Posts by philipmatthews
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My belief that at a distance (which the sighting presumably was) it can be quite hard to distinguish between, say, many East Asians and dark-haired Europeans ... And what if it wasn't Aisling they saw?
Belief ... presumption ... what if. This is all guesswork.
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I just wonder whether they actually saw what they thought they saw.
What's your basis for this? Your belief that everyone else is racist?
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philip: I repeat, the interview with Webber was on the morning on the 7th, barely two days after the disappearance, but the "Asian woman" sightings weren't reported until the 9th. So there is no particular reason for Webber to have guessed anything other than what she did.
I'm sorry Stephen, but you're wrong. We have the hard copies of the NZ Herald here. On the front page of the Herald, Wednesday, October 7, this is the standfirst beneath the main headline: "Police seek mystery woman as fears for Aisling intensify." This is a link to an online Herald story from last Wednesday without the standfirst but with the abduction angle. You'll note that it has the Asian woman in it:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10601788
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I don't think everyone was "assuming" that so much as that was what was being reported as the week went on. The police searched nearby waterways on the night she went missing, and searched the drain twice -- they just couldn't find her.
Exactly. Which led police to the assumption -- and it was never more than that -- that she had been abducted. The Herald's front page stories on both Wednesday and Thursday have that angle. And the suggestion came from the police -- in Thursday's story, "police believed she could be with a stranger". I'm not trying to make a case for Deb Webber, just stressing that as the dominant story was kidnapping, and all the drains and waterways were searched, Webber's psychic guess wasn't as "vague" as someone suggested. I think Webber believes in the reality of what she does. If she was really a charlatan who was just making it up, isn't it just as likely that she would run with the Asian woman abduction line?
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"ditch, hole, in, fallen."
The vague floundering of a charlatan.
Given that everyone else seemed to be assuming that she had been abducted, possibly by "an Asian woman", it's actually not that vague.
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My memory of the period is somewhat unreliable, but I think the Sisters of Mercy beat him to it.
They did, by a good ten, 15 years or so. They also did a cracking funereal version of Hot Chocolate's Emma. But that's enough Goth revivalism for today ...
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Which Nazis in Inglourious Basterds are you thinking of?
Hans Landa and Frederick Zoller. The former is the "Jew hunter"; the latter is the war hero whose exploits are depicted in the Goebbels film Nation's Pride. Over the course of the Tarantino film, both are shown as ambivalent about the greater cause.
In a recent Sight and Sound, Tarantino had this to say about Landa and his skills as a "Jew hunter"(his nickname):
He sets himself up as such a great detective that you don't want him to disappoint you. You want him to be as good as you think he is.
For what it's worth, I subscribe to the Jonathan Rosenbaum view of Inglourious Basterds.
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There is an interesting article on Ars Technica on Nazis as demons. It talks about the fact that in US culture (and NZ too), particularly among the young, Nazis are Bad Guys without redeeming features.
This might be true in video games (I wouldn't know) but the opposite's increasingly true in films. Plenty of Nazis with "redeeming features" in Valkyrie, Downfall, Inglourious Basterds and The Reader. Too many redeeming features in some cases ...
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To those in their 20s now, it is ancient history. They have more recent horrors to consider.
Rwanda, Darfur ... do you think those Lincoln students are "considering" these and other recent horrors on a regular basis? My guess is that if they were sensitive to those stories, they probably wouldn't have thought it a real laugh to dress up as Nazis and Jews.
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Whose idea of "good taste" are we following? And isn't it more likely that ignorance, rather than idiocy, is at work here?
I'm only going to answer the second question. What are they ignorant of? By the looks of it, any German history before 1933 and after 1945. They're certainly not ignorant of basic knowledge about the Holocaust, which is how they managed to come as Nazis and Jews. This isn't about watching Hogan's Heroes or Inglourious Basterds and thinking it might be funny to go as cartoon Nazis. Because it brings the Jewish dimension in, it's much worse than that, surely. So, idiocy.