Posts by Kyle Matthews
-
Also Japan has resource issues, which their war in China was compounding, and were having trouble getting trade with places further south which had those resources. In an age when the other way to get resources was to invade... (umm, still, given Iraq) they did.
-
I'm no expert, but I would have thought that frequent updates on "ohmigod, is a tsunami coming to hit New Zealand soon or not?" might have drawn in the punters more than... the normal good morning type fare.
Even a bit of an update at each ad break, which would recognise that there's not enough news to fill several hours, and an adjustment of the TV show to allow the time would seem sensible.
-
"Cultural baggage" is the point - the impact comes from tapping into that. There's a reason Godwin is about that topic not the pillaging of native North Americans, Ugandans or local iwi.
Yes. But it's also worth looking at why we have the cultural baggage we do have.
I guess I can fully understand how Anke feels about it, and why any Jewish person would be horrified.
Re-reading this, I suspect I don't fully understand these two things at all, not having anything anywhere near to compare it to. I guess respect would be a better word.
-
Retaining a sense of fun is not mutually exclusive with that. But where's the satire in this example?
Yes. But I was responding to a person saying a KKK party would only be making fun of rednecks, not the Lincoln example specifically.
But alternatively, if it was a Wild West party, and everyone turned up as "cowboys and Indians", not many people would care, and it certainly wouldn't be news. Despite the horrific acts carried out against native Americans by settlers and the colonial military in North America.
Which isn't the same thing as a Nazis party (nothing really is), but our treatment of what is "OK" from historical themes and which isn't doesn't necessarily follow any logic about relative "bad-ness". It says as much about our cultural baggage of the theme (or lack of) as it does about the original event, and the recreated event, themselves.
Also see the woman who was in the media earlier this year pointing out that Eskimo lollies would be seen quite differently by some indigenous people in Canada than they would be here. Yet that's something that 99% of NZers wouldn't be worried about.
I guess I can fully understand how Anke feels about it, and why any Jewish person would be horrified. And why Germany has laws about it. And I think it's horrible too.
But in the back of my mind I'm noting "there's other things that we should also be concerned about and we're not". Maybe this incident, in NZ isn't something we should be so up in arms about, or we should express more concern about representations of other things, that currently we don't care about.
-
There's also a lot you could say about why Nazism raises these questions so much, whereas other historical incidents don't, or don't as much.
You wouldn't get much support for a slavery party, but pirates are fine. Cowboys and Indians are still commonly accepted.
-
Yes, but would you have thought it was acceptable for the Lincoln students to hold a KKK-themed party where some of them turned up in hoods, and some of them blackfaced-up and put nooses round their necks?
They're only making fun of rednecks, right?
I don't think you can ever consider humour just by looking at the images. Is there no way that you can dress up as the KKK and it be socially acceptable? Mel Brooks put the African American sheriff in a KKK costume as a disguise in Blazing Saddles. It was silly, but not offensive I thought.
Shortly after 911 I heard Ewen Gilmour set an audience up for a very well done joke about the event. After the joke he said there shouldn't be any such thing as "too soon", and that if we allow ourselves not to laugh at our world, we lose an important coping mechanism.
So I'm not sure anything should be off the table for humour. It's an essential part of human nature. It will always be about how it is done, and who is having the fun poked at them. I'd guess that the kids from Lincoln failed in that regard (or didn't even aim to poke fun), not in their choice of theme.
If you were a Wehrmacht soldier on the Eastern front, or in the Balkans, chances are you saw or participated in unspeakable acts.
But you could say the same thing (or indeed worse) about many of the Soviet soldiers, whose activities upon invading Germany were pretty horrific revenge on both military and civilian populations. Not many of the winning side ended up at Nuremburg facing trial.
At some stage, for 99% of the list of people who did horrible things, it becomes pointless not to move on. If we allow our civilisations to fall into war, horrific things are going to happen, despite the bizarre set of rules that we have developed around what is and isn't OK during a war.
-
Alliance, she stayed with them when the Greens split.
Duh me.
I think it is time someone stood up for Marian and Phillida since there seems to be a move to put them in the same boat as the current situation.
I think on a scale of dodgy, it wasn't quite Bill English dodgy, but it still rated.
-
I think the closest ,recently, are the two Labour MP's that Russell mentioned in his piece,namely Bunkle and Hobbs.
Bunkle was a Green MP.
-
Double Dipton
We likes that.
-
A secondary residence, available only to electorate MPs
I'd argue against that as well. Green List MPs (of which all of them are) seem to have spread themselves around the country and are doing local work as well as central government work. Dunedin has also had a National party list MP open up an office and do work in town, which gives an alternative to Labour who could put a monkey up and win both Dunedin seats. We wouldn't want to discourage list MPs from acting as quasi-electorate MPs where it benefits the electorate.
Seems to me that the ones who shouldn't get the allowance, are the (list or electorate) MPs who live in Wellington. In total, we must be talking about ~2 million a year. So fiddling the rules around to save a few hundred thousand seems like a waste of everyone's time.