Posts by TracyMac
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I'm glad I came out that year. There was a lot of targeting of young people to sign those petitions - so many people I know apologised to me subsequently because they signed out of ignorance and/or weight of expectations.
As for the Salvation Army, the apology was a gesture, I suppose, but they'll never see one cent from me. I don't much like their religious tenets, leaving aside the political meddling.
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All us Pakeha should know more of Te Reo - most of us would struggle to reach the standard of "broken phrases" that many of us manage to acquire for travelling to non-English-speaking countries, much less anything else.
I was steered towards languages at college, but that explicitly did not include Maori - at a school that was 70% plus Maori and Polynesian. Only a couple of Pakeha pupils in those classes. It makes little sense, because in terms of is orthography and pretty damn regular grammar, it's a great language to learn in a purely linguistic sense. And then of course, there is the deeper participation in our nation's cultural heritage, and cultural future.
Things have definitely improved since kohanga reo and other initiatives, and I welcome this one, despite what seems to me to be an odd spokesman. I suppose he has name recognition, and evidently cares about moving this forward.
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For me, DnB was a revelation after crap hi-nrg and mostly-boring (to me) generic house that you got in the gay clubs in the late 80s/early 90s.
Of course, as time went on, there was plenty of samey-samey DnB as well, but it's still my favourite dance genre. Although there's some fine UK dubstep of a few years ago I enjoy, and some more recent iterations of trap.
Speaking of nostalgia dance music (but not the good kind), I went to a gay club in Adelaide a few weeks ago, and other than the young guys "dancing" while simultaneously looking at their phones, the music would not have been out of place in 1989. Maybe it picked up later, but I departed early, for some reason.
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Hard News: Things that do us good and ill, in reply to Alfie,
Given the appalling amount of spam Yahoo permits, and the fact I've never had a problem with sending my self-hosted email there or with gmail, I wonder if there's some other kind of issue.
I don't want to get into a lengthy digression on SMTP server configuration, but are you using your own outbound SMTP, or relying on an ISP's? If the former, are you sending from a static IP address with proper forward and reverse DNS and MX records?
I do admit my organisation blocks all SMTP traffic from dynamic addresses, and even large blocks of IPs hosted by Comcast and similar large ISPs. However, Google and Yahoo don't do blanket blocks like that, but they do check the relaying host is following the proper conventions for SMTP mail and DNS records.
If relaying via an ISP's SMTP servers, the problem there is generally a bad sender reputation if they don't require you to authenticate prior to sending. You can check domain reputation with various online tools.
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Congrats re the award!
Great initiative with Press Patron. I'll be checking it out when I'm on a real computer. Is it intended to be available to international sites?
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Thanks, Russell. Having spent some formative years living in state housing, I feel extremely strongly about the subject, and I agree your predictions about the effect of private landlord subsidies have come to pass.
I think there is a place for a subsidy for single people in particular needing a top-up to their accommodation costs. But this should not substitute for a good base of state-owned housing stock.
Another thing that seems to be missing in NZ are charitable housing trusts, like the Peabody in the UK. Or if they exist, they aren't making much of an impact. I thought they were a pretty good idea for low-wage earners that didn't qualify for full social housing.
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Up Front: What Sorry Looks Like, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Indeed.
And especially since it turns out he hadn't even bothered to inform his victim of his plan to spray his regrets (I can't dignify it as "remorse") all over the media, his self-awareness doesn't really seem to evolved at all.
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Hah, I literally gave away my Yamaha mini-system - purchased in London in 1998 - last week. The only thing wrong with it was the lack of modern connectivity, and the 3 disk CD changer being a bit temperamental.
I went the full-blown 5.1 audio receiver route - no TV, but I have a projector now. Another Yamaha, and pretty compact as far as modern receivers go. Sounds great with QAcoustic speakers.
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To be honest, I think this boils down simply to the fact there is no federal human rights/anti-discrimination legislation for queers in Australia. If I go to rent a house in the Northern Territory, I can simply be denied just because I'm a big old dyke.
We did it the right way around in NZ - once the underlying antidiscrimination principle had been established across the board, it was only a matter of time before the marriage laws and bizzaro adoption crapola was sorted out. For those not in the know, for many years gay single people could adopt - and did - while gay couples were not permitted to. Also, couples where one parent had a biological child could not have their same sex partner adopt the child, without relinquishing their own parental rights.
In Oz, they've spent so much energy on this same sex marriage thing without the underlying rights (sure, yes, there are reasonable rights given out piecemeal in most of the states, but marriage is administered by the Australian Commonwealth) and it drives me nutty.
1. I'm not ever getting married, so I'm not interested that specific thing. However, I am interested in having full rights - whether I choose to exercise them or not, just like straights - anywhere in the country I happen to be living in.
2. NOT having equal marriage rights serves to rub every queer's nose in the residue of their second-class citizenship every single day. Whether or not they ever intend marriage.
3. Turnbull is essentially a socially liberal dude (let's not talk economic policy, mines, NBN, or asylum seekers) who is only going through the expensive charade of the plebiscite to appease the Nats and have something to wave at the ultra-nutbag (i.e. Bernardi) wing of the party. He's obviously not going to place his gonads on the line for a bunch of whinging queers who mostly won't vote for his party anyway.
4. I'm still pissed off with the mendacity of the Australian Labor Party, who could have done it if they weren't wasting time on constant backstabbing and leaders with the social conscience of gnats. -
I think these criticisms are pretty spot on. I almost didn't do it because, yes, I didn't want to be measured on "how much" I might be seen to be "kiwi".
As for the other issues, I just realised I answered them along the lines of "how true is this statement to you?", although they weren't exactly phrased that way.
As for the "Maori special treatment" question, again, I interpolated my response to the dog-whistle, and not to whatever "special treatment" might be deemed as (sure, let's go back to the days of no kohanga reo or land claim settlements!)
I came out as a "globalist", which I'd say is pretty accurate, since I don't think NZ is currently that different or better than other OECD nations. The bits I'm proudest of - other than our still-damn-good human rights legislation - are the bits currently being eroded by the wonderful govt (similar to the trend around the world). Me, I like much of our culture - not so much the sports - and of course much of the parts of the country that aren't being converted to dairy paddocks are pretty damn scenic. (Yes, we need some dairy/beef/wool paddocks - but let's not race to the bottom with feedlots and irrigating/superphosing otherwise marginal land.)