Posts by James Butler
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: About Arie, in reply to Che Tibby,
It appears that, still, no one has had the nerve to ask who beat him.
please god, let it be Collins herself.
She'll need to know so she can hand them a commendation. </snark>
-
Hard News: About Arie, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Assuming that the officer(s) responsible can even be identified. Or do you want every officer who came into contact with Arie prosecuted, just because?
Presumably (if the police were in fact responsible) if the officer(s) responsible can't be identified, it would be because none of the officers present were willing to identify them. I think this counts as "the police covering for their own", no?
-
Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
And I’m thinking, sentiment aside, that a City that has suffered more than 5 major earthquakes in its 150 year history is in the wrong place.
If you really want to take that to the reductio ad absurdum, the billions of human beings living at the rim of the Pacific basin are “in the wrong place”.
This picture has been doing the rounds a bit. What gets me is how many of the regions totally obscured by little earthquake dots are also historically highly liveable, populous areas - the whole Mediterranean + middle east, south-east Asia, central America. Perhaps it's no coincidence.
Cf. the nice rich, fertile soil you get around active volcanoes.
-
Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to Andre Alessi,
I do seem to remember Mikey Havoc gave Ken Ring a bit of air time back in the day (during his first stint on Drive, I think?)
He also had a lot of time for a guy espousing the Doctrine of Signatures, amongst other nut-jobs.
-
Hard News: What Now?, in reply to giovanni tiso,
If National gets re-elected in a landslide
Please don't invoke any more natural disasters...
-
Up Front: Ups and Downs. And Side-to-Sides., in reply to Martin Lindberg,
You're a better cat-person then I am. But then again, I'm a dog.
-
Hard News: Welfare: Back to the Future?, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Say wha? An electorate seat is an electorate seat. There are 69 of them, and they’re totally FPP. Winning a marginal seat absolutely gets you more people in Parliament.
Nope. From Wikipedia:
MMP is similar to other forms of proportional representation (PR) in that the overall total of party members in the elected body is intended to mirror the overall proportion of votes received; it differs by including a set of members elected by geographic constituency who are deducted from the party totals so as to maintain overall proportionality.
-
Muse: Shelf Life: The Dying Elephant in…, in reply to Carol Stewart,
It’s apropos of nothing in particular, but this is a lovely piece by Dave Armstrong in today’s DomPost.
+1
I am forever thankful for going through through WHS in the 90's, while I saw friends crash and burn at Wellington College down the road.
My son will start college in a few years - I hope we can find somewhere half as enlightened in Auckland.
-
Muse: Shelf Life: The Dying Elephant in…, in reply to Islander,
In a word, NO.
Because other readers (self, for instance) do call those stories out as self-involved self-justifying coniving crap. And someone who is a human shit deserves to go down in death as a paltry lacklustre nithing.
So be it, for Orson Scott Card.Are you suggesting that the reader has a responsibility to evaluate the writer as well as the writing? Card has written works which are neither paltry nor lackluster (and, given, a number which are both), and I guess they will have some cultural longevity quite separate from the reputation of their author. Is this wrong?
I have trouble with this idea, but that doesn't mean it's not reasonable. I'm slightly afraid of what I might find if I were to closely examine the lives of artists whose works I admire (present company excluded of course :-).
-
Muse: Shelf Life: The Dying Elephant in…, in reply to Jeremy Andrew,
I most often appeciate authors notes in books, as I find it interesting to know their thoughts on the whats and whys of the work. Stephen King, Piers Anthony and Orson Scott Card spring to mind as examples.
Orson Scott Card is an author whose works I have enjoyed, but whose thoughts on many things I wish I didn't know. I have no problem reading works by authors I disagree with - Heinlein comes to mind as an example - but it's different if the author is not only wrong, but also a complete twatcock about it (I might be less tolerant of Heinlein if I hadn't read how he supported Phil K Dick through some dark times. If anyone knows similar stories about Card, please let me know so I can re-read Speaker For The Dead with a good conscience).