Posts by BenWilson
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Painting lettering in derivative forms hardly amounts to much of an art movement.
Indeed, anyone can do design. Nothing to it.
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I would suggest that Debussy would be the wrong composer to consult.
I'd believe you, I don't know my Aria from my Elbow.
The development of um... development, and in particular the relationship between symphonic development and its contemporary manifestations might provide better insights.
Not to mention pithy comebacks. Imagine, next time I'm pinned down by a particularly hard argument, I'll come back in with "Yes, well I think Bach answered that fairly conclusively with "Dum duh, duh dah dum, dum, deedle deedle deedle, dum...Dah!". If the cretins don't get it, then they're lost anyway.
Anyone wonder why lefty intellectuals get stereotyped as elitist?
I hope the answer isn't "because they're elite".
But can you dance to it?
Of course, with the aid of 20 muscular yet graceful women, I can dance to anything.
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Jan Farr said above that concert music is serious music. It's true. Western 'classical' music traces the entire history of Western philosophical thought.
Yes, I distinctly remember the substances vs universals debate in Debussy.
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Music with something to say. You certainly don't want to be dragged out of it at the end of every movement and told which firm to buy your mobile phone from..
Curiously, I had a better idea of what Britney was saying in "Hit me Baby one more time" than I do about what Beethoven was saying with the 5th. But I still like the 5th, even better than the 9th, which appears to be very clearly saying "Be a christian and you'll be really happy". It sounds a lot deeper when you don't understand. But "Und wer's nie gekonnt, der stehle weinend sich aus deisem Bund" does nicely capture how I feel about groupthink, I'll give Schiller that.
I don't want to be dragged out of anything, heavy or light, for commercial breaks. I pay not to, and if I can't, I avoid it.
I'd try harder if I were arguing for real.
I knew you were just stirring. I'm just amazed it had such legs, must have been a slow news day.
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So that error occurring never can, in reverse polish to write I often am tempted. Maybe that the reason is, that way Yoda speaks. It time saves. No brackets it needs. Over my digression is and not short enough it was.
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Surely irrationality is the kind of thing that only a popular survey can really confirm.
I had to read this (3 x pi x e x sqrt(2))/sqrt(2) x e x pi times, before my rational mind put it in the correct order. Initially it read like this:
"Surely irrationality is the only thing that kind of a popular survey can really confirm."
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On the basis of your argument, we should fully fund things when its a recession, and then provide no funding when the economy is booming. Like everything else, there's an up and down cycle and they have to adjust to that.
That is one perfectly viable way of managing an economy. Unfortunately it needs bipartisan support to work. So, as you say, what usually happens is that lots of things suffer during a recession. It doesn't really have to be that way, is all, somehow the discourse in this country always trends towards cuts when times are hard, very seldom towards making positive investment moves. It's almost Pavlovian. Which is the most galling thing about the 'creative and flexible' rhetoric - it's so formulaic and unflexible a response to a downturn.
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But none of those reasons bother me as much as how we waltzed into having this conversation, happily conceding a huge amount of ground to the privatisers of every single last fucking thing.
Grarrrr!! Tiso smash!
Glad you say we there.
I think that ground was conceded long ago. I also think it was a good thing. It made it possible for people 'of the left' to at least consider such a thing without having to be branded as class traitors. The discussion is about the specifics, rather than the principle. To what extent is there fat to be trimmed from RNZ is a much more productive discussion than the centuries old dilemma of public vs private services. If we can actually see that the fat that is trimmed just cuts the taste of the whole thing, then we might want to keep the fat after all. Concert actually sounds rather lean to me, I'd consider fattening it up to be quite worthwhile and cheap.
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Tou fucking chè.
I can appreciate that countering Berlusconi might actually require a strong left, that a massive change from his kind of leadership would probably be a good thing, possibly even to the extent of making it illegal to have so much power. We haven't had a crisis like that yet to expose the huge flaws in our total lack of constitution. Perhaps that's because it's a moderate place, it hasn't been necessary, or it hasn't been expedient to risk such a crisis. Muldoon was famously talked out of exploiting it, not because it was a wrong thing to do, but because Labour could then do it. Some tinkering here and there is all we ever get. "Piecemeal social engineering" as Popper might have said (and approved of).
Oh and I kind of agree with Danyl, at least in so far as that there is a perception that our left pisses money away. Whether it is actually true that they do it more than the right is another matter.
Ultimately the problem is actually much less about how much money we piss away, and more about how little we earn. And in that arena I tend to agree with you, there is a bizarrely uniform belief that government expenditure to actually generate wealth is a terrible idea. I personally think Muldoon again has a lot to answer for there, and the wild fluctuation of policy shortly after his fall led us to this peculiar position in which a 'liberal' left finds itself having to justify the massive sale of assets in the 80s as though it was fat to be trimmed, when our near bankruptcy had little to do with that.
It's a Kiwi quirk - I never encountered any such thing in Australia. The left and right seem further apart over there, more clearly defined, more rigid, much more aligned around families and regions. I don't think this is a good thing, particularly because it puts the economic aspect of the left-right divide as the main course on the menu every time, and very little progress is ever made by politics that is focused more on social issues. The overall effect is a country that is sometimes to the left of us on economic issues, but never, ever on social ones. The amazing thing is they don't even know it.
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Certainly the moderate Left doesn't differ from the moderate Right very much on the issue of revenue. They even have the same people voting for them, just at different times. There aren't any new ideas from a Grand Vision perspective, just new words.
I'm not sure if this is such a bad thing, TBH. "Wearyingly boring" does describe our politics, but interesting politics (like what you have in Italy) don't seem better.
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