Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Hard News: Grokking things by being places, in reply to Russell Brown,
It's certainly not a good thing to happen, but meeting angry people is part of campaigning. It happens to everyone.
Yes it is - and if I spit at you you're perfectly entitled to be upset without being patronized as a soft-cock who needs to harden the fuck up. Yeah, I guess it was a really slow news day at The Herald and a piss-weak story that should have been spiked saw print. Guess that's not news at all.
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Chinese tend to vote National so they should be welcomed.
I'd like to see some empirical evidence of that, personally.
Europeans should also look to protect their culture by managing immigration carefully to ensure integration rather than displacement of the host culture(s).
And this is where the neo-Yellow Peril argument almost becomes too absurd to be offensive. Which "European" culture are we protecting from the Barbarian horde? I don't see how anyone with even the most superficial grasp of New Zealand's cultural and social history could confuse the place for Little England on the South Pacific. The reality is much more complex and interesting.
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Hard News: A week being a long time in politics, in reply to BenWilson,
Anyone have an opinion on whether National really would go to the polls again if they have to serve as a minority government, and are blocked from their neoliberal agenda?
Picking a question out of the sustained sneer, if any Government loses a confidence vote and is unable to pass the Appropriation Bill that gives legal effect to the Budget there's not a lot of choice in the matter. If you're talking about what would prompt a snap election, I don't know. We've had three snap elections, and I don't think you could argue any of them were prompted by a deep concern for sound governance and the public good. (Which is why I'm a fan of fixing the election date, but I digress.)
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Hard News: The Solemnity of the Day, in reply to James Butler,
I hope Twitter doesn’t go silent – I’ll be scrutineering, and I need something to read on my phone during the boring bits.
I think you might want to leave your phone in your pocket and on silent. I must own to a touch of scadenfreude when a scrutineer for another party was politely but firmly told to leave the polling place if she needed to make a phone call. :)
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Hard News: The Solemnity of the Day, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
It’s nice to have a day away from the barrage of political coverage
As Idiot/Savant, I think, put it beautifully: Election Day isn’t about the media or the politicians. It’s belongs to the rest of us from midnight on Friday until the last polling place locks its doors.
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Hard News: Criminalising Journalism, in reply to Hebe,
A second-string failed candidate like Paul Henry (who was only ever a candidate because of name recognition) beggars belief as a commentator.
And Bryan Gould's major qualification for providing post-debate commentary on National Radio seems to be that he directed UK Labour's failed '87 election campaign. I'm hardly surprised he thinks Goff is just awesome-sauce, but being one hell of a Labour Party insider doesn't make everything he says intrinsically worthless.
Paul Henry stood for Parliament twelve years ago. I think we can find more substantive and recent reasons why he doesn't deserve our attention, yes?
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Well, that will teach me to extend anyone the benefit of the doubt ever again... It's going to be a looooong haul to midnight on Friday isn't it?
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Muse: Indecision '11: Fighting the Grey, in reply to Jeremy Andrew,
As they say “My great grandad didn’t cross 20000 miles of ocean in a leaky boat to see this country overrun by immigrants!”
Can I haz that on T-shirt plz?
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Muse: Indecision '11: Fighting the Grey, in reply to Robert Harvey,
But I do not think it right to imply that just because there are numbers of elderly (of all races) who express rascist ideas, that such behaviour is an essential characteristic of any particular age group.
Oh, that's a perfectly fair point - it will be a fair few years before the repugnant Kyle Chapman is drawing a pension. And I live with a 66 year-old white male who finds Grey Power and Mr Dunlop's anti-"Asian" bigotry repugnant. There are many things that come with the years. I don't accept that ignorance and racism is among them.
I hope my satirical barbs were squarely aimed at one repulsive individual, and an inexplicably influential lobby group that purports to speak for those "50 and over" whose contribution to debate over the future of Auckland is the same-old same-old Yellow Peril crap in a new box. If I was Keith Ng, I would have offered detailed, point by point fact-fu on the outright falsehoods in Grey Power's submission. [sarcasm]You know, he's one of "those people" who is really good at numbers. [/sarcasm] Impertinent snark is more my skill-set.
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Hard News: The perils of political confidence, in reply to merc,
-How does John know we will make between 7 -9 billion from assert sales? (2 billion is also a hell of a variation).
You want the truth? He doesn't, any more than Goff's touching faith in Treasury projections is well-founded. I don't think it would be fair to call Goff and Key stone cold liars, but I really hope Cunliffe and English aren't believing their own Pollyanna acts.
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