Posts by Damian Christie
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@Rich haha that's very funny, although I've got to say that flying every week does warp your view of such things - twenty weeks in a row of sitting in the first couple of rows, then one week I'm back in 10C, it's hard not to think "who did I offend"... obviously shouldn't have written this blog :)
@Jolisa: I was just talking to Robyn Gallagher at Avalon, she tells me that this blog is give or take the only use of said phrase on the Interweb, so we can perhaps assume it's fairly localised (or archaic racism isn't a hot topic on the net). In what little analysis I have given the phrase, I always thought it meant that for a "chow", having a bike was pretty flash, they couldn't hope for much more in life. But your suggestions are definitely making me re-evaluate that.
Poppa used to work at the University, and as an alcoholic, spent a bit of time hanging out in pubs with Colin McCahon, apparently often causing McCahon to miss his lectures. I wonder if McCahon ever uttered that phrase...
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Hi Damian thanks for slagging off us Wellingtonians. Appreciate that.
If you liked that, you'll LOVE the article I wrote for Metro called "Capital Punishment" in July 07. Based on my time in the Capital, it caused quite a stir at the time. Full of half-arsed humourless generalisations and observations. Well worth digging up. I even think I imply that all Wellington music is the same as Fat Freddy's Drop. Hilarious.
PJ O'Rourke does this shit funny. You, not so much.
No-one's forcing you to read it Pete. You might have noticed that unlike a doctor's waiting room, the Internet has plenty of reading material to choose from other than this blog. Go nuts.
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Also, Brownlee's "it's like a postcard on Eden Park" line he's been banging out, as soon as I heard that I thought "yeah but New Zealand's HEAPS bigger than Eden Park, so that postcard..."
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Conspiracists may ...expect John Key to make great play of a reprieve for the Barrier while the heavy machinery rolls in somewhere else. I'm not sure it's that well thought-out.
Intentionally or not, it's a great ploy. The Barrier seems to stick out - probably because it's an island sanctuary far away from industry - as one place mining really shouldn't happen. Nikki Kaye is speaking against it - this probably plays into the hands of the conspiracists who think it's some sort of straw man/lamb to be sacrificed to the greenies.
When I was a young(er) journo, I was told by heads much wiser to always include one obvious error in your piece. The boss always wants to change something to feel they've done their job and marked their territory, and will hopefully take your bait, and leave the rest alone. And it worked. Maybe Barrier is the same for the New Zealand public?
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Dr John tickets have gone, by the way.
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Fair 'nuf then. Of course it is possible to find something racism offensive (or flippant I guess) without being of that race...
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But that is probably just me
I'm sure you're not alone. But me, if I'm having a discussion about when and if it's okay to use the word "nigger", I will use the word nigger in that discussion. And if it's useful to illustrate this by using other racial slurs, then so be it.
If a Chinese New Zealander or even a New Zealand Chinese wants to take offence at the mere utterance of the word in this context, then I'm open to hearing that, and if you're offended by it, then I'm open to that too. But I'm a little confused by your implication that my post (or at least its title) is offensive, even though you find it merely flippant, and inviting people who find it so to comment.
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Appropriate topics for small talk include work, hometowns and regions, family, travel, sports, recreational activities, and film.
How could they forget weather? It's an awful cliche that it's become my stand-by topic of discussion in a taxi. Stops me being grievously but silently offended when some driver who obviously spends all day flicking between Laws and Leighton starts telling me what's wrong with New Zealand these days...
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I would be interested in hearing what people who identify as Chinese think about this post, particularly the title. Might be flippant to us but it could still hurt.
Um, isn't that the entire point I was making? That these old expressions, in this case one used by both Robyn and my grandfathers (grammar police anyone? please?) is racist, even though at the time it wasn't an active form of racism (the "chow" in this case being the passive comparison). I wasn't being flippant at all - I was suggesting that Air New Zealand in 2008 was being as inappropriate as that saying is today.
BTW, if you want to see a great collection of images of discrimination against Asians in New Zealand over the years, the book by Manying Ip and Nigel Murphy "Aliens at my Table" is well worth a look.
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I thought this whole thing got sorted out with the "all our opinions are subjective" line... No-one's forcing anyone to like Avatar, although it doesn't hurt to say what we respectively did or didn't like about it, does it?