Posts by Nick Melchior
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I have no problem with attempts at conversion, within proper bounds. A healthy society will always have people trying to convince others of new (or old) ideas and so it should. It's the proper bounds that mean that the kids can still play.
As for Ross' idea of getting rid of Chrimas and Easter, I don't think so. I've lived in Singapore twice in my life and while there is a ot of things about their society I wouldn't emulate I think their practise on religious holidays is pretty spot on. Cover off every major group (in their case Christian, Muslim, Hindu and "Chinese"/Buddhist) and then have a smattering of shared national holidays. In NZ's case, that means more or less what we have and I don't think anyone is really suffering because of it.
I'm an atheist - hardcore and dogmatic. But I don't care about Easter or Christmas - we have widespread, largely secular traditions built around both holidays (eggs and presents) and they're not doing anyone any harm.
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Well said Russell.
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Hard News: Fridays are still for the music, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
When they pull themselves into a standing position and waddle around a room holding on to things. Before they can walk independently.
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I'm not a coffee drinker but an espresso machine was part of my wife's requirements for moving to Singapore in 2009. But there's quite good coffee in a number of places in Singapore now. It's almost all Australian in origin (owners/barristas etc) and tends to be in odd places due to the price of commercial rent. But Starbucks (and the local Starbucks, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf) are on every corner.
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I actually read the site quite a lot from by BlackBerry here in Singapore so I'm surprised that 100% are new visitors. It might be the way the IP is calculated/assigned perhaps?
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I'm not sure that his No1 problem is actually a problem.
I'm not sure it is either but it's the source of considerable grievance in the community (at least to tell from my discussions with relatives etc) If we get to keep MMP by getting rid of that one small issue then I'm all for it!.
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I've just moved from Melbourne to Singapore and I can't see myself coming back to NZ to live pretty much ever. It certainly tempting at times, especially since having children a few years ago, but having living over half my life outside of NZ since first leaving aged 10 months, and working in an industry that's largely non-existent in NZ (publishing) I can't see it happening.
The move to the National Government certainly hasn't made me more likely to head home but it's really the size of NZ that stops me from coming back. I'm a big city person and NZ doesn't have much in the way of big cities!
What I do miss is the landscape and the natural environment. I felt very alienated from the landscape in Australia and the more time I get to spend in Central Otago the better.
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Kind of? What part of fanatic Maoism during the 50s and 60s wasn't religious in nature? i.e. the cult of personality, the little red book, the irrational hatred of class enemies, etc etc.
The belief in any form of supernatural power is what makes it not religious. You're describing an extreme ideology. Many religions are sometimes expressed as extreme ideologies but they're jsut a subset.
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Another mate gave up on his physics degree after being taught by rote that the correction factor of 10 he was required to apply to his calulations was there 'just because, alright?'. When he started asking difficult questions about dark matter and various other possible explanations, he was told to STFU and stick to the syllabus.
In my experience people like this are actually told to shut the fuck up because they are disrupting other people's learning by asking questions that don't actually make any sense, that others can see the obvious answer to or other, similar, issues. I've got no idea about this particular case (or about physics in general) but that's what my guess would be, having been a university tutor.
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On a different topic, I'm a little confused about your utterly random 'facebook' crack about anarchists, both here and in the comments at The Standard. Maybe Quoth the Raven is a well-known commenter who opines about facebook? I don't know. But the link between anarchists have political and social aims, regardless of you disagreeing with them or not, and facebook is utterly tenuous - a strawman.
Apart form anything else, no one in the thread is a self-professed anarchist. The one comment that mentions the word is quoting from the rioters in Athens. And the condescension in your use of inverted commas to describe the person who mentions this. What's going on Russell? You're clearly not an anarchist, but why the disdain for people who hold a different political/economic view?