Posts by Moz
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Paul Williams,
despite living in Australia for 12 years, in reality, I live in a bubble - the inner west of Sydney - which is exceptionally liberal by comparison with the rest of the nation.
I suspect being white and male also helped you. Even in Marrickville and Newtown my partner cops frequent abuse for being female or asian. The contest to be the most odious arsehole in Australia is vigorous and has many participants.
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I thought every town in NZ was required to have a ferroconcrete decoration in the shape of a boat? It certainly seemed that way to me in the 70's and 80's. Some of them launched, some of them were turned into odd-shaped sheds.
I vaguely recall the one down the road from us being launched to some excitement, largely from my point of view that we now had a bigger bit of lawn at my friend's place. It's surprising just how big a "small" yacht is when it's in a backyard/driveway. And correspondingly, how accomodating the spouse is when her partner (it's usually her) takes over half the section for a 10 year project.
My parents did it the easy way when they retired and bought someone else's boat. Which was a good idea, since they sold it a few years later as it turned out not to be as much fun as they'd hoped. But they did seem to enjoy having it while they did. Well, ok, he enjoyed having it, she enjoyed the occasional sail on a fine day. Much as I did :)
Hope Harold gets better soon.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to chris,
Not being at all familiar the circumstances there, I’m a little uncertain how to interpret that, “it doesn’t really matter” sounds neutral, “vociferously objected” clearly isn’t.
Precisely. A group of Christians were very clear that forcing children to be indoctrinated by Christians as part of their schooling is at worst irrelevant (when pressed they were willing to concede that). Obviously to them it's unquestionably good. To them, however, even allowing the possibility that some children might be taught ethics is extremely bad, wrong, unacceptable and will cause the collapse of civilisation. It's not that they're hypocrites per se, to them the world is divided into the condemned and the saved, and it's just obvious that every child should be at least given the opportunity to be saved. By them, obviously.
I keep saying "obviously" because that's how it came across. They don't see shades of grey, the possibility that they might be wrong, anything like that. Their response to "ethics education" was the kind of uncomprehending "without God there can be no morals or ethics" stuff that you'd expect from uneducated persons of impaired intellectual ability. George Brandis, our federal Attorney-General and beliver that "gay marriage leads inevitably to legalised beastiality" was one of the opposition, for example. They're not operating in a reality-based framework, by definition.
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It does seem odd - the law showing its ass for sure.
Can anyone explain why the law keeps that particular ruminant rather than, say, a camel? As metaphor "the law is a camel" strikes me as far more accurate, it's all teeth and kicking that requires skilled hands to control.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to chris,
The positive I got from Rosemary McDonald’s lesson was “it will not do them any harm as long as YOU, their parents, are the biggest influence in their lives.” It’s pragmatic, we can tell our own children that it’s all cobblers.
I have exactly as much confidence in the sincerity of that claim as I do in my ability to get a posiition teaching the doctrines of The New Church of the Great Old Ones in a primary school. Christian parents can just tell their children it's all a load of cobblers when they get home...
We went through this in NSW very recently, and the "it doesn't really matter" crowd vociferously objected to the proposal that ethics be offered as an alternative to Christianity where there was demand. They were willing to compromise and allow explicitly Islamic schools to teach their version of the Gospel, but Herendetthelesson (to quote Goscinny and Uderzo). The hatred expressed by some participants in the debate was hard to reconcile with some of the claims made about the followers of Isa/Jesus.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
stick with the Latin...
I find that helps. And then there are groups like Lesiem who just make up their own language and sing in that. It's kind of like opera - the music is great, but the plot is awful.
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Hard News: Didn't see that coming, in reply to Russell Brown,
More to the point, as I recall, she said it out loud. Not one of her finest moments.
It was a very WTF Helen moment.
To me, part of the point was that a lot of people were shocked that she'd say something like that. Whereas with certain other politicians we'd mostly be surprised that they were silly enough to say it where people could hear it.
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Hard News: Didn't see that coming, in reply to Raymond A Francis,
Where are the leaks of Miss Clark's emails calling West Coast voters " Inbred ferals"
I suspect they exist only in the fevered imaginations of right wing trolls.
or from the present Labour Leader to his favourite lawyer?
Yeah, hevean forfend a party leader actually talk to a lawyer about anything. That could lead to informed lawmaking, and we can't have that.
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I keep expecting Te Kupu to pop up and give us a round of Whakakotahi or Tangata Whenua (Whakakotahi doesn't seem to be on youtube). Just, you know, while we're talking about capturing the "older activist" market.
Like SimonG above, I'm starting to wonder who the minor parties have further down their lists, and also taking a gander at the high teens in The Green's list. It would amuse me a huge amount if Labour ended up being a minority player in the coalition government after the election, and it's starting to look as though that's possible. 5 or 6 ManaIP MPs would be very satisfying. Especially if we could get the combo of a green-left win with a loss of Labour deadwood.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to Max Rose,
I can't imagine what it must be like to grow up in an environment where your growing sexuality is deemed evil, or your parents were said to be "living in sin".
The Presbyterian Chruch where my mother was an elder decided that since she'd driven her husband away (he moved in with his secretary) she was no longer fit to be an elder. She stopped going to church at all shortly afterwards. That did change how I viewed the chruch, I admit.
My school was quite heavily evangelical, but interestingly they were much more accepting than judgemental. I suspect because of the teacher who lead it, but with a couple of exceptions the kids involved were way more keen to recruit-and-save than judge. A couple of kids from evangelical, judgey homes were arseholes and the school group didn't seem able to rein them in.
That said, my problems with the school and the church were less about sexuality and more about being different. Just, different.