Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Legal Beagle: D-Day for Dunne (updated), in reply to Andrew Geddis,
Well, Andrew, I just found it rather hard to see the compelling public interest in that amendment to the Electoral Act being rammed through under all-stages urgency. (You probably don't want me taking the "grotesque abuse of urgency" hobby horse out for a canter this early in the day.) David Parker and Winston The Fatuous might beg to differ, but that excites my sense of constitutional outrage slightly more than this.
That said, yes, I can really do with Gerry Brownlee exhibiting slightly more gravitas than chanting "the Opposition need to grow up" (boo sucks) and my eyes are rolling at his, as you put, insouciance. That's self-serving and tiresome too.
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Law aside, I'm rather enjoying the theatrical outrage from the very people who pushed through a retrospective change to the Electoral Act under all-stages urgency to avoid a by-election in New Plymouth.
BTW, very well done on Morning Report Graeme.
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Hard News: Media3: We have much to discuss, in reply to BenWilson,
Yes, presumably underage sex can be depicted, just as sexual violence can be, so long as the presentation is in a way that is not designed to tittivate.
Seriously, what the hell does that mean? Arthur Everard got slagged off from both the left and right for being an excessively permissive chief censor, but he worked on the (to me entirely sensible) baseline that... well, New Zealand isn't a nation of high-functioning psychotics who can't distinguish between representation and act, reality and shadow.
Sorry for being a scratched CD on this, but I'm damn certain there are fucked up twists out there who find all the at least implicitly underage raping and sexposition in Game of Thrones enormously titilating, and I'm in no position to know whether it was "intended" to be so by the producers and writers. I'm not really comfortable with on-telepathic legislators, and the law, getting into areas so far beyond their pay grade.
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Hard News: Media3: We have much to discuss, in reply to Emma Hart,
It should also be noted that the 'child' only has to look like they're under 16. This also applies to cartoon fantasy characters - fairies, centaurs, dragons, etc, who look like they might be minors.
So, would now be a good time to hide the season one
Game of Thrones
BRs with the rest of the pornography? Seriously. EmiliaClarke may have been 23 when she was cast as Daenerys Targaryen; but while her age is carefully (and I suspect deliberately) not explicitly stated, she's playing a character who, in the books, is thirteen when she's pimped out by her brother for an army. Oh, and her husband doesn't take no for an answer.
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Hard News: Media3: We have much to discuss, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
What I object to is that a foreign multinational is able to operate monopoly newspapers that, as a matter of policy, encourage the proletards and toryscum in their worst prejudices
*sigh* Yeah, Rich, because New Zealand media was so thoroughly enlightened when it was being run by local media oligarchs with names like Wilson, Horton, Vogel, Blundell and Fitzgerald.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to SteveL,
Never said there wasn’t a lot of misinformation out there, or that people weren't influenced by it - just that not *all* the opponents are.
And if I've given you the impression that I think any such thing I'm deeply and sincerely mortified. At the risk of being presumptuous, I'm sure Russell would say the same. I'm one of this cranky old farts who believes human beings really suck at getting things perfect the first go round (if ever), which is why it's a really bad thing to legislate at any level by divine fiat.
I certainly don't have every nuance and wrinkle of the Unitary Plan clear in my head, and welcome other perspectives. But, with apologies for beating a dead hobby horse here, it's seriously disquieting that the only daily newspaper in Auckland appears to have slipped into quarter-arsed campaign mode and is failing at Journalism 101.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Chris W,
Correct SteveL. There seems to be a trend of labeling all opposition as mis-informed.
With all due disrespect, SteveL when you've got an opposition lobby group circulating "impressions" of the effects of the Unitary Plan that... well, aren't entirely accurate (and getting them published in Auckland's only daily newspaper)? "Mis-informed" is pretty fraking polite, in my book.
And I'm not going to apologize for saying that way too much of what I've seen and heard is whistling for some remarkably unpleasant dogs, rather than making reasonable and arguable criticisms of the Unitary Plan. I think it's very useful to call out people like Winston Peters and the racist rump of Grey Power trying to smuggle their anti-immigrant Yellow Peril bullshit into this debate.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
In 2007, Auckland was unable even to accept a free rugby stadium from Trevor Mallard
FFS, Matthew. Call me an unpatrioric rugby-hating Grinch if you must, but there were perfectly legitimate questions about how "free" it really was and Mallard did a terrible job of addressing those concerns rather than going on a charm(-less) offensive against those ghastly, impertinent elected local body politicians who'd have to figure out how to make up the shortfall. A perfectly justified impertinence, considering massive bydget blowouts on stadia aren't exactly unknown.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Russell Brown,
We actually need central government to stop its hostility towards Auckland Council and engage with its responsibilities here.
It might also be constructive to note relations between local and central government, function or no, aren't a one-way street.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Andre,
The vitriol spewed forth from rich elderley residents in the following weeks' letters to the editor, capped off by a piece of unadulterated rubbish from Grey Power.
And it's about time someone had the guts to state the obvious: There's a metric fuckton of barely sub-textual Yellow Peril racism. If nothing else, certain councillors should cash a reality check on both their demographic and what fretting about "tacky shoeboxes" and "over-development alien to the Kiwi lifestyle" sounds like to a non-trivial number of Aucklanders.
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