The sense that one’s time is inferior to what has preceded it is a lament that propels history and allows one to vicariously experience past glories. As Marx wrote in his essay ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’, we ‘anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.’

Angela Nagle has written an indispensable book that allows both the extremely online- and meme-illiterate to grasp the IRL implications of the online culture wars. From the rise of Trump as a lulzy agent of base enjoyment and unrestrained conspiracy, to the collapse of meaning, all are products of an online culture that privileges affect and transgression.

The Pacific has lost one of its great scholars, activists, champion of the arts and leading lights with the passing of Dr Teresia Teaiwa. Teresia’s impact in the Pacific was as expansive as the ocean which carried her across the region from Hawaii, Kiribati, Fiji and Aoteroa. In her poetry and scholarship she would turn to the Pacific Ocean as a metaphor of a universality that connects Pacific and oppressed peoples

The only thing more disempowering then watching Donald Trump’s surrealist acceleration of American revanchist conservatism is relying upon the Democratic Party to lead the #Resistance. After Clinton’s misreading of the electorate and colossal failure one would hope that even the most willing corporate servant might understand, even if only cynically, the necessity of a left-populist tack.

The psychodrama of the 2016 election is pitting the tortured liberal class against the spectre that haunts them. When liberals expose themselves as wracked by Trump’s vulgarity and concerned about ‘the discourse’, he is all too happy to feed these anxieties. Trump is nothing if not a master of politics as libidinal warfare.

At a recent meeting with business leaders Key expounded his vision to transform the country into the ‘Switzerland of the Asia-Pacific’. Where Europe is beset by terrorism and refugees, America by the spectre of populism left and right, China by ecological catastrophe, and Australia by incompetence, New Zealand remains blissfully unafflicted. Key offers New Zealand as the last new world with echoes of Emma Lazarus: ‘Give me your tired plutocrats, your foreign capital yearning to breathe free and I will give you flexible labour markets, trust-fund anonymity, few investment restrictions and 0 per cent capital gains tax.’

With Sanders' eventual defeat, all of the spectacular fails of the party and punditry can be forgiven in the ritual rebirth through the primary process. My God, how liberals love process. As a loser, Sanders can be a liberal hero, a testament to big-tent neoliberalism as the party consumes his eccentric youthful wing. ‘See, the system works!’ All of this hinges on the fate of Bernie’s database.