Posts by philipmatthews
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As usual, that's a very good piece by Scott Hamilton.
For evidence of this point
For her part, Turia claims that only a few 'rednecks' will be riled by the junking of Wanganui in favour of Whanganui. Such a view grossly underestimates the level of Pakeha anxiety about Maori attempts to right the injustices of the past.
He need look no further than this excerpt from a newspaper column by Chris Trotter, from April:
For a start, I am more than a little disturbed to learn that the Geographic Board is legally obliged to replace English with Maori place-names wherever possible.
This suggests to me that the New Zealand State will not be content until all evidence of its colonial history has been, quite literally, wiped off the map.
Who is responsible for this extraordinary policy? Did anyone seek the endorsement of the New Zealand electorate before embarking on what can only be called a campaign of historical ethnic cleansing?
Are the achievements of our pioneering ancestors worth so little that all trace of their presence and contribution is to be expunged? -
Further to the above, this is a letter that ran in the Press in July this year:
Pavlova, whitebait patties, afghan and anzac biscuits, Buzzy Bee, Phar Lap and Cardigan Bay, Sir Colin Meads and Sir Richard Hadlee, Speights, Lord Rutherford, Chris Knox and Dave Dobbyn, Katherine Mansfield and James K Baxter.
No Pakeha culture? Yeah, right.But it could have -- and probably has -- run in any city in NZ.
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It's called Christchurch isn't it?
(sorry: just anticipating the responses from elsewhere ...)
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I was fascinated by the way that he suddenly seemed to get all 'indigenous' on TV last night, claiming it was an attack on the 'mana' of the people of Wanganui.
Does he normally put on pretensions of cultural sensitivity, or was it just his cunning ploy to 'undercut the Murrys'?
It's related to his notion of brown institutional racism (via the Geographic Board) against whites. Laws is one of those who is big on the idea that a separate Pakeha culture has developed here over the past 170 or so years -- distinct from both Maori culture and British culture of the early 19th century, and distinct from biculturalism too (doesn't leave much). In that sense, an accidental and innocent misspelling of Wanganui in the 1840s or 1850s has developed into a separate Pakeha tradition as though it is actually an English language word, which it kind of is. In the same way that Otago is an English language word and Otakou isn't.
Personally, I'm sympathetic to that idea and think they should go for an official dual spelling: Wanganui/Whanganui. As they should also do Christchurch/Otautahi and so on. The mail will still get there either way.
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Thought this part of that Scientology/EST Wiki page very ironic:
Vicki Aznaran, a former top Scientology official who later sued the organization, stated: "Hubbard was very angry at Erhard's success. Nothing got under his skin worse than someone taking one or two of his courses and then running off and making some money off it and him not getting a slice of it."
In the case of Scientology, everyone from Aleister Crowley to Sigmund Freud would have a beef.
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Because it starts in Christchurch given that's where University of Canterbury Engineering is, and then where the hell else can you go in the South Island?
When I said, why always Dunedin, I didn't mean the race per se. I meant why this kind of thing happens there and wouldn't happen if you drove a bunch of clapped-out cars from, say, Auckland to the University of Waikato.
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I liked that Graeme Downes comment. That's the only thing I've read so far that answers the question no one's asked but should have: why always Dunedin? You could send this car race to Chch, Palmerston North, Wellington, Auckland or Hamilton and this wouldn't happen. All those places have concentrations of student population but none with the density -- no pun intended -- of Dunedin's. The city's let an entire suburb turn into one big hostel for on-the-piss first years.
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Cheers, Hilary.
One other thing I meant to say before: that Close-Up live cross to Dunedin only made me wish that -- and I never thought I'd say this -- Paul Henry was still filling in for Sainsbury. PH may be a tasteless git on Breakfast sometimes but he can be a stroppy interviewer -- if you have a minute, look at his hilarious interview on last Friday's Close-Up with a dodgy bottled-water entrepreneur from Australia.
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David Eggleton had a great line in a review of a novel about Dunedin students by Carl Shuker:
Students. In the 60s they burnt US flags; in the 70s they burnt bras; and in the 90s, in Dunedin, they started burning couches. Idealism was replaced by nihilism.
This stuff in Dunedin had the appearance of protest but none of the meaning or content. I'd also suggest that were someone trying to get numbers together for a genuine march about a real issue, you wouldn't see any of these meatheads there.
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Close to half (47%) of men in the sample support the death penalty. That's the surprise for me.
And I'm not surprised by this, but interested to see it spelt out:
homosexual relations [are] seen as morally acceptable by 69% of women but only 53% of men.