Posts by Terence Wood
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Hi Danyl,
One of the reasons I still drag my eyes over the comments soup at KiwiBlog is the chance that I'll stumble over one of your LOL comments.
And thanks for this review too - it's great.
A point of (sort of) contention though: while I agree that a trawl through the equivalent closet of today’s Labour party would - no doubt - dredge up skeletons of its own, I think it unlikely that you'd come across something like, 'a small group of wealthy Green/Alliance backers, with views far to the left of the average Labour Party, had surreptitiously campaigned for the party and were now exacting policy concessions...’
I'm stating the obvious, I guess, but my main point is that - in terms of economic policy - Labour Party voters tend to get something either similar or to the centre of what they expect. Nation Party voters would have, had National won last year, been in for a heck of a shock – having just secretly elected Act into power.
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David, Che, James,
yikes - could this be the end of Bassett too? I guess not, afterall, Bill O'Reilly got away with being outed as a Republican.
But if it were, I might actually start reading the Dom again - for years I've been put off by the chance of my line of sight accidently plonking down in a piece of Bassett excretia.
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More from Ms Coddington's War on Statistics (WAS)
[shuffles away, the typo having stolen his thunder]
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More from Ms Coddington's War on Statistics (WAS):
Aucklanders forget it's not the Gilda Kirkpatricks or the Kelly Swanson-Roes who drive the economy. The bulk of our wealth is still created by people in agriculture, fishing, viticulture, horticulture.
From the CIA World Factbook
GDP - composition by sector:
agriculture: 4.3%
industry: 27.3%
services: 68.4% (2005 est.)Alt treasury stats here
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this is pedantry (sorry). And I know that it was onlya poem.
But Freidman was not a 'Supply Sider' he was a Monetarist.
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Span,
It was dreadful - I argued with my radio all the way along the Hutt Road.
Coddington dispatched a few strawmen. Mora savaged her with a wet bus ticket, and the other two guests clucked away merrily in the background. No one actually got round to mentioning the fact that her stats were all wrong.
The two absolute nadirs:
1. Mark Blumsky saying in a determined voice (paraphrase): “if they commit a crime here in New Zealand then they must be sent home” [as if ‘they’re’ not]. “And if they’re citizens then we should lock them up”. [as if we don’t]
2. Deborah Coddington claiming (and everyone agreeing) that we didn’t have organised crime before we had Asians. Presumably she thinks that Mr Asia was an Asian. Or something.
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If Dawkins didn't exist, God would have to invent him.
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Terry Eagleton has a good review of Dawkins' book in the London Review of Books.
By saying 'good' (and by linking to it) I'm not endorsing everything Eagleton writes. Indeed, as a good agnostic I'm sitting on the fence with the review as with the whole God Thing.
I thought this was marvelous though:
Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself.
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Apologies if this has already been posted up thread but:
Via Brad Delong the actual scope fo the Democrat's victory in the Senate. Or, at least, victory in the popular vote.
One way to look at last night's election is that the implicit gerrymandering of the Senate and the in-the-tank-ness of the press corps are keeping people from realizing how big the blowout was. Consider this: it looks like 32,100 thousand Americans voted for Democratic Senatorial candidates, and only 24,524 thousand Americans voted for Republican Senatorial candidates. That's a 13.4% margin of Democratic victory.
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This is slightly off topic (at the very least my comment might rescue the comment box from 3/4s of the way down the screen), but isn't Garth George actually quite a senior figure at the Herald?
If we were to devise some sort of weighting system along the lines of:
Crazed nut in blog comments = -5 points for your race/religion/group-that-other-people-conveniently-place-you-in-for-argument's-sake.
Crazed blogger = -10 points for your virtual clan etc.
Then surely the fact that Garth George is not only deemed worthy of a nationwide platform but also actually paid to squirt his spleen onto newsprint (-100 points at least) pretty much puts paid to us white folks in any ‘Judge a Group by their Spokes People’ contest right from the start...