Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Just seen another word misused, over the South AFrica - England game - at least one report claims England was 'decimated'.
People use this word to mean something like 'badly beaten' but it has a very precise meaning: it means losing one in ten men. So if 1.5 England players were killed during the game (or 2.2 if you include the reserves) then it would be accurate. But only then. Anything else is not just hyperbole (and getting back to the sport=war metaphor talked about earlier) it just plain inaccurate.
It's a metaphor. Y'know. Like "South Africa just killed England." Or "England sucked the big one." "Robinson the only Englishman who could catch a cold." None of these things actually happened, but they're also not inaccurate.
And while decimated has origins in selecting people by lot and killing them (one in every ten men), it's also just as valid to use it as 'lots of people died'. As in 'The bubonic plague decimated the town.' The dictionary tells me so.
There's pedantry and then there's complaining about people using plain English in easily understood ways.
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It amuses me with such a wonderfully simple thing as google that people still push things like 'rule of thumb' and niggardly==nigger as anything other than urban legends.
About once a week I get told something or get some silly email which snopes.com or google or any half-decent site disproves in a minute.
And people say it's the internet that's full or rubbish.
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Sorry to be scratchy, I'm suffering withdrawals. Two hours without an update on Conrad Smith's hamstring.
I think www.tv3.co.nz needs some sort of All Black Leg Cam. Refreshing every 15 seconds, shots of Smith, Robinson, and Thorne's hamstrings and calves and whatnot.
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Didn't a Maori Rugby League team play in the Rugby League world cup a while ago? Came... 4th?
Google tells me it was in 2000: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_league/world_cup_2000/group_4/1006739.stm
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I find 6pm is the ideal time to cook dinner. If I time it right, it's cooking but not yet ready to be served by sports news time, which is increasingly the only bit worth watching.
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Is it just me or is the camera work rubbish as well?
Too much wide frame stuff taking in 1/2 the field like they're expecting the 1/2 back to flick it to the far wing in one move when halving that frame give would be better view.
That wide shot annoys the hell out of me. It's been bad with the delayed sky coverage on prime for a year or two, but the world cup stuff is horrendous. My TV is a decent size, but I can't see a thing when they do that wide show from across the room. I end up yelling "I can't see anything!" at the TV until they go back to the closer up shot. It seems to take them a while to hear me.
There also seems to be a tendency for the ball to keep going with a player, and the camera to stay focused on the last ruck or some tiny push between two forwards, rather than... y'know, the guys running down the field with the ball.
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This sort of suggests that there are some nations that haven't met world-class standards, and will therefore be banished from the world. (Awesome!)
If wishing made it so!
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Didn't TVNZ's Close Up drive this one, by telling Cunliffe "if we can get Panah to waive his right to privacy, will you then release this 'secret' information?". It's not really fair for Panah to say "I want entry" but then claim right-to-privacy when the Govt wants to explain why they want to deny him entry.
You can't give someone a private process and then demand that they waive their right to privacy. If it's a private process, then that stands.
Sure, his supporters might be abusing the private nature of it by publicly making statements that don't match up with reality, but them's the breaks. As long as the Authority's decision still has integrity, the hunger strike and and public statements etc, won't affect the final decision, which is what's important.
We need to remember that some of these people get sent back to countries that they really want to get away from, having told the Authority about how bad that country is.
That information needs to be kept private, otherwise people aren't going to feel confident being honest with the Authority, for fear that if they get sent back home, what they've said will be used against them.
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Kyle, I think we're well aware - and have been for many years - that Helen Margaret Clark is a woman. How that "disqualifies" Moore - or anyone else who happens to have a penis rather than a vagina - from commenting on her performance as Prime Minister, the parliamentary leader of her party or even as an MP currently escapes me.
It's not his penis that concerns me. If David Lange had made comments on Helen Clark, that'd be interesting. Geoffrey Palmer, as much as he was a flop leading into that election, he's a smart guy and did other good things in government, that'd be worth a look. Michael Cullen, whenever he goes, I'm sure will have interesting things to say, whether or not he says them.
Michael Moore? She rolled him for starters, so he probably doesn't like her very much. She's been very successful as leader of the labour party, he wasn't, so he's possibly just jealous. She's a significant leader in NZ history, he wasn't. Of course he's not going to be all roses about her, but that doesn't make him opening his mouth worthwhile.
Shouldn't we all be like that kid on the Simpsons and point at Moore and go "HAHA!"?
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I think that "getting the wrong end of the stick" is a very kind way of putting it. I'm sure they are well-motivated and good people, but I'm also sure that Panah's spokespeople knew that basically every piece of evidence he presented in two separate appeals was found to be a crock, and the most they'll cop to are "relatively minor and explainable discrepancies".
I think this is... not irrelevant, but not the issue. If the RSAA process is a private process, which uses anonymous case studies as part of their education and legal process, then it's not up to anyone to break that privacy, except the individual concerned.
If people are spreading false information in public, then people are doing that. However it's the job of the RSAA to figure out the truth and make a decision, it's not a court of public opinion.
The Minister can't go breaching a legal right to privacy like this, just because he wants to jump into the public opinion sandpit. He's a minister of the crown! He's got to stand back and say it's a private process and the government is neutral and will let the Authority make its ruling.