Posts by JackElder
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I'm boggled that cloning, adultery and polgynous marriage are the things that have the most unanimous disapproval.
I'd definitely like to see a gender/location breakdown on that.
Frankly, on cloning: what's the big deal about differently aged twins? Yes, there's a lot of potential for psychological damage with mad parents cloning themselves so they can "get another go and do it right this time", but the people who would do that are probably going to be abusive controlling helicopter nutcase parents anyway. The fact that the child is genetically identical to them, rather than 50% someone else, doesn't change that, I think.
In this case, I think that people are confusing a visceral distaste for the very idea of cloning - coupled with a certain luddite "don't mess with the natural order of things" - with an actual moral principle.Ditto polygyny (I'm willing to bet that the idea of polyandry never entered most people's minds) - people find the idea a bit icky, so they think it's wrong.
That said, I'd argue that most moral questions boil down to the "icky/not icky" test for most people. Just how we're wired, I suppose. Plus, if you hear about people who have derived a substantive moral principle and actually stick to it (say, Kant, Peter Singer), they usually come across as inflexible, humourless prigs. Who may be right, but that's beside the point. ;)
Hmm. I need to move back to Oamaru. The lack of NZ style pies in the UK is starting to really bug me.
Pie Minister in Bristol. Best pies in the UK. And they have a location in Islington, so you've got no excuse.
Anyway, think yourself lucky: I've been home for nearly four years, and I still can't find anywhere to sell me pork & stilton sausages. It's driving me mad.
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I did my first year of uni in Dunedin. That was in 93, so I saw the registry office biffo - when riot police waded into a big group of students protesting outside the registry and put the bash on them. This was in the presence of the president of OUSA, who had about a week earlier convinced a mob of drunk students outside the Captain Cook to disperse prior to being baton-charged by said police. The fact that the police didn't give him a chance to repeat the act, plus anecdotal evidence about the behaviour of the police immediately prior to the beatings, suggests that there was at least a faction within the Dunedin police at the time that regarded the ability to kick shit out of students as a perk of the job.
So I'm saying that I think the police probably escalated it more than they needed to.
That said, I think that the people pointing out that it's a cultural issue are correct: there is now, like it or not, an expectation that there will be a riot, and people are starting to arrive with precisely that in mind. The trick is to defuse the riot aspect of it, while keeping the event transgressive enough that it'll let people "blow off steam". The problem is that if you have a crowd of 300 people happily drunk, and 10 of them want to throw things at the police from the safety of a crowd, it's pretty easy for them to start a riot. And once the biffo starts, a lot of people who would otherwise wouldn't go near it with a yardstick are going to get drawn in.
But the low-grade drunken dumbfuckery was certainly pretty endemic in that part of Dunedin back in 93. You kind of knew that if you didn't want to be part of it, you probably shouldn't flat on Castle St. I can only recall one or two couch burnings, but there was certainly a couch in the Leith for quite a while. In the end, it was probably that attitude that was the reason I moved up to Wellington to finish my degree.
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Hey - has anyone else noticed that we now have an edit button?
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clusterfuck
I think you'll find a lot of it depends on whether the participants know about each other or not.
Interesting to see some polling on "moral" matters. Frankly, I'd like to see some polling on meta-ethics: how many people prefer Kant's categorical imperative to Benthamite utilitarianism, for instance.
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if they really gave a shit, they'd do a lot more. They don't, therefore they don't - classic modus ponnens.
No, that's modus tollens. Modus ponens is "a, therefore b. a. Therefore, b." Modus tollens is "a, therefore b. Not b. Therefore, not a."
I knew the philosophy degree would come in useful one day.
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the groups on the left, who were much more prone to cross-group mistrust, in-fighting and so on.
From what I recall of Homage to Catalonia, this was one of the things that drove Orwell out of the war (that and being shot through the throat) - he was a member of the POUM militia, organised by an anarchist group, and the communists purged them towards the end of the war.
Factions, eh?
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This is precisely why I'm not on facebook: the prospect of a long, rolling high school reunion. Only without the one saving grace of a high school reunion: that you only have to lie about how well you're doing in your career once every decade or so.
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Indeed. In NZ, the fact that I don't drink coffee has occasionally caused people to look at me funny. I've even been (semi-jokingly) accused of being pretentious for not drinking coffee. In the UK, it was a complete non-issue.
On the other hand, not drinking alcohol in NZ isn't a big deal, but in the UK people often seemed to regard it as letting the side down in some way. That's the difference between our cultures right there: the cafe vs the pub as the default social venue.
My workplace has serious, plumbed-in, cafe-style coffee machines. It's not unknown for old hands to gently remove the milk frother from newbs and give them a quiet lesson in how to "texture" the milk rather than just blasting steam through it like an airplane taking off.
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Personally, although online I am polite and constructive, in the flesh I'm a boorish dullard fond of shouting down dissent. Funny how that works.
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I should point out that serious raygun fans can bid on the District 9 BFG on ebay.
Except, sorry, it's ended. You'll have to slake your thirst with locally produced raygun madness by Dr Grordbot instead.