Posts by Tom Semmens
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Speaking of the media and all.. Anyone else noticed how quickly any interest whatsoever in The Times vanished since timesonline.co.uk went behind a paywall?
Gone in a puff of smoke, leaving the field open to the Guardian and the Torygraph...
Tough shit Rupert, what is your next try? -
"This crypto-fascist made no effort to build a base in the party. Now that his only faction, Newspoll, has deserted him he is gone."
OUCH!
I wish someone would apply the same results orientated blow torch to Goff, it is increasingly clear that while he is an effective machine politician, his machine is last centuries make and model.
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Diving is, in my opinion, the reason why football will struggle to be taken seriously here and in to an extent in the US
Diving throws into stark relief a cultural faultline between two definitions of masculinity and confirms some the most deeply held assumptions of Anglo-Saxon superiority over the rest. A New Zealander would no more imagine an All Black taking a backward step from an opponent than a Huscarl would have dreamed of adandoning his brother warriors in the shield wall at the moment of crisis; Whereas the behaviour of the Italians (for example) simply goes to prove the Latins are not made of the same stern stuff as us and come from a history long on treachery, regicide and marrying their close blood relatives.
To us, by diving they debase their manliness and cast themselves out from the ranks of men; For them, it is just a way to win a game.
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I am very surprised at how aggressively Key and co. have come out and attacked Norman over this. Maybe their incessant polling told them that in key demographics their kowtowing didn't go down well.
But then again, when I consider it, John Key is a rank amateur politician, a multi-millionaire opportunist and careerist dabbling in politics. John Key likes to run his government like a company CEO, with a kitchen cabinet of like minded men in suits ( fellow self made man Joyce and the arch technocrat English) and various lesser board members. Like most CEO's he prefers secrecy in decision making (abuse of urgency, the stench of back room deals on the F&S, mining, and PEDA, the preference for publicly unaccountable private sector agencies to run things like Whanau ora and, it seems, soon welfare) and tightly scripted PR opportunites (how many times has he refused to appear on Morning Report again?), with minimal accountabilty to the wider public.
Key has probably never actually been on a protest in his life. His life experience has been exclusively in the corporate world, which not surprisingly is the model he uses to run his government. In the corporate world the big wigs don't like being held accountable in public (except to shareholders every now and again) to anyone and much prefer operating in a culture of corporate secrecy and privilege.
It seems to me that John Key regards freedom of speech as an abstract thing done by bolshie, placard waving, others, something not entirely aligned to his personal corporate values and something to be therefore circumscribed if it becomes inconvenient.
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Anyway, here's some John Cale. It's page 9, and Wednesday is the new Friday. "The Chinese envoy was here, but left."
Would that make it a Chinese envoi, then?
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BTW, am I having an auditory hallucination or did I just hear Judith Collins allege Russell Norman assaulted a police office on Morning Report?
Bill English has run the same line, a disturbing development of this governments favourite Natasha Fuller offensive play - manipulate the evidence and blame the victim.
Personally I found the logical contortions of this morning's Herald editorial - where John Key is found to be simultaneously perfectly correct and totally wrong - as a grimly amusing development on the Herald's highway to achieving its ambition of becoming our very own People's Daily. -
The consensus seems to be that while Smeltz was offside it would have been a tough to call to make
He couldn't have been offside. If he had been offside, the linesman would have put his flag up.
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Going upthread a little, I've compiled the curious facts of the PEDA story and wondered what on earth is wrong with the Herald.
Editorially and in its opinion pieces the Herald has always been the mouthpiece of the Northern Club, not the National party. Of course, there has always a big cross over between those two.
Generally though you used to be able to rely on the Herald to honestly cover the issues of the day in it's news sections. Those days are long gone. Over the last four-five years the Herald has begun to deliberately manipulate and slant it's general news coverage to the point where at times it is little more than a propaganda mouthpiece of the right wing of the National Party.
Interestingly, this descent into partisan mediocrity has almost completely coincided with the editorship of Tim Murphy. Murphy clearly has an agenda, and he clearly regards the Herald as his personal tool for pursuing that agenda. So my questions are these - who is Tim Murphy? What are his views on religion, politics and society? Why hasn't a magazine like Metro run the (un)authorised story of the man behind the paper?
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L'Italia continua a deludere
Solo 1-1 con la Nuova Zelandaand Non è solo colpa di Lippi
siamo proprio modesti...We've already had to put up with good old fashioned Anglo-Saxon pluck being denied by un-manly Latin theatrics, now you telling me they don't speak English either?
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HEADLINES IN BRITISH PAPERS: BRITISH EMPIRE 1 ITALY 1