Posts by BenWilson
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Sheesh, a man can't have an offline life these days? I had a couple of days holiday visiting my family, got the flu, pushed through it because I don't have a choice, worked several days on renovations that have to be done urgently, started a new semester, worked a couple of dozen hours on the association website, cranked out like 50 Facebook posts, had about 100 phone calls, got the car fixed, looked after my kids, cooked, cleaned, unpacked some more. Wrote half a dozen posts on this website on different threads, fixed my bike, had 2 committee meetings, assembled a bed, a cupboard, a table. Also collected and collated information my next 2 Uber posts. And to wind down, and because I'm insomniac, I also read half of War and Peace. So yeah, been slacking soz. Will be back full speed this week.
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Up Front: The Best Possible Taste, in reply to Sister Mary Gearchange,
I’m having trouble thinking of a reason why the two are assumed to be mutually exclusive
Because of sexism, I guess. Was it really that hard to imagine a scenario involving sexism?
As an aside, there’s exactly zero evidence for that currently, although it seems intuitively true.
Your evidence for this being? Claiming the absence of something is a notoriously difficult thing to do. You literally have to look at ALL the evidence. But really, there's so many google hits on "does diversity make teams work better?", that branch off to what looks like it could be evidence, that I don't have the time or inclination to go and fisk them all.
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Hard News: RNC 2016: A literal shitshow, in reply to Russell Brown,
Wow, that's unusual, harsh, and true.
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Speaker: Darkness in New York, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
So, Electrons only really useful for our submarine fleet's second strike capability then. For that day when NZ reaches superpower status, and decides to roll the world destruction dice. We'll have to wait until at least 2019 for that, and GoT will be finished by then, so I'll be looking for entertainment.
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Polity: The most important graph in the world, in reply to andin,
Well they will probably get power, eventually. But it's on us to hold them to a proper cleanup, and we have to start by knowing what we even want that to look like. I know what I don't want it to look like, and that's something. But it's far short of enough.
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Polity: The most important graph in the world, in reply to andin,
I do get the sense of helpless rage. I just don’t feel it. Or rather, I refuse to give in to it. To give in is to say it was always inevitable and all the fighting over all those years was just a rearguard action. As someone who has also lived a long time, but also has maybe the same again to come, I’m not ready to lay down and die, accepting the slide into rising inequality and the violent tumult that it is likely to lead to.
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Speaker: Darkness in New York, in reply to Tom Semmens,
My cosy liberal assumption back in New Zealand – that even if Trump won the nomination, he would still get toasted in the actual election – I don’t subscribe to it any more.
Scary thought. Is the Hispanic vote not still sitting there as the great unknown?
ETA: That's @graeme tuckett, not Tom, btw...
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Is this the most important graph because you can summarize Donald Trump by saying he's the bit above the line on the right, consolidating his position by convincing the bit below the line in the middle, to hate the bit above the line on the left?
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Polity: The most important graph in the world, in reply to andin,
I'd say it was "not the whole truth, by a long shot". There is certainly an element of truth to the offshoring of production helping the workers at those offshore locations. I don't think it was much of the motivation for the decision makers, of course. They just wanted to save money, and get a more compliant workforce that had no comeback on them. But you can't deny that the money in the hands of people in a very much more impoverished society helped those people out of proportion to how much it might have helped a local.
It's a conundrum. I don't entirely approve of it, of course, far from it. But nor can I buy wholesale the alternative, of local workforce protectionism. It seems to me that this is one of the hardest aspects of modern labour, something that there are few good answers for.
To me the problem is the coupling of labour with remuneration itself. It's an ironic offshoot of socialism and the deification of the worker. It sanctifies work itself. To me, this is problematic, always has been. The purpose of work is the end of work. Work is not an end in itself. At least, I'd say that soul-less paid work isn't. The kind of freely undertaken work that we do in our spare time is, and it's not our only end. The other ends are things like shelter, food, companionship, love, pleasure, goods, entertainments, travel, etc. The kind of things we work for.
If the jealous protection of our work against it being done offshore is something that becomes our main battleground, then ultimately we are driven towards nationalism, and it's corollary, racism. These aren't attitudes I support as the way of the future. The Winston Peters brand of socialism, set against the neoliberalism of...practically all the other political players.
There must be another way. I don't see this neoliberal project as some crushing inevitable unstoppable force. It's just something for which the solution has not presented itself clearly enough. The false dichotomy of this slow moving disaster or the other faster moving disaster of tax-and-spend protectionism needs to be exposed. This Left vs Right that no one even cares about any more. There are many more possibilities.
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Hard News: RNC 2016: A literal shitshow, in reply to Russell Brown,
Trump's ghostwriters thought they were too goodthinkful to end up in Miniluv. But just as Newspeak erases all Oldspeak, so unpersoning erases the people who invented it.
Now, back to the Hate Week.