Posts by Bruce Thorpe
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Good one, Russell.
A professional communicator being thoughtful on a subject he knows very well. -
To get back to the motives of whistleblowers, that should never be the issue.Rejected love, nimbyism and unappreciated staffers are often the source of very valid inside information.
It always seems unreasonable to me that a critic is expected themselves to be above criticism, and to only be valid if supplied from those with impeccable motives and record. -
The greatest advantage of democracy is the extent to which the populace accept the process as fair and open.
For this reason a simple majority of votes has always been a favoured way to measure support for an option, but as we have learned with FFP when a simple majority is not achieved the the issue of fairness becomes more complex.
When the matter is not settling a single decision, but choosing long term representation, MMP provides an open system where the means of achieving a majority is at least still overt and comprehensible.
In my view STV does not properly achieve the same level of clarity. I believe voters choose a favoured candidate and then tick the boxes of a few familiar and inoffensive candidates.
I am suspicious of any electoral system where more than one vote is cast for candidates.
I am opposed with our current local government option where a number of councillors from a ward provide the voters with an equivalent number of EQUAL votes. This seems to skew the election in favour of prominence as such rather than personal support.
For example up here in the Far North District, in one ward voters cast four votes for councillors, and quite clearly a large number of fourth preference votes defeat a smaller number of first choice votes, and that seems contrary to the idea of democracy. -
Hard News: We are all twatcocks now…, in reply to Jackie Clark,
No distaste here, just a sense of HN and me drifting apart over time.
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I have only become aware of the word in this column and was not sure of how it should be said, and had no idea who had ever used it. Hardly the word of the year in my universe.
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Onions and carrots grown professionally have heaps of pesticide because of white fly,mostly.
Grow your own.
Eat them at all stages, baby carrots (spring, bunch varieties, etc) grow well in coffee grounds (the smell fools the whitefly as well as great drainage, Kew garden uses coffee grounds for seed mix I have been told)Try all sorts of onion variants such as spring onions, shallots, funky bunch onions.
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The Super City election has brought into the light a political coalition of Pasifika, socially conscious Christian and anti-privilege bogan activists.
I can see McCarten and Bradford will be interested in such a new leftish beast but I think there has always been more of this political flavour at the community level of council and trust board elections than in the much larger polling parliamentary elections.
I do not see a Matt and Sue party polling 5% -
Hone Harawira is a Maori nationalist.
Most of his generation of Maori activists have been uneasy with the Marxists' embrace, and I see nothing of class ideology in the politics of the women he claims to be his main advisors, Titewhai and Hilda.
There never has been a parliamentary role in this country for an avowedly marxist party, and I do not see one in the future. -
Happy birthday to your mum, Russell.
Being of similar vintage I was taken back to demonstrations of rhythmic gymnastics by visitors to Auckland Grammar with the vaulting horses and tumbling mats stacked to the side, and wondering not for the first or last time, if I was the only person at the school who saw things the way I saw them.
But the shots of Wellington streets made me realise how little people run in crowded places anymore. In those times, I was an Aucklander, there were commuters sprinting for buses, trams and trains and most athletic of all the ferry catchers, often with hats, coats and gladstone bags, racing down the wharves and leaping aboard with a ritualistic disregard of gangways. -
Selective trade boycotts can make a lot of sense, and certainly there are moral issues in selling weapons, but most tourism is pretty tacky from an ethical point of view.
I see no great harm in partaking of the scenery of other communities but once you get into receiving services from those with less economic opportunity, it all gets pretty slippery pretty fast.