Posts by Lyndon Hood
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[sorry but I'm not looking up references today]
I believe late last year it emerged that, before the invasion, the had been a war game about what would be needed to achieve a stable Iraq after an invasion.
As I recall, lots and lots and lots of troops were not enough.
Also bear this in mind
As of 01 March 2006 there were 133,000 US troops in Iraq, down from about 160,000 in December 2005 during parliamentary elections.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_orbat.htm [okay, that is a reference]
So not a big difference, probably not even a all-time high.
I say, stop digging.
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Listening to a first nation bloke lecturing on Nat Rad a whiles back, I got the feeling one issue in Canada was the state imposing their own strict genetic definition of nativeness the wasn't that helpful and would see them bred out of existence in fairly short order.
Sorry if I sound wildly vague today. I'll work on it.
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On the "pakeha" thing: I though Michael King had dealth with that. The entire population of the planet read Michael King, right?
A very nice person also just got me the "Best of Whim Wham" (goverment name Allen Curnow). There's a nice response to an MP calling the term a vulgarism in a Treaty bill debate. Don't have it with me, and it would be a bit naughty to copy the whole thing out, but aside from casting aside variou spurious derivations, there was one memorable bit describing the 'vulgarism' as "older than the poet Byron".
Assimilation - if it helps anyone, I read an interesting model in "Critical Mass" a book about using physics-style modelling for social science (and an interesting overview of the history of social science).The idea was if neighbouring zones oin a grid shared the same value for one of several characterisitcs (analogous to cultural features) they could make the value for another one equal every turn.
As I recall, you tended to end up with one dominant culture (set of values), perhaps with one or two ghettoes unable to communicate with the majority.
Not a excellent model for the purposes, I'd have said, be interesting.
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Maori ancestry traced back to Taiwan
Surely none of that was actually <i>new</i> discoveries by July '05?
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4.5 x 2.4 x 0.46 inches / 115 x 61 x 11.6mm, most of which is a touchscreen. Runs on the cingular network. Doesn't say if it will try to assimilate you, but seems to do most everything else.
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The iPhone, which starts at $499 [US, I guess], is controlled by touch, plays music, surfs the Internet and runs the Macintosh computer operating system. Jobs said it will "reinvent" the telecommunications sector and "leapfrog" past the current generation of hard-to-use smart phones.
Also, Apple Computers will now be Apple Inc.
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Stuff site is currently down.
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Eye tiddly eye-tie, eat brown bread
I've proven to my own satisfaction that Google will be of limited help. You can do phrase searches for each line. There''s a noticabely different nonsense poem (that seems to be a transcribed from " I Saw Esau", rhymes collected Iona and Peter Opie c1947) and someone's google-cached myspace page has "Up jumped the beefburger".
Someone may need to look in a book.
Can you tell it's Friday afternoon? Oh yes.
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FYI when I think about defining ethnicity I think of "shared culture and heritage". But - and this is one place where you have to stop and think when using the other definitions - that's far wider and deeper than having some things in common. If you want real rigour, 'ethnicity' doesn't define too well; if you don't, being able to find flaws isn't all that impressive. I know it when I see it.
I'll try this way: If you name the ethnicity that you identify as your own as "New Zealander", people who are ethnically different to you are not New Zealanders. No matter, for example, where they come from or who (which) was here first.
lots of people feel that they are New Zealanders, and not some other ethnicity/nationality/citizenship/culture or whatever
I was thinking of for the purposes of demographics.
And no amount of internet comversation will shake from me the belief that those people do have an ethnicity that could happily fall into one of the other categories.
I'm reminded of people of perhaps the previous generation who felt we had no national culture. Now, there's been a lot of mixing, change and narrating since then, but I would submit that there was something there - it's just hard to see it when you're standing in the middle of it.
I'm still working of precisely how that's relevant, though. And I think I'm basically talking about pakeha there.
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The issue I have is this:
If I were writing in "New Zealander" I would be assuming that the culture and heritage that I share with a lot of other people can sensibly be referred to by a name that makes it sound like it's the culture and heritage of the whole country. It either ignores any other cultures in/of the country - and they are there - or downgrades them.
No matter what the motives, it looks like cultural chavanism.
One assumes a lot of people writing that in are white - especially judging by who would respond to that email campaign. But the above graph doesn't actually show that - "New Zealander"s were added to European in 01, seperated in 06. Problem solved. If you had the raw numbers, they might tell you something.
I've never actually read "New Zealand European" as implying a personal connection with Europe. But my culture and my heritage originated with white Europeans (yes, Britishers) and was transplanted here long enough to now be well distinct. Hence, they put the "New Zealand" bit first.
Personally, I would prefer Pakeha, even in the face of all the debate above. But there are plenty of people I would call that that wouldn't want to be called it.
Of course, "New Zealander" also messes up the statistics - if everyone who felt that the mere desrciptor "New Zealander" applied to them actually wrote that in, we wouldn't have any more ethnicity information than we did before asking the question.
I don't pretend the forms are perfect now - and this question is apparent exactly the kind of thing they have huge debates about in statistics conferences.
I would submit that the bulk of the countries mentioned on the form might actually have a more homogenous or uniquely local culture than us.
I am a New Zealander. But what I share with all the other ones, other than country of origin, I can probably find out more about looking at this thread than into my heart.