Posts by Paul Campbell
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Ah I see what they did there - forget the 3 strikes laws - own a copy of windows, think about downloading a song - go to jail for 2 years
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Hard News: The Wogistan form book, in reply to Simon Grigg,
To be fair, having done HKIA at least thirty times in the past 5 years, (without an issue - I rate it as one of the world's more efficient)
yes that's largely my impression - possibly the most efficient airport I regularly travel through, and given that they actually have a 5pm rush, when all that transit screening backs up, they have to be.
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I suspect that Prosser was just following Winston's previous examples slagging off on the Chinese - it's sort of the NZ First party line, probably why he joined it - even the party name sorts of says it. I bet he was surprised when Winston didn't back him to the hilt.
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Best throw away line of the day was reported at the end of Morning Report:
"Banning young muslim men from airplanes is about the same as banning old white men from contact with money because they might embezzle it"
Which, while cute, is completely inaccurate, old white guys do far more embezzling by several orders of magnitude than anyone does terrorism
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I missed the start of this discussion - but was trying to explain it to a Chinese friend on a car trip today ....
Think about the US system - often they put a value on electing deadlocked governance structures - a Republican president and Democratic legislature because then they can have a government that theoretically can't do large scary things
But we have a different system, a parliamentary system, an executive that's combined with a party that has the votes to pass law - once we can elect them they can virtually do as they like .... but to balance that we have the opportunity to replace them and undo whatever they've done every 3 years - so yes there's a tension there, the politicians are going to tend to want longer terms while the people shorter ones
With all the politicians self interest out of sync with the people they are supposed to represent it seems obvious to me that they are in a position on this issue where they must recuse themselves from voting on it .... so yes a referendum is the only way to make a change here
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Hard News: The Next Act, in reply to Shaun Lott,
Shaun - that's how I feel too - I live overseas for a couple of decades - on my return Holmes as a bit of a cipher, I was supposed to understand who or what he meant,and all I could mostly see was a rather grumpy old man who popped up on TV occasionally (I don't think I've ever heard him on the radio).
It's probably one of those impenetrable shared cultural things like Dave Dobbyn's transformation from geeky afro to balding elder statesman
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And you thought Woodhouse would do something? - as my National MP he sent me a curt weaselly response to my letter to him on the issue, and of course voted against the bill ....
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Hard News: MegaBox: From f**k-all to zero, in reply to Freddie Fleetstreet,
The Kim Dotcom opera seems to have divided most of us down political lines with many on the left descending into breathless fanboy lapping up and faithfully regurgitating his every utterance.
Oh don't be silly - people on the left like him because he supports right wing politicians, tried to buy one off by slipping some money illegally under the table and made a loud noise when he wouldn't stay bought - he provides a public example of the greed, smoke filled room , jobs for the boys sorts of behaviour that people on the left have hated about the Right and National in particular.
We like him because he validates all of our prejudices at once.
Apart from that he's still someone who tries to illegally buy off politicians, we don't like that, he sort of makes it up because, he's funny, reminds us a bit of sergeant Schultz and has a rhino fetish
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It's interesting that NZ recognises polygamous marriages that take place outside NZ but doesn't allow people to enter into them
It's a bit like my neighbours in California a decade ago, two women who'd been married for years and years (one of them used to be a guy)
It's like law and society don't consider being married to someone of the same sex or to more than one person is a problem, but that the state change is the thing that's illegal
I wonder if I marry someone else in another country do I just commit bigamy there? or here too? - want your poly marriage? off to South Africa with you for a quick nuptials and honeymoon
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Perhaps a little bit of NZ history: 'bigamy' used to be a lot more common, largely because divorce was next to impossible - if it didn't work out people would just upstakes and move elsewhere where no one knew them and get married - usually no one noticed - but it's why if you look in old newspapers there was obviously a lot more 'bigamy' (really serial monogamy) going on than these days when an actual bigamy case is very rare.
(My family tree has a case of bigamy, and murder on discovery, not by my actual ancestor, where they moved to Otago from NSW to start afresh)