Posts by tussock
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In New Zealand, estimates indicate between 600 and 1000 people die each year from alcohol-related causes (Berl 2009; Connor et al 2005).
One in four children who die, alcohol is a contributing factor. Because violence and car crashes are strongly associated with alcohol, that really means because of alcohol. 1% of drivers are drunk, 25% of deaths on the road are drunk, meaning nearly half the accidents, so it's the booze.
Says google. Both because people get the immediate dose very wrong quite often and also generally over-use for years on end as addicts. And also because our cultural expectations of drunk people are shit.
45-50 in 18 months, it almost seems like a lot of people.
When I was uni in Dunedin, long before these things appeared, four people died from drinking green potato water. They also got the dose wrong. I'm not saying young people will always die from drug experimentation, but they always have so far, and the legal one is not better.
Pot is better. Marijuana. That kills and disables vastly lower numbers of people who experiment with it. Years of abuse by young people definitely sucks for some, but still much less so than years of abuse by young people of almost every other option that they already have. Tobacco, Alcohol, that shit kills, on top of fucking up their heads.
And all the govt. does for booze is stick a big ass tax on it while allowing them to sponsor sports and advertise like it's just a fun thing and also promote sexism which I don't even understand.
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But hey, let's all get stuck around trying to make sure people who sell the pot anagrams go to prison for all the harm our bullshit drug laws are doing in the aid of protecting the booze industry from competition.
And then these seemingly sensible people, they start saying things like because of how bad booze is, they can't introduce things that are less bad, because arglebargle 30 people a year is so sad but 1000 people a year is shut up and drink ya beer, what are ya.
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Gillum up for a recount in Florida, as well as a few others, turns out counting all the votes makes things a whole lot closer than only counting the votes in the R leaning districts.
They had to get court orders to force people to count tens of thousands of votes in D leaning counties, in really close elections, not because they wouldn't have eventually been counted anyway, they were just delaying it to get their foot in the door off a couple days headlines saying otherwise.
It is completely shocking how partisan the whole thing is, at every step. Right through to which judge hears your case.
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I've read plenty of Woodhouse down here and the man is exceptionally self-entitled so it's quite ironic.
Ooh, look out everyone, people pay the same tax and things are getting better because the government changed. Mostly because a lot of small businessmen and risk takers got out and voted for a change of government.
And good on them. Cheers everyone.
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Dennis, if anyone's calling white nationalists "bigots", maybe it's because ... white nationalists are objectively bigots?
That's not pejorative. White nationalism is bigoted from the first principle to the last, and entirely based on racist garbage thought about how white skinned people took over the world because God loves them and wanted them to rule over non-whites forever. It was bad for the US, it was bad for Australia, it was bad for NZ, it is still bad for everyone who tries it. Racism hurts racists too, bigotry is worth fighting against, and those guys are all bigots.
Black nationalism is about strategies to gain equal rights (in that white people won't do it for you), white nationalism is about strategies to prevent that (because lots of white people, it turns out, will also try and stop you). If Fukuyama doesn't understand that, he might not be useful to read on this subject.
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Cheers for all this Russell. Great work, few top pieces out today from you and others. How good is an evidence-based government set on harm minimisation, eh, even when they aren't poking the budget all that hard. :)
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Up Front: R.O.A.R., in reply to Emma Hart,
And there is the exhaustion, there absolutely is. When you have skin in the game, it drains a lot more energy than if it's all just intellectual. This Trumpian post-truth, lying has no consequences age has just completely sucked out my will to engage.
I have the privilege to feel more engaged than ever. There's a lot of ring wing stuff internationally has taken to calling the left Nazis, as a way of covering for their own decent into madness.
The recent gaslighting with the white power hand signs while appointing a 5th crazy justice to the US supreme court who seems dead keen on overturning Griswold of all things ..., so much modern international good came from that one court case. Like, that is everything post-70's started there, and everything in the US still leans on it. If they lose that, how do we keep it? All of it.
Trump and the guys around him are just so obviously dangerous to everyone, kidnapping thousands of children for fucks sake, with no understanding that people might object. I find the parallels with the 20's and 30's to be existentially threatening in the age of rapid climate change and nuclear weapons. Not just his openly stated desire to crush the free press and imprison his political opponents, but the open support of terrorist militias to attack people he doesn't like, that's 1870's stuff in the US, and the police in so many places are totally on board with it.
The move to blockade Yemen under Trump, there's over a hundred thousand kids of died of starvation and cholera so they can rent their power to the Saudis and cut taxes for the super-rich just a little more at home. The UN is trying to bring war crime charges but it's the US so nothing even happens. The guys they're supporting in that war are basically a branch of ISIS, just like they kept doing in Syria until the Russians turned up, and all we get in our news is "but Iran", because Iran are opposed to ISIS, and the Saudis are not.
Also recently, Saudi Arabia beheading women for being public feminists. And that's, like, the crown prince did that to troll the Canadian PM. Because he can, because they pay the US enough and Trump is a monster. That all engages me.
But yeah, it's not the left in Nazis. Antifa are the good guys. Everyone having rights is awesome good.
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The TPU is the official propaganda and net troll arm of the National Party of NZ.
As in, set up by the people who do propaganda and net trolling for the National Party, run by relatives of National Party MPs, funded by the same people who fund the National Party, and constantly ranting and trolling about how things the National Party plans to cut in future budgets are terribly wasteful, along with of course, random personal attacks on anyone who opposes National Party policy, including troll-stalking people to get a reaction and then complaining to their boss about said reaction to try to get them fired.
They get on Hosking because he votes National every day of the week.
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It would require registered parties to have rules around the process they would use to seek to expel an MP from Parliament.
Not just that, I would hope, but also clear rules for what constitutes a breach of proportionality to each party, so that MPs are not loosely ambushed by such accusations but step over the bounds knowingly.
Crossing the floor on matters of confidence and supply is obviously a problem, but lots of other things need not be for any particular party, especially the first time.
I wonder if it shouldn't also be able to be over-ruled by a super-majority of parliament, 2/3 or so, to allow the MP to remain as an independent, in case of a widely appreciated and principled stand against, say, Nazis.
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Hard News: On joining the international…, in reply to Dennis Frank,
We believe in giving people a fair go.
Maximising tolerance does actually require you be reasonably intolerant toward particularly intolerant people.
We don't give fucking Al Quada a fair go, they don't get to make paid public exultations on the lack of humanity inherent to western society and the urgency of unspoken actions while raising money for thusfar undisclosed future adventures. Because we noticed they were exceptionally bad and banned that shit.
We don't need to give fucking Nazis a fair go either, for the same reasons.
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Why ever was there a fuss about shit-canning Nazis?
The end game for the Nazis is they kill everybody who isn't them. That's why they're into this whole "we're the real victim and everyone else is out to get us" thing. It's to justify their fantasy of a world wide genocidal race war they plan to win.
Telling those people to fuck off is just entirely sensible. Their fantasy is not just stupid, it's extremely dangerous when legitimised in any way. It took fifty million dead to stop them last time they controlled one country. Fuck those guys. I mean, hugs and stuff, peace is good, but not speaking venues for that.
And if there's a legal problem there, fix the law.