Today, Whailoil reported:
Scott Yorke and Martyn “DBD” Bradbury have been having a one sided battle of wits. I say one sided because Scott has all the wits and Martyn is just a half-wit, or if I am feeling especially unkind, which I am, a fuck-wit.
Anyway Martyn got upset again at Scott and wrote a vitriol filled post. Scott has responded with a post of his own. In that post he proposes a Deed of Settlement for their dispute.
It is a piece of genius. I particularly like the resolution process that involves dueling.
[...]
Scott wins, it was a comprehensive victory. His post and attacked Deed of Settlement is the finest piece of Blog-taliation I have ever seen. It is fit for Boing Boing.
This should be reason enough for Scott Yorke at Imperator Fish to reconsider who exactly is the butt of his jokes... perhaps he has:
Have you ever been involved [in] one of those endless disputes on the internet that you just can't seem to escape? It's like one of those schoolyard fights where the first person to walk away and say they've had enough is labelled a coward and loser by the other, even if the reason why you want to walk away is because the other person is talking gibberish, and because it is three in the f**king morning and you just need to sleep. It's okay to sleep sometimes.
I have not yet reached that point in my exchanges with Martyn Bradbury, but I fear things are escalating. To recap, he wrote a post about me, I wrote a post mocking him, we had an exchange on Twitter, and now he has written another post about me. My immediate reaction is to want to taunt him further, particularly with regard to his claim that Cameron Slater is my new best friend (a claim that anyone who actually reads my work will find as entertaining as I do), but I suspect that lefties labelling each other as friends of Slater may be something similar to the phenomenon known as Godwin's Law.
As an outside observer who has no vested interest in either side winning, this all seems rather tedious to me. What sparked the dispute off and the main issue here is whether the Greens and Labour can work together, which is something Bomber thinks is a trivial matter:
While Scott York bitches about the little things, (imperatorfish is latin for 'so much effort, so few laughs'), conventional wisdom for Labour has been not to compete with the Greens but with the Greens recent success perhaps Labour needs a new strategy?
I mean, how does one compete with Metiria's speech at the conference? This is simply one of the best political speeches on social justice ever given.
Metiria's speech was very good, but I'm not sure how exactly Labour is meant to compete here... by giving good speeches as well perhaps. I think that's exactly what David Shearer has been doing.
I also don't think the complete brain fart on twitter by some Labour MP's is such a small thing. It points towards possible difficulties in forming a working relationship between the two parties, which is imperative if New Zealand is to get moving again. Imperator Fish made the same conclusion as The Jackal:
There will always be some rivalry between Labour and the Greens, because they are competing for the same group of voters.
But if Labour and the Greens are going to form a government after the 2014 election, they will need to learn to work together, rather than quarrel over things that don't matter.
A couple of senior Labour people have been using Twitter this weekend to attack the Greens and Russel Norman because (oh the horror!) the Greens may or may not have changed their policy on mining.
This makes Labour look like a pack of clowns, and turns many supporters off. It should stop.
Fomenting division between the Greens and Labour might suit a Mana supporter I suppose (it certainly suits rabid National propagandists), but ultimately it's damaging to the entire leftwing, and should not be promoted by anybody who wants to see an end to National's reign of failure that is destroying New Zealand.
There are no winners in this battle.
