Posts by Tom Semmens
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I picked up Mr. Clairborne's book at the Hard to Find in Onehunga. He didn't seem to have a bad bio when I looked the old duffer up, but there you go.
Great links BTW.
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Stephen Judd
"..horseshit,Ocean, defend, confidence, cost are all Latin, Greek or French in origin.
There must be some sort of law of the internet that people who make sweeping pronouncements about language always screw it up..."
Right I went back and checked my source, Robert Claiborne's "The life and Times of the English Language" and here is what he says:
"...IF our native words are syntactically powerful beyond their numbers, they are also powerful in another way: taken as a group, they stir the feelings in a way that the borrowings do not - a fact well known to those skilled at using our native tongue to persuade or inflame. Listen, for example, to Winston Churchill in 1940: "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." Every word of this is pure English, save only for the final French trumpet peel of surrender..."
So my point remains valid. Horseshit? I'm gonna send Whaleoil around to shoot you in the head and steal your cigars, which I shall smoke whilst snogging your widow at your funeral. Unless you are gay, in which case I'll quietly give the cigars back and wash my hands.
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"...We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender..."
You know, there is only one loan word in that speech, all the other words are original, solid, old English words. The loan word? Its from French, and its "surrender."
I don't know if that was deliberate or not, but Churchill had an innate understanding of the words that sound most weighty and important to a speaker of the english language.
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The most depressing aspect of the decline of Auckland is the generalised feeling of powerlessness to do anything about it. Everyone laughed at the “Absolutely Positively” campaign that got Wellington kick started several years ago now, but the capital is over-achieving and Auckland is most certainly under achieving. When I think of local government in Auckland I am reminded of the quote from the Duke of Wellington when asked his view of superior general who was taking over command of his army which roughly went something like this: “He has no plan, nor any idea of a plan, and indeed I do not know if he would recognise a plan if he saw one."
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I know something about boats, and a 35 knot ferry would not be practical within a confined waterway. However, I've always wondered why Auckland doesn't make better use of its harbour as a road. It seems to cost a squllion dollars and take months and months to build a few km of busway. How much to build a wharf and terminal every 3-5 km from Orewa right around the harbour and into the Tamaki estuary and then a canal and links through to Manakau? The ocean is there and provides a free ready make road that doesn't cost a cent. Even at a steady 16 knots for the regular "slow" ferry bus given that at sea you travel in a straight line between two points you would be very competitive with the road. The prevailing wind in N.Z. is a westerly, and the number of days the more open sea services up the Eastern coast would have to be cancelled could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.
I am not sure if much of what Richard Simpson proposes would stand up to detailed examination, but I think much of the problem in Auckland isn't so much a vision thing as the balkanised mind set of its local government. A massive "not invented here" syndrome afflicts all local government. Everything is conducted with one eye on petty power struggles. There seem to be entrenched camps that will oppose something simply to stop the other side looking good. And of course, there is the Kiwi obsession with zero or low cost short term incrementalism as a way of staving off making bowel emptying major decisions.
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New Zealanders are uncomfortable with discussing ideological conflict, because we have a national myth of egalitarianism and conformity. But attitudes to social security and poverty are touchstone philosophical issues that define who you are politically. John Key is a fundamentally a Tory, otherwise he wouldn't be in the National party, and Toryism has never accepted socialism of any flavour. The whole Tory Victorian idea of social Darwinism, of deserving and undeserving poor, of punishing the poor for their plight, and of relief from poverty being largely a function of arbitrary charity that allows crumbs to fall from the table of the rich into the outstretched hands of the suitably grateful poor is rooted in a deeply judgmental and conservative Christian morality. I suppose that’s why the charity model is so popular in the USA, where we are supposed to cheer when mega-billionaires give hundreds of millions back to "deserving" charities. But this is the attitude our grandparents and great-grand parents determined had to be done away with. They fought for - and won in this country - social security and the idea that everyone should be free of the fear of want regardless who they were. The New Zealand way, our egalitarianism, is really the "applied Christianity" of Michael Joseph Savage's social security made real.
John Key's prescriptions are just a return to the ideas of noblisse oblige discredited by the failure of the ruling elites to prevent either the Great War or the Great Depression. Nothing he says will satisfy those who oppose his ideological starting point. But he has potentially done the left a favour. By squarely placing the issue of income disparity and wealth distribution on the political agenda, he has opened the way for a debate on how those disparities and inequalities came about and how to best roll back the "reforms" that created them in the first place.
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I don't get why people get so carried away about flags, but after several beers my view on the matter is simple: A flag is meant to be a chauvenistic expression of nationalist sentiment. A wishy washy piece of wavy hippy crap (from Hunterwasser or Jeffy James) does doesn't cut it. I mean, can you se that that thing waving defiantly from the flagstaff's of our fleet as it engages the enemy more closely? it might look good over a organic public toilet in Northland but thats all.
Kiwi's seem to have largely spoken on the matter anyway. The Silver Fern on a black background has been used by New Zealanders as a national symbol since the first contingents headed off to the Boer war, and as such it pre-dates it use as a sporting flag. And for the intellectualising of the middle class, whenever Kiwi's seem to want to express nationalist sentiment, the black banner is what they seek out and black is what they dress in.
Like all good symbols, the black banner is simple, and expresses a simple, singular and powerful idea of nationhood that practically everyone is happy to identify with.
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repitition of opinion AS fact. Grrrr. Fatiigue from to big a gym session right there.
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Also from the "Northern Advocate: "Voters alienated by almost three terms of an increasingly arrogant and non-accountable Labour Government.."
Thats the sort of lazy passing off of repitition of opinion of fact that pisses me off most about the media in New Zealand.
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When last in Sydney - last November - myself and my two female companions visited the Chinese Garden at Darling Harbour (excellent fun if you dress up in Chinese costume before you wander around). As we left, we noticed a group of white, middle class yobbo's (trying to look like skinheads) attempting to catch ducks from the pond with hooks baited with bread. My female companions were shocked, not just at the obvious cruelty and the pleasure which the yobbos were obviously getting from it, but also at the complete indifference by any of the hundreds of people wandering about. We told the cashier at the gardens, who when calling the police didn't seem surprised or shocked, and eventually some NSW police, clad in the pseudo-paramilitary gear they seem to favour, turned up and chased them away. Thuggism seems to lurk very close to the surface over there.
When I travel to Australia, I am constantly struck by the racism and at the relentless plugging of a mono-cultural myth similar to the American dream. Led by John Howard, a canker is eating Australian society from the inside out. With heavy handed policing of kids at a rock festival in a country riddled with massive organised crime and police corruption, Acts of extreme violence on strangers, and blaming the victim for anyone who does not buy the prevailing societal values and myths, the Americanisation of Australia continues at breakneck speed.