Posts by David Hood
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Linneaus (taxonomy) more than Darwin. But people don't need much excuse to hate other people, as the Stanford prison experiment showed.
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Also, the census is of individuals. So while you might be able to describe a Platonic ideal of an ethnic group having all kinds of characteristics, as soon as you actually try and apply these to real people you have to face all the issues like inter-marriage between supposed ethnicities (and intermarriage of their scions), adoption, and other things that pollute the imposed boundaries.
All this on top of arguments around if dominant cultural groups can be ethnicities within their own sphere of influence, or the term only applies to minorities within a larger unit (the imperial model).
On some days I am a New Zealander. On days when I consider the question in more detail (such as when filling out the census) I am a Pakeha. I don't consider myself a New Zealander of European descent as after 5 or 6 generations, I don't have any particular personal cultural affiliation to Europe. I am definitely not a white New Zealander by ethnic affiliation (though I have a very pale pink skin tone). I am happy with census accepting my opinion of my ethnicity, and being able to derive useful correlations from that. -
And this is why the census has suggested options along with a write in space.
If the census opts purely for predefined categories, then you are measuring how people assign themselves (or not) within the framework dictated to them, rather than what the population might think about the matter. In NZ the ethnicity question measures what broader identities people consider that they belong to, not what category you might place them in. That you consider some of their categories meaningless means that you have a different value judgement to them about the label and its meaning, but by collecting it (for at least those people who felt strongly enough to write into the space) it at least shows that the idea is contested.
To take an example I am more familiar with, NZ Electoral Rolls up until 1905 listed women's occupation. After 1905 they only listed marital status. This change in recording, from self identification to a fixed list of options, has dramatically shaped what we know about women of the time from electoral roll sources.
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For many long years, New Zealand has adopted the "who do you affiliate with" approach to ethnicity. This is in contrast to most countries focus on blood quanta.
The downside of the NZ is approach is that you have to work with various self declared categories, on the assumption that because people choose to identify as such the label must be of significance to them. This makes it hard to place people in nice clean boxes for analysis and description purposes.
The downside to the blood quanta approach is that it inevitably has led to formal, rigid approaches to classifying people which bear little relationship to their life experience. Also arguments about exactly what proportion of ancestry defines who you are. -
Well, it is half again as long as the collective contract I'm on, and in an industry I'm not involved with, so my eye glaze over fairly quickly. But one thing I do notice is that, compared to my one, the MEAA contract is keen to spell out the exact method and time of contact between employer and employee. My contract use notify, but when the MEAA uses the word notify it is followed up by "in writing". Also there are a lot of provisions for the production company to report to the union (presumably to make sure that the company is behaving correctly), whereas this seems to be covered by more general law in my contract.
But I don't work anywhere near this industry, so have no idea what comparable contracts might look like.
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My impression, from media reports is that the daily rates were higher, and the residuals (which having any at all was a first for New Zealand) were lower than the SAG rate.
I think we can be sure that Warner Brothers are not going to be sentimental about where the movie gets made, and it will go to Australia if the increased costs of the contracts involved is offset by greater tax breaks offered to get the movie made there. -
Actually I disagree with this
If industrial action causes catastrophic damage to huge numbers of people, far in excess of the interested parties, it's not justified.
I' d say that if industrial action causes catastrophic damage to huge numbers of people, far in excess of the interested parties, it means you have a potentially very strong bargaining position. But to use it, you need to have the support of the people having the harm caused to them. But to get that you need to be crystal clear about what you are trying to achieve and why, and to be seen to be using it as a matter of last resort once people who can actually do something about your demands have not done so.
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Until Lyndon arrives, I can contribute
A letter from Bilbo Baggins:
It’s great to be back in the Lonely Mountain. Our team is getting stuck into the hard work, delivering on our promise of a brighter future for Dwarves (and this Hobbit) – and making the Lonely Mountain a place their children and grandchildren want to call home.
On Tuesday I opened the Secret Passage, laying out our route to economic prosperity.
Our first priority is to lift the performance of our economy. We want to make ourselves more prosperous, so we can provide well-paid jobs and better living standards for all of Lonely Mountain and Laketown, and so it can provide the world-class public services we need.
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Galling though it may be to the habitués on this forum, the dispute won't be brokered on these pages
The odd kerfuffle aside, the general forum support for being able to respectfully disagree within the forum, and the diverse contributers adding their voice, I'd say this forum is more likely to have a 'Brian Edwards moment" than any other on the Internet (Not that it will be sorted out on the internet).
And even within the kerfuffles, people are still talking to, rather than talking past, each other.