Posts by Craig Ranapia
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BTW, am I the only person who remembers when Sue Bradford had no confidence whatsoever in the Solomon-like wisdom of the Police when it came to discretionary judgement calls about when to prosecute folks for offences under the Crimes Act.
Of course, those were the days when the popular image of Ms. Bradford was of a professional protester who spent half her time being put in choke-holds and dragged away from protests by her hair, and the rest plotting the next pinko riot.
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OK, am I the only person who quietly mutters 'bullshit' every time I hear the claim that 'time out' is a non-violent method of disciplining children?
No, what it is rather effective pychological intimidation that conditions children to associate undesirable behaviour with physical isolation and withdrawal of affection/attention from a parent.
If you did that to a partner or subordinate in the workplace, it would be called harassment, intimidation, psychological domestic abuse... or flat out assualt.
So, when is Sue Bradford going to introduce the bill banning a nasty form of mind-fucking defenceless children?
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Where's Hiro when you need him?
Midland, Texas: Six months ago, and having a pretty dreadful life lesson. Poor puppy.
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Do you have any idea how difficult it is to put little leather chaps, harnass and false eyelashes on a guineapig?
It's got to be easier than getting a three year old, up, dressed, through the bathroom, fed and watered, reunited with 'Golly (don't ask) and person-handled into a car seat... all by 6.45am. And then the fun really begins...
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Hadyn:
Heh... Now here's a new essay question.
1) Guinea-pig-friendly programming on TV should be much better. (There should be some, for a start.)
2) You can't call a gay male 'Princess' - at least not if you want a second date, and he's already told you to call him 'Sir'.
Discuss - and show your working.
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3410 wrote:
When I dealt with them "awash in production money" is exactly what they were.But not so flush they could could afford to sustain too many debacles like 'The Point' or that awful Water Rats clone that got balled up from one end to the other, I suspect. On one level, I feel some sympathy with the argument that TVNZ is held up to a surreal standard of success for television drama/comedy that not even the often cited BBC/ABC can live up to - after all, we never see the misfires, flops or projects that died in the womb at considerable expense. OTOH, you can't call yourself a 'public service broadcaster' when you've got the begging bowl out in Wellington than tell everyone else to bugger off once you've cashed the cheque.
I'm buggered if I can figure out what Steve Maharey means by 'public service boradcasting' beyond the usual unexceptional, and meaningless, platitutdes about 'national identity' (which is?) 'seeing our own stories' (channel dedicated to 24/7 Shortland Street Re-runs, Steve?) etc. If you can translate it into English, 3410, you'll have my eternal gratitude.
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Posted on You Tube? ;)
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Oddly enough, Maori TV is doing this, on a fraction of the budget. Takataapui, "the only show for gay, lesbian and transsexual Maori", actually covers real stories - things that actually matter to the community, like the closure of Herne Bay House. There is no shortage of skills or motivation to make a sensible programme for the gay community. But what TVNZ wants seems anything but sensible.
Well, dare I say it, but could it be that MTS aren't exactly awash in production money (and have a certain siege mentality that whitey are out to get 'em anyway) so they just can't afford to green-light any half-arsed nonsense to fluff the local content hours, and minority checklist, that keeps the Charter cash flowing. (That's not to say it hasn't turned out some crap - it takes some perverse genius to make Hori Ahipene & Te Radar boring, but it happened. Still. it's hard not to argue they're doing more with less. The strangely hypnotic Ask Your Auntie is more interesting, and informative, than the back half of the news hour on Three or TVNZ.)
Here's the nice thing about living with a gay man who's been around a lot longer than you have: He remembers what it was like long before law reform where anything in the media with even a hint of gay or lesbian subtext was grasped with both hands for pretty obvious reasons. Now, you can mince down to Whitcoulls and pick up gay/lesbian-themed magazines, novels and DVDs they would have been prosecuted for even trying to import thirty years ago.
Sorry, girls, putting a NZ flag and a red ribbon on a pig doesn't mean you can take 'the community' for granted.
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Riddley:
Oh, that was just me being snarky - because that's another part of the Moore-Coulter shtick that really pisses me off - the Park Avenue populist, pretending they're oppressed but undaunted speakers of truth to the evil forces arrayed against them. Please, if that pair ever said anything genuinely 'politically incorrect' to their respective constituencies - as opposed to just scratching their nastiest little itches like a whorehouse medic with no penicillin during a VD epidemic - well, I'd die of shock.
From the right side of the spectrum, I find it depressing that it wasn't so long ago that real conservative writers and thinkers like Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, Alan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama were on the bestseller lists and getting serious media attention. (And I could draw a similar line of de-evolution on the left.) When Coulter is the Madonna/J.K. Rowling of American conservatism, then I think we've gone from dawn to decadence in a human lifetime.
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Simon:
Sorry? Perhaps I'm really politically incorrect, but I do like books being marketed as non-fiction to undergo some basic fact-checking before they hit the shelves - a good start is making sure footnoted quotes and references bear some relationship to their source material. Otherwise, you might as well sign up David Irving and give him the spurious respectability of appearing under the imprint of Random House or the Penguin.
I know this offends their respective fan clubs, both on the loony left and the rabid right, but one carefully elided quote or fudged chain of events you can put down to human error. One crack like the one you quoted from Coulter, or Moore frothing that the 9/11 attackers should have remembered nobody in Manhattan voted for Bush, you can write off as "well, we've all said stupid things and moved on."
But when we're talking about a long history of OTT rhetoric, careless disregard for easily checked matters of fact, distortion of their own cited sources, evasion and smears against critics and (let's face it) FLAT OUT LIES, when does the Moore-Coulter Axis of Stupid stop getting a pass because it's ideologically congenial.. and enormously profitable?
Some folks, I'm sure think I've OTT myself in bringing a Holocaust denier like David Irving into this discussion. Well, I don't think so. If anything positive came out of Irving v. Lipstadt & Penguin Books, it was to reassert the notion that 'Truth' isn't just a hegemonic construct of the dominant power paradigm. It exists, and it matters - especially when, like David Irving, you're presenting yourself as an intellectually credible speaker of truth to power.
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