Posts by giovanni tiso
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OnPoint: If Wishes Were Horses..., in reply to DexterX,
Once a tax has been introduced it will never be removed
Like estate taxes, you mean?
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OnPoint: If Wishes Were Horses..., in reply to BenWilson,
"More roads" is something I don't even want at all
I think National's reasoning is pretty solid there: put assets up for sale so their friends in business can buy them, and devolve the proceeds to their friends in business to build roads. It's beautiful really.
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OnPoint: If Wishes Were Horses..., in reply to Craig Ranapia,
In Masterchef terms, it was beautifully plated, over-garnished but still lacking substance.
What substance were you expecting? A list of policies? That's not what a political broadcast should be about. A political broadcast needs to give electors the why, not the what and the how. There are plenty of places for the what and the how (campaign literature, leader debates, policy releases, speeches), but if you put them in your campaign broadcast, like National did, you're just trying to lose the election.
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OnPoint: If Wishes Were Horses..., in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Gio also Tweeted, “I want to vote Labour – in 1935”.
Which I immediately followed with this tweet, as well you know.
I thought it was a remarkable broadcast, personally, ever bit as good as National's was awful (and surprisingly so). One could of course discuss the substance of how Labour's policies reflect the philosophy that is put forward in the broadcast - Scott Hamilton for instance dealt with the fiscal responsibility narrative earlier this week - but that's precisely what's so good about it: it puts forward a coherent and historically grounded rationale for what motivates Labour and the key members of its caucus against which to measure their campaign promises. Each of us will come to different conclusions about that, but by god does it raise the level of political discourse. That really was remarkable stuff.
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Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to Ian Dalziel,
on a typewriter...
Plus, that. But I was thinking more of where computers were in 1983, pre Jobs doing his thing.
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At the cost of stating the obvious, one doesn't need ever to have owned or even barely to have used an Apple product to have benefited from the design revolution of the early Macs. I still remember the first one I played with, in the office of a friend's parents when I was 14 or thereabouts. That was quite mind-blowing.
Thinking of this tweet by William Gibson, which is on topic, and reminding myself of the fact that he wrote Neuromancer in 1983, which is not.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Speaking of Easton, for whom I have a great deal of respect, I remember being less than impressed by him once when he poo-pooed in passing in one of his columns the fact that somebody had been funded to study the history of the orgasm. What struck me is that he passed judgment on it without feeling that he had a need to elaborate, as if it was self-evidently ridiculous (think hip hop tour). But it seems equally uncontroversial to me that the orgasm would of course have a history, and of course it would be interesting, and of course such a study could have many valuable offshoots and implications.
Okay, this is going to sound a bit odd so bear with me: I've been challenged on the above, and not only I wasn't able to find a reference for what I claimed Easton had written, but I could rule out that he had written it since all of his Listener columns are archived ab urbe condita or thereabouts. I therefore unreservedly apologise and withdraw the above paragraph.
As you all were.
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Hard News: Angry and thrilled about Arie, in reply to Russell Brown,
I'm really struggling to keep a civil tongue with your for implying that.
It's really not my week for making myself understood on PAS. I withdraw and apologise.
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Hard News: Angry and thrilled about Arie, in reply to Russell Brown,
It’s reasonable to suppose that working police officers may have been particularly traumatised by the February earthquake and its aftermath, in a way that other residents might not have. They’ll also have been feeling the same emotions about “looters” as most of the city, and been in a position to act on them.
Items one to ten of their job description are about not abusing that authority, however. And you're not saying that it would have been okay for them to rough up actual honest-to-god looters, I presume, yes? There are broader issues than your feelings, or even Arie's, to consider in a determination of what would have been "forgiveable".
In fact pursuing a convinction so aggressively might just have been designed to create a scenario in which the police will be able to walk away simply by dropping the charges, as opposed to facing charges of their own for their treatment of a defenceless suspect. And to the extent that they might have lost some face, I suspect they care about material impunity more. (I could, of course, be completely wrong about this.)
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Hard News: Angry and thrilled about Arie, in reply to Russell Brown,
The Christchurch police are ineptly covering for original actions that are, in the context of the psychological bruising they had been subject to, forgivable
Hardly. It wasn’t the police that had been psychologically bruised, it was the city. If this created an environment in which police brutality might be more then usually excused or even welcomed by the public opinion, it still wouldn’t make their actions forgiveable. But you’re right that they’ve managed to make matters even worse. And it really has to stop.