Posts by chris
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It sure must be exasperating to talk politics in a second language
English is not my second language, as you say, “the feeling was conveyed all the better for it”. You understood, you’re just not sure what it meant, not at a level you can intellectualise, it’s just train of thought. scan for gist, or read it allowed as Rob Muldoon, ask questions about anything you’re unsure of or make assumptions, up to you. You were quite accurate regarding Salmond’s methodology, but there are 101 methodologies one could use to make the same point. If as is the case that point is an ill-considered point, then energy spent justifying the methodology could be better spent elsewhere. When the purpose of the long-winded methodology is to malign people with ancestry in specific country in which the 100 most common family names are shared by 85% of the population then one could suggest quicker means.
But it’s an interesting assumption you make, this assumption that I am a second language user, based on my disdain for imperialist rules, my unconventional word usage or my total contempt for punctuation. I’m confident enough that I earned my UC English Lit degree as well as my CELTA from Cambridge. I’ll defy those who would attempt to marginalise heartfelt communication on the basis of a lack of adherence to linguistic protocol, because English has moved on, and it feels like bad faith to do so. If someone is difficult to understand, and you’re satisfied not understanding someone, not seeking clarification, before making assumptions, that’s your prerogative, unlike Youi and Seelan.
This issue, as I see it, is not so much the Auckland housing bubble as it is the firesale of New Zealand, farms, homes, businesses, throughout the country, to nonresidents, aggravated by a lack of development in the regions. However this like many issues that the media present us with is secondary, the key issues that our country faces are those affecting the most vulnerable; the disabled, the homeless, those suffering addictions, the under-clothed, the underfed, those in abusive and violent relationships, the suicidal, those cast under the wheel of the legal system.
half a year ago, I was on here and people were discussing the Auckland housing bubble. Six months on and wouldn’t you know it. But of far more concern to me is this stiflingly uncreative bubble the intelligensia of the left have pitched, around themselves, preventing much in the way of good ideas getting out, it’s becoming a tiny of clutch of intellect talking to itself. speculating on the fate of the country as if they’re watching a sports fixture. When I talk of jargon, of insularity, it’s not that I have any difficulty reading plain English, it’s that the rhetoric has evolved to a state where while it is ideal for any political pundit aspirant writer par excellence, very little if anything of value will reach or speak to the “average kiwi”. As a random example, take a hat, the hat of an ordinary kiwi, and read this random sample paragraph.
"I take your position to be that otherwise innocent policies and discussions pertaining to blanket restrictions on foreign investment in housing are racist because such policies will have a disparate impact on New Zealand’s residents and citizens. I think the basic incoherence of this idea has its origins in your nebulous use of language. Despite what you appear to believe, it’s no small thing to publicly call the shadow Minister for Housing a racist. Obviously, I’d be disappointed if the impetus behind Labour’s housing proposals were blunted in this way.
i.e. don’t call Twyford a racist, punk.
Let’s stop calling people incoherent shall we and read a bit harder, and feel a little more, perhaps write a little less, and instead maybe put all that surplus energy into time with our loved ones and communities and thinking up solutions, and great ways of communicating them succinctly.
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OnPoint: My last name sounds Chinese, in reply to ,
Leave the ethnicity of my car out it Steven! um, yes.
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OnPoint: My last name sounds Chinese, in reply to Katharine Moody,
I have no idea, I was possibly a bit blunt with Nina earlier in my criticism of them focusing too much energy on us making farewell cards for John Campbell while the Saudi sheep controversy was emerging. Either my junk food advertising feedback was too much or when I ticked the “less email” on that last survey they decided to they weren’t going to do things by half.
Either way I’ve gone from receiving 5 emails a fortnight to zero, and any idealism I might have once had about how this country should be run has expired, no one in power is speaking in terms that grab me, I lack the dictionary skills to wade through enough jargon to even get through a full political thread here, so I’m just going to go back to voting The Communist Party and leave the politiking to the big kids with their extensive vokabs, twitter accounts and sophisticated moderate tendencies. Who knows maybe I’ll tune in to Back Benches every so often for a dose of Gio sipping beverage and a sound bite from one of the PMs about e-cigarettes being no less harmful than combusted tobacci, just for a laugh, as I inhale the fumes from this fireplace burning these colourful pamphlets that appear in the mail box. At the end of the day, it looks remarkably like the end of the day. But it was a fantastic day.
