Posts by James Butler
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I'm young enough that the details of the first couple of international bands I heard are available online as an aid to memory, no doubt due to the efforts of a few geeky fans: Supergrass at Wellington Town Hall and The Gurgs at the VUW Student Union, both in 2000. I would have been 17.
I'm pretty sure I had been to local gigs earlier (I'm not counting Smokefree Rockquest), but I can't remember what. I heard the Clean reunion at the old Bodega whenever that was, and that wasn't the first gig I went to there (anyone know when it was pulled down?).
Of course the first proper concert I went to was the Orpheus Choir singing the Bach Mass in B Minor when I was 9 or 10.
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Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you…, in reply to Russell Brown,
no boycott of any advertiser was undertaken or, so far as I’m aware, even proposed
It's like the Man Ban: if you can convince enough people to call it a duck loudly enough and frequently enough then it is a duck.
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Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Whereas I’d say: it’s not going to die until you counter the idea, rather than silence some of those who give it wide currency.
THEY ARE NOT SILENCED. And they lost their platform because the idea was countered, effectively.
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Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
And other people have no trouble deciding either, they just disagree. There are plenty of people out there who consider that telling women that “no means no” is dangerous because it they don’t think it will protect women from rape, and may discourage actions they consider would protect women from rape.
And if they think they can mobilise public opinion to back their actions they're welcome to try. I think Ben nails your misconception:
No, it IS an expression of an idea. A very strong expression of a widely felt and held idea. It entered the marketplace and crushed the competition.
The idea was floated on the marketplace that it was harmful for JT and Willie to continue having a paid platform for their speech. It won. This is speech, no?
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The cure for free speech you don't like is more speech. Gio's "more speech" was "Hey advertisers, how do you like this?". Advertiser's "more speech" was, on the whole, "Not much". No boycott.
Photo-shopping the head of a female politician onto the body of adult film star is an exercise of free speech, as is publicly commenting upon which people you consider are ugly, and who you would like to “do”. But it is speech that risks discouraging other ideas from being expressed.
And engaging in entitled chauvinistic victim-blaming of a young woman on air is also speech that risks discouraging other ideas from being expressed, specifically any idea a woman might have of reporting a sexual assault. I have no trouble deciding which of these speeches is worth protecting.
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Up Front: To the Letter, in reply to Emma Hart,
He left his wife his “bed with the yellow curtains in the back house chamber”. You have to specify that your wife gets a bed?
How Shakespearean
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Obligatory
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Matthew Poole,
They want these guys for rape.
Precisely. The cops will be gunning for a hefty chunk of 20 years rather than an equivalent chunk of 10 years.
I would be worried if the Police thought the difference between a 10-year offence and a 20-year offence was worth allowing the alleged offending to continue for two years. Maximum punishment needs to be balanced against harm reduction surely. OTOH if they're not charged with rape it would just be that much harder to convince them (or anyone else who didn't already think so) that what they did was in fact rape.
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Sometimes relying on the system doesn't work.
Then instead of further undermining the system, you fucking fix it.
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It’s pretty much the opposite of literature
And visual arts, and in fact most other forms of music. "True" pop is supposedly more ephemeral, but it's full of seasoned pro writers, producers, session players churning out hits. And classical music, whoa. Even Mozart was showing some signs of promise when he died at 37.