Posts by Stephen Judd
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Thank you for picking my tweet as an illustration. I’m sure many other people made better tweets that night and really, if it hadn’t been for the New Zealand cricket team and all the sad people on Twitter, I probably wouldn’t have tweeted it at all. In the end it’s about how you tweet, not what you tweet, and I’m just disappointed for the guys, really.
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Is that Sun cover trying to remind people (pork, bacon, Milliband's face pulling) that Ed is a yid?
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Hard News: About Campbell Live, in reply to Michael Meyers,
I don’t understand why a body like NZ On Air can’t replace the work that these public broadcasters do by funding appropriate shows.
A potential problem with piecemeal, show by show funding, is that it's hard for talent to develop and expertise to build up. Such funding is inherently insecure and short term. It's an issue in many sectors where the product is complex and cultural and improves with practice (see for example science funding).
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OnPoint: Leviathan, in reply to Idiot Savant,
No doubt that in public debate, opponents are labelled cranks.
But when I said don't be a crank, I was thinking in the context of one on one interactions.
Best summed up in this classic post from Simon Garlick:
I pulled up at a small park in Adelaide’s north-east suburbs to find a group of local residents waiting for Zappia and eyeing the grey clouds warily. A staffer arrived and put up a couple of folding Zappia signs shortly before Zappia himself got there. With the exception of myself the attendees were all white senior citizens. At 37 I was probably the youngest attendee by at least a quarter century, while the oldest would have been the woman who mentioned in conversation that she was 92.
I felt it would be polite to wait my turn so I stood back for a while and allowed the others to begin raising their issues of concern. It was at this point that the event took on a surreal quality. Discussion revolved around the following topics for the first half an hour or so:
Asylum-seekers and immigrants, and what Labor was doing to keep them out. (Subtext: I’M NOT A RACIST BUT KEEP THE DARKIES OUT MATE)
Foreign investment in Australian corporations and what Labor was doing to restrict it. (Subtext: I’M NOT A RACIST BUT KEEP THE ASIANS OUT OF OUR COMPANIES MATE)
Privatisation in general and would Labor promise not to do any more of it. (Subtext: I’M NOT A RACIST BUT IN MY DAY YOU COULD RING UP THE POST OFFICE AND SPEAK TO AN AUSTRALIAN MATE)
Exports of natural resources to China and residential-property sales to foreigners, and what Labor would be doing to curb it. (Subtext: I’M NOT A RACIST BUT THE CHINESE ARE BUYING UP OUR COUNTRY MATE)
The inadequacy of healthcare for senior citizens… ("Whew, a sane line of discussion at last") …and how frustrating it is to be unable to find a doctor who can speak English properly. ("FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU")Yeah, but then it got weird.
Zappia was asked why Australia was shipping so many millions of tonnes of coal to China when it was self-evident that moving all that mass across the equator would physically destabilise the planet. I mean, just look at all the earthquakes lately. Then Zappia was asked by one elderly gentleman why the Government did not solve “the alcohol problem” (people didn’t get drunk in his day, no sir) by simply banning alcohol. “They had the right idea in America in 1920!” he said.Think about this for a second: these are the people who turn up to meetings with their local MPs.
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Leviathan is biblically a large sea monster, but these days in modern Hebrew, livyatan is... a whale.
I feel there's an angle there.
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OnPoint: Leviathan, in reply to mike.riversdale,
What do to you, I, we do?
Make an effort to work with MPs while not being a crank, submit to select committees, join and/or help political parties that promise the closest policy to what you want to see, use social media to spread real-world stories of abuses, use whatever juice you have to support the journalists who are keeping this issue alive in the national discourse, try not to cry yourself to sleep at night.
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Speaker: Stuck inside the Great Disruption, in reply to Hebe,
No worries. It's a legitimate complaint and I feel a certain amount of imposter wotsit.
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As I suppose one of the colonists and intellectual hustlers, we have common ground on the fear of a timid, conformist future.
Was going to quote the local leader who recently said “Christchurch is essentially a large rural service town” and pooh poohed any effort to be something more, but oddly, The Press have taken the article down.
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Hard News: When the fast track seems a…, in reply to Jeremy Andrew,
I once attended a lecture in Germany given by a man who had TWO PhDs, and was a professor. He was introduced as Herr Professor Doktor Doktor Soundso. Nobody but me found this funny.
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Speaker: Losing cultural treasures under…, in reply to Sacha,
Disney ripping off old European fairytales
Although that's kind of the point. It wasn't ripping off, to retell them. That's legit reuse from my POV. The rip-off is creating a private good out of them that NEVER reverts to the public.