Posts by Tom Semmens
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Russell: Single parent family, I am shocked at your un-politically correct assumption of nuclear family-hood! I think I shall write to Santa and dob you in.
I agree with you all... Since my alternate plan of locking her in a tower until she is thirty has been ruled out as possibly an over-reaction and you can't protect them forever, I suppose on going worry and fretting is about we can do.
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Sorry for the thread hijack - BUT it is christmas... And hopefully topically for the PA crew.
OK so I have got my thirteen year old neice a laptop for her present this year (I made the fatal mistake of asking two now self-aware pre-teens what they wanted rather than just giving them something) and now her mother and uncle are most concerned on how to keep an eye on the wholesomeness or otherwise of her internet usage.
I don't want to put an intrusive net blocker on her computer, or spy via a key stroke logger or somesuch. She is to clever anyway for me to be sure she doesn't know how to find and disable such applications - I know I would have at her age.
So I am thinking that I will have to completely re-jig the way the broadband works at her house, rather than simply sharing the ADSL modem via a wireless router I am glumly resigned to spending a day or two converting an old machine I have here at home to act as a firewall, installing a wireless card and sharings its internet connection.
Anyone got a more elegant solution than that? Know any decent software that might allow her to browse on a laptop without heaps of false positive stuff happening?
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Are the Dunedinites here happy with/resigned to Dunedin slipping ever further into being a backwater though? I know sport isn't the be all and end all, but in terms of profile losing all test matches and your professional sporting franchise is a pretty big hit.
It seems to me the logical outcome of not having a decent stadium is the end of the Highlanders and the end of Otago as a force in rugby, and the establishment of a Crusaders hegemony in the South island with a new Super 14 team based in the upper half (Tauranga?) of the North Island.
That would leave Dunedin, already dangerously over-dependent on its university, absolutely a one trick economic pony. Do the people of the deep South really think that if the (for example) Bay of Plenty gets its team, someone up North won't be coming after their Univesity as well?
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I got the impression the Ralston column was written with the main goal of simply pissing people off. More generally, isn't that the aim of most opinion pieces in our broadsheet in type but tabloid in inclination national daily papers now? I think the general tactic is to have a group of columnists who have such outlandish views that hopefully the audience will be drawn back in outraged fascination, as if Bill Ralston is a gruesome intellectual bruise you can't help pressing.
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Just to exapnd Sacha - it seems to me your comment "...You calling us..." is an unconciously ironic QED of my point. If Public Address is an "us and them" community, then whose values do you think are reflected within it? This site doesn't appear to be overrun with truck drivers, West Coast miners or low paid perfume counter assistants from Farmers, now does it? I am always struck at the hissing response discussion of class attracts from the middle class. For working class New Zealanders, class is a self-evident truth. When it comes to class the middle class inhabit a la la land where they are largely blinkered by their unshakeable belief in the self-evident universality of their own value system.
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@Joe Wylie - what's your problem?
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@BenWilson:
All right then, how would all your benign middle class voters react if we truly did something revolutionary to ensure equality of education for all new Zealanders? How about, for example, we completely abolish all private schools are make it part of every schools charter that their ethnic and demographic make up accurately reflect wider New Zealand society - even if that means bussing kids from Remuera to Otara and vice versa?
I tell you what you would get - you would get a middle class reaction that would befit a genuine attempt to tilt the class bias in education system back towards the most disadvantaged
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Sacha, i am under no illusions of the class bias of most of the people who post on this site.
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Everyone here seems to me to be missing the politics of these education changes, as if they think these changes are being done with primarily educational outcomes in mind.
Alan Peachey may not be the minister of education, but it isn't hard to see the strings on Anne Tolley, who in Hawke’s Bay has a reputation of being a rather dull woman more known for her simplistic dogmatism than sophisticated political philosophy. Bovine loyalty clearly has its rewards in her case. The problems inherent with having MP’s with limited talent promoted to levels beyond their ability will undoubtedly become evident to Mr. Key at some stage, but at this stage in the Tory game this debate shows she clearly has her uses.
There exists within New Zealand a group of elite state schools that would like nothing better than to create a two tier state education system in which they cherry pick the best students, athletes, etc and leave the lumpenmass to an inferior second tier system. Alan Peachey was a principle of one these schools and is a leading advocate of a two tier model. Nothing facilitates the creation of such a system like the introduction of a system of testing that automatically creates a set of winners and losers, and which automatically confers an overwhelming advantage to the elite decile ten schools.
Such a two-tier system suits the middle class bedrock of the National Party, because for the middle class the primary purpose of the education system is to tilt the playing field to their advantage as early and as comprehensively as possible.
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Craig, its only been a month and already you have been reduced to posting lame intellectual sophistry?