Posts by B Jones
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I think there's a charming novelty value to one senior labour party person being publicly nice about another one. That to me is the takeaway from this - not whether someone is smart or inclusive or authentic - but that the labour folks may have stopped stabbing each other in the back and started to play nice.
Anyone writing something like this is putting their rep on the line. You can't do this while still thinking "what if he lasts ten minutes like the last guy, then what's his successor going to think of me?"
This doesn't change my opinion of Little (all of the above could be true of a leader I'd hate) but it makes a nice change from the past.
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I think this is a positive initiative, overall, it's just that I'm familiar enough with the terrain to know there are often unexpected fishhooks, and that efforts to do good can often be held up by plans to do better.
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Fair enough, Graeme. But the idea of doing this by private member's bill raises a few questions for me about where the Crown is in all of this and what its responsibility to Maori is in terms of the Treaty (not passing that law back in 1962 in the first place, maybe). I wonder whether any of the 2000 or so registered historical claims mention this issue. One could always be amended to include it, I suppose.
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Yes, it's definitely racist to return a tiny fraction of what the state appropriated from Maori after promising it wouldn't, and also to fund health and education services in such a way as to reduce inequalities, which is why governments of every flavour have been doing it for decades.. FFS. 2004 called; it's for Royal Courtier and wants its race relations back.
Speaking of decades, it's been customary since the mid 80s to consult with Maori when you make policy changes that affect them. I'm assuming Graeme and Trevor M have a process in mind for doing that? Otherwise there's a risk that you're charging in to rescue a princess without stopping to check whether the dragon's actually bothering her. It's not a bad assumption that this law is a problem, but it does seem to be an assumption.
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But, given their positions, and their philosophical consistency, I can guarantee you 100% that both of them would be in favour of repealing this section of law.
You'd have thought in their many years of campaigning for one law for all, they'd have spotted it and mentioned it, if only in support of their claims not to be racist. I can't find any examples of them mentioning it online. Mike Butler and David Round, who write for NZCPR and are more or less in Muriel Newman's ideological camp, both talk about it only to complain that it or its review gives too much power to the Maori Council.
I've followed this issue closely for a long time, and if there were any philosophical consistency to Brash and Newman et al, they'd have campaigned vigorously for the protection of Maori property interests in the foreshore and seabed.
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I’m sure they know what they’re doing, I’m just curious about the effect I perceived. You know how when the car stereo is on too quietly and you can hear the high frequencies and enough of the vocals to tell what song is playing, but you can’t quite tell what pitch to sing along at? I had a similar effect but at really high volume – I couldn’t tell whether the sound I heard matched the note I expected to hear. I’m just not sure whether the problem was in my brain, my ear, the speakers, or some other part of the setup. I know nothing about sound engineering and don’t have much experience listening to amplified live music, but I normally have a reasonable sense of pitch and it was odd to have that disappear for a few moments. I couldn’t tell that anyone else noticed, so maybe it was just me.
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I asked the acoustic engineer in the family and she says some speakers don't do so well at low frequencies, human hearing isn't as sensitive, and that it's a sign I'm getting old, complaining about the noise at concerts.
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I was at Fat Freddy's Drop last night in Wellington and had heaps of fun. At one point, though, I found myself wondering at how the sound people decide how loud to play it all. Obviously you want some foot stomping energy for a track like Razor, which is one of my favourites from the new album, but there seemed to be a tradeoff between getting the rhythm pounding through everything and making it possible to interpret the pitch of all the heavy bass and enjoy the tune as well as the rhythm. Anyone here with technical know how to explain how all that works?
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Hard News: Music: The year the…, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
I feel like the second paragraph of this post is basically a mansplaining of "All I Want For Christmas is You".
I think that's more Columbusing than mansplaining :-) Like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at an ocean millions of people had been living beside and navigating for millennia.
White Wine in the Sun is one of my faves as well.
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I worked retail in the 90s, so I have to say anyone who's managed to avoid All I Want For Christmas for the last twenty years has done extraordinarily well. Cheer, bah humbug. There are very few songs that can be played eight hours a day on repeat for a month every year that don't give survivors the twitches. Boney M's Christmas stuff I still like.
The entire history of NZ television hasn't been catalogued yet, otherwise I'd share the completely bloody awful 1993 Wheel of Fortune Christmas Special, featuring Sir Howard Morrison, Simon Barnett, Rima Te Wiata and at least two PA readers on backing vocals. You guys reminded me of it with John Lennon above, and The Lord's Prayer video clip the other day. Unfortunately the version we sang didn't have a funky disco beat.