Posts by Phil Palmer
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I'd like to add something about the dialogue on Outrageous Fortune. It crackles. It's interesting to listen to. It's written for characters with thoughts and a point of view. It tells you more about what's happening than just what's happening. Packed To The Rafters, please note. The actors do great with it, too.
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I can't say that I share your sympathy with Edroso's point. Other people may have discovered warblogging, swift boats, tea bagging and so on - I discovered Salam Pax, Talking Points Memo and Digby. People aren't stupid and ignorant and hate-filled because blogs told them so, it's because that's what they were already. Edroso comes across as a journo with professional jealousy issues - that at least is understandable in human terms but is hardly cause for a recommendation.
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Interesting that McCann is pushing a global-city strategy based on Auckland (which presumably evaluates to: more motorways! one big council! more motorways!) when the one and only example of anyone inducing a multinational to put its FDI (whatever that is) into NZ is Peter Jackson.
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I think you'll find that a great many people, especially in the disability sector, find "retard" and "retarded" equally stigmatising.
Yes, that is the official position. But you don't jump down your kids' throat for saying a computer interface is retarded; I'm guessing you would if he said the interface was "for retards", or "by retards".
I don't use either term but I don't like the alternatives either. I wouldn't be able to say someone had a learning disability unless I knew what their learning experience actually was. There is too much presumption that school today is a perfect learning environment where inability to achieve is the symptom of a personal flaw. Some schools might be, but I distrust the presumption. And a few years ago, "disability" was itself a shunned word.
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oops, I see someone has already covered my point about retarded.
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Unless Paul Henry paraphrased himself at another point in his programme, what he actually said was that Susan Boyle was"retarded", not that she was "a retard". There is a significant difference; the first usage derives from an attempt to express disability in terms of a flawed developmental model, the second is a stigmatisation. If people are dealing with which words are offensive, they should be precise, or else they fall into the same trap as those who banned the word "niggardly".
I am not, however, prepared to cut Henry any slack over his remarks. He did follow up by claiming that one can tell that she's retarded just by looking at her, look at her closely, etc. This is direct stigmatisation.
The larger question is why any of this is on television in the first place. Why are we expected to spend breakfast looking at presenters? Why not scientists or educators? Or a soap opera? Why should we be noting Clayton Weatherstone's remarks when he was only discussing someone in the terms that economists discuss the luckless victims of their policies every day, whose forced circumstances magically become their optimal and efficient economic choices? Sure, he's a monster. But economists are monstrous, and that never gets on television.
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Am I to take it that you are so enraptured of this Tivo device that you are now in favour of two-tier internet? (Uncapped data transfer for "premium" Tivo users at the expense of everyone else.) OH NOES sa Telecom, we never saw that coming.
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While New Zealand's broadband is generally accepted as being off the pace of the rest of the world, Minicola says TiVo is unaffected by this.
She said that data delivered at a modest speed of 1.5Mbps (megabits per second) it would only take three to five minutes to download the first ten minutes of programming.
1.5Mbps isn't a modest speed on my broadband connection, it would be blazing. I shall wait and see just how happy telecom customers are with their Tivos before I think of joining them. But a most appropriate contribution to a post about crazies, thanks JPH.
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Greetings Ben Wilson! I want you to bottle two media interviewers, six production assistants and two cameramen. Your reward will be three trollhide inflammable sofas.
You will receive 1g 20s
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"Put simply, our healthcare problem is our deficit problem. Nothing else even comes close."
I would have thought military and prison spending came close, though prison spending is probably hidden in state budgets.