Posts by James Littlewood*
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Phrase of the day around my workplace:
"It wasn't me. And it never will be me."
Well la-de-fucking-da. If it wasn't him, after a guilty plea and all, then who the hell was it?
On t'other hand, my colleague copped one glance of the Herald lying on the smoko room table and jabbed her finger down hard on his mug, shouting "hate!hate!hate!" For a moment, I felt the same twinge of sympathy that I felt for Sherman McCoy, Tom Wolfe's Wall St character, who experienced a global media network coursing throught the very fibre of his central nervous system.
His media minders have a record of doing great work for genuine media victims, people who've awoken to find themselves far from the spotlight and little to leverage. But this time, with celebrity endorsements masquerading as character witness reports, it seems his friends are doing him a profound disservice: helping him believe the greatest untruth of all:
"It wasn't me, and it never will be me."
Given a motivated and emotioanlly well adjusted subject, self-insight can still take years.
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Rich: u meanie!
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Eddie
Of course you and your parents were entitled to their share of the tax vote. But if y'all want to duplicate that expense on a private school, don't ask me to subsidise that extravagance with my share of the tax vote, which my oldest daughter is happily enjoying to the full.
Besides, you and your parents already did benefit from their share of the tax vote by living in an educated society.
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Q: The "big" religions are over-represented in murderous rampage stats?
A: 9/11 wasn't an act of war.
That, as my boss would say, is just bouncy castle floating away.
Agree religion's been unfairly represented in the #1 cause of all warfare leaderboard. But it's also been grotesquely masqueraded as the cause of war, by the aggressors themselves.
"Islamo-faschist," anyone? Or perhaps PIL's Johny Lydon ...
"Destroooyyy the iiiinnnnfideeeelllah!"
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Rich of Obs & Graeme:
Doh. Yeah meant Maori Party MPs.
Actually, I don't accept my own argument. Bart's right. You just end up with a bunch of tokens. Guess this shows why I'm not a wonk. Mikaere, u=champ.
Roger: how do the representation stats (1:70K) compare to some of those other places to which Auckland's been compared, e.g. Toronto?
And can't be arsed reminiscing on the rapidly-being-dismantled Clark achievements. Go the UN Dvlpnt programme. The way the current gummint's going, we're all gonna need it.
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Bart
Aren't all Maori MPs in Maori electorate seats? Which means it couldn't survive without 'em.
If biculturalism is the first step towards multiculturalism, and if biculturalism is served by Maori seats, then multiculturalism must be served by all seats being allocated to other ethnicities.
But why stop there? Surely, culture is larger than ethnicity. Gay seats. Transport seats. Music seats.
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Roger: holy fuck.
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Mikaere: Adoring yr comment that we've done mono-rule to death. It's hard to disagree with that.
As a former (and I hope repeat) Maori list Green candidate, how would you say our communities (both local and nation-wide) would benefit from entrenched Maori representation?
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Giovanni and Roger
What legal obligation do TLAs have to honour the treaty? Untold moral obligations. But legal?
Arguably, the more influence central government exerts on TLAs, the stronger the obligation becomes?
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Matthew: how about that because they have been here longer than anyone else (as you reminded us) that it is rudely rebellious of the subsequent arrivals to force their governmance structure onto Maori, and should, really, count ourselves lucky to be consulted by Maori on anything at all?
Which is not so much about history, so much as simply acknowledging the order in which things happen.
And also: Maori governmance can - at its best - accommodate a much wider diversity and subtlety of opinion than the honky version.