Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: Drugs and why Dunne did it, in reply to Russell Brown,
The animus towards Dunne is quite reminiscent of the way people kept on hurling invective at his predecessor, Anderton, even as he was doing some quite progressive things.
I'd have thought that it's the incongruity of Anderton's more throwback views with his wider supposed progressiveness that's historically riled and exasperated many of his critics. While I get that politicians may feel unjustly maligned, my squeamishness is triggered when you weigh in to dismiss their ordinary constituents as a bunch of ill-informed dupes.
It would seem that it's Anderton's belief in himself as some sort of historical great man that's led him to hold to some of his more controversial views. It probably accounts for his ruthlessness in dumping his former Alliance comrades once he'd secured his own terms for returning to the Labour fold. When he ran for the Chch mayoralty in 2010 a number of these former colleagues swallowed the dead rat and doorknocked thanklessly on the great man's behalf.
In short, there are a number of reasons why an ordinary constituent might feel animosity towards an old political bruiser like Anderton, and they don't necessarily stem from ill-informed ignorance. For example, someone who once received help from Anderton's office over a health matter was dismayed years later to find that their personal details were online in an old Alliance press release. It's one thing to receive help, but quite another to discover that your privacy was sacrificed to the greater glory of Jim. While the helpful folks at Scoop were reluctant to tamper with what's become a valuable historical repository, they very kindly removed the personal information.
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Hard News: Drugs and why Dunne did it, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
rocked a 'pompadour'...
Perhaps what Dunne needs is a nice biopic.
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Hard News: Budget 2017: How do we get…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
...when you get your groceries you’ll be pleasantly surprised it includes a light bulb for the one that just popped in the kitchen because the big data noticed when auto-analysing your line for power fluctuations a type of fluctuation that with a 99.85% probability indicated an immanent light bulb failure of that type in your house. And that sort of analysis is already possible, BTW.
That sounds like a pale echo of Thomas Pynchon's tale of the sentient and immortal Byron the Bulb, tucked away among the many substories of Gravity's Rainbow. As a freak immortal bulb Byron attracts the attention of the hit squads of the evil global cartel known as Phoebus through Weimar and then Nazi Germany. "He will be screwed into mother (Mutter) after mother, as the female threads of German light-bulb sockets are known, for some reason that escapes everybody."
Humans moved from factories to the service sector with automation. Big data will wipe those jobs out as well.
Assuming that's true, do your insights afford you anything other than bragging rights? Perhaps, like Byron the Bulb, at best they'll provide you with an enhanced enjoyment of an inescapable fate: "He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it. ... "
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Hard News: Drugs and why Dunne did it, in reply to Hilary Stace,
He was in a different role then. Just like public servants who have to toe the government line when it might be contrary to their personal views. I was surprised to hear him speak and find he is actually quite liberal on a lot of things. From his years on and near the front line of policing he has seen that a lot of laws just victimise certain people, and he has some good old leftish social justice answers.
I don't doubt any of this. Nevertheless in his role as a police union advocate he calculatingly - and perhaps effectively - played to the shallow end of the media. A little more public clarification from the man himself might go some way towards justifying the kind of apologetics he seems to have attracted since declaring his intentions in Ohariu.
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The day can't dawn soon enough when we no longer have to second-guess the minutiae of drug law reform via the sphincterish prism of Dunne's "personality". Naturally it's better than dealing with Jim Anderton's throwback bigotry, currently being echoed by Bill English, but we've been subjected to this crap for so long we're at risk of accepting pathetic gratitude as our natural state.
As for O'Connor being a Hanger & Flogger, he certainly wasn't shy about playing that part when he felt his old role demanded it.
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Hard News: Budget 2017: How do we get…, in reply to Neil,
And planning ahead is continually made more complicated by the ground figuratively and literally moving beneath our feet. Technology changes, markets change, disasters strike.
A good mum lets them lick the beater. A great mum makes sure to turn it off first.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
His language is, shall we say, plain, but treading along the edges of ethical lines is hardly limited to property speculators.
I'm not seeing a major philosophical distinction between this and Bill English's dismissal of the disadvantaged as the drug-addled authors of their own misfortune. Especially so when Matthew Hooton drops by to confirm it as a foundation myth & legend of the grammar zone.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
They were damn stupid to send out a dvd/video without actually viewing it first.
Still, the poor(?) little fella seemed to genuinely believe that he was only advocating the kind of thing that they've been giving out Queens Service Medals and JP-hoods for.
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Anyway at some point folks decided to include all sorts of post high school training and learning as tertiary education. Rightly so. All those training/education schemes "add value" to the people who take them and add value to society.
I suspect that the high water mark for that kind of overhyping of "qualifications" happened decades ago. In an early 90s article attacking the shonkiness of the "Crown Health Enterprises" reforms of the Bolger Government (Metro? Can't find it online), Spiro Zavos gave the example of a hospital manager whose tertiary qualification cited in his CV boiled down to a weekend corporate bonding event held at the Tatum Park boy scout facility on the Kapiti Coast.
While that emergent class of brave new bureaucrats were initially able to bully nurses when awarding themselves free parking while introducing charges for medical staff, their resolve rapidly crumbled once the doctors got wind of the attempted shafting.
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Hard News: Media Take: We need to talk…, in reply to ,
These are completely different substances that do entirely different things to human beings. Its just as good to argue that a shot of whisky would do the trick at a car accident.
One of the striking things about accounts of 18th and 19th Century medicine is the widespread use of alcohol, e.g. lashings of brandy for a whole host of ailments. Prime Minister John Ballance's unsuccessful 1893 bowel cancer operation was supposed to have involved literal injections of champagne. It's almost as if Big Pharma supplanted the booze barons.