Posts by Dastardly Bounder
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His picking apart bling turns up in the third essay as well where he references our Lorde...
"A song like Lorde’s “Royals” critiques one version of hip-hop’s values, Cristal and Maybachs and gold teeth, and while it’s reductive in some ways, it’s also instructive, because it shows how the signifiers of hip-hop culture (which has swallowed black culture in general) have lost much of their cool."
He writes really well, but in my reading so far I've noticed a distinctly American bent on cultural influence - probably for obvious reasons, he’s writing about how ‘African-American culture has defaulted into hip-hop’. He talks about disco's influence with a nice analogy to corporate influence and big business, and seems to see hip hop self-destructing through its own gravity and lack of gravitas. But so far I’ve not noticed any reference to the Jamaican or English influence on music and popular culture – he notes that EDM is the most popular music in America at the moment (which surprised me) but doesn’t note where that sound arises from other than it being another vapid form of disco rebirth.
Like anything else hip hop doesn’t exist it a void, it influences and is influenced upon. I think we’ll see another massive flourishing of unexpected music and culture with the greater availability of music production tools and the ability to self-publish.
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Hard News: What rules are these?, in reply to Russell Brown,
I wouldn't like to see it descend to persecution
Point taken here.
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Hard News: What rules are these?, in reply to Russell Brown,
she has exactly the same rights to photograph Runting and distribute the pictures as anyone else
Until she follows him when he's on holiday and making an effort to maintain his privacy...
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Hard News: What rules are these?, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Or better still, hoist him on his own petard and do an Edward Snowden on him.
Which is exactly what Lorde was doing by posting a picture of him and linking to his FB profile. Hopefully her faithful followers will use the power of the masses to bomb him to smithereens…
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Hard News: What rules are these?, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
refreshingly low bullshit tolerance
That's one of the things I admire about her style. As a father of girls I thoroughly appreciate her stance to reduce the beauty myth
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I think possibly the best way to deal with someone like Runting is socially. Something came across the FB feeds recently calling for a boycott of Runting, don’t serve him coffee, turn him away at your door… never darken this hearth again kind of thing. As group our actions determine what is socially acceptable, and although I doubt he’ll change his style we can certainly tell him that it’s not welcome.
Runting came to New Zealand from the UK and seems to have bought the dubious ethics of the English media with him. But at the same time he’s chosen an image of himself that is obscured for his Facebook page, perhaps in the hope of maintaining some obscurity.
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Colorado has collected over $4 million tax on recreational marijuana use in two months, making a year’s forecast of $24 million. We could expect similar figures here as Colorado has a population just over 5,000,000 compared to our 4,500,000. In fact we could expect more - The Ministry of Health estimated sales of synthetic cannabis at $140 million. Creating GST revenues of $21 million per year, and if we throw in another $10 million for illegal sales of weed, based on shifty guesswork around Colorado’s figures and taking off a random $14 million because of legal high sales, it all adds up to a substantial loss of tax income to the New Zealand economy. Regardless of the actual figures all of this is now in the grubby hands of the black market.
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Hard News: A law gone awry, in reply to BenWilson,
It’s kind of amazing how far the rights aspect has been crushed out of the discourse.
Good call. I think decriminalisation advocates stopped using 'rights' in anti-prohibition discourse because it just hasn't had any impact. The use of 'harm' has a long history in discussions about rights and self determination.
John Stuart Mill wrote about it only being appropriate to assert control over someone to prevent harm to others - that they might do harm to themselves wasn't a good enough reason to reduce their personal liberty. "Over himself, over his body and mind, the individual is sovereign." Mill 1859.
I agree with Ben - we've become accustomed to a slow degradation of our freedoms. This debate is about reduction of harm but it is also about our rights and our personal liberty.
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Hard News: A law gone awry, in reply to Samuel Buckman,
I can see how you've read my comment as a call to ban everything, but that wasn’t the intention. It was more an observation of the hypocrisy associated with the Governments motives. I actually don’t support prohibition of anything at all. Historically we can see that prohibition has never worked and banning cannabinoid mimics will not work either.
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It strikes me as ludicrous that this government that is usually obsessively focused on decreasing restrictions on business can justify changing this law in the name of addiction prevention or any effort to reduce harm when they continue to allow alcohol, tobacco and codeine to be freely available.
In November 2009 Medsafe classified Ibogaine as a prescription medicine which is indicated for the treatment of drug dependency. Ibogaine has an outstanding track record with treating opiate addiction physically and mentally and there are strong indications that it works at a psychological level to treat other addictions.
Almost unbelievably Ibogaine was approved under a National Government. We can only hope they don’t do an about-face given their current approach.