Posts by rodgerd
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I do not wish to be killed,
Especially not for such silly reasons.
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Hitchens is a expert polemecist, and not afraid to take on what are considered otherwise unimpeachable people and movements (consider Mother Theresa or attacking Fallwell in the States). His actual opinions and understanding of the world are all over the place.
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The only thing I really dislike about Cullen's economic stewardship is the overcomplication of the tax system. And while I understand there are reasons for going down this route, it only seems to make it worse. As a self-employed contractor it seems to be making it more and more tempting to setup my own company, because really, having the difference between everything I earn over $60k go from 6% to 9% is just getting to the point where I'd be silly not to.
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Or his principle is that the Government shouldn't interfere in NZer's family lives.
I assume he'll be campaigning to repeal compulsory school attendance so kids can be put out to support the family at 12, like my grandad.
After all, it's interefering in family lives to force me to keep my kids in school.
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What right in a democracy have the rest of us to tell them to stuff off unless they earn enough votes for 6 MPs?
For the same reason we have 120-odd MPs rather than a nation-wide plebescite every time we wish to pass a law; a modicum of practicability. I am quite comfortable without New Zealand suffering the same fate as Italy or Israel - breakdown in the former case, and pandering to religious and racial extremists in the latter.
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The thing I find wierdest is that there are three high-profile cases around the same time that people thought looked more than a little odd: Ellis, Bain, and Watson. Of those the Ellis prosecution seemed most credible; Ellis and Watson the least - Watson seemed like a play-by-play replay of the Arthur Allen Thomas case, and Ellis seemed like a textbook mix of Christian nuts (the officer who went on Holmes), gay panic, and satanic ritual abuse mixing in the most toxic fashion.
Yet all this time later it's the Bain case that gets thrown out. Funny old world.
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Wasn't Broad the cop on the Ellis case who gave the Holmes show interview about how the problems of society were that we were ignoring the teachings of "good men" like Graham Capill? Or was that another officer on that case? tI would make it all the wierder if it was.
I also know one of the officers involved was accused of having an affair with one of the mothers in the case, but I'm buggered if I can find who it was. Help me, Google!
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Or most of New Zealand vs Auckland, actually.
Yes, it's not like we've recently had an entire thread of Aucklanders congratulating themselves about how superior they are to the knuckldraggers south of the Bombays, and that secession would be a nice idea. They're above that, you see.
I'm sorry, I'll get out of the smarmfest's way...
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I got to the point where I don't ask friends how our show was - I tend to have a good idea of how it was myself and unfortunatly, my friends being nice people, will tend to provide nice feedback (which is well.... nice, but not really that useful).
True story: my wife (who Scott knows 8) decided I was worth asking about her paintings only after I said something negative about one of them. She'd gotten sick of uncritical friend-response by then.
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bands used to tour relentlessly and New Zealand had a viable touring circuit which did make money for the acts throughout the eighties and into the nineties
Well, that's what build Hello Sailor, Dragon, Mi-Sex, DD Smash et al, isn't it?
But then I get the impression, rightly or wrongly, that venues that will pay for live music have gotten rarer and rarer. Wellington has suffered the influx of wankers in cheap-shit apartments using noise control to shut down venue after venue, for example.