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OnPoint: My last name sounds Chinese, in reply to nzlemming,
She’s from Raro?
No car for you today sir, perhaps we could get Rawshark onto it eh?
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OnPoint: My last name sounds Chinese, in reply to BenWilson,
As fascinating as that was Ben, and I'm not being sarcastic, in the express interest of curtailing property speculation, especially with regards to offshore investors;
as self reported by people in NZ with those names
we appear to have made no headway whatsoever so...
Why would I try?
is a valid question, appropriate for a range of situations for any number of people.
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– we Chinese-sounding named people are in way more trouble in New Zealand than we ever thought we would be again.
Yeah, nah, it's not personal. Beyond some newsy articles and the wrath of usual suspect commentators, things look to be about exactly the same as they’ve always been. Which has never been a good thing. But Labour’s stock has been down a while and 1/4 of the country no longer cares about politics either way, for obvious reasons. traction with a certain demographic, their confirmation bias etc.
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OnPoint: My last name sounds Chinese, in reply to BenWilson,
He would have built up a table of names from such official data as he had that linked names to the actual ethnicity of the person
As I said above it’s those traditional names native to the land area covered by the Ming dynasty. There was a limited name pool.
So I don’t think that he would have gone about just forming opinions on what names were Chinese etc. He would have built up a table of names from such official data as he had that linked names to the actual ethnicity of the person
Really? Salmond would have built up a table of names from such official data as he had that linked names to the actual ethnicity of the person instead of running wikipedia:
Historically there are close to 12,000 surnames recorded (including those from non-Han Chinese ethnic groups), of which only about 3,100 are in current use
?Then using Google to get a list of those traditional names in use; the most common, a list of the whole gambit.
A table of names, official data, linked names, actual ethnicity? That sounds almost like Firework experimentation. My wife’s family name is Tang, I will give you a free car if you can tell me her ethnicity, not simply the country her name originated from, but her actual ethnicity, I’ll give you one guess. And while we’re on it what’s your actual specific ethnicity Ben? While we’re furrowing our brows, pulling up our sleeves, digging in heels deep for national debates about ethnicity my major beef is that there are far too many ethnically Scottish captaining our rugby and cricket teams. Far too many, and you know how I know? I saw them on the telly. Is this about rich and poor, about possessed and dispossessed, is it about residents and offshore investers? Or perhaps, just perhaps,
That’s him trying to describe what the algorithm does to a layperson.
I’ll see your algorithm and I’ll raise you half a mouldy laydog’s soggy bollock.
There is such a thing as overthinking things, and there are ways to debate an issue without buying in wholesale to an opponents’ flimsy moot.We came to this, how you call it, New Zealand, with high hopes, the first week we arrived an agent told my wife she should change her name to something more Anglo sounding, I was booted off the Action Station mailing list for providing too much feedback when prompted, feedback along the lines that stopping the advertising of junk food doesn’t really begin to address all the junk food that isn’t advertised i.e. most of it, and now my wife works 9 and a half hour days on her feet with no break on minimum wage with no holiday or sick pay. Can you guess the ethnicity of her employer? You probably could, given enough time, enough words typed onto a keyboard, and an algorithm but it’s fucking irrelevant. Neither of us a Yorkshiremen, though I could probably trace roots given some tracing paper.
This country – the intelligentsia, the pundits, the commentators, the politicians, the talking heads, the left, the right, the inbetweeners, the journalists, Nabour, Lational- has gone so far up it’s own ass you can see the trees. Meanwhile a 70 year old waits 2 years for a hip replacement, immobilised. Christchurch waits for home.
Pacific Islanders are under represented, so give them your house. Or type more words, up to you.
In the nicest possible way of course. ;)
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Most interesting for me is that they targeted traditional names from the Chinese land area circa the Ming Dynasty. They weren’t looking for Uyghur names like Sabir, Tibetan names like Cezhug, and you won’t see many of those names because for the most part like the Maori and Islanders here, they are under represented in terms of wealth.
But this idea that there are a limited array of Chinese names to target, That Keith is offended where for example Riwi Alley may not have been or Mark Rowswell and his children may not be, is a fascinating one, in the way it perpetuates this outdated notion of the limited Chinese name pool.
