Posts by Stephen Judd
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Shapeshifter at St James... by all accounts brilliant
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When he says "my Jewy, Jewy day", that's funny. When you say "clever semites... thought control", it clangs in my ears like "Asiatic" and "natural sense of rhythm".
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Oh yeah, blame the Jews. It's all our fault. We schemed it, you know. And while you're at it, ignore the fact that the quintessentially Aryan Persians had a very similar bunch of ideas, which were equally prevalent at the time. And that the Romans knew all about social control, which they achieved with circuses and gladiators. Yeah, maybe if it weren't for Constantine (or really Diocletian) Christians would still be wandering loonies. But you'd be moaning about Mithraist or Zoroastrian thought control as you toddled off to see the All Blacks kill the Wallabies.
... so a big pile of bullshit, really,
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I recall seeing Tutaekuri wine in the supermarket once, presumably named after the Hawkes Bay river. It was clearly a small run done for export, judging by the back label with a London address. And it had a very happy looking dog on the main label.
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Q: Why does Snoop Dogg carry an umbrella?
A: Fo' drizzle. -
I'm quite gratified that my page with Stuart's story on is the number 2 result for AFFCO on Google.
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From Don Brash's valedictory speech today:
A country where I can watch my 13 year old Eurasian son playing happily with a dozen of his friends, and count two Chinese, one Korean, one Sri Lankan, one Eurasian, six Pakeha, and the grandson of a Maori activist - all of them New Zealanders.
Let the deconstruction begin!
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I think that deep in the heart of this "I am an ethnic NZer" thing is an insecurity over one's claim to belonging.
Spot on.
However, I don't think we should look to South American for analogies. On the one hand, the upper classes still claim their pure descent from Spanish antecedents as part of their cachet. On the other hand, South America is also where the lovely idea of La Raza Cosmica comes from. On a third hand they have a legacy of slavery and genocide that we don't have to deal with. It's a whole continent that's way too diverse to draw conclusions from.
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it has a long way to go before it catches up alot of even basic indigenous concepts (see above).
No. We have a long way to go before certain basic indigenous concepts can be shown to have a scientific basis or not.
If you are content to accept ancestral knowledge as correct without investigation, why bother with science? But if you want the validation that science brings, you have to accept that some part of what your ancestors taught is not factual.
...but others, which are integral to the whole navigation method, are well beyond the abilities of scientiist to 'prove' - the way navigator often work with their eyes closed, navigating by feeling into 'unknown' waters, some will even navigate while facing in the opposite direction to where the waka was heading. .
I doubt that. Such techniques are quite susceptible to scientific investigation. You should be easily able to compare the navigational accuracy of several craft departing from the same point whose pilots use different techniques.
But anyway, it's quite likely, for example, that a crafty old coot (or tohunga) who knows which direction to go in from observation of currents, birds, stars, cloud etc, would get some valuable shut-eye and relief from nervous nellies who think we're lost and going to die, by closing his eyes and turning his back. And he'd gain valuable respect, and wanna-bes who tried the same stunt really would die at sea, lending credence to his mystical powers. That's a far more likely explanation than a supernatural inbuilt sense of direction.
Anyway, what are all you people doing posting on a Saturday night? Don't you have anything better to do?
Er, no. At least, not up until just now, when I got a better offer :)
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What I object to is a literal claim that a mountain is your ancestor.
Hmmm, is Manakura making such a literal claim?
I am a descendant of Abraham and my fathers were slaves in Egypt. I can't begin to demonstrate the literal truth of those claims. But those claims are not intended to be take literally. They are an assertion of identity and group belonging.
In the context of a claim of connection to an area, saying Taranaki is my ancestor is a way of saying "I am really, really, really strongly connected to this area."
No comment on you, Deborah, and I know you didn't do this, but something I hear way too often is disparagement of Maori sensibilities as stoneage or animist or whatever, from people who would never dream of disrespecting mainstream Christian practises which are equally irrational.
That doesn't then start to make us 'indigenous' people, because we who have European geneology can still easily return to place of origin.
I dunno about that. My antecedents are variously Scots, English, and from the former Russian empire, and the first ones got here 6 generations back. After the successful indigenous revolution in this country, where will I be deported to? In fact I think that's precisely what's behind the need people like me feel to claim the sort of native status that Russell alluded to above: we are not native to anywhere else, therefore we must be native to here.