Posts by Joe Wylie
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Oops, no, I've looked properly out your comment and this isn't the religious organisation you're talking about.
Nice of you to bother, considering my rather over-flippant tone there, but the best way I've found to deal with such folks is not to take them overly seriously. They're just a certain stripe of US-centric fundies who cater to / prey upon the damaged lives end of the market, and possibly do a passing amount of genuine good, though not necessarily by design.
Unlike some of the dodgier operators they don't seem to actively encourage dumping one's psychiatric medication and throwing oneself upon the mercy of the lord for a cure. I know of someone who allows herself to be talked into this occasionally, you know it's happened when one of her letters denouncing the evils of freemasonry turns up in the local rag. Not too funny for her immediate family though.
Many of us express essentially magical beliefs for one reason or another, and often as a means to an end.
I do enjoy the poetry of religion.
Amen (sorry hardline atheists) to that. Venturing beyond the immediately rational, and being able to find one's way back whenever one chooses, is what makes so much of life worth living.
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Sorry Sofie, I think I started the pig-dissing. Point taken.
That said, I DON'T eat pigs. Or cows. Or any mammals.
Occasionally I'll have a whitebait fritter though. One bite, so many lives. -
one heavily tattooed chap denounced the Catholic church, and then went on to inveigh against evolution and the laughable idea that we had descended from the trees, or from anything in fact... he said i would be beseeching God on my deathbed - cheery fella, charitably I'd say he used to be messed up on drugs and now he's messed up on religion...
Sounds like he's a member of that special church, for special people, the name of which I've never bothered to establish. Even the clergy are special - proudly iggerant hillbilly crackers sent out to spread the word, a basic tenet of which seems to be that Americans are somewhere between angels and regular humans. For some reason this seems to go over really well with certain NZers. If he called you brother at any point, and had a rather disconcerting way of stretching the vowel whenever he mentioned the laaaaaaaaawd, he's gotta be one of them.
A few years back they were preaching that Dubya was ordained by God. I know this because my neighbour sneakily put a leaflet to that effect in my letterbox, which breached our policy of tolerance. After I did my balls he rather sheepishly admitted that the idea was a bit silly, but if he didn't go along with the church's teachings he'd be back on the piss in no time.
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Much to do with muskets . . .
Ewart O'Donnell, in Roderick Allan McDonald's Te Hekenga, 1920:
Incidentally it was always said by the Maoris who fought on the British side against Te Rangihaeata in the Hutt campaign, that they had invariably abstracted the bullets from their cartridges, when firing against the Ngati-Toa, using powder only, and that they merely joined the British in order to get muskets. Whether this was true, or merely a policy statement circulated after the King movement had healed the breaches between the tribes, it is difficult to say.
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Ignorant fucks, regardless of class, have always tended to extrapolate from within their own little pockets of pig-ignorance.
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I won't turn my fire on Labour . . .
Assuming it's them then they may, given time, end up doing it for you. Of the two biggest beneficiaries of Labour Party branch stacking back in the day, one went on to lead the ACT Party, while the other supposedly had a major hand in producing Brash's Orewa speech.
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As Idiot/Savant puts it, you just don't expect this kind of shit to happen in New Zealand.
Maybe not, but it's more than a little reminiscent of the kind of Labour branch stacking, using members of the Pacific Island community to boost the numbers for certain candidates, that was all the go in Auckland a couple of decades ago. -
What do you think?" he demanded impetuously.
"About what?"
He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.
"About that. As a matter of fact you needn't bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They're real."
"The books?"
He nodded.
"Absolutely real--have pages and everything. I thought they'd be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they're absolutely real. Pages and-- Here! Lemme show you."
Taking our skepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the "Stoddard Lectures."
"See!" he cried triumphantly. "It's a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too--didn't cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?"
He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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Ideal home photospreads are occasionally good for a laugh, as when Bob Hawke and his then new squeeze Blanche D'Alpuget flaunted their sumptuous living arrangements back in the 90s. The beady-eyed pair posed in Japanese bathrobes next to a hideously oversized Mexican onyx chess set, with the pieces arranged as though for a game in progress. Closer examination showed that the arrangement of pieces couldn't possibly correspond to any known variety of chess.
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Friday being a sharing and caring day, some of you might be interested . . .
Gee thanks Geoff, much appreciated. A very handsomely done PDF it is too.