Posts by Joe Wylie
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Guess, what Joe – on Saturday electors didn’t have to exchange a fucking book report for their ballot. Sorry about that, but I’m still struggling to see what the media could have possibly done to satisfy you without (as Andrew put it) becoming nakedly partisan in a seriously troubling manner.
Craig, my reading of Keith Ng’s piece – and Andrew Geddis’s response – is that it isn’t simply about what happened on Saturday night. It’s about the implications of a whole heap of unresolved issues.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Woodward and Bernstein spent two years working the story, and didn’t go to press with anything they didn’t have solidly corroborated from multiple sources and/or with documentary evidence to back them up – which I know is dreadfully old-fashioned nowadays, but there you go.
I’m aware of that. I’ve also taken the trouble to actually read Dirty Politics.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
And maybe people like us who were sickened by what we read are just outliers who live in a social media bubble with other people like ourselves, and so have no real clue what the rest of New Zealand think or believe.
Which has nothing to do with the media at all.
So back in the day, would you have advocated that Woodward & Bernstein simply assumed the position and got with the program? Given your bizarre assessment of Farrar's role, I guess you would have.
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Speaker: Three times over, and never again, in reply to simon g,
Thank you for doing this, June. If you ever asked yourself – ’Will writing this make any difference?” … well, it has.
+1
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Hard News: The humanity, in reply to Trevor Nicholls,
I find Patrick Gower quite endearing, sometimes (not so much recently), but he always looks to me like his face belongs in the pages of Viz magazine.
I think I know what you mean. More Finbarr Saunders and his Double Entendres (fnar fnar!) than Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Tersticles.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Paul Campbell,
ven mail sorting was moved to Chch, cross town mail now takes 3-4 days rather than 1
Thanks, I didn't know that. What I have noticed is that from well before the quakes cross town mail in Chch could take that long.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Helen Clark’s symbolic peace-making with Jim Anderton was a big step in looking like an alternative Govt in the face of the Shipley-Peters morass.
Clark, along with other young Labour figures, worked in Anderton's Auckland dairy in her student holidays. These people were nothing if not effective networkers. What seemed like a historic rapprochement was simply the re-establishing of old ties disrupted by the fish & chips gang upstarts.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to tussock,
We did better than that in the 30’s.
In many ways we did, although the history of the first Labour Government shows that they were far from monolithic in their commitment to social justice. As Bruce Jesson’s The Fletcher Challenge reveals, it wasn’t only the Government who trained the workforce or employed the men with clipboards. The Fletchers that reaped a lucrative sweetheart deal from the Chch rebuild grew from being just another building firm to a dominant player in the economy through building state houses.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to simon g,
We hated Muldoon and we loved Mandela. Except for … well, most of us.
Heh. I remember the 1981 election night TV coverage, where an excited young suit with an unfortunately squeaky voice declared he’d voted for “Mister Muldoon” because he’d “got the deficit down”. Three years later the election night coverage was swarming with his clones, all reviling Muldoon as a disgraced charlatan.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to tussock,
a working man out of a job was the state’s fault and they’d pay him enough to feed a large family in a free house on a giant section by way of apology.
The unemployed were expected to work. Having a family exempted you to some degree from being directed to live in work camps, though many who endured the freezing conditions under canvas planting the Kaiangaroa forest in the 1930s left their families simply to work.
As recently as the late 1960s single men were compelled to live in camps grubbing nassella tussock (nothing personal intended there) in exchange for the dole.