Posts by Kyle Matthews
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I actually think Broad should give Louise Nichols some form of public award or recognition, she has gone through a hell I doubt many could survive & I think it would go someway towards removing the link Craig talks about for Police to recognise publicly what she's gone through.
I concur. I think the outcome of the rape cases will always be disputed, but ignoring that, clearly she got shafted by Dewar, and hopefully now that a conviction has been got in that case she gets an apology on that count at least.
Aren't you confusing Howard Broad with Rickards?
Russell was saying that he should never be our commissioner, not that he currently is:
And I know one thing: Clint Rickards not only must not be our most senior policeman, he should not be in the force at all.
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I wonder if you're overstating the case a little Keith. Car ads have run in the motoring section of newspapers for so long as there have been motoring sections. Hightly respected newspapers run travel sections whose chief purpose is to attract travel advertising.
That's true, and I was thinking the same thing as I read Russell. What Keith didn't state as explicitly as I'd like to have seen, and what I'm never sure if I should worry about, is the linking of advertising to your google searches.
It's not putting car related adverts on car-related pages. It's looking through everything you've ever searched for and putting up adverts which relate to that. Knowing that you searched for 'car repairs' last week so putting up adverts stating 'sick of your car breaking down? buy a new XXX!'
I can see it has advantages for both sides, but I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with my adverts knowing that much about me personally.
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Lets just devise humans that dont fall out of love from previously perfectly good relationships... And also devise ones that dont get horny and go having rampant sex with people they have no intention of forming a long term relationship with in the first place.
Where were you ten years and two kids ago? You suggest this now?
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Instead of a complicated wordy advert on TV, imagine a slogan stated by respected sportsmen/women: "We don't hurt people!"
I have made this point elsewhere but I think it's worth repeating: we will know that this nation is ready to do something about the appalling violence wreaked on children when an All Black donates his player of the match award to a campaign to stop child abuse.
Rodney So’oialo and his wife are fronting a campaign by Jigsaw, supported by the Body Shop. It's called 'kids are unbeatable' and they sell nice t-shirts. The So'oialo family designed the products that they sell. So it's not player of the match award, but it's out there.
Campaign is here: http://www.jigsaw.org.nz/news.html
Crap it isn't. If the crowd condone the behaviour, it is hugely more likely to be repeated & emulated. If 10,000 people in the stands are shouting "yeah, goodonya! He was asking for it mate!" then how is a player not going to believe his actions weren't warranted?
I presumed justified and warranted was referring to the legal process, such as the referee and disciplinary panels. Check how Mr Newland of the Hawkes Bay rugby team spends the next few weeks, assuming he gets banned tomorrow for punching Mr Tialata. The crowd won't have any say in that.
I referee ice hockey, which can be an aggressive, and sometimes violent sport. It also has a strong culture, unlike most sports these days, of having players who are specifically on teams for fighting and bashing around the other team. It's truly sickening as an activity, but the reaction of some crowds is the worst thing - to have two players going at it is bad enough, but to give them positive reinforcement from the stands for their actions...
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It is an artificial kind of thought experiment because it would never happen. Well not in isolation.
That's why it's called a thought experiment, it doesn't have a real-life application.
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And pay dearly for the privilege... I'm sure there's a word for that.
Nut allergy? In both senses...
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I can understand that, in broad principle, if someone wanted to maximise the financial benefit to themselves of something like the DPB, it would involve having as many children as possible, and neglecting them as much as possible.
I have two kids, and I can't think how it would be physically possible to neglect them enough for the DPB to be profit-making. Perhaps if you had them all sleeping in one room, hardly ever fed them, never did anything with them, or spent anything on them, you might make a couple of bucks.
Anything more than that is a loss leader. We're not talking hundreds of dollars/kid/week here after all.
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In the end, child abuse will only *reduce* as people get better education, a stable income, decent housing and a positive attitude to life. The only thing politicians can really do is to promote that, not scrabble around for quick fixes that will probably be counterproductive.
I did some summer research for the police in the mid-1990s about violence. They were seeing increasing levels of violence in one of the regions, and they wanted to get a feeling of what sort of violence it was, why it was occurring, and some suggestions as to how to turn it around. I was tremendously underqualified for the job, but they were paying money, so it worked out OK for me, and I can't imagine that they took my report as seriously in reality.
Anyway, the police officers that I spoke to and who provided me with direction for my work, were really tied up on alcohol. They wanted to know about licensed premises, alcohol-related crimes, consumption etc etc. One of the things they were looking for was to be able to say 'alcohol causes violence, we need to limit licensed premises, opening hours etc'.
