Posts by Craig Ranapia
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And, Che, I'm feeling remarkably good about being 'beyond angry' that Harawira has the gall to call anyone a 'racist bastard' - and is getting applauded by folks who should know a little better - when he can on the race-baiting immigrant bash without comment.
Then again, I guess sickly white pseudo-liberals have to walk a very delicate tightrope when the red neck is brown and in our own backyard. And it's kind of sad that when the likes of Harawira and Turia have someone like Pita Sharples - who I genuinely respect, and has the charm of the devil - willing to do the media wash-and-spin on their behalf.
In the end, Che, the Australian electorate is going to pass judgement on Howard - and I have my doubts the verdict is going to be to his liking - and that's how it should be. I'm more concerned that we should be talking out our own trash - and our very own racist bastards - before affecting any degree of moral or political superiority over anyone else.
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Otherwise I don't believe the Pacific should act as a moat across which criticism may not pass.
Certainly not, but I sure hope the traffic goes both ways -- because I don't think New Zealand has a great history of welcoming megaphone diplomacy from Canberra. Or Washington. Or Westminster.
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Gasp! we could be a target. Heck we'd better scrap the system pronto: party vote ACT this election. That's what I say.
Well, if you're that worried about dirty furriners prodding your nethers before they strap a bomb to Granny's new hip -- and judging from the accents and skin tones of the folks who treated my partner when he had his heart op done at Mercy, there's just as many of THEM in the private sector -- you better put your vote elsewhere.
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I find it hard to think of any demographic less likely to become terrorists than doctors. They have a lot to live for, and live to heal.
I'd like to think so. But Ben Goldacre dug up a rather disturbing factoid, in passing, in the column I linked to in the last thread,:
Doctors had been active participants in the Nazi project, and joined Hitler’s National Socialist party in greater numbers than any other profession (**45% were party members, compared with 20% of teachers**).
I'm not trying to get this thread Godwined, but while it would be nice to think putting your kids though medical school would act as a vaccine against being a religious fanatic or a murderous ideological bigot, it doesn't work like that. Bugger.
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That's a great piece by Craig. But I did enjoy the irony of his "and pay careful attention" admonishon to his listeners :-)
Fair cop, you could almost hear me waggling my finger in a school-marmish way. :) But, really, if you're going to use the plural form of 'group' in your lead and headline, then you better come up with more than one. I actually agree with Russell - you can have a serious argument on all kinds of level about whether trying to import our health sector workforce like flat-screen TVs is anything more than a quick fix patch. I'd be thankful if the only daily newspaper in New Zealand's largest media market would contribute to it.
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Hone & the Maori party talk on racism is from the expert position of experience & they're not radical, they're really quite reasonable.
Michael: Sorry, but 'racist' is exactly what I'd called the anti-immigrant bullshit brown neckery I've heard flow from the Maori Party - especially when there's no MSM reporters around.
And if the following appeared (with a few small tweaks) under the name of John Key, rather than Hone Harawira, I think 'racist' would be the mildest response.
__Do you think that current immigration policies are aimed at stopping the "browning" of New Zealand?__
Anonymous, via emailA couple of years ago, statisticians predicted a 'browning' of Aotearoa by 2025; saying that by then we’d be the largest Polynesian centre in the world. And then, hello, in the last two years, all of a sudden the net number of migrants from the UK goes up by 20,000. Government will tell you it’s not about race, it’s about skills. Brownies will say "yeah right."
I guess the Maori Party has no problems with that, because the whole column is archived on their website. Then again, when you've got Winston Peters and Kyle Chapman as a benchmark, then I guess that is the reasonable face of 'we're being swamped in our own country' immigration rhetoric.
I welcome the long-promised top to bottom review of the Immigration Act that's apparently going before the House later this year. Urgently needed and long overdue. But all I'll say is God help us all if the Maori Party and Winston First get their grubby little fangs into it.
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BTW, I wonder what the reaction would be if some backwoods Australian MP stood up on his hind legs and opined that Helen Clark was a racist bitch in thrall to the politically correct dykeocracy?
Whatever I think of her and her government, I must admit my immediate reaction would be to suggest he stick to something more closely related to the job he was elected to do. Failing that, it's never too early to buy your sister a Mother's Day present.
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AFAIC, Hone should be a damn sight more concerned about the brown necks in his own party - starting with the more unhinged half of the leadership.
And Banks vs. Hubbard. Well, I guess a campaign season that's going to resemble nothing more than Dumb and Dumber, Part Deux should have some entertainment value. I can only hope this time round, the Herald's election coverage is going to be a little more extensive than Brian Rudman and whatever hobby horse he's riding at the time.
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Regardless, Frida is worth seeing though it's one of those films that's a fascinating failure. And if you can lay hands on a copy of Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film, Taymor has an truly awful 'why I'd rather die that work with Harvey Weinstein again' story, which is saying something.
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Andrew Wilson wrote:
I'm sympathetic to the 'mercury mums'. I've met lots of parents of ASD kids while researching here and they are all, in general, lovely people desperate to know what happened to their child. They just want something to blame, and MMR etc was a convenient scapegoat.
Well, so do I - and I don't expect journalists to be freaking pod people. But they also have an ethical and professional responsibility to value truth above scaring the shit out of people - while playing on their sentimentality - for fun and profit. The enormous sympathy I felt for the family of Folole Muliaga doesn't change the fact that I was nauseated by the media/political lynch mob that formed up with indecent haste.
And I know this isn't what you meant, but I'm quite happy if scientists don't pick up the ability to speak fluent soundbite when discussing their work, and it's not their responsibility to do so. I'm more interested in the media learning to treat science intelligently and accurately.
Rodgerd wrote:
There's a certain irony that one of the first terms of abuse to be rolled out by vaccination flat-earthers in these debates is often the idea that 'pill-pushers' are on the payroll of 'big pharma', yet in the case of the autism scares, it turns out that the people most financially compromised are the ones whose work is being used to decry vaccination
Well, as Ben Goldacre says just look at the data:
We live in troubled times, where scientific research - at least in popular forums like newspapers - is only ever critiqued by ad hominem attacks on the person who did it. Evidence showing that MMR is safe was rubbished, because some researchers once accepted a drug company pen; and similarly, when the MMR scare died in the popular imagination, it wasn’t because of the evidence, but because Andrew Wakefield was shown to have personally profited from legal cases and applied for potentially lucrative patents for the alternatives to MMR. It would have been less complicated if everyone had just looked at the data.
But how bad would someone have to be for you to completely disregard the findings from their research, simply on the grounds of who they were? An adulterer? A recipient of private consulting fees? How about a cold-blooded racist, homophobic mass murderer?
This Sunday a smoking ban comes into force. In 1950 Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill published a preliminary “case-control study” - where you gather cases of lung cancer, and find similar people who don’t have the disease, and compare the lifestyle risk factors between the groups - which showed a strong relationship with smoking. The British Doctors Study in 1954, looking at 40,000 people, confirmed the finding.
You wouldn’t know it, but the Nazis beat them to it.
Keep reading...
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