Posts by Tom Semmens
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No rugby = end of Sky, simple as that. Sky suck. They are a monopoly who know it and have always treated their customers like shit, playing incessant promos and advertisments (I’ve have PAID already, you douches) and continually putting up new paywalls to new and interesting stuff, using their stranglehold on sport to sneer at anyone who moans about their rack-renting.
But anyway, nowadays no one I know has Sky for anything other than sport. You can download whatever movies or shows or entire series you want from any number of sites for free, when you want. It is only by controlling the league, union and soccer that Sky have you by the balls and boy, does that squeezing hurt. So if they lose the rugby, they will lose two thirds of their audience in a week, and most of the rest the following week. And I say good riddance to bad rubbish if that comes to pass.
The future for premium content is probably going to be more audience atomisation via the internet, but that will IMHO paradoxically possibly be good for free to air TV – it will potentially once again become the one place we can all have a shared experience for live and local content like news and current affairs.
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Hard News: Not good enough, Eden Park, in reply to Chris Waugh,
What happened was unpleasant. Eden Park’s official response was insulting and unacceptable. It’s not actually that complicated.
Oh come on. Let’s not re-write the thread and declare victory. The complication is actually the hypocrisy where we’ve got a lot of people explicitly demanding the fun police biff out ANYONE that crosses a very subjective and low set line, yet they are often exactly the same people who on this very blog excoriated Eden Park’s security for chucking people out who made paper aeroplanes and/or for starting Mexican waves.
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But these guys were shouting homophobic slurs (hate speech)
I suppose this is the nub of it, and where we disagree. I don’t think hate speech should be banned, one groups hate speech is unfortunately another communities commonly expressed opinions. As long they weren’t inciting the crowd to violence, they can say what they like and be judged by the crowd. I trust that people can work it out for themselves, without the need for some risk averse bureaucrat introducing yet more creeping restrictions on my freedom to say what I damn well like.
physically harassed her.
This is a bit of a red herring, since the existing law already deals with common assault, which brings us back to the appalling attitude of Eden Park to the physical man-handling of a patron.
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So a “couple of dudes” have a right to be obnoxious pricks and then bully a young woman when she objects to their behaviour, but that young woman somehow doesn’t have a right to object to their obnoxiousness? How does that work?
They both have the right, and as far as I can tell they’ve both exercised it, albeit in different forums. My point is you can’t bitch about over-priced beer in flimsy plastic cups doled out one at a time then in the same breath demand MORE security for someone/thing you don’t agree with. They two sides of the same coin. In a free country If someone isn’t of a disposition to treat others with basic respect and common courtesy then you can’t make them.
But in this case, they give the razz to someone who has actually been subjected to bullying and harassment? What the hell is wrong with them?
THIS is the question that needs answering, not demanding they simply be even more authoritarian, except when you want to buy two mini bottles of Sav oh and with a proper glass please.
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Spoken like a straight white educated dude, sir.
Well what do you propose actually doing about it? Chucking people out for loudly expressing opinions you find distasteful? Because that is a cure worse than the disease, IMHO. Everyone sitting around in silence, unless they celebrate in the manner proscribed in the terms and conditions printed on the back - enforced with the sort of over-proscriptive "security" paranoia this very site has railed against in the past. That would just turn Eden Park into another Vector Arena, a venue made dreary by the infantilising attitude that everything is forbidden, unless expressly permitted by the management.
If you can't cope with being insulted, ever, you'd best not to go out at all, ever, just in case you over hear some school kid two steps in front of you pronounce the app they just downloaded "literally gay".
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Hard News: Not good enough, Eden Park, in reply to BenWilson,
Josh Kronfeld and Graham Mourie agree homophobic utterances aren’t OK.
The problem is this argument has quickly become a censorship one, rather than one about the appalling attitude of Eden Park management to a genuine complaint.
No one (well, maybe except the Eden Park spokesperson) is saying it is OK to bellow homophobic slurs, even if they are as common and widespread in current usage as the sudden affection for abusing the word “literally”. However, we live in a free country and until that changes then I can’t see how anyone can do – or should do – much about a couple of dudes yelling bad taste and offensive insults at the teams on the field (for that is the charge, no one is is saying they were using expletives) in a crowd. The only defense for bad taste barracking is if it is funny, IMHO (like the Aussie commentator last night who observed of the Root/Warner incident that Warner “couldn’t even middle that”). Since that is the case, I am not sure why people are getting their knickers in such a twist about what to do about the two guys in question. Sometime, you just gotta put up with it.
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Que? Aside from some appendices which were classified, the report was merely marked as “Sensitive”
While the report was marked as ’sensitive” it seems that it terms of the very limited distribution and the general way it was handled it was effectively indistinguishable from something marked “top secret”. Thus, it follows that (from a spooks POV) the leaking of this report also potentially held grave security implications for other cabinet documents treated in the manner reserved for “top secret”. This is I believe the origin of Dunne’s downfall. He thought he was just leaking a sensitive document, without grasping that the leak would be treated as gravely as the leak of a seriously top secret document.
Also, to repeat – that our government bestows a merely sensitive report with all the security trappings trappings of national secrecy is to my mind an insight into a culture where habitual and compulsive secrecy is the norm – even when something might notionally merely be “sensitive”.
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Given the extraordinary level of security level accorded to what was a rather mundane report (in itself a facinating insight to the compulsive secrecy of our political elites), it is amazing Dunne thought he could get away with it. I thought it was fascinating that Winston Peters suggested on the Nation that our ESCHELON partners may have demanded we discover the mole in the highest level of our government who was leaking, because I imagine for the paranoid Langley spooks he could have been leaking all sorts of sensitive stuff to the Chinese as well.
My pet conspiracy theory on no evidence whatsoever beyond explaining where Winston Peters got all the emails is the GCSB gave the full, unexpurgated emails to him in the sure knowledge that he would bring Dunne down, something the resident spooks wouldn’t have been sure Key would have done. Now the GCSB can point to Dunne’s head on the platter and tell their mates in Washington they’ve got their trophy and the leaks have been plugged.
As for Dunne’s privacy – this is the man with the enabling vote to pass the Orwellian extensions of state surveillance in the Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill, which he says he will still vote for. I have great pleasure in watching that supercillious cock finally getting a taste of his own medicine. Politics isn’t a sport – it is about cold houses and hungry children, and for thirty years Dunne has acted as the ultimate grey man with no morals, enabling neo-liberalism and being available for hire to whoever would stoke his ego or whatever opportunist lobby group who knew his price whilst wanking on with his particular moralising and haughty arrogance about being “sensible”, as if he had a mortgage on common sense. Well, Mr. Sensible has finally been revealed to have feet of clay, and while I don’t like Winston Peters, he has done us all a favour in finally ridding us of Dunne.
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You would have needed a lot of liquor to have enjoyed the load of old clarts the All Blacks served up tonight. Still, Rene Ranger laid out one Froggie, which kinda made it a bit worthwhile.
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The common sense of Joe Public will slice through the Gordian knot of legalistic analysis of standing orders and the relevant legislation going on here, and simply see a guy getting $122,000 a year of their money for a party which no longer exists.
$122,000 is chicken feed to long-term troughers like Dunne, but it is a lot of money to most New Zealander and around the water coolers and in the bars and pubs, this is the sort of issue that can really hurt a government.