Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
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Today's library bosses want to spend $70million on a massive and inappropriate rebuilding project that will see much of the collection unavailable for three years and with no guarantee of the safety of the collections or the jobs of the specialist librarians.
This just in. The building redevelopment will still go ahead, but at a significantly reduced cost and with a narrower focus on fixing the building's structural problems and addressing storage. The more grandiose and inappropriate aspects of the redesign will probably go:
The scaled back project would require the design work to be revisited and a fresh resource consent would be sought from Wellington City Council.
Unfortunately, staff and those of us who conduct research there regularly are still going to be seriously inconvenienced, but at least the revised design may be slightly less Arcade Game than a lot of us feared.
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3 News has obtained articles written by Mr Shearer
OMG magic! Thanks goodness we have Duncan Garner to dig up this super-secret stuff! Is there no limit to 3 News' omniscience?
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Well, the first 90% of that story is interviewing said emos and someone who revealed that "you can't see it".
Well it can't be easy with all those fringes ...
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In New Zealand, more than 8000 people died, with Maori particularly badly struck. At its height, the country virtually ground to a halt.
Something like 22% of Western Samoa's population died in only two weeks.
Here's the rather bloodless policy perspectives paper on the economic impact of a pandemic that Treasury released in 2006: "Impacts of a Potential Influenza Pandemic on New Zealand’s Macroeconomy".
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Yes, John Drinnan does seem to be somewhat obsessed with you Russell. He use "taxpayer funded" as if they were dirty words. So, should we refer to the "taxpayer funded New Zealand Army" or "taxpayer funded hip operations"?
Yeah, or perhaps we could refer to Drinnan as a business- and Irish-media-oligarch-funded journalist.
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Most of this comes from Michael King's "Being Pakeha", where he argues that "Pakeha" is also an indigenous culture of NZ. It exists only here, and it has evolved as a result of engagement with the unique conditions of living here: partly the land itself, but also contact with Maori, the lasting influences of Anglo/Celtic roots, the recent experience of being colonists and the sense of distance from Britain.
Yeah. It's an important argument. I sometimes wonder if King hadn't died when he did, the whole post-Orewa thing might not have got so poisonous so quickly. We miss his voice in this country.
It's also important to say, however, that there are counter-arguments. For people like Stephen Turner and Patrick Evans, the whole cultural nationalist movement in New Zealand -- the idea that 'we' have a unique, shared culture -- is at best autocthon- or indigene-envy, and at worst a kind of apologetics for colonialism, a denial of its ugliness, its dispossessions. Here's Evans at his most scabrous:
If we add all this up, we get a New Zealand literature whose purpose is to deny the basis of the white settler presence in the country: the distance of its origins, its status as interloper, the unlawfulness of its conquest, and the violations colonial capitalism inflicted on the environment. In this argument, the kind of revulsion we saw in Baughan and especially in Mansfield is what all Pakeha conceal, ready to be triggered by any unconscious reminder of how it is that we have really got here.... [We get] a literature which urges towards the sublime but never quite gets there—which, instead, represses and denies, risking all those affective surpluses and returns that come with repression and denial.
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Michael Laws in incredibly stupid statement shocker!
Wanganui mayor Michael Laws, who was holding a referendum to decide the most preferred name for his town, said the geographic board's decision was "crazy" and culturally biased.
"Where else could you go in the world and the locals have actually two different names for everywhere?"
Gee, Michael, I don't know. Wales, perhaps? Or Ireland? Or, you know, any number of places where two or more different groups of people speaking different languages have historically occupied the same ground? Like, you know, New Zealand?
But no, it is clearly impossible in the whole history of language for any object to have two simultaneous names. There are no synonyms! There can be only one!
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Good timing on the Media 7 panel subject. The top three stories on TV3 last night seemed to be pitched specifically to generate maximum race relations outrage: Maori names sought for North and South Islands, Eskimo lollies slammed as racist by Canadian tourist and the UN conference.
Oh definitely. I was thinking that during the rather similar shenanigans on Sunrise this morning. The media really do seem to be playing race issues from some bad gothic horror script, with Maori as the unspeakable other who just won't die . We voted in that nice John Key but ... oh noes, the Maori Party! Now you're telling us that Cook's Endeavour map referred to ... Te Ika a Maui and Te Wai Pounamu, not the North and South Islands! Good heavens, the ground is shifting beneath our feet! The crypt won't stay closed! You were supposed to die, godammit!
I really wish they'd stop.
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I'm not trying to be a prick, but am seriously wondering whether our juries are being slanted towards those who aren't overly aware of WTF is going on.
That's one hell of an assumption ...
The other issue, though, is to what extent barristers use the challenge system to massage the makeup of juries. My perhaps overly cynical impression is that prosecutors in particular don't want independent thinkers with trained minds assessing their arguments, and will try to weed these people out if they get beyond the ballotting phase. The ideal is a jury of, ahem, 'average Kiwis' who will be oblivious to the extent to which they're being intellectually bullied.
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Let's see you get in faster than that, D'Anvers!
*Shakes fist*