Which is a winning solution. If there was suddenly no more alcohol in society, there'd be less violence, no doubt.
I really didn't like it though. It didn't answer the question of why I could go out in the weekend and get drunk and never get anywhere near a fight or hitting anyone, and other people could have a few beers, get in a fight, and go home and beat the Missus up. Community groups involved with domestic violence, who I also spoke to, were quite cynical about the police's attitude to alcohol. Alcohol released the inhibitions keeping the violence in check, but the people still had the violence underneath. To some extent, it was dealing with the symptom of the personality/culture - alcohol-released violence - rather than the underlying problem - the willingness, whether drunk or sober, to use violence against others.
It was an interesting learning experience, and I keep coming back to it in life. I agree with the above comment that income, employment, education, housing etc, will all help deal with the problem of child abuse. The incidence will reduce.
However violence is something that doesn't leave a person when they get a job. They might be less likely to use that violence against another person, because they have income, self-esteem, less time on their hands, less opportunities to take drugs etc etc. But you don't change a person by giving them a job - at least not immediately. And jobs, income, housing, can all disappear just as easily as they can appear, and it's difficult to make them permanent for people. It could only be a quick fix, before things sink back again. We (unfortunately I think) don't have that society anymore. Our society and economy is structured to have poor people, un/under-employment etc, it's not going away, it's just shifting around.
As others have pointed out, the statement also makes the assumption that if we can just make everyone better off and employed and in good housing and kids in school etc, that child abuse won't happen. Middle class, or even rich people are not immune to violence, so making everyone into those clones, isn't going to make the problem go away, even if the newly employed/rich/educated adopt those middle/upper class values. Those values are not perfect by any means.
So while those things will help, violence, particularly violence against children, particularly by their parents, will only go away when people learn skills of parenting which provide that environment for kids. And people break cycles and make positive choices about how they're going to be different from other generations in raising kids. And society sets in place laws and structures to best support that.
The solutions are tremendously difficult, moreso when we think that someone will not put a young child in a dryer just because they have a job and a steady income. I can't imagine what sort of person would do that, but their problems are clearly much more than that.
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Y'know, sometimes these comments really piss me off. To the point that I fantasize about annexing Auckland, sealing the borders, and declaring ourselves a sovereign state.
But yes, I do find all this 'I hate Auckland - and the disrespect is entirely mutual' crapola rather tiresome.
There's some psychoanalysis work in figuring out why a comment about Wellington draws nothing, a comment about Auckland draws a piss off and a crapola. Still touchy up there?
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Just that LOTR is a vastly superior work of art to the Harry Potter series, and that comes mainly from the connection between Tolkien's work and the profit motive being very weak. In fact, the Lord of the Rings was a sellout in Tolkien's mind, the book he really wanted to write was the Silmarillion.
The LOTR was the one that made the money, yet its a vastly superior work to the Silmarillion which is a hodgepodge of stories and histories and literary notes which Tolkien could never pull together into anything that a publisher was interested in. And he worked on it for his entire life, so it's not like he didn't give it a decent go.
I'm not sure if Tolkien's books support your argument that 'going for the money' reduces the quality of the work. If you decide that LOTR is much better than Harry Potter, it might have something to do with them being aimed at different audiences, one being a professor at a top international university, and the other not, simple taste, or... y'know, 'snobbery'.
And I doubt that JK Rowling did books 2 - 7 for the money, though I'm sure the publishers did it for the money. She did fairly well out of book 1 after all. She wrote them because she's a writer and that's what writers do. And because she's written the most popular book series in history, and the readers want the rest of the books. If she's stopped at 6 and said 'fuck it, it's not art any more' then she would have been hung.
Emma, I can agree that Tolkien didn't invent the fantasy genre in a 'first person to make it up' way, though he was one of the early people to cross over from mythology and religion to 'fantasy fiction'.
However I think fantasy writing in the second half of the 20th century completely changed as a result of his writing. His creatures and the world they inhabit are the model for thousands and thousands of books, games, computer games, movies etc. Why are elves tall chaps with bows instead of little pixie like creatures? Tolkien. Why are goblins snivelly nasty green things that live underground, rather than things that live under toadstools at the bottom of my garden? Tolkien. Trolls turning to stone in sunlight? He borrowed that one.
In the sense that nobody really invents anything major new in literature, sure. In the sense that he turned it on its head, made it a major part of fiction writing, and set the model that all others compare to - yeah, I'll give him fantasy.