Posts by Tze Ming Mok
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...not every journalist is a good journalist...
Kumanan's line!
every time I read your blog, I learn something that makes the exciting-knowledge part of my brain tingle.
...er ...that Deborah Coddington is not a good journalist? That Keith tucks his t-shirts into his pants? In any case, happy to help.
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Neither Nelson Mandela nor Aung San Suu Kyi are 'minorities'...
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Where on earth is DC getting her statistics from?
Good question. The Statistics NZ figures show clearly that it is only pregnant Asian *teenagers* who display the 80+% abortion rate, compared with the 50+% abortion rate of pregnant Pakeha teenagers. Additionally, 'Asian' teenagers have the lowest pregnancy rate in the country. Here is the rather clear and concise summary of the statistical information that Coddington seemed unable to read.
In 2002, European women had an abortion ratio of 209, below the national average of 242, while Asian women had a ratio of 374. The corresponding ratios for Māori and Pacific women were 245 and 243, respectively. Among women aged under 20 years, Asian women had the highest crude abortion ratio (824 abortions per 1,000 known pregnancies), compared with European (534), Pacific (377) and Māori (331) women.
Quite apart from this, I wasn't aware that abortion was a crime, let alone an 'Asian crime.'
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The ruling in which North & South/ACP media did not accept NZ Press Council jurisdiction (Winston Peters vs North & South) was in 1999. ACP has since become a member of the NZ Press Council,and North & South is now subject to its rulings.
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Where Coddington went horribly wrong, of course, was failing to interview an actual recent immigrant (and pretending that one Chinese New Zealander who explicitly dissociates herself from those immigrants is representative of those immigrants)
Coddington did in fact interview Justin Zhang from Skykiwi.com and Lincoln Tan. It appears neither of them gave her the message she wanted, so she had to simply quote Lincoln's columns selectively, and find someone completely irrelevant instead.
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There was one case, but it was a long time ago, and not contested. (white supremacist)
In general, complaints to the Human Rights Commission of publications and speech 'exciting racial hostility' do not meet the threshold of harm required to outbalance the principles of free speech. Appropriately, it is a very high threshold. However, complaints of that nature received by the Commission are a useful gauge of public opinion and public offense, and can result in action taken by the Race Relations Commissioner. Because of this, the Human Rights Commission never 'discourages' people from complaining under those grounds, even if there can be no formal complaint proceedings under law. -
Wow - Daniel also says this on his column.
Viewers often wonder why we don't have more Indian or Chinese characters, but there are very few Chinese or Indian actors in NZ.
What a load of crap. By the way, they lost Pua Magasiva as well as half the Maori and Li-Mei in that fateful few months... And it's a bit rich of him to take credit for the Hudson family.
Here's my original tasteless column from July by the way, now lost to the archiving whims of stuff.co.nz... I'd put it behind a cut but I don't know if it's supported:
Shortland Street's ethnic cleansing is a relief to us all
Shortland Street finally lived up to its medical credentials this week, taking responsibility for showing the nation what the real human effects of a pandemic will be.
Key Health Message: Pandemics only kill Asians. Because that's where pandemics come from.
In fact, Asians can only die from pandemics. It is the only way you can get rid of them when you have exhausted all the other crappy "Asian'' plotlines.
Growing up surrounded by that generational cluster of Commonwealth migrant doctors (Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, India, Sri Lanka), I assumed when I was a child that all doctors were some kind of "Asian'', and that all "Asian'' grown-ups were doctors. That early impression wasn't too far off the mark. In 2001, Chinese people made up about 3% of the population and Indians 2%, a quick scan of the New Zealand Medical Register comes up with 37 Dr Patels, 35 Dr Singhs, 69 Dr Wongs and 44 Dr Lees, compared with 82 Dr Smiths, 38 Dr Joneses and 37 Dr Browns. Oh yes, and 19 Dr Chens but only two Dr Warners. Despite this demographic dominance in medicine, we've only had four core-cast "Asian'' doctors ever in 14 years of our "national soap opera'' (and equally preposterously, no South Africans).