Spend long enough time in China and you will certainly encounter metropolitan east coast Chinese telling you what is Chinese and what is not Chinese, you can lose years of your life listening to these kinds of spiels if you’re prepared to put in the time. Names like Sabir and Cezhug, Mongolian names and many minority names are not acceptable for official use and are duly appropriated to fit within the language system for use by authorities despite these people being free to use their real indigenous names outside China and in their personal lives.
In a survey last week on a Skykiwi a site for New Zealand based Chinese, of about 2000, 61% agreed that Chinese are buying lots of property 19% said they don’t know and 20% disagreed. Not that this poll is any more illuminating than Labours’ ‘study’. 46% of a smaller survey felt this was racism by the Labour party.
But the basic fact, that what we are discussing is ‘Chinese sounding names’ as opposed to names that don’t sound Chinese, buys in wholesale to the homogenisation of China, the racism perpetuated by the Communist party and moral majority. This is a major issue for the increasing number of Chinese born from mixed parentage in China, deemed outsiders due to their appearance, names etc.
Early in the discussion Tze Ming Mok attempted to specify that this was a survey carried out using ‘actual Chinese names’ and one can by inference assume there are names that are not Chinese. This is antiquated: distinguishing between the name’s Ng and Nguyen, perpetuating this perception, the perception that no Vietnamese person has ever crossed that border to China and kept their name.
The ‘racism’ we are seeing in this instance with Labour in New Zealand is microscopic compared to the racism experienced daily by minorities, foreigners and mix-raced Chinese, in China. Despite Labour's absolute lack of nouse in the way they have attempted to present this ‘data’, calls of ‘racism’ against Labour, only perpetuate the myths that 1) that China is a race. 2) That there are a limited number of Chinese names which can be used to identify Chinese ancestry, parentage, origin, what have you, and that’s something to be precious about,. Furthermore it perpetuates that these names, these people, the immigrants, the minorities and those with mixed parentage simply don’t exist and haven’t for hundreds of years, since well before New Zealand became New Zealand.
Your last name sounds Chinese, so does mine Keith it’s just not ye olde Chinese name, in this global 21st century, as it probably sounds more Scottish to most in the know, but prove it.
I don’t condone what the Labour party have done, but this, their argument, can be quite easily laughed out of court by simply, diligently, asking ‘what is a Chinese sounding name?’..rather than perpetuating the myth.
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Hard News: We're in this together, in reply to Russell Brown,
Awesome words Russell. As someone who tends to push the barrow quite a bit, e.g. I have more logins than John Key has hats – it’s not that I’m attempting to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes; in the interests of transparency those logins: mark taslov, NSA, “chris” and this one – It’s just that I guess I tend to think of logins the same way our PM thinks of his job. And yeah, guilty of tub thumping, tendentiousness, being a bore, and worse, so I’m immeasurably grateful for your tolerance of my often injudicious longwinded posts. W.I.P. A Merry Christmas to you and to everyone here. And a goodish new year.
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Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to Kiwiiano,
It’s dismaying to find that we are world leaders in the equality gap
If it’s any consolation we’re not even close. Were the OECD the world, and if in that period, the economic growth hadn’t skedaddled off to developing countries, where the greatest inequality incidentally is, then be dismayed. Chile, despite being the OECD country with the greatest inequality somehow absconded from graph duties there. It’s difficult to know exactly what we’re looking at, if the 11 most equal countries are: 11. Germany, 10. Finland, 9. Kazakhstan, 8. Austria, 7. Slovakia, 6. Luxembourg, 5. Malta, 4. Czech Republic, 3. Norway, 2. Hungary and 1. Sweden, and the economic growth of those countries is respectively ranked 203. Czech Republic -.9%, 201. Finland -.6%, 191. Hungary 0.2%, 186. Austria .4%, 185. Luxembourg 0.5%,183. Germany 0.5%, 178. Slovakia 0.8%,175 Sweden 0.9%, 153. Norway 1.6%, 135. Malta 2.4%, 58. Kazakhstan 5%.
The OECD paper puts cart before horse asking:
Does income inequality hurt economic growth?
Push come to shove who really gives a hooton about degrees of economic growth – what we want is greater income equality. With available data, a similarly tenuous argument could be made that economic growth hurts income equality. Mainly, like most things, a fair suck of the accountability sav probably boils down to crappish management by the autorites.