Posts by richard
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I've also got to ask whether a less high profile author than Ihimaera would have unceremoniously dumped.
We know the answer to this. They had two other plagiarizers, both of them were treated far more harshly. The Victoria guy lost his job (not sure whether he resigned or was fired, but either way he likely won't be in a VUW classroom again unless he is pushing a broom, to paraphrase James Hynes) and the book was pulped and re-issued, and the garden book was pulped -- or perhaps mulched.
But Witi comes out of it smelling of roses, rather than the ordure in which they grow.
Nice trick if you can pull it off.
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To me the big question hanging over all of this is the alleged "buying back of the warehoused copies" -- the book has remained on sale, apparently, and has been marked down in several places.
So there is clearly copious stock, and it doesn't seem plausible that all of the stock had passes out the warehouse door before the buyback announcement had been made.
But that announcement was likely crucial in buying off the people whose words were stolen, and who have a very real grievance against both Penguin and Ihimaera -- and who would likely be incensed to learn that this was a Claytons buyback.
I would be interested to know a) where the "warehoused" copies Witi bought are sitting now and b) just how big a fraction of the print run these copies accounted for.
And if I worked for, say, the Herald, I would be asking to see these copies or -- in their absence -- evidence that they had been pulped.
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@Steve MARK QUIGLEY’S HOMEPAGE
Wow -- that has to be in the running for the prize for "fanciest webpage for an academic scientist who does not also have a book contract".
It even has a login and registration box (although I am not sure why).
HTML handcoded in emacs won't cut it these days, by the look of things.
[I am not being snide about this -- he (or someone else) has done a really nice job]
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It may not be a ponzi scheme, but it does have a wiff of Madoff if it is true that Hubbard traded on his reputation as a pillar of the community to keep the balls in the air for much longer than he might otherwise have managed...
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Each sees the other as universalising a particular experience when neither actually is, so in attempting balance you just end up skewing wildly between two extremes.
Balance is always worth attempting. Otherwise you risk falling into the same trap as Martin did with his original comment.
Why does the size matter? Rather than, say, working conditions, or the happiness of the people in it?
I'll skip the obvious joke, but asking whether you would be happy to see the sex industry double in size is really asking whether it is a good thing for the great majority of its current participants. But if you can't make an argument that it should be bigger, then perhaps you are obliged to conclude that it should be smaller. (I am not arguing against better working conditions and all the rest of it, just that I doubt that many people would argue that sex industry is somehow akin to, say, clean tech start-ups, and what New Zealand really needs is more of it).
Someone in a debate in another forum a while back asked people to consider if, in their perfect future utopia, there would be sex work. And after what I've learned over the last five years or so, I'd have to say 'yes'. Or at least, that it wouldn't be a utopia if you banned sex work, because there are people - and it doesn't really matter how many - who genuinely enjoy it
I am not sure any decent utopia would have work, sex or otherwise. Some people lack imagination.
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I'm going to guess that members of all three of those professions support a P habit in NZ. Banking and dentistry are probably harder to get into and make enough money off if you've already got the habit however.
I'm sure they are. But if you weren't already a dentist or banker, but already had a P-habit my guess is that the lead time between deciding to take up those professions and actually making any money at it would make them unlikely destinations for our hypothetical addict.
Just a wild guess, but would be happy to learn that I was wrong.
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I must admit, this contours of this debate are starting to seem more than a little familiar on PA.
But as a purely logical matter, simply pointing to individuals who are happy, well adjusted prostitutes with blogs does very little to substantiate any claims one may want to make about the industry as a whole. Certainly finding some examples of X that are not Y disproves statements of the form "all X are Y". However, these existence proofs say nothing about the weaker (but more relevant) statements "Most X are Y" or even "Many X are Y".
Ben's comments struck me as particularly interesting and refreshingly honest (big ups, hat tips and all that!), in that he appears to be well informed and genuinely sympathetic and to have checked his judgypants at the door, but it would be hard to take his comments as the basis for arguing "it would be a good thing if the sex industry was bigger than it is already", whereas you could probably find some leverage for the proposition "it would actually be better if the sex industry was somewhat smaller than it is today" -- nor does Martin's squeamishness seem particularly at odds with Ben's more informed commentary.
(And I guess one difference between dentistry, banking and prostitution is that only one of those professions would be likely to be chosen by someone who was looking to support a P-habit. I am not sure what conclusion one draws from that, but it seems there is at least one fairly clear difference.)
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Syzygy? Sounds more like a magazine for women who get excited when they win at Scrabble.
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I voted.
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Thinking back, George Bush refused to answer questions on his cocaine use (although the answer is widely assumed to be "yes") while Barack Obama was open about his drug use (including cocaine) in a book he wrote before he was actively running for public office.
But neither of them called the criminalization of cocaine hypocritical. Whereas Prast did not even bother to dress his comments up in a Dutch/PAS "harm minimization" argument -- he just sounded whiny.
[This reminds me of a friend of mine went to college with Obama, and was excited to be called by the New York Times as a part of an in-depth profile they were doing shortly after Obama secured the nomination (I think -- a huge multipage paper of record -style piece in any case), but was a bit disconsolate that they did not use any quotes from him. My feeling was that if wanted to be sure of being quoted in the article, the best approach would be to cheerfully recall a few drug-fueled parties with the candidate. However, the friend in question is fairly straight edge, so (presumably) neither inhaled nor subsequently embellished, and thus stayed on the print equivalent of the cutting room floor.]