It's curious how there is a sort of synchronicity of stupidity around the world right now, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's sense whereby stupidity is nothing to do with IQ but rather wilfully chosen in the spirit of sticking fingers in one's ears and going la la la.

Here in New Zealand Milei is a hero to the right, and so we've got a bit of a Milei-lite syndrome going, of which one symptom is the firing of a whole lot of scientists last year and the reversal of efforts to get the country away from dead-end dependence on mass tourism and ruminant agriculture, which supplied a good living in past decades but are increasingly insufficient now that Auckland has hit 1.7 million and the nation as a whole 5.3 million (our population density overall is about the same as Argentina, but actually with far less arable land per capita, a fact that usually comes as a surprise to most New Zealanders, brought up to believe that they inhabit a land of plenty).

The case for diversification was well put in a 2011 video by the late Sir Paul Callaghan, here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhCAyIllnXY, but the innovation institute named after him, Callaghan Innovation, has just been disestablished in the last couple of days, to the rejoicing of the pro-Milei right: https://www.callaghaninnovation.govt.nz/stories/the-government-has-announced-that-callaghan-innovation-is-to-be-disestablished/.

So it is two steps forward, two steps back, in ways that have some local peculiarities (in 1987, a historian named Bill Oliver described New Zealand's history to that date as being, in some ways, "an account of missed chances,") but also in ways that put one in mind, right now, of an international far-right brospiracy.