Posts by ali bramwell
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more and more often these days there are times when i think i must have walked through a tunnel of light in my childhood for these type of things to not befall me, when they definitely befell children in my neighbourhood.
I also have felt this ...exact image actually Che Tibby...and something a learned friend tells me is called survivor guilt, because the other children befallen were much closer than 'the neighbourhood.' We had the paedophile that lived next door, and (disasterously) stayed with us after his wife kicked him out.
We found out 20 years later when the police were finally investigating the trailing string of broken children, that he was already known well before. But the wisdom of the day was that getting married was evidence of being cured; ie he had always preferred boys so if he was managing to perform with an adult woman everything was ok.
It seriously sucks that kindness to a neighbour can cause such harm, and makes a difficult to refute argument for community disclosure.
...and meanwhile, almost comically, at primary school we were sternly advised not to get into the white van. presumably other color vans were ok? weird. Although not as perplexing as being told as a nine year old not to eat any colourful pieces of paper a stranger might give me! I can remember reassuring Dad with my tongue firmly in my cheek that I would 'definitely try to remember not to eat any paper.'
these almost superstitious rituals to keep harm away when the rabid dog is in your house already. (colored pieces of paper? I imagined eating the christmas decorations!).
Cancer and paedophiles...whooo, too heavy.Thanks for ending that post with a positive suggestion, I will donate to that fund, it will make me feel better about the others things I cant change.
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yeah, thanks Kyle
...did I make it clear that I dont actually agree with that vocational perception thing? I was talking about the advice students get from worried parents...Mum and Dad are convinced if Judy or Johnny goes to art/film/drama/etc school their life will be ruined, they will never have any money and they will suddenly get a whole lot of embarrassingly placed body jewellery, a drug habit and peculiar political ideas...
actually that last one is pretty much true, gets them all in the end. mwa ha ha ha ha
Creon: sorry no I havent been to faust chroma, but there is still time, its on again tonite and tomorrow night
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kerry I cant agree about the futility of arts education or of history. (how can we prevent the same mistakes if we dont know how they happened the first time for instance?)
But I totally agree with you that the student loan issue is a major part of the problem. young students now have to make cold blooded decisions about likelihood of income and employment before they even start to study...at the same time they are still trying to figure out what their priorities are in life, this is very difficult. and without good independent advice to guide them, many rely on listening to their parents fears.
BA and BFA are not perceived as vocational pathways. for those that cant manage science, welding and business management are perceived as vocational pathways. the formula for predicting guaranteed employment after study seems to include a direct relationship with product based economics. this is falacious and fails to account for knowledge added economic growth. Inventiveness and entrepreneurial creativity come from a similar skill set... all those generative problem solving skills are endlessly transferable to other professions.
How many people make supposedly 'job sensible' study choices that they then regret at length?
lost dreams...
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I wish we could have a Government that encourages and celebrates achievement at all levels, including financial achievement, without taking the majority of this achievement by force to give it to those who feel entitled by right of mere existence.
que? taking by force from a sense of entitlement? you mean like Robert Mugabe's land reallocation policy? Hard to understand the parallels to life in Nelson.
Im assuming you mean tax. Goosestepping revenuers lining up at the door (with billy clubs and money bags?)...my goodness things must have changed in the sunshine capital since I left in 97...
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vacuous is a good descriptor.
adopting a political persona who is as inoffensive as possible, mouthing populist platitudes or 'genial waffle' as someone put is earlier seems to be part of a strategy of hanging back and hoping Labour will hang itself. All opposition parties have the luxury of waiting until the Governments platform is clearly expressed before committing to policy detail. This in itself doesnt seem particularly surprising or heinous. and yet Key seems so, well ..weaselly.
Craig Ranapia said:
And perhaps the plebs and the differently hued deserve a media giving them sound information to make judgements about their own interests as they determine them, rather than an ever so patronising commentariat -- still largely white, male and middle-class -- scolding them for being silly peasants who don't know what's good for them?
The style of the post was a bit heavy on hyperbole, using repetition to drive a point, somewhat oversimplified and one eyed... allowing that it is a transcript of a speech not intended to be read as an article.
However despite finding its slightly hectoring tone off-putting, silly peasant that I am, I also realised while reading it that I essentially agreed with its main premise: that Key's completely generic persona and lack of any distinguishing feature, although probably part of an attempt by National to appear moderate and build trust is actually tending to the opposite effect.
I am not put off Clarke's style or gender as McDonald suggests I should be, my discontents with Labour are more based on the technique of governing with a quick-draw screwdriver..that rushing to fix things in response to media squeaking (usually full of the hyperbole that CR so dislikes) that very often doesn't need fixing. This technique has been consistently effective at derailing single issue opposition before it has any chance to gather steam and be politically useful as a polarising tool, but also may have incrementally alienated core electorate. Foreshore and seabed case in point. Current TEC policy may be in the same category (refer Creon Upton thread)
While my opinion is unlikely to affect Nationals poling profile...even so the distrust and aversion inspired by the honorable Mr nobody-home Key is much more acute than my irritation with Labour's well worn blend of pragmatism (expediency) and dogmatism.
