Posts by B Jones
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That's a much better way to put it, and it sounds a lot less fatalistic about his role in sports broadcasting. It might even suggest there are people involved who've made a decision about it, who could theoretically have chosen to do something different. Talking about it as a right to be employed erases that responsibility.
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Does anyone have a right to employment? We have rights when we have an employment contract, and we have rights not to be discriminated against on certain grounds, but those grounds don't include assault convictions.
Veitch's employers have a right to employ him if they want, but he doesn't have a right to be employed.
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"Hard-working" could signal a different sort of other, though - those who are wealthy enough not to need a proper job. It depends on the context of course - if you use the term when you're talking about exploitative businesses it means something very different than when you're talking about people being on the dpb for however many years. I haven't analysed what's actually been said, but it's got potential either way.
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They might have been trying to do something similar, but it's not the same for them. You need something populist but convincingly left-flavoured - it looks insincere if it's not been part of your recent political history. Labour would need to cannibalise the Greens in the same way that Brash ate into Act's support. I'm not sure that's possible or a good idea. Certainly the long term outcome of the Brash effort has been bad for the racist right, who no longer have a powerful political advocate.
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I'm curious as to whether this theory applies as well to the right. Don Brash was no centrist, yet he was at least partially successful in kicking the early 2000s National Party out of electoral doldrums, and while he didn't quite get over the line, he did enough damage to Act to reduce their political clout, and solidify National's overwhelming dominance of the right. Then the mistakes Labour made in responding to that resurgence lost them Maori support, and once Brash had left the scene, that lost support in the Maori Party could safely ally with National . It was almost a five year game of bad cop, good cop, assuming it was deliberate.
It's not a safe bet to say a right wing politician is too crazy to be electable. I'm not up to play with Trump's likelihood of presidential success, but he's certainly eating the other Republicans' lunch.
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I had plenty of fun last summer with a deck and the bloody council, but it wasn't the rules that were the problem, it was the penny-ante business processes used to work around the rules. Got a twenty day ticker for approving consents? Start the clock a week after you've received them to give yourself administrative headroom. Got a missing piece in the application? Sit on it for three weeks then send it back to the designer rather than follow it up when the client calls to see what's happened. And by no means should you employ enough people to be able to answer accurately where someone's application is at. Or post a letter that's been sitting fully addressed in someone's inbox for a week.
Getting an inspection was a dream compared to dealing with the administrative arm.
Changing the rules won't fix that. Improving administrative support might, but that's not real work in the govt's mind.
I have some sympathy for the poor person who had to decide whether to pulp thousands of dollars of printing or get the marker pen out. It's a bad look either way.
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I pulled out Deborah's arguments about secondary taxation a while ago in conversation with relatives who thought it was terribly unfair. Always useful to have some reality inserted into subject that everyone has opinions about but few people have expertise in. Yay taxnerds.
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I think there's a legitimate question over the concentration of a kind of exclusive social and political connection being deployed here, and you can't unpick that without resorting to "gossip". That story about the Ya Ya Club for example - gossipy but genuine reporting as well. It's not trivial to wonder how the spaces in front of a tv camera may be increasingly getting filled up by a particular clique, and one of that clique's features seems to be spending a lot more money than the amount of useful work they do would normally generate. I wonder if we had a brief visit from that dimension here over the last few days, in the refugee comments.
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If Daman's comments weren't his genuine beliefs, that's trolling, and it's a great way to become unwelcome in online communities real fast.
I can't believe that's third year communications, it reads more like Phil 101 students arguing about the existence of God in the letters page of a student newspaper: "Lo, I have opinions. Let me share them. Why do you not instantly agree? Y U so mad? Just kidding, lolz."
That's the absolute antithesis of communications, and it's also pretty distasteful, using people's personal tragedies and our response as a country to that tragedy as casual online debating practice.
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Westside: I've been reading Maurice Gee's biography (thanks Craig for the inadvertent recommendation), and wondering whether his work based in West Auckland has had any sort of influence on the development of the world around the West family. I can't think of any obvious examples because I haven't read many of his Auckland books (just Under the Mountain and In My Father's Den), but it would be weird if it hadn't, being right down the road in both time and place.