Posts by John Armstrong
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: The Advocate, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Stories, they are complicated by facts.
Yep, but also vice versa. Without wanting to start any firestorms, facts in and of themselves are of limited use without being contextualised, and often, narrativised. I don't think that this denigrates the status of factual information, but instead highlights the care that needs to be exercised when using or critiquing it. Your example perhaps illustrates this; the only 'facts' of the matter were the number of people on board the Titanic, the number of lifeboats etc. I'm not sure that the conclusion that you offered can really be considered a fact - it seems to be more of a judgement about the relative importance of those facts.
-
Speaker: Key: Concession Not Recession, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Joe Bennett's take on it all
Interesting that it - like Graham's piece - includes a reference to Mr Dotcom's head on a plate. Satirical synchronism. Spooky.
-
Hard News: Reviews: #NZGT and the Herald, in reply to Jackie Clark,
Highly irritating font
In terms of the headlines, I agree. All the curvey parts of the font (I'm sure there must be a fancy word for them) look pixelated. Makes me think that the page is always only partially loaded.
-
Hard News: Living with the psychopath, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
The odd code that exists inside would see him in a situation befitting his treatment of his victims.
Great, let's pile some more brutality in there. Wilson's apparent psychopathy might mean that he is effectively beyond help, but that doesn't justify brutalising him in turn.
The answer (as Sacha alluded to earlier) has to be making legal provision for detaining these rare offenders indefinitely, and in Wilson's case, in making such provision retroactive so that both he, and we, are safe.
-
Greg Wood has already touched on this, but is there any guarantee that the requested information will necessarily be used to compile and publish league tables? Given the direction the debate has tended to run in the media so far (further evidenced by the direction of this thread), isn't it at least possible that the story might well foreground and discuss the shortcomings of the information itself?
Wishful thinking? Yes. Delusional? Probably.
-
Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Lilith __,
Unless a position is defensible in rational terms, it's irrelevant.
Isn't that maybe going a bit too far the other way? Particularly in the context of a discussion about the institutionalisation (or something) of love?
-
Colin Craig thinks we should recognise polygamy as well. Sort of.
-
Hard News: The Music for Occasions, in reply to Sacha,
He..
-
Hard News: The Music for Occasions, in reply to Sacha,
Oh shit, I didn't mean that! Damn you, bald lady..
-
For me, fIREHOSE's version of Daniel Johnson's Walking the Cow is it (I recommend 'watching' the clip with your eyes closed; the song is just all about surreal visual imagery that is just not helped by actual cows walking..).
I'd be hard pressed to justify the choice, but for me that song captures everything that I love about music: great musicianship without an ounce of wankery, great lyrics without an ounce of pretentiousness, and a certain gravitas-without-being-properly-dark quality that I have only ever been able to summarise as 'candlelit'. And it has a line that reminds me, every time, of my wife.