Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Wait a mo' - Unless you're privy to information I'm not, I've seen nothing to even imply that Jackie Lang was sacked because she has Asperger's.
To be quite honest, I found references to her Aspberger's gratuitious and irrelevant - or would her treatment somehow have been less appalling if she was"'normal"? Not from where I'm standing, Crag.
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I was surprised - although perhaps I shouldn't have been - at the extent to which MPs aren't familiar with the whiffier details of the Copyright Amendment Bil
OK, bu manfully resisting the urge to take the usual slap at politicians, I'd like to think I'm a moderately intelligent chap and every discussion of copyright law seem to end with me reaching for a wee fistful of aspirin and lying down in a dark room. And I'm not being lobbied from all quarters by industry groups, who I think it's fair to say have their own interests to protect which aren't necessarily the same as mine/consumers.
So, what kind of advice do you think MPs get - and do they bother to read it? :)
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Just FYI, Neil Finn has a *cough* free and frank response to his critics in The Herald's Time Out section today. Worth a read, as they say - not least for the sight of that pompous prima donna Howard Morrison getting a (IMO) long overdue slap.
Finally, back to the Real Groove article that these quotes were taken from. There is an argument that it might be a negative thing for New Zealand music to become an exercise in flagwaving and feelgood posturing by the Government and music industry. I was merely pointing out that we should be realistic about our chances in the wider world and not fall for an orchestrated and illusory hype job.
There are many brilliant musicians in this country and when they do reach a wider audience it will be because they have worked long and hard and have the talent. I wish them all well.
Well, indeed. And I must admit I got equally pissed off at the whole 'he lives in Australia, therefore he's not a real New Zealander' sneer. Even if it was true in Finn's case (which it's not), what exactly is Morrison's point beyond a rather pathetic mutation of the cultural cringe?
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Or I guess I could have boiled down all the above to one sentence: I don't read for confirmation bias, how about you?
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__The Listener's free to take any position it wants, but I'm also free to decline to renew the two subscriptions I currently support.__
Certainly... I've got to admit that I tuned out from The Listener back in the late 80's, not because I found the political content objectionable (even though I did) but because it was unreadable - the kind of clotted, pretentious, jargon-splattered prose Holcroft would have blue-penciled without mercy.
Which segues into this comment from Maureen Jansen:
__Yeah, that's what has always outraged me - that someone in a previously liberal mag is given a weekly platform to mouth conservative views.__
Strange it may sound from this Tory quarter, I spend quite a bit of time reading 'journals of opinion from all over the political spectrum like The Weekly Standard, The Spectator, The New Republic, New Statesman, The Nation, The Atlantic. Some are broadly 'conservative', others 'liberal', but they only interest me to the extent they provide a forum for lively, well-considered and interesting writing rather than impose some dull ideological orthodoxy - whatever it may be.
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Everything changes, but everything stays the same...
Nope... everything changes, but people - for better and worse - remain essentially the same.
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With you there. That tends to be my view of the ghastly excesses committed in the names of Marx and Mao.
Um yes... and getting my Polyanna mojo on, it's actually encouraging seeing some conservatives out there who aren't willing to totally surrender the field to the theo-cons. (People I don't actually consider all that conservative, given how fond they are of Mommy Statism, eroding separation of powers or State's Rights when it's inconvenient, and fiscal irresponsibility not seen since LBJ had his arms wrapped around the pork barrel.)
I'm sure I'm in the minority around here, but I'd rather not see American Conservatism surrender to the Coulters and Dobsons without a fight.
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But they're not debating how their philosophy should change: quite a few of them are saying "it challenges our philosophy, therefore we should refuse to believe it."
Oh dear... Reminds me of a bizarre conversation (well, it was a monologue while I did my best cornered bunny routine) years back I once had a women's studies major who was going to convince me or else biology was a construct of patriarchal normative hegemony. Don't you just love it when science becomes politically inconvenient?
There's a book to be written on politics as secular religion, and why it's not a very good idea.
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Oh, and on a tangentially related matter -- bipartisan kudos to Helen Clark and John Key for a pretty temperate response to events in Wanganui. (Tariana Turia, Michael Laws and Ron Mark... well, understandable but I'm not sure how construcitve their contributions will turn out to be.)
The media, for the most part... creepy. I'd like to think my suspicion some media outlets would be rather chuffed by a gang war is too cynical, even for me - but I'm just not sure if some line between straight (and sober) reportage and pumping up the melodrama to justify the coverage got crossed very early in the piece.
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Because young people do need a 'training' period to learn to drink responsibly (well, semi-responsibly, even adults can't seem to manage it). Of course we all drank stupidly when we were young but that happened in our late teens because alcohol was only available by law to 21 y.o.'s.
Nobody Important, I've never really found that argument terribly convincing, either logically or empirically. There are people - raises hand, waggles fingers in a friendly manner - who don't, can't "drink responsibly" at any age. My memory might be rather fuzzy, but wasn't there a case a few years back when some little charmer wiped out three people while driving loaded on vodka purchased for him by his mother? You're right, when a culture is that f**ked up something does have to change, but I don't think turning the drinking age into a political ping pong ball is going to do a damn thing about it. And at the risk of sounding glib, it's also pretty hard to legislate against cretins doing incredibly stupid things for reasons that defy reason.
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