Posts by Tom Semmens
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I am pretty sure that is the end of any talk of "Red Peak"....
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"...The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which because one had his private parts in the other's mouth..."
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Hard News: RWC 2015: This wasn't in the script!, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Have you considered a job at the Sun?
Funnily enough, one of my best friends works for the Sun.
But actually, the line came from my flatmate, a man who hates rugby and South Africans with an equal and indiscriminate passion.
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Reading through this discourse puts me in mind of the public broadcasting license. I think Bolger put an end to it in 1999, in his last political act before electoral feat later the same year.
I am a strong believer that some sort of broadcasting fee needs to be brought back - possibly by taxing internet downloads. I have no idea how much data New Zealanders download every year, but a small tax on each gigabyte, collected by ISPs and built into the monthly line rental of users, could potentailly be a very profitable way to make public broadcasting free of tax payer funding... If guess that if you wanted to raise a 100 million a year and someone knows how much data is downloaded in NZ every year it would be easy to work out the tax per gigabyte, and that would tell you if it was a practical idea or not.
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“there is no longer any requirement for Auckland commentary”.
The democratic implications of having a media where political and Auckland coverage is all rolled up in one series of uncritical celebrity worship news about Max Key's bimbo girlfriend and her performance in a beauty pageant are terrifying.
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A sudden, swift and well planned surprise attack on a complacent major power. Not like Japan at all....
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The irony there, of course, is that the rationalisation inevitably brandished by those who favoured playing with apartheid South Africa was that sport and politics shouldn’t mix.
When you have pro-National, ex-media works head Brent Impey as head of the NZRFU then the temptation to use all that soft power was always going to be to much for Impey and Key.
Usually, it takes a generation to forget the lessons of the past - and it is about a generation since 1981. And the lesson of that year? In New Zealand, if you try and mix rugby with politics, you'll get a violent reaction.
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Poor Cameron, the media slug passed by the heir apparent, news glaucoma.
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Key's problem is almost certainly that his focus groups tell him the majority of muddle Nu Ziland is afflicted with a serious case of Islamophobia, and beyond that we've ALWAYS had a degree of xenophobia about foreigners in general (yes the irony is not lost). After all, if New Zealand has a foundation myth it is that of the noblest race of savages building a new nation with the best of the British, untainted by inferior peoples. So on the one hand, he has elite opinion demanding he do the morally right thing, while on the other his focus groups are telling him that most people in his support base are secret Tories when it comes to these refugees. Many people I talk to are informed largely by a media that parrots the Daily Mail, and are terrified of repeating the "failed" immigration policies of the EU and creating terrorist havens on home soil.
And how can you blame people of having a fortress mentality? Key himself has whipped up fear of Islamic extremism to justify all sorts of new spying powers. If you trust that nice man Mr. Key, then how can you not believe we are under siege from shadowy ISIS sympathisers, and need to be constantly on the alert?
Anti-Muslim feeling is the elephant in the room no one is talking about in this tragedy.
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Lovely graphs. Pity the Soviet Corbynites are now shelling your bunker.