Posts by Tom Semmens
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Jose: I grew up in a household of self-employed parents running their own small business, so to me many of the organisational requirements, worries and mysteries of such things were warp and woof of my life from a very early age - one my earliest memories is the bed made for us kids out the back of the shop, where we would fall asleep to the clatter of commerce. What has come as a revelation over my life is how clueless people from backgrounds of salaried families are to the world of running your own business. I am sure many of the journalists at the conference just saw a big blank space on their mental life map with "here be dragons" on it when you mentioned setting up their very own publication.
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Perhaps one of the declared aims of such a trust would be to campaign for media ownership law reform in New Zealand?
Anyway, if a Guardian like trust were to be set up I would contribute - but the "liberal tradition" would have to be mentioned.
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For some reason, reading all this reminds me of Spike Milligan...
"When I look back, the fondest memory I have is not really of the Goons. It is of a girl called Julia with enormous breasts."
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Hmmm, I am not going to comment anymore on this - Much like the Olympic threads, I have said my piece.
Frankly I think to expend anymore effort on it is to make us all look comically provincial and make Steve Crow and rest his meat market crew bigger than they are... Let him have his parade, blink and you'll miss it.
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PS Rant over.
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Let Steve Crow have his little “parade”, it’s hardly the end of the world if a few wannebe porn stars and assorted strippers want to roar down Queen street topless. After all, they are doing it voluntarily and there is no accounting for taste - a whole lot of Aucklanders spend a whole lot of time in strip clubs and the like, otherwise they wouldn’t exist. The people who oppose this parade are in large part the same sort of people who killed off the Hero parade so as far as I can tell its just an unholy alliance of prudes making a big deal over nothing. Indeed, by opposing the parade in court the council has chosen to play into Mr. Crows hands - yet again - and turned it into a battle between the po-faced, wowser christian property developers who pass as the city guardians and Steve Crow, defender of free speech. Odious as the sex industry (and they are pretty odious when you meet them) is, I'll support their right to be sleazy and odious. And as for the “left wing” Cathy Casey - spare me, that woman reflexively opposes anything and has made a local government carrer out of bitching about everything. All in all, the council reaction is yet another reason for local government reform in Auckland.
You would think that in a grown up city in a grown up country this wouldn’t even be an issue. In a tolerant city we would have a Hero Parade and boobs on bikes and even naked bicycle day, and people would find them a mildly amusing or mildly irritating footnote (unless you are a teenage boy, in which case it is a must see event). Instead, we have a city where a totally unrepresentative council (earnest left wing kill-joys and middle aged right wing Christian fundys appear to make up the bulk of them) spend their whole time either opposing anything or trying to line their own and their mate’s pockets by demolishing heritage buildings. When recently the local licencing N.Z. Police officer seriously suggested shutting down our only city, And it REALLY annoys me to see all the so-called “left wingers” lining up with Bob McCroskie and the rest of the Kiwi Taliban. Bring on the revival of the libertine left! Instead of celebrating the only New Zealand place that actually has an urban culture - an urban nightlife - and revelling in the various joys and tribulations of living in the naked city, the council had determinedly engaged in yet another reductio ad absurdo drive to reduce Auckland to an enlarged Timaru, just in case someone might be having some fun somewhere that someone else doesn’t approve of. One would hope at least Auckland would be a refuge in our own country from our reflexive Presbyterianism.
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Properly trained, paid and resourced journalists breaking well written, well researched, good stories will almost almost blow the enthusiastic online amateur out of the water. The trouble is, they don't exist anymore. Instead, opinion pieces are substituted for reporting and analysis - and everyone has an opinion.
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Actually the British Empire did use its hyper-power status stamp out slavery, and in the end for whatever reason bequeathed democracy to what is now a billion Indians. Compare that to the bitterness of the French retreat from empire in Algiers and Indo-China.
Whilst no one for a minute would pretend the real joy of Hilaire Belloc's little ditty:
"Whatever happens, we have got:
The Maxim gun,
and they have not."was about the increased speed one could extend the benefits of muscular Christianity and democracy to the white man's burden, here in NZ we have to be grateful for the certitude of their Imperial outlook, otherwise none of us would be here today. Funny thing, history - It's always the curate's egg.
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"...And lets not forget, that while Iraq was a mistake originally, it hasn't turned out all that bad. The silence now from the left-wing media on Iraq says it all...nothing much remains to criticise..."
I think the silence from people in general is because they've run out of adjectives to describe the enormity of the fuck up. Think about this: Who is America's most natural ally in the Middle East if you want to stop southward Russian expansionism? I'll give you a clue: Its got four letters, starts with an "I" and ends with a "N."
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Here is a question: For the Baltic states, is membership of NATO in reality as worthless as the security guarantees offered to Czechoslovakia in 1938? Would the Germans, French or Spanish (let alone the United States) really militarily confront Russia if it intervened to protect Russian minorities in those places? If not, why in God's name were they admitted to NATO in the first place?
The thing is, Western Europe is now hostage to Russian energy, and at the same time committed to defending members of its alliance who have huge Russian minorities (like in Ossetia). What worries me is we now have the potential of a Munich-like humiliation for the Western European nations over the Baltic States, followed by a "line in the sand" set of security guarantees for Poland, with the Russian dictator missing the new resolve in the West.... Where have we heard that sort of scenario before?