Posts by Stephen Judd
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
please go lecture my next door neighbours on what a shithole New Zealand is. They’ll patiently explain why they’re in no great rush to go back to Iraq. They have family who are more concerned about securing clean drinking water
Do tell me where the intermediate point is between here and Iraq where I can worry with your blessing.
NZ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------Iraq
Not OK with Craig^........somewhat OK with Craig^.........OK with Craig^ -
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I think any analysis of what is happening has to take into account that the behaviour of people in groups is not a simple aggregate of their individual motivations, but something more complicated, more chaotic, and more primal. When enough of us are together, our relationships transcend the merely spatial, especially when some outside force acts on us. In those moments, it is not all about me.
If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump too? If we are honest, sometimes the answer is yes, we would.
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Those little keys allow for some wicked fast txting too.
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Hard News: Fixing Auckland, in reply to Sacha,
the apartments all have balconies or terraces
exactly – private rather than public space
Oooh, that's not quite how I'd see it, at least potentially. It can be good for street life when private zones bleed into public ones. Perhaps I've been a bit brainwashed by the Jane Jacobs school of urban (non)-planning, but a theory is that residents' eyes on the street make it safe. Porches and so forth can be sociable in an urban neighbourhood. I don't think merely have oversight of a space privatises it and having people around who keep a neighbourly eye on things can even add public amenity.
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the council has specifically stated that it is unnecessary for cyclists to wear helmets around Wynyard Quarter.
Whoah. How does that work, legally? And how on earth did they manage to sneak that in without the helmet lobby going ballistic?
Also, as a Wellingtonian, excellent to see Auckland providing some competitive heat in the nice waterfront department. This can only be good for stimulating urban improvements everywhere.
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(Ok, it depends on the URL by which you accessed this page whether you see the “choose file” button. In the system page, you see it, in the blog post page, you don’t.)
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About the alleged propensity of people to swing from one political extreme to another -- I feel we are confounded by the fact that such swings are more salient. When an extremist moves a few units on the political plane* towards the centre, it's not exactly noteworthy, whereas apparent flip-flops attract our attention.
* if we must simplify politics to geometry, I prefer the two dimensions of economic and social rather than the single Left vs Right.
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Weeell... is it unreasonable to suggest that anonymity/pseudonymity are enablers of aggressive and transgressive words for the rudely inclined, though it's by no means inevitable? I think a real names policy does filter out a lot of crap; the problem is it also filters out genuine and even necessary contributions. Which is why I rather like PAS' apparent "real names encouraged but not required" policy.
I have another identity on another site which is easily tied back to me. I probably am a bit freer in what I disclose of my inner workings there. But on the whole, I try hard not to say things on the Internet that I wouldn't want attributed to me publicly. I'm not entirely sure why. I think having a pre-internet childhood and adolescence might be part of a general reticence. Dunno.
