Posts by Stephen Judd
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the search for a cause is inherently degrading. It sees a particular sexual taste as abnormal, as a departure from how people are supposed to be. Nobody asks what causes a person to enjoy vanilla sex. The need for an explanation is reserved for kink. You start by telling me I’m wrong, then you try to work out how I got broken. The next step is of course fixing me. This is the same attitude some people display towards homosexuality.
Is there no legitimate reason to inquire?
The example of homosexuality is a good one. People are actively researching this, for motives that range from the political to the purely scientific. Indeed some of those researchers (eg Simon LeVay) are themselves gay, and their aim is the complete opposite of stigmatising their sexuality as abnormal, but rather of establishing it as normal.
I sympathise with your argument but I have a problem with putting these things entirely off-limits. I also can't reconcile it with the very next paragraph which provides an explanation based on physiology. There's your cause right there, yes?
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Interesting. I felt kind of soiled after reading that, and bad and nosy for going to the end. I'm not sure why my sense of propriety is offended, but it is. To me that should have stayed in a diary, and not been splatted over the papers.
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TONIGHT a troubling new phenomenon rocking the nation's food and beverages: edible pareidolia . All over New Zealand's meals people are finding New Zealand all over overall.
We talk to a mother whose children no longer want to eat their school lunches after finding a gingernut with Rodney Hide's face on it.
But first, Bob McCroskie, should she have just given them a smack as part of good parental correction?
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I'm always worried that the volume I have in my hand at Unity is not quite literati enough.
Don't you be dissing the staff at Unity -- they are lovely, lovely people and I won't hear a word against them. Especially that Toby chap.
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The thing that gets me about various justifications for the high remuneration for MPs is this notion that it's required in order to get the best people, as though all the best people are the ones who currently make a lot of money.
I reckon there are a lot of people who have the intelligence and judgement to be in Parliament who are paid far, far less than an MP, because they are already in jobs where they serve the community rather than being in business for themselves.
I don't necessarily mind people being paid a lot to be an MP, but I do mind the implication that only the financial high flyers deserve to be one. If you're on a half million a year, and you have to take a 50% pay cut, well, the nation thanks you for your sacrifice. If you don't like it, I'm sure we could find a teacher, or a scientist, or a GP, or perhaps a plumber, and they'll do the job just as well -- and maybe better.
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Actually, brown bread and cabbage and the odd bit of animal protein you can afford or nick probably is fairly healthy -- it's just very monotonous and not really what I'd call a cuisine.
Damn near everything I cook at home now could be considered a pseudo-mediterranean local take on cucina povera, but we have a lot of fruit and vegetable resources that would have been hard for any poor person to find in 19th century London or Riga, fresh or preserved.
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To repeat what I said upthread: blaming people for not taking the time to cook is a handy way of diverting attention from the problems of a capitalist society and making collective problems a matter of individual responsibility. There's also the fact that some people simply do not like cooking, while others regard food as fuel.
If it comes to that, the traditional, everyday home cooking of my ethnic ancestors (Anglo-Celts and Ashkenazi Jews) tend heavily towards bread and potatoes, with overboiled vegetables of a very few kinds, and the whole lot made palatable with as much fat as possible. Lots of veges, fresh seafood, fresh fruit and so on were luxuries for rich people. Stale bread with a slice of onion and a smear of chicken fat, maybe some salt herring...
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See my paper in the Leguminous Ontology Review.
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some a priori conception I have of falafel.
My proletarian felafel challenges your bourgeois legume croquettes and spurns your decadent particularities of edibility, sapidity and esculence.
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Heh, here's something I just read that I commend to Brickley:
The fact that some people simply don't enjoy cooking, much less find it fascinating, seems to completely escape Pollan. In 1960, before most Americans had heard of Julia Child or Betty Friedan, Peg Bracken published "The I Hate to Cook Book," which included instructions like, "Add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink." The New York Times said in her 2007 obituary, "Ms. Bracken's cookbook ... quickly became a staple of suburban homes. Published in various editions over the years, it sold more than three million copies. Every baby boomer's mother, or so it seemed, had one on the kitchen shelf, its pages stained with the makings of Stayabed Stew, Sole Survivor and Spinach Surprise."