Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: About Chris Brown, in reply to Russell Brown,
But Lisa, If you don't watch the violence, you'll never get desensitized.
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Hard News: About Chris Brown, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I will happily argue that George RR Martin’s treatment of rape and violence against women in A Song of Ice and Fire is ghastly on so many levels (and the television adaptation is even worse) *
I'd argue that this, among many other levels of nasty, is exactly why GoT is so popular. Medieval fantasy that "keeps it real". Everyone in it is a gangsta to some degree or other. If they weren't at the start, they are by the end.
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Hard News: About Chris Brown, in reply to Russell Brown,
Dirty little secret: they basically couldn’t really find out before.
Wellll. I don't think I'd risk that, in the case of the USA. Goodness knows what they've got on us all.
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Speaker: Rugby, Racing and Emotions, in reply to Kyle MacDonald,
At the risk of seemingly like a walking cliche, for me rugby is about my dad
Surely for a therapist, it would be a cliche if it was about your mum :-)
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Speaker: Rugby, Racing and Emotions, in reply to william blake,
Perhaps the whole colonial relationship with the mother country is why post war NZ worshipped such a horrible bully boy game.
It was well popular before either World War. But probably being more English than the English (who mostly actually obsess about soccer now) would have had something to do with it. Doesn't really explain why it's so popular with Maori and PIs, but that's probably more to do with the leveling power of sport, in which prowess is clearly a major factor in selection, rather than class, income, race. Whatever the hegemonic sport is, you'll probably find it's popular amongst some disadvantaged groups, just because it's something that reduces the disadvantage.
I leave out sex, though, in my list of disadvantages that a sport could help someone overcome. It's not a great leveler there, it's the opposite, highly exclusionary. This is not limited to rugby, of course. But it seems to have quite an extreme expression there. I've never so much as seen a woman playing any kind of game involving tackling against men. At least in soccer, girls and guys can have a kickaround. In the rugby-like sports, there's pretty much only touch rugby that can be enjoyed together.
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Speaker: Rugby, Racing and Emotions, in reply to Kyle MacDonald,
and that further the more, as men in particular, we can get comfortable with feeling, tolerating and verbalising emotions the better.
Yes. I've kind of struggled to comment on this thread because it's about something quite serious, under the hood, and I felt it quite strongly after the last World Cup final. I mean, we bloody well won, and celebration should have been some kind of no-brainer, but it didn't happen where I was. It was a strange and sad insight into our national male character (the women didn't really seem to be affected at the party I was at).
It is interesting to hear from an actual psychotherapist who, no doubt, has a lot of NZ male clients. I took Kyle's point to be that sports appreciation is therapeutic, if you don't take it too seriously, and that somehow our inability to so thoroughly enjoy the catharsis in NZ is a problematic part of our national psyche.
But I may have got that wrong, because, (and please don't take offense at this, Kyle) therapists so often try not to offer a strong opinion, since it's not about them. They invite reflection hoping that the client will find their own insight, and will deliberately see both sides of the situation, in order to promote realistic self evaluation. So I'd also say Kyle seemed to be also acknowledging that the NZ male way of dealing with shit may just be different. But I did get a feeling that he was suggesting that the emotions brought on by getting into a sport might be better on the outside, since it's essentially something rather unimportant.
TLDR: Kiwi men are bad at emotions. Let them out?
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Field Theory: It's about time, in reply to Sam Bradford,
It’s bugging me too, but athletes should be able to say what they want, same as anyone else. It’s not surprising that the wealthy young men of the ABs are mostly Nats-by-default.
They should, although when they're pretty much representatives of a professional organization, they should consider the extent to which their pronouncements associate that organization positively. The head of Telecom would be ill-advised to pronounce on their political alignment, in case they alienate a chunk of their customer base unnecessarily.
I definitely feel a big turn-off from rugby when I hear them expressing their opinion, because then it goes from something that doesn't matter, in which all opinions are pretty much equal and ridiculous hyperbole is expected, to something that does matter. I feel like cheering for Ritchie is cheering for dickheads who are fucking the country up. It makes me feel like he's a dickhead and that I'd rather he lost face publicly. Only a little bit, of course, but that's because he's only done it a little bit.
OK, if it were support for my own political choices, I might like them more, but I'd say the losses from alienating people are greater than the gains from increasing support. Especially when their support is already so huge, they have only losses to make from a branding decision like that.
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There's such an easy way to spike National's guns here. We just need a Rugby Party, which promises that the nation will be run by and for the All Blacks. Then the All Blacks can safely endorse it with impunity. It's first leader will be his royal Snaffleness, Sir Ritchie, should he choose to accept it. Which ever side comes out on top in the election has nothing to lose by aligning with him, and making him the Minister of Rugby.
Then, at the end of the day, even in a game of two halves, rugby will always be the winner.
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Hard News: NZME and you, in reply to Alastair Thompson,
Dismissing other people’s solutions is easy.
Proposing workable ways to address this issue is what is need.
I could have been nicer. But I don't think that means I have to be nice about a really bad idea, just because I personally haven't proposed a better one. You could propose to solve world peace by killing cats. Do I have to propose an alternative to convince you this is not a good idea?
Neo-liberal economic views on the dead weight of taxation are highly debateable
I'm not exactly coming from a neoliberal perspective to say that taxing something unrelated is hardly the best way to raise money for some service. Taxing bandwidth to support journalism is as arbitrary as taxing petrol for it. Except that petrol already has a taxation levy system in place, and isn't growing at a high exponential rate, so it wouldn't be quite so expensive or impractical, or unfair. I'd rather pay tax for the air I breathe than my bandwidth, because at least the air I use is constant, and you could argue it's a common good I'm taking from, unlike data flowing down a wire that I'm already paying for the use of, and indirectly the installation and maintenance of, something not being done by the government in the first place.
As an alternative, it seems fairer to me just to slap it on the current tax take as is, rather than invent arbitrary new taxes with new admin overheads that involve winding back the unlimited bandwidth clock to the bad old days. If it's a common good it should be paid for out of the common tax pool. If it's not a common good, then it should be user pays, and if it dies, well, so be it.
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Hard News: NZME and you, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Again, VUW’s Peter Thompson proposes levying all communications infrastructure, not just the Internet.
I propose levying his communications. Jesus, could communication be one thing that doesn't have the government's finger right up it? They're already scanning it all. Now we have to pay them for it too? Just to maintain something older that people who use it won't pay for, and those that don't use it have found another way for? Gah!
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