Posts by Emma Hart
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The Canadian left may not get everything it wants, but it will get a lot of things it wants. That’s what victory looks like in a modern democracy.
So a whole bunch of my best friends are lefty Canadians. What they want is 'shot of Stephen Harper'. I've never heard any of them mention the opposition parties. Their main issues are environment, inequality, and women's rights, but it's all "Harper is doing it wrong", not who might be going to do it right.
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Field Theory: It's about time, in reply to Raymond A Francis,
I give you Miss Clark who broke the law ( or encouraged her police escort to do ) to rush to a league game that I suggest she had as much interest in as I have in tap dancing because it would go down well with her voters
Union. She was a massive League fan. Still is, I assume.
Pretending to be interested in sport is something NZ prime ministers have to do. But sitting in the stands at a netball game so bored you can barely keep your eyes open is a world away from having the World Cup launch at parliament. I can't fathom why the NZRU agreed to that.
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Hard News: A better thing to believe in, in reply to Callum McGillivray,
i.e. Aaron Smith’s d**k pictures scandal.
I do wish you'd picked an example where the All Black in question had actually done something wrong, not one where he was the victim of others' arseholitude.
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Polity: Refugees and aid - we’re laggards, in reply to Daman Saini,
don’t you think we should clean up our backyard first before we go solving other issues?
No. Because that day never comes. We are never DONE fixing social issues.
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As far as actions go, there are Read-Ins in Dunedin and Wellington. Reading your own copy of the book is about the only thing left you can legally do with it.
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Legal Beagle: Into the River/Interim Restrictions, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I don’t think that’s a fair description.
I was going by what the Censor's Office say in their case study on the book's censorship history:
However, the Board also felt that the degrading and demeaning conduct depicted in scenes of bullying would be likely to shock or disturb children under the age of 14, and so the Board classified the book R14: 'parental advisory explicit content'.
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Heh. I was going to write on this tonight, but you've saved me the trouble.
I think it's also important to note that the reason for the R14 restriction was not on the basis of the sexual content or the strong language. It was because they felt younger children might struggle with the bullying depicted in the book. The sex was not considered a reason for restriction.
Everyone's favourite, 50 Shades of Grey, was submitted for classification in 2012, and passed as unrestricted. A 13 year old can legally read that, but not Into the River. It's absurd.
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There were several refugee families at my kids' primary school. My son was friends with Abbas and Ali Nazari, whose family were on the Tampa.. Their sister, whose name I unfortunately can't remember, wrote an extraordinary account of their journey, of her moment of utter certainty that she was going to die, in the language of a ten year old girl. They're a family of remarkable people who've enriched this country - but they shouldn't have to be.
Here's Abbas talking his experience a couple of years ago.
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Hard News: Not yet standing upright, in reply to Bart Janssen,
So yeah our current flag is kinda meh and our anthem is a god bothering dirge, but hey who cares, our country is still quite good really.
I've always kind of hated our anthem. Then one day I was curious about how and when the decision was made to add the Maori verse, and I ran across the documentary David Farrier made about it, and I kind of changed my mind. Turns out God Defend NZ is the brash new anti-colonial anthem. And the answer to my question was there never really WAS a decision, it just happened.
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Speaker: The silent minority, in reply to Lilith __,
It's a cohort thing, indeed. Those young people establish a pattern of not voting, and largely carry it through their lives - so far at least, which is into their thirties.
I've recently discovered that my own 18 year old daughter isn't enrolled to vote, and can't be arsed enrolling to vote, and isn't really bothered about voting. I'm torn between the shame of it, and having my own little n=1 lab specimen in the house.