Posts by Alistair McBride
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I sort of get your bellwether electorate argument. If I take Mangere at the other end – it says nothing about votes so much as it is more likely to have voted Labour (in its case) irrespective of what the national party vote was.
If that's the case then does your model give us a better sense of what the swing nationally could mean or is that casting too long a bow? -
Part of the meme going through some of this is that it happened during the previous Labour govt. I'm scratching my head to find anything near this systematic. The idea is being seeded that this is the norm of politics so if you get rid of us you will only get more of the same along the lines that izogi wrote "But lately the alternatives haven’t been putting up a very convincing show, so there’s more incentive for voters to look for excuses to write off this type of thing as unimportant. (“They’re all corrupt anyway so what’s the difference?”, and so on.)"
The media have not helped by promoting this line of thinking instead of doing the sort of analysis, naming the issues clearly and pointing the finger when something clearly wrong as in this case, the conceptual land, the sheep files revelations and most of the dirty politics stuff during the election. -
Hard News: 2015: The Budget of what?, in reply to George Darroch,
Token initiatives – is that like the Z service station place your token in your favourite of the charities they have chosen?
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I was looking for "proactive relationship" – should've nominated it… I know. But surely it would be there amidst some of the nominations. I'm curious too as to what the opposite would be – inactive relationship? no relationship?
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to Sacha,
And that would be better than a Christian prayer how?
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to Russell Brown,
If the journos just used the language the public would get used to it very quickly. All the poll figures do is show a possible trend. The graphs they use need the band width which shows the trend even more clearly instead of the succession of "spikes" they currently portray.
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Would you consider a New Year contest for the best sentence that contains a minimum of 7 of the wonderful words?
Need new sponsors for a prize no doubt!Also for the whisky neophyte – The Singleton from Glen Ord is a smooth wee drop, and Oak aged Glenfiddich offers a different, almost velvety touch.
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Up Front: Professional Counsel, in reply to Jackie Clark,
Hi Jackie, you are right. My wife has recently died after a long dance with cancer. Three months ago things changed and I took leave to care for her. Amongst the teams that came through our house were occasional visits from a counsellor from Hospice, a minister friend, and the main hospice nurse assigned to Denise. Both of us utilised these people through this intense and all-consuming time. For Denise, it was addressing her fears of what she was going through and working out a sense of meaning in the chaos of the body's self destruction, while for me it was keeping a sense of perspective, keeping touch with the outside world, and also preparing for what now lies ahead of me. Some of what we did would have counted as "counselling" and in one conversation much deeper. These professionals were able to offer a safe space to talk without having to cope with others with their anecdotes, sureties, well intentioned but inappropriate advice and so much more. As for the grief I am now experiencing: being aware it is a journey and not a process, helps. The latest stuff out of the APA trying to reclassify grief as a pathological condition is alarming. How does medication help one live in a world without one's beloved.
Thanks Kyle for your useful perspective on the issue. As a member of a profession that has had hundreds of years experience in the talk/listen/counsel model (being a clergyman) I know this approach works – but then being a clergyman, what would I know? -
"Intriguingly, New Zealand's overall 2012 ranking is actually one place up on 2010 -- but if you compare our 2010 and 2012 country profiles, you'll see that our score (high scores are good in this instance) on "water resources (ecosystem effects)", which includes water quality, has gone from 94.98 to 40.3. We're ranked 43rd in the world there."
Intriguing? Definitely! To more than halve the "score" in two years would suggest either we have screwed up our environment in a mighty way in a very short space of time, or else the measurement goalposts have been shifted. My eyes would seem not to be seeing that degree of environmental degradation, but then I may have the wrong goggles on. What is really behind this "shift" in values?
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"off the cuff" and "on the hoof"…?
It might seem that way but that is the cover for the real agenda being slipped into the public discourse. That was a deliberate and carefully constructed piece of media massaging. Which bit of disinformation do the experts and critics respond to first in order to get the story flowing right – just read the responses here? And the news media doesn't know which bit to pursue either having been sucked in over the last four years.