Posts by Stephen Judd
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Hard News: Mandela, in reply to Hebe,
The pitch invaders were brave
(at the risk of a derail)
In my Dad’s case, he had no particular intention of doing so, but found himself swept along with the crowd once the fences had been pulled down. We were glued to the black and white TV, waited anxiously for him to come home, which he did hours later, with a black eye.
He and I were talking about it a couple of years ago. My Dad is a classic stoic, unemotional New Zealand male like most of his generation. Apart from when my Mum died, the only other time I can recall his voice shaking is as he gave an account of that day and how the protesters were subsequently hunted through the streets of Hamilton.
I am very proud of him.
Nothing to add about Mandela, it’s all been said.
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Hard News: Media data, in reply to Russell Brown,
I’ve contacted Merja Myllylahti at JMAD who has acknowledged the error in the blog stats and will be re-publishing a corrected report asap.
What's concerning is that 750,000 visitors would put WO in the same league as Stuff or the NZ Herald, and yet this didn't immediately strike people in the business as implausible. As far as I can tell in reality WO would have less than 5%, maybe 1% of the readership of NZ's major news sites.
This really speaks to the myth of WO's influence.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Hebe,
Yeah, she's a woman who can think on her feet. Probably why she won the nomination in the first place.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Hebe,
Yeah, I'm pretty stoked by this. Good practice for Labour in Christchurch, and a nice end to an exhausting 6 months for the Chch party. Shame it didn't get more coverage in the national media.
Pretty sure people who haven't seen a Labour rosette in years got door-knocked -- it's going to be great groundwork for the 2014 election.
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Thanks to a few women in my Twitter stream, I am now able to articulate what is so horribly inappropriate about using this case as a hook for an examination of free speech issues. In a forum with a general audience, it's like using Holocaust denial as your free speech thing in a room full of Jews. That poor Irvine, why is Lipstadt so meeeeeean to him.
Also if this Godwins the thread to death, good. It really does deserve it.
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Prized highly enough to preserve it in this case? Nope, not going to the barricades for this one. Anyone with enough principles knows that they need to be balanced, and I'm very happy with the balance here. In this complicated world I think it's up to absolutists to explain to why their principle get to be privileged. Especially when they seem to consistently protect one class of people over another.
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Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you…, in reply to A O,
Check out the transcript towards the end of this article and get back to us. There was more, but Radio Live has removed all legit recordings.
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Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you…, in reply to Swan,
I will put words in his mouth and suggest he doesn’t think ends justify means. I would hope other don’t also (Marxists aside, obviously).
Given a desirable end and innocuous means, there's no problem. There is no clear principle here, only a question of where the compromises are. Again, Andrew Geddis laid it out beautifully upthread.
If anyone is missing the point it's people who think defending talkback jocks' right to give shit to young women about whether they deserve to be raped is a good metaphorical hill to die on.
And if we must have these stupid rhetorical "who agrees to extreme proposition X" type questions, who agrees that all broadcasters must be allowed to say whatever they like, under every circumstance, without criticism? See ? It's so easy to come up with these ever so challenging, provocative, edgy questions, but what is the point?
/me goes off to mow the lawn and mutter exasperatedly.
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Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you…, in reply to Lilith __,
oh but then how else will Chuck be able to complete his script? if he can't use wilful misunderstanding and false equivalence to make an irrelevant point about imagined hypocrisy, he might lose at internet!
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Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I suppose I could have started my attempt to persuade people not to engage in speech designed to decrease the speech of others with an article about Into the River, or about about misogyny in politics, but that’s low-hanging fruit around here.
Graeme, I think for a lot of people we had a brief moment where the curtain was drawn back and there was a chance of an honest discussion about a terrible and pervasive phenomenon in our society. An emotional, really fraught discussion that many people, mostly women, are too close to to even participate in public or under their own names. Frustratingly, and all-too predictably, instead we have the usual suspects wringing their hands about free speech, even though as Andrew has pointed out with great clarity, there is no simple principled stand to be made here.
In this light your determination to make a point of principle over a minor setback for a pair of well-connected media men grates. It's an irrelevancy, a sideshow, a distraction, a bit selfish.