Posts by rodgerd
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You shouldn't lose your superannuation for anything other than defrauding the superannuation system.
Sweet, so I'm still entitled to retire at 60, then. After all, I've been paying taxes since it was 60, so it should be impossible to ever make any negative changes!
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Hard News: New Old Left?, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
That’s right: it’s totally cool to leave the poor and disabled to suffer as long as you don’t start any actual shooting wars while doing so.
So, Lucy, did the wealth gaps in the UK narrow or widen under Blair?
Or are you arguing, like the Chinese government, that the poor shouldn't worry their pretty little heads about detention without trial for months on end, for example, as long as there's rice in the bowl?
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Would there be much of a political market for a Lib-Dems type party?
The Fitzsimmons/Donald/Tancos Greens actually had that nailed down fairly nicely in many ways.
Oh, that's what they promise - but when they go into coalition, it turns into the social policy of Thatcher, and the economic policy of Thatcher.
And yet rolling back Labour's human rights abuses, more traction on electoral reform than Labour had after spending the 90s promising it, and no illegal wars started.
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First they came for the journalists...
And the bank employees, which makes this near and dear to my heart.
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I guess Mao wasn't a true Scotsman, eh, andin.
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Losing a hard close fight is one thing -- and on paper, Wellington Central was always going to be a seat we'd have to hustle hard to win. But being stabbed in the face by your own leader when you've been working your arse off is quite another.
If it's any consolation it's the only time in a life of voting for (at least nominally) lefty parties and candidates I've felt motivated to vote for a Tory. Not that it did me much bloody good.
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And I'd be the first to cheer if we discovered an hitherto unknown reservoir of Marxists.
Why? Because Stalin, the Shining Path, the Red Brigades, or the Great Leap Forward haven't put you off them yet?
It's pretty hard to see any how anyone can call themselves a democrat and defend the 5% threshold.
In the same way one can call oneself a fan of democracy and not be agog at the prospect of directly deciding every electoral issue by referendum. I believe Russell has written quite a lot about the catastrophic fuck-ups that's led to in Colorado and California. One can likewise look at the politics of Israel or Italy and wonder if no-thresholds might be one of those ideas that don't always work out in practise.
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Going elsewhere would have meant Warners uprooting its star director, who reportedly hadn’t much enjoyed the experience of shooting part of The Lovely Bones in Pennsylvania. Jackson would have had no desire to live in Ireland for the next two years – not in the least because of the havoc his enforced absence would have wreaked on the ability of Weta to attract other projects in the meantime, with related damage to Weta’s image as a one-stop shop headed by Jackson, and at the forefront of the FX game.
Because it's not like they could just assign direction to someone else.
Or Jackson could relocate all his businesses to Europe.
This makes Campbell seem remarkably thick. Perhaps there's a reason one of the people in that article is a multimillionaire film producer/director/special effects studio owner and the other is a journo.
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I have it on good authority that there was no meeting of the general membership before the "don't work" was issued.
It would be hard to have a membership meeting for an unregistered, legally non-existant organisation, wouldn't it?
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(a) The DPB doesn't ever seem to have been an issue in this case, although Brown was a sickness beneficiary. Mental illness? At any rate, it's a hard counterfactual to argue, because ...
It was more a counterpoint to the notion that the DPB is the problem; the DPB was introduced in recent history, we should see clear evidence that Creswell's notion of abolishing it will produce a drop in crime.
There doesn't seem to be any.
(More broadly one might ask whether welfare-free Victorian Britain had more or less crime; I rather suspect that even ignoring that Victorians didn't treat rape or domestic abuse as crimes that they would have had more crime, but I don't know any hard numbers to back up that intuition, and I'd hate to be making as many fact-free assertions as Peter.)