Posts by BenWilson
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This is my 1000th post to PAS.
So that's what the party is about?
I think I cracked 2000 posts before ever meeting a PASer ITF. I would not recommend this.
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They might, but it wouldn’t make much sense. There are virtually infinite liberties, so how do you argue from a position of “full restrictions”? Each prohibition would need to be argued for.
It could be worked. A large list of what's allowed, a number of the things being worded in an open way. Adding or taking away things from this list would require argumentation. Lists of rights are basically this already, and considered to be a workable foundation of many a constitution.
It seems to me a bit like saying that someone could establish God must exist because you don’t have an argument to prove he doesn’t.
Can't see the equivalence, really. You might have to elaborate.
Again, I tend to think that the presumption of liberty is important, but I don't see that is obvious, a simple numbers game based on the near infinity of possible liberties. There's also a near infinite number of ways that liberties can be restricted. So what? For me the more compelling thing is that I consider liberty to be an important good. But other people think it's not so much.
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@stevep
He carried on killing Nazis.
Yes, a great many them when they were prisoners. Not exactly one of the good guys.
Which leaves you Bridget von Hammersmark who, as I explained, is shown as shooting an unarmed man after he negotiated to lay down his weapon. She's also shown to be a bit of a buffoon too, in having made the stupid choice of location that lead to the carnage and near failure of the plot.
There are also no particularly nice non-German characters, but the tone of the film suggests everything they do is OK because it's against Nazis. So burning people to death in a theater is fine, braining them with baseball bats after surrender is actually cool, scalping them is funny, branding marks into them is poetic, etc.
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Not true.. large scale derivatives trading did happen in in NZ in the 1980s, via the New Zealand Futures and Options Exchange which operated in the country from 1984-2003.
Well I stand corrected on my interpretation of what Gio was saying. Or do I? LOL.
@steve parks.
Actually, he did it before he met Pitt’s character. His Nazi killing is what attracted the ‘Basterds’ to him. He made a moral decision to be anti-Nazi without any intervention from the Americans.
Yes, but he carried it on afterward with particular relish too.
I’m fairly sure Tarantino made it clear enough that the subject of this revenge fantasy was Nazis, and not Germans in general.
I don't think it was very clear at all. As I said, German was conflated with Nazi. The only 'innocent' Germans in the film were the soldiers sinking some piss after a son was born, and the actor who was traitoring for the Allies. The soldiers were depicted as probably not being Nazis, but certainly as extremely annoying wankers who saw no problem imposing upon a famous woman, and the woman undermined her own moral sanctity by killing the man after he had surrendered, taking advantage of the fact that he had just had a son and most likely wished to at least see him before he died. But again, that was OK because he was a German. It turned out to be an especially repulsive scene in the end.
First, it assumes the maximization of liberty only in the sense that by default you have liberty if no convincing reasons are given for any particular restriction.
There's nothing a priori about that. I happen to like it as a principle, but I don't know that other people find it anywhere near as convincing. Or perhaps a better way of putting it would be that other people's threshold for overriding it is extremely low. They might think it should be overridden just because someone else finds that liberty offensive, for instance. Or they might even go so far as to say the it is liberties, not restrictions, that need to be justified.
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I think the burden of proof is on the person arguing for increasing criminalisation though.
I personally would like it to be so in this case, but as with all moral issues, this assumes a moral position all of it's own, the idea of the maximization of liberty. Plenty of people are not subscribers and never will be. I actually think a lot of socialists are like this, as plenty heaps of conservatives.
Wasn’t one of the ‘Basterds’ a German who killed Nazis?
Yes, he was especially ruthless and vicious. That was OK though because he did it when Brad Pitt told him to.
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LOL it's a huge departure from a static image of a cross for 5 minutes, although I confess that did get me a little bit pissy.
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I read Gio as meaning "large scale derivative exchanges didn't exist in NZ". The truth of that claim is somewhat dependent on what you count as a derivative. You have been able to take out a massive loan on a house for a long time, effectively magnifying your exposure to the risk/return ration of the property. And you could take out insurance to protect against a lot of things that could ruin the value of the investment, like a fire.
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Timing is likely to be the difference. The '87 crash was a much smaller affair than the current one.
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Steve, I also wrote one on much the same topic, but I deliberately deleted it. You've got more guts.
The way men interact with girls is extremely problematic, and it's no surprise that a great many of them withdraw their participation where girls are concerned. Much the same, I imagine, with gays and boys. It's not that they are going to do anything, it's that even having people thinking about it and worrying about it, and talking about it, is too much for a lot of men to risk. I don't think there are almost no male kindergarten teachers entirely because men don't like children. It's also because one false accusation is the end of your life as you know it, and that's just not worth the risk.
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Just to be a history pedant for a moment: the Normandy battlefield was every bit as vicious as the Russian front, with or without provocation. Have a read of Antony Beevor's 'D-Day', if you're interested in the detail.
Yes, war is a shit all right, but that doesn't mean glorifying violations of the Geneva convention is a good thing to do in film, just because it's being done to Germans.
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