of volatility from month to month. And he also wants to target the EU, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. Sooner or later he’ll want to target New Zealand.

It remains my intention to carry out a personal boycott of US goods and services over at least the rest of Trump’s term in office.

The Trump Administration has shut down USAID. It has withdrawn from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees. It is engaging in mass-deportations. It has granted Elon Musk unfettered access to the US government’s payment system and personal data held by the US Treasury. It has taken down public information from the CDC and other scientific bureaux. And it has withdrawn support for gender-affirming care for trans youth.  I believe the US has strayed too far from democratic norms and has become an oligarchic state with fascist tendencies.

I’m not Canadian or Mexican, but I am at least one of those people who Trump holds in contempt – a non-American. Trump cannot be seen as a success. And I can’t support economic growth under his regime. The best thing I can do for Americans and anyone else suffering under him is accelerate his failure.

Of course there are limitations and I can’t promise perfection, but there are a number of easy wins I can happily achieve.

• Unsubscribe from the New York Times – I was only subscribed for Wordle and Connections on a $12 per annum deal, but I can live without a couple of puzzles.
• Unsubscribe from Prime Video – Bezos is going to take a big hit from me. He’s already aligned himself with Trump, so he has it coming. This is the only US streamer I currently pay for. I still have my DVD collection – it’s about 1,000 titles – and TVNZ+ is actually very good. I’ll do my best to avoid sailing the salty seas. I want to do this ethically.
• Block Amazon. Make greater use of the public library.
• Do not renew my Adobe subscription. Use RawTherapee instead.
• Don’t buy games through Steam, use GOG instead. I already cancelled Microsoft Gamepass some months ago.
• I don’t use Microsoft 365. My desktop PC has Office 21 and I’ve got Libre Office on my laptop (along with Office 2003 I installed for a lark a month ago). If I really need a modern iteration of Office, I’d buy Office 24 (a one-off payment), rather than subscribe to 365.
• Continue using an adblocker on YouTube.
• Social media: I already closed my Twitter account back in November. Facebook and Instagram are shuttered – I switched to a minimalist launcher on my phone so I don’t get any alerts from those services. I quit TikTok way back in February last year. I do enjoy using Bluesky, though and I’ll make an exception for it. But at any hint of enshittification and I’ll be back on Mastodon.

There’s probably more I can do, but these are the easy wins. In the offline world I need to educate myself on food brands and who owns what. But as I said, I can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good and I have managed at least to outline hundreds of dollars worth of cuts that in my own small way will contribute to Trump’s failure. I’m just one person, though. I hope many others the world over are watching him and taking him into account when they make their decisions as consumers.

Donald Trump was sworn in as 47^th President of the United States today. A key ally of his, Elon Musk, delivered a speech in which he performed the Nazi salute twice.

Trump has pardoned the January 6^th insurrectionists. He has issued executive orders to outlaw gender-affirming references in the US government. He has declared an intention to impose a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada. He is withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord. And so many other disruptive things.

I can’t spend the next four years in a permanent state of outrage, and as a New Zealander I am shielded by some degree of distance. But this kind of shit spreads far and wide and with our right wing government we’ll see it percolate through more and more.

I cannot change or influence events in the US, except in terms of where I spend my money. Dialing back from Amazon would be a good start, I think.

The best way for New Zealanders to reject Trump is to reject those here who share his views. I won’t play my part as the triggered woke lib whining behind a keyboard as right wingers bait and troll the left. I’ve got more substantive mahi to do.