The Shortland Street "Asian'' groundbreaker was Dr Grace Kwan, whose only ethnicity was an Australian accent. Hey, at least her character wasn't a joke at our expense. During the height of the "Asian Invasion'' years, Mac Jeffrey Ong played a convincingly urbane and linguistically realistic ethnic Chinese international student from the Philippines, who taught Rachel McKenna quantum physics, but never got to pash her even though he was a hottie. I missed most of Jacob Rajan as Dr Ashwan Bashar (did he get to pash anyone?). Then, as Shortland Street's "conscience of liberal New Zealand'' years gave way to high camp, we had hospital CEO Sofia "I worked my way up from thee slums of Maneela!'' Martinez, who was as good as a sexually rapacious Joan Collins-meets-Asian capitalist dragon-lady stereotype could get.
But with the advent of Dr Li-Mei Chen, I lost all hope.
Our Li-Mei was always a surly bitchface -- you would be too if you had suffered the indignities heaped upon her character, shoddily cobbled together as she was out of the most hare-brained and mutually contradictory stereotypes possible. They scripted her lines in broken English, then suddenly switched her to a perfect Kiwi accent, and humiliatingly for everyone involved, had her played by a non-Mandarin speaking actress who was occasionally forced to speak Mandarin really badly. Most nonsensically (there is a difference between reversing stereotypes and having no understanding of reality), they made her harp on about her
"third-world peasant'' upbringing and lumbered her with (groan) an arranged marriage, despite this being a virtually impossible class background for one of China's modern-day international student urbanites. Predictably, they made her run a phone-sex hotline and prostitute herself for money and power, while simultaneously making her an ice-queen obsessed with studying. "Try not to make me look like a hooker,'' Li-Mei said in one of her last sick-bed scenes, her most brilliantly self-referential line. Too late.At least now she has been put out of her misery.
With a producer whose first move on the job was to eliminate the show's Maori/cultural adviser, and whose most recent overhauls have been to get rid of Li-Mei and axe an accumulating number of Maori characters to match the disappearance of the only Pacific Islander, it's no wonder Li Mei has been humiliated since inception.
The writers didn't know any actual Chinese people to ask about suitable names for her character, so they just combined the names of the actress who played her, and that of the Chinese doctor from ER. They called her mother Gong after Gong Li, and her fiance Chow after Chow Yun Fat. I wish I was making this up.
Forget transcending stereotypical plotlines -- if writers can't come up with a name for an ethnic minority character without descending into farce, then perhaps it's for the best that they are ethnically cleansing the cast in preparation for never having anyone on Shortland Street again who isn't white. It might be a relief for us as well.
Who needs to be embarrassed within the national imaginary when one can just secede from it? Who cares about Shortland Street's own humiliated Chinese international student anymore when Chinese international students are -- wait for it -- producing their own soap opera? From the preview I've seen of the long-awaited Sunshine Beyond the Rain, it looks like an impressively professional production, sentimental and romantically tortured in the style of most Chinese soaps. Best of all, it features Chinese international students doing slightly more realistic things in Auckland than Li-Mei: hanging out in pool halls, smoking cigarettes, speaking Mandarin fluently and sleeping with each other rather than with no Chinese people.
RIP Dr Chen -- your time was well and truly up.
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Asking a question like "good god, did you see Garth George's column the other day?" would be a dead end on a site like this (so far at least), but someone did bring this little doozy to my attention yesterday:
I know that [climate change/polar caps melting] is codswallop, and every time I see a rainbow I have it confirmed for me. It tells me that God is keeping the promise he made to Noah after the world-drowning flood thousands of years ago recorded in Genesis.
"I establish my covenant with you," God told Noah. "Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the Earth ..."
So I'll keep on pumping gas into my four-litre Ford, the home fires will keep on burning, newspapers, magazines and books will remain my reading of choice ... and the doom merchants can prognosticate until the cows stop farting while I laugh in their faces.
Woah.