Posts by Peter Calder
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Money well spent. An annual request like this would not go amiss, Russell. Reminds me that it's time I sent $$ to the Auckland Radio Trust which rebroadcasts BBC World Service in NZ ...
-
Bollocks. There have been far more sophisticated discussions of power on Public Address than in anything you have ever published, Peter.
Oops. Argumentum ad hominem now. Sorry to have bothered you. Over and out.
-
Would that be a bit like when you wrote this in your own story?
The microphone she thrusts towards him is plugged into King’s camera and I feel constrained to ask him whether he has crossed the invisible, but important, line between a documentarian and his subject.
Of course I wrote that. It was a question that I knew would be in readers' minds so I asked it because I was interested in their answer to it. That's what journalists do. But what people in this thread seem to be saying is that it is incumbent on these filmmakers to observe standards of "objectivity" (whatever that is) that are routinely ignored by the MSM. And I think that is a) harsh and b) oblivious to an analysis of power.
I assume that
There may be a reasonable explanation, or even police malfeasance at play, but assuming there isn’t, activists who try and buy grenade launchers aren’t really my style.
is not a sly attempt to imply that they are mine. (For the record, they are not and I rather specifically said so).
-
This discussion - like so many others on PA - is dispiritingly devoid of any underlying analysis of power. There seems to be some assumption here that the filmmakers should have adhered to BBC standards - never mind that our TV broadcasters don't. These people are documentarians - working with a $1500 camera - but they are activist documentarians: they don't make films about, say, pony club days or a girls rugby team or DoC rangers rescuing threatened Kiwi. In their first film, they looked at the sale to developers of an old-fashioned beachside camping ground near Mahia in northern Hawkes Bay as a springboard for a look at the steady erosion of ordinary people's access to the coast. In this they explore and give a voice to dissenters, who as they remarked in my piece and as one of the interviewees remarks in the film, are an endangered species in this country and around the world. When I was in my 20s, we were protesting about shit every bloody week - partly because it was fun and a good way to pick up girls but also because protest and dissent was an important part of social discourse. This film needs to be seen in that context. Sure some animal rights activists are nutcases and pouring acid on anyone's car is a crap thing to do. But this film is not about defending specific dissenters. It's about delivering some oxygen to the very nature of dissent and calling to account those who wield state force to make it difficult to express dissent. To quote Paul Buchanan in this film "the last time I looked, that was permissible in a democratic society". Those forces of the state, incidentally, have PR budgets paid by the taxpayer and spent on hardened hacks who know damn well how to hijack the agenda. They also get PR TV each week in prime time, which some contributors to this thread apparently enjoy for entertainment value, but see as quite free of problematic implication.
-
Dear God, that Shanks speech is deeply disturbing. This woman is on a publicly funded salary? Tell me she is one of those, you know, like people you create on the interweb thingy with your computer but they're like, not really real. Computer-generated, that's it.
-
Go well, Fiona. The website looks like ... hey, it looks like a website rather than a concrete-block wall.
Love your work. -
I accept that Tizard was ill-treated by some pretty vindictive commentary. But hang on: she said she had "unfinished business", and cited as the sole example her desire to give a valedictory speech. It takes a high degree of solipsism - not to mention a tin ear - to even contemplate the prospect of being paid $150,000 to give a speech. Her remarks about Goff, though not inaccurate, were petty and redundant. And her complaint that she was "bullied through the media" by Little was infantile. This is politics - and the party she represented is in rather dire straits. It's not Play School.
-
Fine piece, Garth. But I'm not sure about your logic. Should I carry a chainsaw around on the basis that I'll be bloody glad if a tree ever falls and traps my leg? (Warning: this post may be prompted by the iPhone envy of a man who has a $49 Samsung.)
-
apropos of nothing much, can anybody detect any flaw in this analysis? I'll be damned if I can ...
-
... as people were gathering in what is now known as “Liberation Square” in Cairo – ...
It's Tahrir Square, but Tahrir is Arabic for "liberation", so it has been known as Liberation Square since they kicked the Poms out in the 1920s.