Posts by B Jones
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Field Theory: Man Moments, in reply to slarty,
A bunch of old white boomers who are nearly dead are going to shell out some cash. That's it.
No, that's not it. Every person that encounters that campaign is going to be a little bit affected by bit, be it annoyed or excluded or impressed. It might be just another drop of water on the stalagmite, but that builds over time to create and reinforce a culture with a really crap image of what masculinity means - specifically, dominance over women and exclusion of them from all the cool stuff. It's so ubiquitous, we swim in it every day and most of us barely notice it.
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Field Theory: Man Moments, in reply to Tristan,
Tristan, I think it's because we expect more from a beer company pitching at a different market. It's one thing having the young yobs going for sexist marketing, it's another when marketers think that people like us would go for it as well. Overt sexism isn't really a feature of upper middle class hipster culture, and crafty beers (I can name a half dozen other ones like Moa - big bottle, high alcohol, strong flavour) seem to be the drink of choice of the upper middle class hipsters I know. Hence the dismay and confusion when an apparently hipster drink turns out to be intended for that horrible pack of yuppies who think that flashing around the dollars at Shed 5 makes them cool.
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The uber-douche image doesn't really go with the name "Moa", which is a bit more earthy, kiwiana-y and crafty - you don't stick a te reo word on something you want to brand as non-PC*. Then again, Moa are extinct...
*with the exception of Tui, of course. But I'm talking about new brands.
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My daughters have some very generous book benefactors among their grandparents, so I don't often get a chance to buy children's books myself - last night I spent $80 ordering various Mahy anthologies from Amazon and Fishpond. It's been so long I hardly remember any details of her stories, but I do remember the sense of love and imagination I got from them. I'm looking forward to rediscovering that with my kids.
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For many people, part of the appeal of alcoholic drinks -- and cannabis for that matter -- is that it has come from the earth, with all the mystery and variety that reflects into the end product. I currently have a bottle of the Bruichladdich Rocks, which the label says is "an innovative single malt ... [that] uses water that has filtered up throygh the oldest rocks in the whisky world -- the curious 1.8 billion year-old geology of the Rhinns of Islay."
You're not going to get that out of a lab, are you?
Yes, but I bet someone in a lab tested your single malt to make sure it was the proof it said it was, and wasn't full of methanol. The mystery and variety of the earth is a bit mythological when you're talking about cultivated plants, distilling and so on, and there's a tension between safe consumption and making things earthily variable.
It would be interesting to see what the effect of regulated mood-altering drugs would be on the subculture of folks who dislike the evils of big pharma but are happy to take their chances with the pills their mate's mate sells them.
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It doesn't crash the browser on my Android phone anymore, but all I can see of the original post is the jpg. Perhaps getting a better browser on my phone will help.
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Hard News: The Editorial Image, in reply to Scott Chris,
Cultural Reproduction would appear to be the favoured sociological description these days.
Ah, I see: "Groups of people, notably social classes, act to reproduce the existing social structure to preserve their advantage." Like well-off people supporting governments that cut taxes and reduce social assistance programmes.
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Hard News: The Editorial Image, in reply to Scott Chris,
the problem of long term welfare dependency and breaking the social reproduction cycle
The fact that you've identified this as a problem and described it this way is not apolitical. Another way to describe the problem is that the levels at which state support were set in the 90s are too low for many recipients to bootstrap themselves out of poverty, because they damage local economies and people's health and education prospects. When life's a game of asshole, it's not apolitical to wonder what the losers are doing wrong to keep losing, or to dream up policies to make it less attractive to lose and more appealing to win.
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Hard News: The Editorial Image, in reply to Scott Chris,
whose greater statistical propensity to bear children outside of a stable relationship or become infected with STDs freer access to contraception is simply pragmatic social policy.
Citation bloody required. Also, if that's your problem, then offering long term contraceptives that don't protect against STDs to existing beneficiaries is not the solution. It's not pragmatic if it doesn't work in practice.
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Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to Don Christie,
It would be nice if the content providers decided to sell content to NZ consumers.
But until they do, are there many other reasons to pay for a 20G data plan?