Posts by George Darroch
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You realise he’s the one that’s caused your phone to be tapped…
Nah, could be any one of my family. It is weird when you watch unmarked cars parked down the road at all hours and wonder if they're going to break your door down at 5am (not an idle threat, it's happened to many I know). It's a relief when you find out your neighbours are dealing P.
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Heh. You realise John Darroch was that guy? That was pretty cool.
He's an awesome brother.
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The trailer.
During the mid 2000s I had a fair bit to do with the animal rights movement, and agent provocateur/spy Rob Gilchrist had landed himself in the middle of it. At the time we didn't know about his intimate relationship with senior police, obviously, but uncovering his involvement made a lot of connections clear. He organised "camps" where he would train people in techniques that would allow them to carry out activities like rescuing chickens and locking onto bulldozers with greater skill, but also tried to make people model themselves on covert cell structures, from which they could act with impunity.
There were police regularly following people round, and treating activists as a threat and through the lens of security. Even a simple march down Lambton Quay was often a very intense thing, with arrests and assaults from the police. In this context, people shut down from public organising - if your event is going to be disrupted and shut down before it happens, that's pretty inconvenient and upsetting - and started to organise in private. Retreating into what was assumed to be secure territory is in part a response to all of this.
In this very weird environment, it's possible to see how versions of the truth get twisted. What we see is a result of this mess.
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Rashomon 911
Or the The Wi... wait, I'm going to stop before we have one of those threads.
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I prefer Motorway Patrol, which deals with the less serious and is therefore funnier.
I find Motorway Patrol too sad to watch. Every time they pull over an unwarranted, unregistered, or otherwise defective car belonging to some poor person unable to afford their duties to the state or safety, my heart sinks to the floor. I identify with the villains far to much.
I haven’t seen the film, although I have no doubt I’ll catch it soon, but I’m sure my connections to many of the defendants will make it an interesting viewing. My own moral compass has a loyalty to people I think are generally good, and a conflicting one to principles that seem to go against much of what was left out of the film.
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I think there's an interesting comparison with the propaganda films with the New Zealand police every week, broadcast on primetime television. Compelling television, with, and in the service of the police. The camera is with the excited officers in the car, runs around with them around the scene of the crime, stares at the accused, speaks warmly to the arresting officer after the fact, and declares the criminal charges laid at the end of the segment. It is entirely compelling television, and often first rate entertainment. Yet I suspect if the camera was on the other foot, we'd have a story of harsh and unreasonable police violently invading and destroying the house of a humble drug-dealer who provides the good herb to his community, and then taking him away from his loved family.
I'm not suggesting moral equivalence, or that either is entirely dis/honest. Like Russell says, each is what it is. I find either interesting not so much for what they tell us about the truth of the matter, but what they tell us about what people believe, and what they want others to believe.
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Quite independent of mine and Damian’s interests, it’s worthwhile if you can afford a -sub$200 decoder or a $450+ Freeview-integrated TV
It'll happen, eventually. That's a purchase decision I out of my hands for the moment. By then TVNZ7 will more than likely be gone.
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There are still a great deal of households that do not get digital television. This is one.
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Perhaps we've stopped buying them because poorly formatted paperbacks on cheap paper cost so much? We have other, freer forms of entertainment now. There's a lot to be said for a book that has genuine physical beauty and which is an ease to read, but damned if I have to pay above $50 for the hardback just to experience this.
Obviously, authors, editors, designers, illustrators deserve a fair amount, but I'm always stunned by the price of books in New Zealand.
That may soon become true for publishers, too. Printing a 9-by-9-inch, 334-page hardcover book in China costs about 44 to 45 [US] cents now, with another 3 cents for shipping, says Goodwin. The same book costs 65 to 68 [US] cents to make in the U.S.
source
Obviously the economics for a small NZ print have differences and I don't expect them to be quite so cheap, but to have two orders of magnitude between this production cost and the retail cost strikes me as bizarre. Perhaps the retailers and publishers have decided low volume - high margin is where their best returns lie? Genuinely curious. How many NZ publishers manufacture overseas anyway? -
I realised that I entirely missed out on counting Ant Sang's The Dharma Punks and Dylan Horrock's Hicksville as fiction. Which they are, of the very best kind. I didn't really dig Sang's new wuxia, but that's just me. I think it's partly because I couldn't remove BroTown accents from the character's mouths.