Posts by Danielle
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How exotic you are!
The exoticism thing gets scaled back a tad after I tell people that my mum is from Invercargill. Southland reprazent!
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Back in the unspecified (in case someone pops up and tells me what a terrible memory I have) day, I loved the 3Ds. Didn't they play at an Auckland University Orientation one year in the early 90s? That rocked.
(Tangential theatre-question: how long does the Russell-Robbery-Off continue? It's been months now, hasn't it? I don't even know what the initial offence was! Russell, did you steal his mint condition vinyl AK79 or something? :) )
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And yes, we certainly did notice the French -- but what dialect is it? Nothing like I learnt at school that's for sure.
Cajun French was my grandmother's first language. It is seventeenth-century French, transplanted to the USA via les Acadiens - hence the wacky dialect and accent. (My parents had a really-French-from-France friend who said that to him, Cajun French sounded like his grandmother speaking with her false teeth removed!)
Most of my family no longer speaks it fluently - a byproduct of being beaten if you spoke it at school in mid-twentieth century, among other things - but they still insert Cajun French words and sentences into their conversations ('mais non!'), and their word pronounciations are definitely French in many ways, including their stresses on the last syllables of words or phrases. Their sentence formations in English also reflect French grammatical traditions. For example, the repetition of 'me, I' in sentences - 'me, I don't know!' - just as French people say 'Moi, je...' This dialect is now known as Cajun English, and there is a distinct difference between north Louisiana and Cajun country in this regard - you can actually drive from the New Orleans dialect to the Cajun dialect to a generic southern accent within three or four hours.
Gosh, sorry to go on. I am a part of a rather unusual ethnic group (um, for New Zealand, anyway) and I think the language aspect of it is pretty neat. And the food kicks ass. :)
(Oh, and Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour is like my favourite thing ever - all the amazing songs the show finds are just a treasure trove. His voice is so soothing, too. And he's funny!)
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he is the Huey Long of New Zealand politics
Huey Long, although corrupt in many ways, did believe in wealth redistribution to the poorest: he was far more of a progressive than Winston, I think.
(My grandmother loved Huey Long. 'Ma chere, before he was governor we didn't even have roads!')
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but i don't have any togs.
This thread is giving me the impression that you might not need any...
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If there really is a culture of spin and hype, it is really unreasonable to expect the likes of Macdonald to engage in a little honest self-examination around whether they're perpetrators more than victims?
So your argument is 'first remove the mote from your own eye' and all that, right? Which... OK, I get it, but your position makes any contrary argument ultimately self-defeating: if he writes about this culture of spin and hype as it relates to John Key, he's being a hypocrite because the press are full of spin and hype; but if he spends his time attacking the press for being full of spin and hype, then no one ever talks about John Key and he gets even more of a free pass then he's already had.
So surely this article is actually *helping* to work towards your ultimate goal, which is to transform the press into something rather more analytical?
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the real level of income of the poor is staying well ahead of inflation and improves in real terms
Really? I'd be most interested in seeing some relevant data to back up this assertion.
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Craig, that's kind of a weird argument: 'I do not like the newspaper in which these thoughts have previously appeared, because they publish works by other people with whom I disagree.' Therefore this particular argument is wrong, or...what...? I am confused.
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And suddenly I is all in favour of mass Asian migration, especially the girls
Were they under 18?
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you are accepting the legitmacy of their interest, and turning it into an empirical debate rather than a moral one
No. He isn't. What he's doing is listening to what they say and then telling them why it is, objectively, wrong: you can get into the moral and ethical issues later. I thought one of the many points of the Obama speech was that the reflexive distancing, and the finger-pointing, and the yelling 'you're a racist! you're a racist!' doesn't actually seem to be working all that well. Why not work on these people with, like, facts?
Just as people in the US tend to be more pro-gay-marriage if they actually *know* some gay people, the likelihood of being anti-immigration is probably lessened by learning actual real things about immigrants. Knowledge creates understanding and eventually tolerance.
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