NZ to try again to take refugees, loving Kierkegaard and other news and views

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern lashes Australia over treatment of Manus Island refugees - NZ Herald
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has blasted Australia's handling of the refugee crisis on Manus Island as unacceptable as she seeks another meeting with Malcolm Turnbull on the issue.
Ardern has continued to push New Zealand's offer to accept 150 refugees and asylum seekers from Australia's offshore detention centres since her first face- to-face meeting with her Australian counterpart in Sydney a week ago.
She wants a more substantive conversation when both leaders reach the Philippines for the East Asia Summit this week.
"We made the offer because we saw a great need. No matter what label you put on it there is absolute need and there is harm being done," she said on Saturday night (Sunday morning NZ time).
GRAHAM FREUDENBERG says “Sorry” - Pearls and Irritations
How has it happened that a Constitution framed by the Convention politicians, a majority of whom themselves were born overseas, is now deemed to disqualify somebody whose father was born in New Zealand or Britain or Timbuctu?
I repeat that this fiasco is self-imposed. The lack of political leadership has been beyond belief. The hot-shot Sydney lawyer has been caught up in the tails of his own opportunism. ...

Ultimately, this farce must be ended once and for all by an alteration of the Constitution. Turnbull should have made this clear from the start. The problem is that confidence in the present national leadership is so low that almost any referendum proposed by them will be rejected. Repeal or even clarification of Section 44 would almost certainly fail at present. But we have to act before the next Federal election. The proposal with the best chance of acceptance is a simple one:
That any citizen qualified to be elected to the Parliament of any state should be qualified to be elected to the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Yet what an irony: to clear up a federal disaster by following the example of states formed as British colonies!

Explainer: what exactly is a living wage? - The Conversation
Essentially, while the minimum wage sets a bare minimum, the living wage aspires to be a socially acceptable minimum. Typically, this is seen as a level that keeps workers out of poverty.
Republicans Say They’ve Got to Act on Tax Reform—or Donors Might Get Mad - Mother Jones
Everyone knows politicians pay excessive attention to the demands of their campaign donors. But if you’re a politician, you’re not supposed to actually say that publicly.
I still love Kierkegaard - He is the dramatic thunderstorm at the heart of philosophy and his provocation is more valuable than ever - AEON
Kierkegaard was the master of irony and paradox before both became debased by careless overuse. He was an existentialist a century before Jean-Paul Sarte, more rigorously post-modern than postmodernism, and a theist whose attacks on religion bit far deeper than many of those of today’s new atheists. Kierkegaard is not so much a thinker for our time but a timeless thinker, whose work is pertinent for all ages yet destined to be fully attuned to none.
A London Meeting of an Unlikely Group: How a Trump Adviser Came to Learn of Clinton ‘Dirt’ - New York Times
Muhammed bin Salman and the push to establish a new Saudi political order - Brookings
... the old, consensus-based order and previous power-sharing arrangements amongst the various branches of the ruling family is effectively over. In the new political order, power is to be consolidated in the office of the king and the crown prince. MBS has established control over all coercive arms of the state apparatus: the army, the police, and now the national guard. The message is clear: Kinship does not guarantee safety; fall in line or be purged.

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