Posts by giovanni tiso
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Heh...
So, when can we start the book club? I have a whole thing about The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum and the limits of interpretation but I can't express it in fewer than three thousand words and I need a captive audience. By which I mean actual abductees, I'm not speaking metaphorically.
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Does anyone actually have a mayor they wholeheartedly approve of?
I'm looking forward to approving wholheartedly of Celia Wade-Brown in Wellington, but I guess I should wait for her to win the election first.
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There is one? Kewl!
I give you Nomad Codes. (Well, not literally. You're going to have to buy it yourself.)
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I am curious, how did you handle your man in Milan?
Did you ignore him? Did he, as a result, go away?
No, we obsessed about how unfit for office he and his pals were, ridiculed and satirised him and his supporters constantly, instead of debating his ideas and articulating a progressive brand of politics that connected with the electorate.
And it worked out *great*.
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Yes, needless to say I'm more than happy to make good on that.
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But what's this with "taking" it to a paper? Why on earth would I do that? What possible interest would I have? I was forwarded it, checked for permission and published it in a blog post headed 'Friday Gold'. Which I think is a fair description.
If your interest is seeing Laws taken down a peg, you might wish for a larger audience. I stand corrected on the interest from other news media front.
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This is the email address on which Laws represents Whanganui, and in that context his immediate resort to abuse is extraordinary and unusual.
Why don't you take this to a paper, Russell? I'd be curious to see if they'd regard it as being newsworthy. A lunch at Maria Pia's the first time you're in Wellington says they're not going to.
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QED.
It's almost as if you guys had never dealt with a troll. He thrives in this kind of stuff. No amount of QEDing is going to make the slightest bit of difference to him, and calling his supporters rednecks (which is a racist epithet at the best of times) is just about as stupid as it gets.
I take this seriously because back home we have ten times the Michael Laws per head of population, and I know just how ineffective it is to expose them for the thugs that they're proud to be.
There's a bloke in Milan - a European MP, no less - who suggested having separate train carriages for immigrants. Do you think he's worried about institutional propriety, or the decorum of his office? Trading insults with him makes him feel validated. And - I can't stress this enough - you're never going to win that kind of argument with these people.
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But you’d expect Laws the mayor, replying to an e-mail to act differently to Laws the talkback host.
Well OK you wouldn’t, but you know what I mean.
Just goes to show he's a straight shooter, no? And he replies to his emails, so he's a hard worker to boot.
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He deserves to be laughed at at least as much as North Shore mayor Andrew Williams, whose late-night emails have been quite widely reported this year.
Laugh all you want, it won't make the slightest difference to him or his level of public support, is all I'm saying. In that maybe the Williams story was a little different.