Posts by Stephen Judd
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I watched the Media 7 programme just now. Then I checked my newsreader, and Steven Price at Media Law Journal said exactly what I have been thinking, only in proper joined-up words and everything:
Let me go on record as saying I think Jon Stephenson’s allegations about NZ involvement in abuses in Afghanistan demand a proper independent investigation. Wayne Mapp seems to have admitted many of them, but somehow the government still seems to be saying “Move along - nothing to see here”. At the same time the PM is attacking Jon Stephenson’s credibility in way that strikes me as being both despicable and entirely beside the point.
Was NZ party to war crimes? I want to know.
I haven't actually been able to buy a copy of Metro with Stephenson's story in it -- I suppose it's a good sign that it must have been selling out around Wellington -- and without Media 7 exposing this story not once but twice, I'm afraid I would not have heard about it.
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I believe that if John Key ripped off his latex human mask to reveal the slavering raptor head underneath and ate a baby on live television, most people would chuckle and go “gosh, that cheeky bastard really knows how to eat a baby, eh?” and then carry on as normal. Attacking his character directly is a lost cause. Since his behaviour in the House is a combination of arrogance and ineptitude, this is especially galling to Labour MPs, who are very frustrated that the public doesn’t see Key the way they see him every day. But they’re going to have to accept that they’d do better to take the battle on other fronts.
I reckon it’d be better to embrace the narrative of Key as a nice bloke who’s made it and embodies the dream, agree with it, and then tweak it by pointing out that he chose the bunch of incompetent drongoes who made the mess we’re in. At the moment unhappy people are still in the mode of “if only the Tsar knew.” Well, he does know.
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Heh. I was sort of thinking that Megan's comment was almost an invitation to create Brontë fanfic... but also I was thinking like this:
"Historical characters" are literary constructions, based in fact, but nonetheless already the product of multiple authors, sometimes closely coupled to a person, but often already distant and speculative.
Therefore, if I just really like the story of a known historical figure, and decide to create a fictional work that makes up things out of whole cloth, and we've decided that when the Brontës did this about their near contemporaries, this was fan fic, how exactly is, say, I Claudius, to be distinguished from fan fic? It even has a few sexy bits, although teenage me wanted to hear a lot more about Messalina than we actually got.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Megan Wegan,
I wonder what would have happened if the Brontes were alive now?
Ah well, that'd be historical fiction. Interesting, isn't it -- isn't much historical fiction just fan fic that achieved respectability?
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My Ubuntu desktop offers a Māori keyboard layout option that maps alt-shift vowel to a macronised variant.
Unix and Linux systems also have a neat thing called a "compose key". It composes two keystrokes into the intuitively obvious result -- eg:
a + " = ä
n + ~ = ñ
c + , = ç
s + s = ß
- + > = →
and so on. Makes typing Latin letters from other languages a breeze. The compose key is usually the right ALT key but you can set it up to be whatever you want.Roger: it used to be a problem in the past, so one issue long-lived organisations have is older writing that was composed electronically using the umlaut character. And many people learned the umlaut substitution didge back in the day when they first encountered computers and have never moved on. There's no technical barrier to getting it right, but there are significant hurdles in converting existing writing and in training people who believe they already know how.
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Where in central Wellington still has this month's Metro in stock? Tried a couple of places today and they'd already sold out.
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to Neil Morrison,
Sounds like Waihopai is part of a system that enabled getting bin Laden without recourse to torture.
Is it? Perhaps it's part of a system that incorporates torture for some things and not others.
See, I can make oblique trolls that don't clearly state a point too.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Craig, what got me about the DomPost billboard was the tag "BUT ARE WE ANY SAFER?" which of course presupposes much about who "we" are and the likelihood of danger.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Bart Janssen,
It really is a remarkably bizarre thing to suggest, it would be laughable except I have no doubt there will be conspiracy groups that will suggest this for decades to some
Surely it's obvious that Obama the secret Muslim would set this fake death up to allow the search for his mate Osama to be called off -- Osama can then continue to organise their joint plan of destroying the USA.
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Look, Key is simply embodying the standard NZ male abroad experience of being invited somewhere and feeling like an under-dressed clod.
Also, if he were to wear a morning suit and someone got a clear photograph, it would provide a great base for riffing on early 20C capitalist caricatures a la the little Monopoly mascots.