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Comment by balls187 | Hacker News Reader

Your comment is absolutely fascinating.

Is there a place on the web folks can read more about your time fighting apartheid?

I just had a look, can't find anything about the wine protest - it was 40 years ago, all pre-web, part of a larger anti-apartheid movement in New Zealand - organised by a local group HART who, among other things were targeting NZ imports from SA, people were going into stores and stickering SA products (especially bottles of wine)

The 1981 Springbok was probably the biggest thing that happened - I got arrested for blowing a whistle during a game (seems there's some silly rule that only one person at a rugby game can have a whistle or something, they couldn't find it when I got to the station and I was released without charge)

https://nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/1981-springbok-tour

I have never heard of any of this. You should do a podcast or find some way to preserve all of this long-term as it’s honestly pretty valuable!

I went and worked in Silicon Valley a few years later - moved back after 20 years, NZ is a far safer place for kids to be independent teenagers - and was pretty amazed that my son was taught about the '81 tour in high school history - it's not something that's been forgotten here.

A documentary about this would be great. Especially, if it was a series that covered peaceful, disruptive protests over the years. It would be helpful for those wanting to do something similarly effective without the violence and chaos we've seen over the last few years.

I should add that all this meeting-hacking was not my brilliant idea, can't claim any credit I someone else thought this up.

I only realised that we were invoking a form of recursion years later when I was working with a patent attorney on a patent and realised that his patent-english was a sort of programming language in it's own right, with variables and recursion and different meanings for little things like 'or' etc (but, as he explained, not infinite recursion, because that would require infinite dollars to file)

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