Posts by Joe Wylie
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Thought Chris Knox was the odd one out myself.
Yeah. While the intricacies of pakeha culture and its on-again-off-again honours system are a little beyond me, 'Sir' Chris Knox seems less likely than 'Sir' Dave Dobbyn. Or even 'Sir' Buzzy Bee.
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Pavlova, whitebait patties, afghan and anzac biscuits, Buzzy Bee, Phar Lap and Cardigan Bay, Sir Colin Meads and Sir Richard Hadlee, Speights, Lord Rutherford, Chris Knox and Dave Dobbyn, Katherine Mansfield and James K Baxter.
No Pakeha culture? Yeah, right.That'd be the James K. Baxter who, commenting on the futility of attempting to suppress Maori culture, said that if all Maori were cast into jail to rot the stench would kill us all.
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Joscelyn Godwin
Goodness - any relation of Mike?
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Maybe we make Whanganui a world heritage site or apply for a Unesco World City of Literature or something as a consolation prize for adding the 'h'
Sounds like a retread of the shonky 80s pipe dream to turn W(h)anganui into a kind of low-budget HQ for the Olympic movement - hyped at the time by the now largely forgotten De Coubertin institute. A quick Google reveals that Laws is the only one who seems to remember, and he ain't going there.
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DPF's slack-jawed credulity regarding the ridiculous Trevor Loudon isn't surprising. As he made clear here a couple of years back, he's happy to outsource his thinking on the red menace to the guy who stated on his own blog, and proudly reiterated it when challenged by a disbelieving commenter, that his wife and children are his property to do with as he pleases.
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. . . which school I went to . . .
That particular form of bum-sniffing is very much the go on Sydney's lower North Shore, where even the wait staff in restaurants seem to have gone to "good" schools. Once, in Neutral Bay, I witnessed a monocled fop - an actual monocle, the only time I've seen such a thing in real life - engage a waitress in a long yibbling conversation about what school she'd been to. Bloody annoying when you're waiting for someone to take your order.
Compared to Christchurch, it's an anthropoligist's paradise.
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And the only convicts to actually be shipped here from Australia were those under 'sentence of death to be eaten by the cannibals of New Zealand."
They were probably at greater risk of being cannibalised if they'd stayed in Australia.
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which first four fleets?
All Cantabrians bear the convict stain. It's knowledge, Bro.
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I blame the death of WWII vets. They came back as victims of foreign policy decisions and the welfare state was born. When they started to retire the welfare state was destroyed.
The people you're describing are/were Muldoon's "Rob's Mob". There certainly was a sense of entitlement, often in the form of a do-as-little-as-poss job at the likes of NZR, in return for having fought the war. Muldoon pandered to this, and his brand of highly selective socialism deliberately pitted one "deserving" generation against the younger and supposedly less-deserving.
As Rob Stowell has already pointed out, social welfare in NZ long predates WW2. If anything, welfare today is far more widely spread and administered according to need than it was in the post WW2 years. Key seems well aware of the dead end of the Brash experiment, and can bail out of that line of policy whenever it may become inconvenient by pulling the plug on Rodney "no mandate" Hide.
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. . . Islamists who have no concept of woman's rights that we would recognize, stone to death woman accused of adultery who are actually victims of rape and think gays should be killed . . .
This from a guy who thought it a splendid wheeze to parrot the expression "hairy armpit brigade" here a while back when sneering at feminists who begged to differ with his beloved Republican agenda. Just a slight derivative detour from James's usually well-formed arguments.