Posts by Stephen Judd
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hon BILL ENGLISH: That kind of advice is not unusual—
Hon Members: Ha, ha!
I am afraid I read that in the voice of Nelson Munz.
-
I do not understand the fundamental opposition to this kind of GE - which is no different in the end result from traditional cross-breeding or grafting. I vote Green and this drives me batfuck.
Pretty much how I feel too. (Disclosure, I have voted Green recently but am now once more a Labour party member).
The Greens have some fantastic evidence-based policy, and have impressed me with their commitment to logical rigour on social issues. Their hippy blind spots on science and health drive me nuts. All that credibility on AGW leaks away when things like this come up. They love evidence, except when they don't.
-
Thanks for the pointer to the Armstrong article Sofie -- normally I'd give him a miss.
Struck by this sentence:
"Those two politicians failed because the country was not ready for such an overhaul."
The country was not ready. I love the implications of this: that dismantling the welfare state is inevitable, something we'll have to face up to, when we're ready. It was nice that he noticed that the state of the labour market is the determining factor in how long people stay on a benefit, but he still seems to have accepted the basic premises of Tory policy.
-
Yeah, can we have a moratorium on gratuitous evocations of Nazism please? I mean, Jim Anderton is Goebbels? Or Hitler? I fear, Craig, that in the search for the pungent phrase you may have lost your sense of perspective somewhat.
-
All this focus on "policy" and "rules" and "guidelines."
Don't real manly men in charge just make their own rules? By passing Acts of Parliament, if necessary? If a bloke wants a bottle of wine with dinner, or a few 1000 cubic metres of irrigation water, why should some pencil-necked bureaucrat's bleating about conventions and rules get in his way? Journalists should be focussing on stuff that really matters, like how much it rains in New Zealand. I don't hear nearly enough about that in the news and it's about time the Government did something about it. Maybe Sir Geoffrey could be appointed to write a report, as long as he doesn't use the word "pluvial."
-
So long then, David Slack
Your columns were infrequent but they had many funny pictures
And rather clever words with which I frequently agreed.
This is coming out all wrong.Thank you very much, please come back when you have time.
-
I just think there is a vein of frustration in this discussion. Russell and Damien are very good journalists and they have chosen to work in aspects of the industry in which they can make an intelligent contribution. It's not about them. It's about the way TV One news and current affairs is not as good as it could be, the way it used to be before it was so ratings driven.
Yes.
I do not like television news as it is now. Maybe it was never that good, but I feel it is not even as good as it once was. I feel that so very strongly that having started to make a small, gracious, to my mind completely defensible criticism, I lack the self-control to leave it at that, and I have to sing my relentless monotonous song again. Come back, let me hold you with my skinny hand, see my glittering eye. I started growing this beard when we had Dateline Monday with its typewriter intro sequence and Brian Edwards stalked the land.
Perhaps I lack the industry knowledge to appreciate current standards of "good". Perhaps, now that I'm an elderly man of 40, I just have to let go of expectations formed in an earlier, never to be recovered age.
It's interesting, though, isn't it? Yesterday's orthodoxy, to which I am attached, is today's heresy. So I live in hope that as swiftly and arbitrarily and unexpectedly as it went away, it will come back. Meanwhile I see no reason at all to accept as givens things which once upon a time were extremely doubtful.
Am I unreasonable? Very well, I am unreasonable. I can't help it. Frankly I wish I could -- I feel these surges of ill-feeling are unbecoming.
On the other hand:
"You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables."
(I think Sam Johnson would have died many years younger, perhaps of an apoplexy, had he been exposed to television as it is now.
BOSWELL: And what do you think of the art of television broadcasting?
JOHNSON: Sir, it is a very base medium, in which a few supremely artful men are employed by the mercantile classes to sow the seeds of avarice and mound them in dungheaps of distraction, so that multitude of artless persons might be induced to make unwise purchases of goods and services which they otherwise might have disdained, while the groves of Academe are left to wither untended.) -
At the risk of defending Mr Henry more than I really want to, drawing equivalnce between his actions and those of Veitch seems a bit reckless.
True. I was more thinking of the Williams/"where apes come from" type on-air behaviour than domestic violence.
-
Point of information: RNZ ratings, coming in at number 2 nationwide, pretty awesome for an underresourced outfit doing boring worthy news.
I do think to some extent we are at cross purposes. I think it's perfectly consistent to rate TV news as crap, and yet also think that many of the people engaged in producing it are working miracles, given the constraints that they labour under, which prevent it from being even more crap.
I know it's hard not to take that criticism personally, but it really is a critique of the constraints and not the people. Even the rotten behaviour of the Henrys and the Veitches in this environment is ultimately the result of a system of selection pressures.
It would be interesting to find an objective assessment of which profession gets the most undeserved crap for phenomena that arise from the rules they work under -- I suspect criminal defence lawyers would be near the top.
-
I would just like to point out that I DO write (or email or tweet) to journalists when they do awesome stories too, as at least one person posting here knows.
But a lot of jobs are like that -- good work is unremarkable and people only get in touch about bad stuff. Everyone who's ever worked on a help desk* knows that punters never ring to say "my pc is working great! Thanks for everything!"
* I still have phobic reactions to the telephone ringing years later.