Posts by Stephen Judd
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Morgan Godfery has what appears to this Pakeha to be an excellent blog on Maori politics over at Maui Street. Today he posted two articles very relevant to this thread (1, 2), in which he passes on rumours of planned Operation 8 style raids on Te Whanau a Apanui.
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Hard News: A Work of Advocacy, in reply to Russell Brown,
He ate my falafel, too.
Did you make it yourself?
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Hard News: The file-sharing bill, in reply to 3410,
I keep hearing this argument, but I just do not get it.
What I'm picking up, notably from Lianne Dalziel's comments on Red Alert, is that Labour's Chch MPs got some sort of concession they felt was vital for their constituents, in return for voting with the Government. What I'm hazy on is what the concession was, and what consequences they feared from voting against.
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Hard News: The file-sharing bill, in reply to Sacha,
It's just another self-obsessed defensive rant that refuses to acknowledge responsibility.
Is it? The distinction between bills that have been through the select committee process (the Copyright stuff) and bills that have been rammed through without (CERRA) seems important to me. I actually feel a bit misled by the news coverage on this point.
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Hard News: The file-sharing bill, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
. Despite the world moving substantially over the past 20 years to adopt green ideas, the Greens aren’t gaining substantial support
This month in Germany the Greens have overtaken the SPD to become the largest opposition party. My understanding is that the nuclear disaster in Japan had a lot to do with the surge in their support, but it’s impressive and surprising to me nonetheless.
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In the end, “good grammar” is a social marker. Either you were raised in an environment where you absorbed it without effort or you made an effort, possibly a very big one, to acquire it. In some contexts, I am interested in that, but in others I am not. Some of the reflexive annoyance I feel when I think “poor style” or “bad grammar” is caused by resentment that I put the effort in and other people did not.
I think much confusion happens because we believe that effort or breeding is correlated with the sort of education that claims to produce clear thinking, and consequently we assume that poor style is a marker of muddled thinking.
By the way, wont you all join me in my campaign to eliminate the apostrophe from English, except in cases of genuine contraction? Its just a shibboleth now. I believe 99 out of 10 people whove mastered the possessive apostrophes complexities know nothing of historical inflections, and the other so-called contractions are all words in their own right now. Phonetic spelling is probably impractical but this is something we could do for the little children now at no cost other than the loss of our personal sense of superiority.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Russell Brown,
Question: how many of you here are Usenet veterans, and is that where you learned your culture of internet argument?
Yes and yes. At the time I first got into usenet, say 89 or so, it was still heavily dominated by the university student/staff demographic which I think set the tone.
It's taken me a long time to adopt a more gentle approach to disagreement. The line-by-quoted-line style of takedown is a luxury I still allow myself when I am really provoked. However, I have printouts of the XKCD "someone is wrong on the internet" cartoon in various locations in order to remind me to back away from the keyboard.
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Hard News: The Wall and the Paper, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
they’re afraid of upsetting him and his radio audience if they don’t.
This is the problem, isn’t it? Laws has a constituency.
We don’t have enough national-scale papers in this country and they can’t differentiate into different niches – there’s no Daily Mail or Daily Star for low brow right wing nut jobs – so the SST graciously recognises its inclusive role and gives space for them too.
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So who is the deputy editor who actually does select and edit pieces for the op ed section?
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Hard News: The Wall and the Paper, in reply to Paul Williams,
Where is the articulate and reasonable right?
Well, there's our own Rob Hosking if you want a true blue but thoroughly reasonable chap, albeit I don't think he does much opinion journalism. As noted, I believe you could have a nice drink with Karl du Fresne and reach amicable conclusions on some subset of the worlds' problems without fear of violence. Fran O'Sullivan we've all bagged at one time or another, but she's not unreasonable per se, just starting from a very different set of political axioms. And so on. Laws has got nothing in common with the most of the right wing people writing in the NZ press and I don't think many of them would want or indeed deserve to be lumped in with him. The only "attraction" he offers to the SST op ed section is controversy.