Posts by Kracklite
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And meanwhile a tumbleweed blows through David Shearer’s office.
I once thought that a sack of potatoes would be better than Phil Goff, but then the Labour caucus actually elected a sack of potatoes as his replacement and it turned out to be no better at all.
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This is sheer grooviness.
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Hard News: Briefing, blaming, backing down, in reply to Kracklite,
That said, it's interesting that he doesn't even bother to hide his contempt now - and this isn't the first time by any means. Is that all he has? Is the ennui setting in? Will that be broadly felt soon?
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Hard News: Briefing, blaming, backing down, in reply to Sacha,
I've often described Key as political comfort food for voters. After eating it, you just want to be sick.
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oh look I'M totally reasonable and down with teh gays but we shouldn't let them adopt because my kids will bully theirs
God, I didn't even read that nonsense beyond the blurb. "Look, don't get me wrong, I'm not a bigot - I'm quite reasonable and, really, some of my best friends are [insert any and every group here], but let's be reasonable..."
The Oatmeal has the best onomatopoeiac summation: "Hork! Hork! Blorch!"
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This year, we encountered a situation at tertiary level where, I believe, new, results-conscious management treated our older boy that way – not on the basis of his actual achievement but because he looked like a risk. That was bad enough. Had we been fighting for his rights at primary level it would have been much worse. But I suppose that’s not John Roughan’s problem, is it?
Flippancy aside, I'm afraid that your experience is probably not going to be unique. As a professional in the tertiary sector with autism, I've had to deal with some very personally demeaning behaviour from a supposedly senior academic who should have known better.
However on the other hand, I've also worked with another senior academic who has been very gracious, pragmatic and sympathetic and who has allowed and encouraged me to aid a potentially brilliant student with Asperger's who has had to deal with an architectural and teaching situation and assignment briefs that clearly show severe neurotypical biases. I've forestalled a serious panic attack or two by them thanks to having learned my own coping strategies, but really, it shouldn't depend onsomeone with my experience fortuitously being there.
Of course on Planet Roughan, such people just have "issues" (that was the word I heard from the former... um... "individual") and just have to get over them.
One would have hoped that university-level faculty would know better...
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a frankly embarrassing column
I’m always amused to find logical failures in basic precepts. For example, that comment is based on some fundamentally flawed assumptions: (A) sometimes, something John Roughan writes would not be embarrassing* and (B) he has the intellectual capacity for embarrassment.
Anyway, look at his hair – that man is in obvious and deliberate competition with Donald Trump and Peter Dunne. He clearly has not even the slightest concept of dignity, perception or integrity if he sees them as his rivals.
Jane Clifton said much the same – in longer sentences and even longer paragraphs – in The Listener.
At least she can write paragraphs. John Bloody Armstrong, oy vey... (I claim the right to use that lament on account of my Jewish stepfather).
*Are you perhaps thinking of the famous thought experiment of the infinite number of monkeys? Do you suppose that if Roughan writes enough, perhaps he might by sheer chance say something that is intelligent, without pomposity and perhaps even witty?
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Isabel Hitchings,
Spreading the domestic and financial burden across more people means that everyone has more, not less, time, energy and resources to spend on their romantic relationships.
I'm too snowed under with work to have the energy to make a serious contribution to this very interesting thread, so I'll only make random observations. This in particular struck as being a description of what , functionally, extended-family relationships accomplish - and even why they exist. The institution of marriage as it is currently constructed, both legally and culturally (in Western terms, anyway) not only downplays but inhibits... um, whatever.
The advantage of polyamory seems to be that you can choose its boundaries and contents.
Western Mediaeval and Renaissance marriages among "important people" tended to be more in the nature of corporations, and I wouldn't be averse to the state recognising marriages purely on those terms.
blah blah.. you get what I mean, I hope. Kinda. Back to marking assignments: "Your insights are interesting, but poorly articulated and I recommend that you be more assiduous in your referencing, in keeping with University guidelines...."
As for Shelley Bridgeman, she reminds me of a comment by Peter Watts about the border guard who beat him up - he could denigrate him in a story, but if he did so, he's be accused of bad writing, because the real man was so cardboard and two-dimensional that no reader or critic would take him seriously. Necrotising fasciitis gives more literary inspiration, it appears (warning: latter link NSFW or your most recent meal).
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Hard News: Time to move on, in reply to Islander,
Ah, birds or archosauria, reminders that the Mesozoic didn't end at Chicxulub... mmmm... Kaka and Kea, the intelligent cousins of Tyrannosaurs...
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No, don't - that way lies insanity! The line between someone who writes and someone who teaches about writing cannot be crossed without ... well, whatever it is that I've done to myself.
Bloody Ian McEwan and tutorials on Atonement. It's all his fault. Threadjack imminent. Someone get it back on track, fast...