Posts by Keir Leslie
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To be contrary, I do think the readers/fans distinction is actually quite a good one, and when I get around to my `american engineering lit: why it's shit' thing, I am going to make hay with it.
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But if you compare that to the record of the French, German or American constitutions, the UK one starts to look pretty good. It's all very well to point and say --- that wasn't good, but there are many worse options out there.
Take the abdication crisis tho'. Did anything bad actually come out of it? No. Likewise the People's Budget. It was put to the people, the people backed it, and the King and Lords did what they were told by the people.
(And it is 400 years of constitution time --- 4 constitutions * 100 years = 400 constitution years.)
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What, exactly, prevents a Westminister constitution that happens to have a native President, instead of a far-removed British monarch, as its Head of State, from being as stable & viable?
Far-removed monarchs don't engage in nefarity very often.
(More broadly, I don't want a President. Why do we need a Head of State? Why can't we have an acephalous state?)
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Er, that's roughly 400 years of Westminster constitution time (NZ, Canada, Australia, UK) and you can come up with four crises, of which one was a nullity (Edward VII did as he was damn well told) and one arose out of the unique features of the Australian Washminster. That's pretty good.
And comparatively, in Germany they had a fascist dictatorship, in France they had a dysfunctional Third Republic, a short-lived Fourth, and a Fifth brought in by a military strongman to the beat of student protests and terrorist bombs, and let's not talk about Spain, Austria or Italy.
In fact, people have done studies, which I really can't be arsed looking for, which have found some evidence that Westminster constitutions are more stable than Presidential and semi-Presidential systems. So while of course the constitution could be improved, current best practice looks a lot like what we've got at the moment.
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I ignored Ballard because I think that there is actually a much more interesting argument that, basically, organised American Campbellian sf was a mistake, and ended up taking the genre utterly boring places. And Ballard and Gray were interesting non-Campbellians and much better.
And there's large parts of sf fandom don't believe in Ballard (& Gray for that matter) as an sf writer, so it's better to play that one safe.
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Keir, that really just sounds snobish & I don't see it as valid except for size, but no Uni is openly talking of moving into the City (3kms east) in any numbers.
I don't think it is snobbery. CPIT has 30,000 enrolled students a year. It has 6,000 EFTS. Roughly speaking, most CPIT students are part time and living in Christchurch already. Most students at the uni are full time, and a large proportion come from out of town. Quite a lot of students live near the university*, and quite a lot stay near the university after graduating. That's not really true of CPIT.
And that's not a bad thing about CPIT. CPIT is doing something different from the university, and that's good, and it's something that should be supported. But it isn't a university.
It is true that Canterbury doesn't look like moving any time soon. But, on the other hand, the buildings out at Ilam are getting old, and over the next ten-twenty years there's no reason* you couldn't move parts of the uni back into town.
* Aside from the general problems of having a split campus.
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- Victorian stone buildings with pointy bits = good.
God yes. The sacred Gothic fucking Revival.
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CPIT doesn't count so much, 'cause (a) mainly people at CPIT are from Christchurch anyway so you don't get the same free money effect a uni gives you, (b) it's smaller, and (c) more students are part time or only studying for a couple of years (vs four or five years for many uni students, and north of that for grad students) and so don't live as near and spend as much near as they would at a uni.
You also get less of a hub effect from a poly as opposed to a uni.
But it is of course a Good Thing, and it is a Good Thing all on it's own, even if it were out in Belfast. It just doesn't have the same urban effects a uni does.
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The best thing to do would be to start using the RMA and the long term planning process to move things* back into the city centre.
It's true that the centre of town is pretty deserted, partly because the suburbs are pretty vampiric, and also because, duh, the four aves is a bigger area than central Wellington, and only about the same population to be served. So where pretty much everything in Wellington happens on or around about three streets, in Christchurch there's probably one or two streets with any real density of things happening, and then a bunch of streets with one pub on them, in the middle of nowhere. (Imagine if, say, Mighty Mighty was somewhere up by the Basin, and then the SFBH was out on Customhouse Quay, and there's only a Courtenay Place that's much much worse than the one that actually exists.) So Christchurch seems much deader and flatter.
I'm not sure resident population makes any sense to use against crime figures for the centre of town given that most of the criminality we care about involves people who don't live there.
* That is to say, retail. Unfortunately, at the moment getting a large shopping mall established in the centre of town would be a step forward. Anything that isn't just sleazy bars. Real stuff that gets people in at weekends and during the day. Ideally, getting bits of the uni back in.
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By which I mean to say that there is a hierarchy of genres; you chaps might be peeved but think how the Romantic Fiction people feel.
oh dear lord Paul you must own shares in fire retardant clothing manufacturies.