Posts by Barnaby Nicholls
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Thanks for all your work, mate - I've been a more-than-weekly reader of this website since the early days of Media7, but only just recently joined so I could comment as well. It doesn't take long looking around the web to realise that the culture here is special. I imagine any budding sociologist would generally find reading the comments below the line a depressing experience - but it's always a pleasure on Public Address.
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Hard News: Local interest, in reply to Tim Hannah,
I read the Stuff report on the 'apology', but it seems to have been edited - "Mystery" in the headline has been replaced by "Morrison", and a couple of other points are absent that I'm pretty certain I didn't imagine!
I'm looking forward to the release of Generation Zero's report cards for the candidates - local body elections could do with a bit more youth attention. Such a low vote turnout will lend significant force to relatively small voting shifts - bringing out people who don't usually bother voting would be an effective strategy, methinks. Of course, that's also the case with the 25% who don't vote at national level.
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Hard News: Local interest, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Too true - when the Dom Post finally reported his ludicrous showering remarks (lagging behind an Auckland newspaper - which is ridiculous in itself), they didn't even use his name in the headline. They talked about 'Mystery remarks', and then filled the article with references to "Former NZ cricketer John 'Mystery' Morrison" - it read like an indulgent fluff piece about him "landing in hot water", which is quite an act of contortion.
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I'm told John Morrison is likely to win the Wellington mayoralty, which is a truly disturbing thought. Dinosaurs aren't really extinct, after all. A delight came in the voting packet - all the candidates except Celia Wade-Brown have given their party as "Independent", while she is down as "A Good Choice for Wellington". That's a stroke of genius that marks her out on the ballot paper (the party name appears next to each candidate)
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Hard News: Friday Music: Dancing Fool, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Glorious, thank you. Seems to be just like posting on Facebook, which I doubted was the case.
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How the hang do you embed clips in a post? I'm new, and I really hope this works, because the Pet Shop Boys have started pumping out honest-to-god bangers
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/qNR8gQAoYCs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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It's hard to know exactly what kind of model is ideal for newspapers - they're still large news-gathering/disseminating organisations, and continue to be widely read. Profit may be just about impossible for them, so all they have left to recommend them is influence - and this leads to ownership by those who can afford to run them at a loss. Murdoch's grip on the British press is incredible, let alone his much more significant influence in Australia - owning a newspaper may not be directly profitable, but political influence can pretty easily be converted into entrenching a favourable environment and ensuring considerably more significant profits for their other commercial interests than newspapers have ever earned for themselves.
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There's nothing more disturbing than a government granting itself more power and failing to construct adequate accountability or oversight mechanisms.
Marriage equality aside, I'm having trouble thinking of any legislation this government has passed which hasn't aided the privileged few at the expense of the rest. Tertiary education cuts, charter schools, welfare "reforms", and so on. National is the party of freedom - freedom to fall in the absence of a safety net, with the predators less constrained when hunting in the jungle.
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The surname point is interesting - I, too, see no point in one taking the name of the other. I know of several people who took a less mainstream route and chose a new name together - it would make genealogies complicated (although they're historically bloody patriarchal), but it's much less random than the traditional practice. The Swedish actors Noomi and Ola Rapace provide an example of the chosen-marriage-name practice ("Rapace" is French for "bird of prey").