Posts by Nik Dirga
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Lockdown seems the only real choice.
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Boy, I’ve been listening to a LOT of Miles lately. Particularly love the late 60s/early 70s era where he just started to stretch out in all sorts of directions. Yeah, he was apparently a fairly flawed and often awful human like so many artists are, but I have to say that in these plague days his horn can still put aside my worries like few sounds can. Jazz is more soothing to me now than ever.
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This piece in the Atlantic remains the single best piece of writing I’ve seen on why the US has gone so far off the rails with this election. It’s years and years of obfuscation, illiteracy and idiocracy coming due.
“The biggest obstacle, I think, is the general public’s reflexive, unreasoning hostility to politicians and the process of politics.”
From an outside, strictly historical presidential history-buff perspective, this year is utterly fascinating. But for the human cost and long-term dysfunction it's spreading, it's utterly terrifying. Clinton is a flawed candidate, but she's struck me for years as the only grown-up in the room and I'm hoping knee-jerk nationalism, rampant sexism and "everything is the other guy's fault" blamesplaining won't win the day.
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I agree with Joe, it's depressing now being an American in NZ and trying to have to explain Trump and defend the many millions of Americans who deplore him and everything he stands for.
I have to admit, anyone who actually thinks Obama was president during 9/11 should just lose the right to vote because obviously they're brain dead.
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This definitely reads like balance has tipped away from an equal parternship to Fairfax getting absorbed into NZME.
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Paywalls for quality, sure. I subscribe to the NYT and might eventually sign up for some of the other quality news organisations, but I'm not paying for viral clickbait I can find for free on FB and Twitter and reddit.
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Here's a fun trick of late - go to news.com.au and count how many stories are repeated directly, headlines, standfirsts intact, on the NZ Herald website. There've been many days where the websites appear to be clones of each other.
And it's not as if News or the Daily Mail are some tiny isolated websites. They're some of the most read sites on the globe, whether or not you like them, and the Herald's so blatant attempts to emulate them makes them look cheap and also, as Russell rightly points out, completely devalues and insults the many good hardworking journalists left over there whose work is constantly shoved down the pack in favour of "YOU WONT BELIEVE WHAT BROKE THE INTERNET TODAY" garbage. Is "Dr Parti reveals his glimpse of the afterlife" type trash really more important than issues that actually affect New Zealanders, IN New Zealand?
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Great Iggy footage, and the new album is a keeper. I've been listening to Iggy a lot lately which kind of scares me because I was also doing the same thing a lot to Bowie and Prince pre-posthumously earlier this year... Stay healthy Iggy.
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What is infuriating is that we all know Veitch is a massive jerk, and he deserves the condemnation of this piece. But I also question the judgement of the editor or editors who thought this was an appropriate use of their otherwise worth anti-violence campaign, to flog yet another of their in-house radio hosts and his "I-I-I" "me-me-me" rant instead of far worthier voices. And on Mother's Day to boot. Of the shocking and dismaying decisions we keep seeing from NZ media lately this one ranks among the worst.
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Excellent post mate. It's so difficult to explain the niggly differences between parliamentary and US politics that it's hard to get the message across that Trump has a lot less chance than the constant barrage of coverage tells us. And while I like a lot of Bernie Sanders' ideas, I have yet to see a single sentence from him that acknowledges how he's going to make them happen against a congressional firewall that would be even stronger than the one Obama's faced.