Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
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Once again its evident here on PA most bloggers are radical minority vocalists
Minority vocalists! Kristin Hersh! Joanna Newsom! Alison Shaw! Awesome! Hang on. Isn't that what we're talking about here?
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It occurred to me yesterday what the problem with Goff is: he's the Bill English of the Left. Labour need to realize that they will never win an election with him at the helm. These latest attempts to play to the easily-impressed-by-Don-Brash crowd are embarrassing, and, frankly, an insult to Maori, who have given a level of support to Labour over the past 70 years out of all proportion to the gains they have received in return.
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The Wikipedia "talk" and "history" pages for the person rumoured to be involved are interesting, needless to say.
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It's not as if there's a whole heap of data lying around which can be used to predict how skyscrapers will react when large jets are flown into them, given that it's happened in real life exactly twice....
Hey, at least the fact that they both collapsed in the same way shows that the effect was repeatable. +1 scientific method.
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But what defies any rational explanation was how hundreds of people failed to notice that their offices were being wired up for a controlled detonation by a conspiracy that involved hundreds (if not thousands) of people operating in total secrecy and with robot-like precision. Nobody noticed, Steve.
It's easy enough once you realise that the Forces of Darkness have harnessed the power of time travel. Obama's Honolulu birth notices prove that much. And let's not forget the mysterious disappearing Civil War pterodactyl photograph! Clearly, awesome cosmic forces are at work. And it's also no coincidence that time travel just "happens" to be a key plot point in the Warner Brothers TV shows Lost and Felicity, both created by Mission Impossible director and Tom Cruise acquaintance J. J. Abrams. So Elron Hubbard has the tech. Knowing how that tech should be used requires precisely the right number of simultaneous, multiverse viewings of Primer.
So, clearly Witi Ihimaera was onto something.
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But calling them "fascists"? Oh, please...
To be fair, Craig, he called them "facists." Entirely different.
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I wonder what the UoA wil think of the quote from American academic Margaret Soltan, "Pretending it didn't happen is the sort of thing a very provincial university wiill do"
Soltan's been blogging this fairly extensively, and has this to say:
It wasn’t really, as Gracewood graciously claims, Google Books that outed this man. It was Gracewood’s impressive sense of prose — the way style always displays the mark, subtle or not, of one person only; the way language flows or doesn’t flow — that revealed this imposter of a book.
I'm an academic gossip junkie and I've been reading Soltan's blog for years, but it's just weird when you know (and have been taught by) the people involved.
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Caleb, could you link to Anderton's pro-war speech?
I was thinking of some especially craven TV spots he gave in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks. They're seared in my memory because of how jarring they seemed, but I have no idea if they're anywhere on the internet.
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Squandering our unearned green marketing advantage is far from "ambitious".
Absolutely. I remember listening to Key's two-handed-head-clutcher of a victory speech last year and thinking the same thing. "Nuh Zillun's got food and it's got scenery!" Great. Nice one, John. You do realize that, in the long term, those two things are largely incompatible? The more dairying there is, the more forest gets cleared, the more effluent and run-off there is in the waterways, and the uglier things get. Eventually, it's going to be so obvious even the tourists will notice.
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Don't blame Labour because the Alliance was full of romantic "Hanoi Jane" wannabes, relics from another era. The Alliance imploded not because of the actions of the government of the day, but because it hadn't moved on from a hokey, foolish, thirty year old "One, two, three, four we don't want your Asian war" view of international relations.
But they were right. The war in Afghanistan has been a disaster. I was really annoyed about the breakup of the Alliance, and still think that the loss of that coalition party cost Labour dearly in terms of energy and ideas. But, from the vantage point of 2009, it's pretty clear that the Alliance had a point about the Afghan invasion. And Anderton's gung-ho speeches about standing shoulder to shoulder with the US in the wake of 9/11 were disgusting.
Speaking of overseas relations, there's an article in today's Guardian taking NZ to task for gross hypocrisy over green issues. I wonder if this will be the start of a trend?