Posts by Gareth Ward
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I particularly enjoyed the Herald's "AirNZ's Rico is hated by staff because he's so inappropriate" article that finished with "want a Rico t-shirt? Email us!"
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Surely we are meant to be electing representatives from a party that we feel will best represent our viewpoint in Parliament - and so under MMP the parties should be campaigning on what positions they will take and where their "walk away" points are. If anything, your thesis just shows that the two big players haven't yet adjusted to the fact hat they won't be calling all the shots and are still campaigning on a "this is what we'll do as supreme rulers of the country" model
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M'kay?
As I said, it may only be an issue of semantic weight and you personally are making some important distinctions, but plenty of people don't and as a reader I think it fair to point out that some people are making statements that sound an awful lot like implied causality, whether that is the intent or not.
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In that same video, Palin claims that acts of monstreous criminality begin and end with the individual and have nothing to do with the state. As much as I wish this was a change in her foreign policy on terrorism I figure it's simply monstrous hypocrisy.
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I really think the line should be made clearer in all your discussions that you are condemning the absurdity of the rightwing rhetoric (especially in light of someone having just undertaken the worst possible natural conclusion of it) without laying specific causation between the rhetoric and the specific act here. Russell when you say the Tea Party are important 'here' because of mainstreaming it sounds an awful lot like a definitive link between their actions and this event 'here' - completely unprovable and a MASSIVE call.
We can all be deploring the nature of the discourse given what's happened but the implicit or explicit causative links to a mass murder do nothing but provide unwarranted martyrdom. It may be a semantic weight issue but an important one.And Danielle I failed to pick up faux equivalence in John Stewart on this topic - on others, sure, but there was little of that here. Colbert's montage of all 'sides' instantly laying blame was quite genuine equivalence on the other hand...
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I guess on the plus side of partisan political news out of the US - De Lay got 3 years prison for blatant purchasing of the Texas elections via that web of PACs he set up (there's a really lame Pacman joke floating in here somewhere). I think the specific charge was a little different, but a prison term is excellent given the way in which he outright purchased the election, boasted about it, amended legislation to reward his business backers and then used his purchased electoral power to redraw the boundaries to cement the thing for a generation.
Without being too coarse, I suspect some in the Republican party may actually appreciate the focus on the symbols on their campaign ad maps, rather than their ACTUAL map drawing. -
While this is probably unnecessary for the PAS attendee, get a look at John Stewart's take on it if you can (I believe you still need US proxy servers to view thedailyshow.com?). Aside from a rather flat attempt at levity with John Oliver, he nails the tone and explicitly states how ridiculous attempting to lay blame or causation with rightwing rhetoric is. And as he said, this is coming from someone "who hates the political speech in the US".
What he does beautifully nail (and the distinction is significant) is the fact that said rhetoric is not all that indistinguishable from the ramblings of the crazies that do these types of things. "It would be really nice if the ramblings of crazy people didn't in any way resemble how we actually talk to each other on TV. Let's at least make troubled individuals easier to spot."
I certainly hope a few of the centre-left commentariat that respect him take the message to heart and drop some of these attempts to imply straightline causation. Frankly that stuff is just handing martyrdom to the Palins, Becks and Limbaughs of the world; as opposed to the much harder-to-defend charge that the rhetoric and messaging they use is the same as that of the type of mentally ill individual that pull guns on Congressmen and children.
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While the climate and discourse may have been one factor here - and therefore quite a legitimate topic of discussion - I think it needs to be remembered that, at best/worst it is just one factor and that discourse seems to be bearing a disproportionate amount of the current discussion.
I guess the likely unanswerable question is would the nutter have done this anyway under a different political climate? Or was it a tipping point factor? -
How ironic, given that I suspect Gibbs' farm specifically owns foreshore land or at the very least denies public access to it. Happy to be proven wrong...
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Craig that is extraordinary, and would like to share it through the banality of social media if I may...
(Edit, naturally I mean Larkin's poem)