Posts by Andre Alessi
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It seems Key's infuriated his own support base more than anyone, Fran O'Sullivan included.
Them's fighting words.
Back when I used to read the dead tree version of the Herald, I made a game of writing Fran's columns in my head before I read them. It'd go something like "Take any press release or policy statement made by the National Party, add some vaguely pro-business jargon, throw in a casual swipe at whatever Labour Party official was in the news that week, and voila!" Amazing how easy it was to predict her exact wording with that method.
So if they've lost Fran, well, what's next? Garth George coming out as a 20-something lesbian atheist living in Ponsonby?
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Every day we see images of illegal acts (often real rather than recreated) so while (fake) erotic images of children might feel different I find it hard to logically justify treating them differently from, for example, a murder in a TV drama.
We're also going to start seeing more questions like this in the context of video games, which are, in a monetary sense, becoming bigger than TV and movies. I have no doubt that depictions of rape (for example) are going to start creeping in to adult video games in a few years time. (Not just in hentai games.)
As a long time proponent of the idea that video games are the next big thing in storytelling and should be taken as seriously as any other artform, I'm struggling to think of an easy answer to how this can be dealt with. It's easy to stick a rape scene in a novel and have it slip past the censors, but it's much harder to do so in TV and movies, and I suspect that video games will find that level of narrative freedom even harder to achieve.
NB: I'm completely avoiding the problematic way in which rape and other crimes are handled by most fiction authors, let alone visual fictional formats just purely for brevity here. Apologies if this offends anyone-I actually have a blog post on "Why Rape In Fantasy and Sci Fi Is Objectively Lazy Writing" percolating in my brain on this very topic.
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Under what circumstances should it be illegal to look at a picture of something it is legal to do?
If the production of the image directly involved a criminal act. I'm thinking, in particular, of "upskirt" pics here-there's no crime in wearing a skirt, but the harmful invasion of privacy involved in taking the pictures is magnified by the act of deliberately viewing them.
Other than that rather lose and broad line though, I don't really think their should be limitations on the viewing of images even if what is depicted is illegal (which puts me on the side of people who might enjoy photoshopped or cartoon images of illegal acts where the base "real life" source and production does not involve an illegal act-a strange and uncomfortable place to be, I agree.)
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It's really easy to put the world to rights in a 800 word column, but it doesn't hurt to at least acknowledge the reality that people like Key and Obama have to operate in the real world and passing legislation is a little more complex and messy than hitting a POST button.
So opinion writers shouldn't say anything unless they personally have a working, politically viable solution written up and ready to be submitted to a select committee?
This hyperbole stuff is fun!
Hickey's justifiably underlining the fact that the changes announced so far are not encouraging for the young, the poor, and those who don't own property-closing current tax loopholes has no impact whatsoever on people who didn't benefit from it previously, but who will now pay more for the necessities of life. The fact that it might be hard to make stuff happen is immaterial- politics is hard , and using that complaint as an excuse to half-arse tax reform should result in a thousand thousand Hickeys all calling Key out.
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Why would they want to do that?
I'm only on coffee number one, so my rhetorical question detector is still a bit wonky. But I'll answer seriously anyway: the last thing National wants is to be known as the government that increased the tax burden on low income families disproportionately. That's the sort of tag that loses elections.
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The GST increase would have been not-terrible if it had come bundled with genuinely sweeping tax reform (most particularly property and capital gains taxes) and smarter income tax (universal no-tax thresholds and so on.) Instead it just looks hopelessly weak and uninteresting.
And did Key really think about the implications of using the "It's too hard" excuse for the reason why they're not including property/capital gains taxes?
The whole thing's such a huge letdown. I got the sense that most people had an appetite for some pretty significant change, so to let that slip past us is just depressing.
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A tired old game perhaps but I can't resist:
If Labour were still in power, and had made the same changes (not completely out of the question, IMO) we would be hearing nonstop that A) the increase in GST will lead to a reduction in discretionary spending, and thus harm small businesses in New Zealand, and B) the administration costs of making this change, reprogramming tills and tweaking accounting programs, etc, would fall heavily upon small businesses and drive many out of business.
Now both these things are probably worth talking about anyway (particularly the second, which I think is going to cause headaches for some not-so-small companies for months afterwards) though I don't for a second believe anyone will actually lose their business as a result of this change. But still, funny how things change eh?
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Certainly when I went to Victoria, the requirement to get into - say - Math 112 was a B or higher in bursary Maths. It wasn't "B in bursary Maths, unless you come from an underprivileged school, in which case we'll let you in with a C"
Do universities even take individual grades at 7th form/year 12 (or whatever) in to account anymore for entry into specific papers?
I seem to remember getting in to every paper I wanted at Vic back in the mid 90's with pretty marginal grades, and the same again when I applied for UoA in the late 90's.
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Reminds me of my first year at uni. Living away from home and expected to self govern my time and learning was a complete shock. I failed the two main papers in my degree and had to redo the year. While independent learning was encouraged in 7th form at my high school, I did not feel prepared for what I had to step up into.
I was even worse. I dropped out a couple of weeks into my second semester because I felt so utterly lost, with accommodation debts, bad grades, and unresolved relationships all left in my wake. I had none of the skills I needed as an adult, though I don't fault my high school for this-put it down to the inevitable gaps in my education as the result of the time pressures on a single parent. It might be nice if high schools offered kids courses in "How to open a bank account", "How to obtain and manage a bank loan", "Shared accommodation etiquette", etc
Perhaps those courses are there now, at least at some schools, or perhaps university orientation organisations offer them, but to me learning that stuff beforehand would have made all the difference.
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If anything, this debate (if you can call what's happening a debate when one side apparently doesn't really understand what's being discussed) has highlighted yet again that a majority of parents feel like they don't have a clear idea how to judge how their children are doing at school, and whether their school is actually meeting the needs of their children.
So how do we fix this? Is it just about educating parents, or are there concrete changes to reporting that could help parents feel that they do have a clearer understanding of what their children are experiencing at school? Or is the whole project doomed to failure given the Heisenbergian nature of the analysis of educational performance?
As a non-parent, I really don't have a horse in this race, and I haven't been as caught up in the minutae of the arguments as I probably should be to comment, but surely the fact that there's a debate here at all indicates that something could be done better?