Posts by Lucy Stewart
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A lot of the language is aggressive and unreasonable, almost trying to play against the image of the maternal mind as an empathetic one.
Yes, Jeremy: women can be grumpy right-wingers, too! Whatever will they do next?
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'I am your senator and, to you who lobbied hardest and most expensively, I will remove the tax on fairy dust.'
The political ads running in my district basically go "The government has given you lots of money because I made them do it. Vote for me." So......yeah.
And the sad thing is: I am quite fond of the positions held by the incumbent congressman in my district. But that's simply not what he's campaigning on. (The congressman in the next district over has consistently won 98-99% of the vote in the last few elections. Imagine that in a New Zealand electorate.)
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No one likes huge fiscal deficits, but without the stimulus spending, it's entirely likely that the US could have really gone down the hole.
As far as I'm aware, there has never been a time in recorded history where cutting taxes and government spending fixed a major recession, whereas there are plenty of examples of stimulus spending doing so. The fact that there's an entire political movement based on the idea that the government were foolish, if not criminal, for trying to fix the recession with a method that has never been proven to work - it's just nuts.
But possible, of course, because "American news media" and "real world" form an only-just-overlapping Venn diagram.
You just need to accept that the loonies seems to clump together and move on to a different (better) group.
This was a large-ish subsection of the students *in my department*. Difficult to move on from. We do actually agree politically on a lot of other things; it's just welfare that seems to be the big sticking point. That's what was scary. These aren't the loonies. I haven't met any real loonies yet.
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It really is hard to fathom how different the political discourse is over here. I had a conversation with a group of fellow students which ended up with some of them defending the idea that it was okay to let the children of people on welfare starve by cutting off their parents' welfare because, well, their parents should work harder and get jobs and it's not anyone else's fault, really, is it? It's just a consequence.
The longer I'm in this country the more I get the impression that it's built, in a large degree, on the idea of just not caring about people who aren't you, or your immediate circle. It's bloody terrifying.
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I understand why he's so popular in the US, because there are very few people willing to say some of the things he says. But he's also a smug sexist douchebag more than occasionally.
I've only seen Bill Maher a few times, but he seems to mix it up between "wow that's incredibly funny", and "do you have to be an arsehole?" That's never going as far.
Both of those, basically. I used to watch some of his show but the enjoyment/annoyance ratio started moving far too rapidly in the wrong direction.
In terms of influence, Jon Stewart has it all over him. Barack Obama is appearing on Comedy Central - a cable channel I believe - this week, and he's not doing it because there's a big hole in his schedule and nothing better came along. Pulling power.
Maher is on HBO, which isn't part of regular cable channels the way Comedy Central is - you usually pay extra for it. That being considered, he is very well-known. But the Daily Show/Colbert Report have moved into a class of their own, though I have spoken to graduate-school-attending Americans who haven't heard of Colbert, so.
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Bill is just as big as Jon Stewart in the US and it is huge pity he isn't better known in the rest of the world.
Just as big as John Stewart, and significantly bigger in the departments of sexism and anti-vaccine crankery. He's occasionally funny, but hardly a huge gap in New Zealand TV viewing.
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That's a bugger - the DVDs of Sherlock have the unaired pilot version of 'A Study in Pink' in the extras. (It's a standard TV hour, and the Beeb decided to shelve and re-shoot when they decided to commission three 90-minute episodes instead and, apparently, Sreven Moffat did such heavy re-writes there was basically nothing they could re-use.)
Sherlock starts airing on PBS this Sunday. SO EXCITED.
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I'm also hoping the backdoor pilot is going to be included on the DVD -- Tovey is the only member of the central trio who made it from pilot to series, and the tone is considerably more gothic.
It isn't. At least not the DVDs in the States. Who knows about the NZ edition, though (or any extended edition they're offering - I'm going by what I'm getting from Netflix.)
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Geoff, my thought was more along the lines of "Thank God that's over, surely it's not always that awful?". But things got better fast.
Edit: We were both virgins. Not recommended.
Not necessarily a problem, as long as you approach things in the right manner (i.e. with lots and lots of practice at all the other options before you attempt the "intercourse" bit.)
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That's luxury pricing, and it means that the books are going to either be rejected in favor of necessities or considered in competition with other luxury items.
My husband has a theory that online book piracy is higher in NZ than in other countries, due to availability/pricing, and will get significantly higher once e-readers are available. I suspect he's probably right.
Which will be another interesting test, actually - once it's possible to distribute NZ fiction widely as e-books, will it still be $30 a book? Will more get published (or self-published)? Time will tell, I guess.