Posts by BenWilson
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I get about one giggle every five minutes from Radiradirah. Not the best ratio, but they do have some funny bits. I'll give it a few more goes. I found it a lot funnier than Cougar Town, if that's worth anything.
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Nope. But the only thing my presence in Fiji could achieve is transfer of my wealth to the dictatorship of Fiji, with some small fraction going to the Fijian people.
I'm curious as to how you figure that. Most of the money I spend on vacations goes directly to whoever is providing me with what I want. This is of direct benefit to those people. Are you talking about tax?
Sanctions have always been a symbolic gesture. But arms embargoes do seem to make a small difference - unless of course, military-industrial complexes are at stake.
They're more than a symbolic gesture when they impoverish an entire nation. I see them as pretty cruel.
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In your shoes, I'd go. My gut feeling is that you'll come away rather surprised by what the Fijians think, if you are able to talk to a wide sample. I certainly am, every time I talk to Fijians, which is most weeks.
I don't really think sanctions are a good idea. The people they hurt are not the leadership. Instead, they actually rally support for the leadership, who are the only people that can now help the masses, the world having shunned them. And I don't think the hurt is trivial. It's actually pretty severe, what NZ has done, and it's only made the Commodore more powerful.
Yeah, releasing sanctions can be sold as a win by him. But so can basically anything that happens. And what difference does it make anyway - he's not going to get voted out, and he's not going to be overthrown. He'll still live in luxury surrounded by guns, even if Fiji is economically squeezed back to the stone age.
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I found it so poignant, so heart breaking, that your child dies, and you deal with it by just going to work every day, and never talking about her. Maybe things aren't so different after all.
He sounds very pragmatic. Working probably is a very good way of dealing with that kind of loss. Inaction can lead down the path of depression and despair really fast. And talking about it, whilst a very good solution for some problems, might simply be impossible when the grief is too powerful. At least when you work you are typically surrounded by and interacting with humanity, and your mind gets respite from dark thoughts.
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Could never fathom why he was scared of the former, but not the latter.
Medieval dead Italians are a lot closer to the bone than ancient dead Egyptians? Perhaps he was thinking "what if he looks like Grandad?".
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my point (perhaps not clearly expressed) is that the intention makes all the difference.
I think you're clear enough, and I don't really disagree. I carefully chose the example of the skull ashtray because the intention of the Nazis was to dehumanize their victims, so most people will feel a visceral sense of repulse at the idea of the use of a body in this way. But other people consider being put in a display cabinet to be dehumanizing too, and so feel creeped out in a similar way about mummies, even though the intention of the display is not to dehumanize them - that is just a side effect.
I actually don't feel that spooked by mummies myself. The connection between living and dead is so long ago. I'd be much more grossed out by the Lenin and Mao mummies, and somewhere in between about really old shrunken heads. As to whether it's moral to actually keep them, that's a really complicated case by case question.
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Almost without exception the "no-budget" indy features and even shorts that I've seen suffer hugely from lack of focus on quality writing and directing, and instead seem to be entirely built around cool looking shots and fancy effects.
I'm not surprised - that's a lot cheaper to produce. Quality writing and directing takes untold effort and training by comparison. Just getting a bunch of people to turn up and act in something they won't get paid for, to the directions of a director, is a hell of an ask.
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Context is everything.
Yeah and every person and society is a context too. Showing the mummified corpses of humans is offensive to a lot of people, not so much to others. I don't think there's any truth about whether they are "objectively" offensive. Just subjectively. And we make further subjective judgments about whether the offense to other people take matters. Egyptians who feel deeply offended at people gawking at their mummies are basically ignored, on provisos that they did not agree to. Did every Russian feel that it was right to mummify Lenin? I doubt it. Are Maori still allowed to mummify heads? No. Not because that would be disrespectful to the dead Maori who might be mummified but because too many people in NZ find the idea abhorrent.
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I'd rather have an NZ series in the league of...
I don't see it as an either/or.
We all feel good when a kiwi wins an award at Cannes or their film makes some money in the US, but that's why we have sports teams, to get that "plucky kiwis take on the world" national pride thing.
If that were solely confined to sport this would be a poor nation indeed. I feel way more pride at a successful film than something ephemeral like a sporting victory. It's not just about taking on the world, it's about setting up something lasting, and extremely beneficial to a lot of people.
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I would still want to hurl on them.
I find wigs made from real hair quite yucky, I must say.
But that's different from my original point - talking about bodies as bodies, on display not bodies disguised as something else, on display. I don't think the two are the same or can be equated.
I'm not judging you as cold, if that helps. Just pointing out that it doesn't take much looking to find examples of the use of human parts that make most people feel exactly what others feel when they see mummified remains. And the choice of reason for that is quite arbitrary.
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