Thanks Tom Semmens for the pithy assesment that is both clear and specific. and pleasantly unpatronising.
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Its good to see someone speaking so specifically about the implications of Canterbury's 'change proposal' and its potential impacts on arts development.
I was at the recent govt forum for the arts in Chch which was gatecrashed by a determined student group (from the under-threat film and theatre studies dept at U of C) who made some passionate pleas for intervention to save their departments.
At the same forum other voices repeated the weirdly persistent political meme "there are too many artists being produced." I call this a meme because it is contagious and yet has untraceable origins and completely opaque logic. (where are all these artists? how many is too many? even if true, more artists is harmful how exactly?)
To further complicate things the University of Canterbury (following the path already taken at Otago University and others over the last 5 years or so) appears to be 'streamlining' unprofitable humanities programmes for purely economic reasons.
Of course this has/ will have disastrous effects on speculative research in humanities, thats an obvious consequence.
But to decry the symptoms in isolation fails to consider the underlying causes. The user pays emphasis in tertiary education has caused a steady decline of student uptake in humanities since it was implemented. This decline was predicted by many at the time. Why so surprised? From one perspective U of C has held out against the larger trend of eroding arts/humanities for an admirable length of time.
The argument is more fundamental than criticizing U of C for a lamentable, but hardly unique, lack of foresight. If some things are a social good..as opposed to being a directly functional part of an economic/industrial production ecosystem...then social sphere has to invest in maintaining them.
Arts are widely considered expendable and of no discernible function. Even where the contribution of arts/humanities to a healthy society is taken as a given, the assumption is that no social investment is required because these activities will continue anyway. The old and tired artists do it because they love it economics of matyrdom are being used, where society benefits by default from artistic acts of selfless service. A monastic/ vocational calling doesn't need education and research. dont be silly.
#cost benefit equation that thinks (bizarrely) that tertiary arts/humanities education has created too many professional artists (writers/actors) etc will remedy this by reducing tertiary arts courses. In reality the reverse is true, the equation is much simpler: by economic standards the number of prospective students is spread too thinly over existing courses. the result is the same: attrition of arts education.
#cost benefit equation that thinks fees paid is a reliable measure of educational worth will make structural educational decisions based on fees paid.
#cost benefit equation that thinks arts/humanities activity has no measurable use in society will not act to protect and foster said activity
am I happy about this? hell no.
apologies for far too long rant. -
a belated response to the pickle of the unwise property investor:
I note in the Herald article:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10500398Investor 'Big Sam of Maketu' lost $532k he had *borrowed on his mortgage* his house had previously been unmortgaged and he doesn't now how he will afford to service his new mortgage.
Sorry, no sympathy, for private people to borrow to invest is just mad. Greed is not good.
well no greed is never good, but to be fair the hard sells around property were coming in thick and fast from every which direction even just a few short months ago...
by way of example someones-I-know of extremely fiscally prudent stripe, were literally hectored by their accountant because they were failing to leverage the on-paper equity gains in their home by taking down a loan and reinvesting -in property of course.
being very very prudent and turtle cautious, as already noted, they didnt do it. but the relentless well meaning advice and the hyperbole about massive capital gain other people were achieving was starting to wear down even that well developed caution and they were actually thinking about it.
if there's a character developing lesson here perhaps its not to give too much weight to the opinions of financial advisors like investment analysts, mortgage brokers, accountants and bankers?
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on the other hand, facing down the Foveaux Straight into the teeth of autumn will be quite bracing.
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That commenters and even some bloggers continue to reference it as though it is anything else illustrates its intrinsic problem - it is imbued by those who quote it with an air of finality it does not deserve and thus, amongst the uninitiated, perpetuates errors of fact across the Interwebs and out into the real world.
agreed. but by the same token why is the political nature of the editing activity a surprising fact? the content is negotiable by design, people edit for various reasons, usually based on what they actually think. its democracy of ideas in slow motion, I really like the visible acknowledgement that history is a negotiable document...and with a built in regulatory system for inevitable bias.
I agree totally that, as with any source supposedly authoritative, you cannot safely accept what is published on face value without tiangulating your sources. the problems you cite about too ready acceptance of information presented to you are not limited to wiki.
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This is an interesting topic, one thing I think is creeping in is an idea that wiki pages are somehow (or should be) owned by the individuals that they purport to document. For example:
The removal of the first paragraph, particularly the parts around his policy views as influenced by his religion is a little more questionable - but I have no issue with a politician choosing how to present those policy issues themselves (although I do note that there is nothing close to policy or views on his page anymore).
I have no issue with polititicians managing their professional profiles as they see fit when they self publish either. But a wiki is clearly not in the same category (as a pr publication or in house policy statemment), it is supposed to operate on a principle of best consensus to accuracy -as opposed to catering to an idea of self representation or image protection.
If the information is relevent to understanding the public life of Bill English, which I would personally argue that it is, then why not just reinstate the information in question? one caveat: I do however think the information could be restated so its more specifically related to an actual policy record -and less of an insinuation /inference of some kind of vague process of political osmosis via the marriage bed.
has there been a block placed on the topic?