Posts by Rob Hosking
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Russell,
'immersiveness'???? Shudder.
But you're right.
Grizz Wyllie played fewer tests in his entire four year career (11) than the ABs will play this year.
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Firstly, a general comment - Congrats on one of the most thoughtful pieces, and - subsequently - one of the most reasoned discussions on this issue I've seen. From the 'this bill will stop child abuse and oh, by the way, no smacking either' at one end to the 'this is a Satanist-lesbian-communist plot' (yes I've had emails arguing just that) at the other, there has been a lot of rubbish talked over this issue.
I was disappointed last night the Borrows amendment now looks like going nowhere. Not perfect, I know, but better than any other options I've seen.
I don't believe the occasional slap on the wrist or the bum causes any harm but it is effective for some kids and should be an option.
I'd be opposed to anything more than that. I don't believe it should be beyond the wit of our Parliament to devise a law which allows for that.
I was a bit disturbed by comments in an eariler discussion on PA about how people could understand parents getting beyond their tether and hitting their kids. That is where abuse happens. 'Time out', as Russell has hinted, is often as much for the parent as for the child.
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Whether smacking (mild) is effective or not seems to depend as much on the child as on the parent. I know one couple who very occasionlly use it: their older girl is absolutely devastated; the younger one just laughs.
In my own case - my parents rarely used physical punishment and when they did it was mild and over in a jiffy. Yeah, I think it worked.
As a parent I've used it when all else has failed. My three year old responds to a slap on the wrist by saying 'No!' back at me and slapping her wrist again in imitation. There's an element of defiance in the gesture, no doubt about it, but she also stops what she was doing. She also has a high pain threshold - a product of a medically troubled start to life. So it doesn't really hurt her much, but it gets the message through when all else has failed.
All this is a long winded way of saying this is very much a horses for courses thing. And whatever legislation emerges from this needs to reflect that.
I think - and I'm not defending the nuttier religio-whackos here - a lot of the opposition to the Bradfod bill is because she was not, earlier on, careful enough about distinguishing between child abuse and correction. I've talked to a number of people who are genuinely outraged about that.
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Think about this conceptually for a minute:
NAKED BLOGGERS.
These are two words you do not want to see together, let alone see the concept made, umm, flesh.
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No, no:
Topless male year LAST YEAR.
That was when Hide, Harry Potter et al did it.
Let's nip this one in the bud right now...
[seriously though: good article, even though it went on a bit] -
John Key ferried that girl from McGehan Close around (which, depending on your view, was either a great human gesture or a blatant press opportunity)
It was both. He ALMOST dug himself a big hole with that Burnside speech, but he's dug himself out of it now, bigtime.
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Ben wrote:
Deborah, it's funny you make that 'god of the gaps' point, as it was almost an identical description for philosophy in one text I read - the gaps in our 'firmer' knowledge. Damn that Jap.
We really should just get over the fact that there's a lot of things we don't know, and of that, quite a bit we couldn't anyway.
the 'gaps' is actually a tactical blind alley for the churches. What it means is that all the things that can't be explained get filed under 'God'.
But then they are explained, in other ways, as humanity finds out more. And if they have been relied upon too heavily to sustain arguments for God, these discoveries have a hugely undermining impact on faith.
Which is why the more evangelical Protestant churches are turning themselves into all sorts of dialectical knots to try to come up with counter-arguments against evolution.
Funnily enough, it was the Catholic Church which was the most anti-Darwinist initially. It took a real reactionary turn in the late 19th Century - the doctrine of Papal infalliblity was part of this.
To me, arguments about how the world got made are actually irrelevant to faith, or how I should or should not behave. But the churches have a long and ignoble history of tearing themselves to bits over arguments which seem somewhat peripheral.
A couple of other points: I actually LIKE the Old Testament. some bits of it, anyway. One of the big differences between the Old and New Testaments which is seldom commented on is that in the Old Testament people argue with God. A lot. Not as much as they should have, perhaps (Abraham should have told God to sod off over the Isaac sacrifice business, for example).
But a lot of the prophets argue with God. OK, sometimes they get fireworked for their trouble, but not always.
Jeremiah shakes his fist at God and asks him what he thinks he's playing at. This is my kind of religion.In the New Testament that does not happen. the closest you get is Christ's plea that the cup be passed from him.
And the rest of it is Paul's guilt trip.
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'Tutaekuri' is also, from memory, the name of the Maori tribe in Maurice Shadbolt's 'The Lovelock Version'.
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Stephen Glaister wrote:
Anyhow, *while* Campbell is correct that parochialism plays a part in the FN phenomenon here, as does certain amounts of catchiness etc., for my money the core appeal is just some sort of weird inner integrity - the FN bands sounded like something, and the something they sounded like wasn't much like anything else.
There is that. I had an impassioned argument with a fellow journo a few years ago about whether NZ and Australia had different cultures. He reckoned not. The strongest thread in my argument was that Australia would never produce a group of bands like those Flying Nun ones [the closest they got was the Go Betweens] and NZ would never produce a band like Cold Chisel. [this will get me flamed, perhaps, but I love Cold Chisel as well]
Another friend, during her PhD in Edinburgh, pleaded with me for a NZ music tape - she reckoned there was a sense of distance and isolation in the music she didn't hear anywhere else. The Nun bands featured prominently [as did groups like the Muttonbirds].
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I'd actually had John Campbell down as more a Rick Astley type, but he is clearly a huge fan of this stuff....
If you were outside the main centres - as I was for much of the early 1980s - but had had some exposure to bands like the Clean, Verlaines, Chills etc...hearing this stuff was like hearing something you understood, instinctively, and beting able to get those singles and EPs was a lifeline to a life less, well, dull...I'm raving too much here and I've even been inspired to blog on the subject...
the Rheineck awards - yeah, remember those, was in Auckland by then, the award sort of hurt the Headless Chooks because it was seen as a sort of selling out...
Crappy beer, too.