Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Please be polite to referees. Rugby, like many sports has terrible problems with how referees are treated on sports fields at all levels on weekends. Many of them are unpaid volunteers just trying to make the sport happen as best they can.
And if it's OK at Eden Park or any other major stadium to abuse the referee, then it becomes OK at a game with a bunch of 10 year old kids. Be unhappy with the call, but don't hurl abuse.
From my sport, this page here is getting some traction around facebook:
Hey Ref - Through an official’s eyes.
This weekend I'm entering the fire again and refereeing Dunedin vs Queenstown in our national ice hockey league. Be nice not to be called a "fucking faggot" by the players this time. :)
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Also, can we appoint Lieutenant General David Morrison to take care of security at Eden Park from now on?
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I suppose this is the nub of it, and where we disagree. I don’t think hate speech should be banned, one groups hate speech is unfortunately another communities commonly expressed opinions. As long they weren’t inciting the crowd to violence, they can say what they like and be judged by the crowd. I trust that people can work it out for themselves, without the need for some risk averse bureaucrat introducing yet more creeping restrictions on my freedom to say what I damn well like.
In this instance, if one person is being abused by a large group of people, and no one else is around, that's OK.
What a bizarre thread.
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I very rarely go to rugby games. However I went to a MLB game in 2006 when Boston was visiting Toronto (great fun!) and the security was quite actively seeking our people in the crowd and throwing them out of the facility. To the extent that they threw out a couple of poor local kids who had the misfortune to be misidentified as the rowdy Boston supporters sitting next to them.
Once in Queenstown at an ice hockey game in a crowd of 500 or so with my 12 year old son I asked a person sitting next to us to stop abusing the referee (who was simply making good calls against the home team) and he argued with me that he would continue to do so until the referee opened his eyes. Didn't achieve the desired effect, but I was always glad that I spoke up.
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As a side note, I took over responsibility for keeping David's database online and available for the public after he left our common workplace, and there should be laws against allowing him access to big data. The maps for starters...
I attended a talk last year by a NZ expert on data and data privacy. He was talking how companies use membership cards to learn about trends in their shoppers (like a Farmers Card). The company he was using as an example in the US had remarkable success in predicting when people were pregnant and sending them special deals for baby gear, based on their shopping behaviour trends for non-baby gear several months beforehand. It was fascinating, if a little scary given how much data we provide for free to facebook and google.
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Paul does know David has written about their relationship and didn’t object, although given that he doesn’t read and doesn’t understand the internet, the idea of informed consent is difficult. But does that mean no one should be able to tell the story, ever? Or that David should have censored important parts of the story? I’m not sure that’s a good result.
Only people who know him can answer whether Paul can and has consented for elements of this to be told.
I'm not sure him being unable to read and understand the internet is a good answer though. Would he be happy if he was in a room of people and you started to read out bits of this story and he knew it was about him, even if he wasn't identified? If most of the people in the room were complete strangers to him?
My feeling is that there are parts of this story that need explicit consent before being put up on the internet, anonymous subject or not. David seems to have flitted around that question without answering it directly.
I'm not saying it's not insightful or interesting. Just that surely Paul has the same rights to informed consent (as much as that may be possible for him) as anyone else, and it's not clear to me if that's happened.
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to BenWilson,
In this country, some stats on that would be awesome. The main killer STD, HIV turning into full blown AIDS, killed no one at all in 2011.
Even if no one dies in a year (and we're unusual with HIV, lots of other countries are losing people hand over foot), there's several hundred people being kept alive by a cocktail of drugs and their lives, and the lives of their families and friends drastically affected.
I'm just not sure that an argument that there aren't really any downsides to sex is a good argument. Our sexual health clinics are full of people discovering some of the possible downsides to sex.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Gudrun Gisela,
I keep seeing your photos in my facebook feed Gudrun as I know several of the Canterbury guys - great to see you supporting the sport.
I'll be refereeing them 29th and 30th when they come down to Dunedin. The official you've caught there in the photo with Hayden Argyle is Ryan Cairns, one of my colleagues.
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You also don’t really hear of many people dying from sex.
You hear of plenty of people dying from diseases from sexual contact though.
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While the report was marked as ’sensitive” it seems that it terms of the very limited distribution and the general way it was handled it was effectively indistinguishable from something marked “top secret”.
In limited distribution and the general way it was handled it was effectively indistinguishable from a cabinet paper on a new welfare policy. "We don't want this to get out now until we've put the right spin on it at the right time".
Top secret documents don't get handed around cabinet. Most members of cabinet are likely to have never seen one.