Posts by linger
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Hard News: Spread the Noise, in reply to ChrisW,
[…] refer to Key’s style of policy and political management as ‘sanguine’ often enough, with ostensible meaning of something like (unthinkingly foolhardily) optimistic, whether it would be heard with sanguinary connotations
Using potentially confusable words might not be the best strategy. Probably would be more effective if people were to repeatedly refer to his management as foolhardy, unthinkingly driven by ideology, and lacking in long-term strategic vision for the country.
Or how about …
fabricational; lackadaisical; unaspirational,
This is what we call the Muppet Show. -
Hard News: The War Stories, in reply to ChrisW,
The aggression seems dissonant with the inscription “Lord into thy hands we commend their spirits”.
… indeed: presumably the inscription is supposed to refer to the list of the fallen, but really the only way of reconciling the verbal and visual messages is to read “their” as referring to “those we killed” (cf. Patton’s comment that war “isn’t about dying for your country, it’s about making the other poor bastard die for theirs”). And, well, yeah, we should remember also that there are other fallen than our own.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Hebe,
Twatcock FTW.
What does that mean?Which bit? “Twatcock” is the PAS generic double-or-nothing-gendered insult; “FTW” is apparently “for the win”, as teh yoof put it these days, or so I hear.
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It does bring to mind the Freakonomics question "Why do so many crack dealers still live with their parents?", with a similar answer: for the vast majority of those involved in the operation, it wasn't sufficiently profitable for anything above subsistence.
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Cracker: It's urs!, in reply to Brent Jackson,
Especially with that logo.
(which, to me at least, also signals “Make it Japanese” : )
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Field Theory: Mr Collins in Japan, in reply to JackElder,
It seems to be played at some universities
including mine (though, a few Tongan imports aside, our team sucks).
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Legal Beagle: A little known story of…, in reply to Sacha,
There are two complicating factors in interpreting the total answers for the “ethnicity” question:
(i) a significant minority of individuals choose not to respond to this question at all;
(ii) individuals who list several options are counted for every option listed (which has the effect of lowering the calculated proportion of “Maori” compared to the "descent" question, which is not affected by this problem).
If you correct for these known issues, the proportion of “Maori” individuals (rather than responses) given for the two questions is not very different.
(N.B. Statistics New Zealand released a report in 2007 cross-classifying the respondents who chose to list their ethnicity as “New Zealand”, which concluded that such individuals were mostly Pakeha who were not comfortable with the label “European”.) -
other census data isn’t presented in this way
because most New Zealand statistics are not based on "descent". The definition of "Maori" used in all official New Zealand statistics since 1986 was "Somebody who feels he or she is a Maori, and who is recognised as such by other people" (Pool 1991: 11), which is more accurately captured by the "reported ethnicity" question; but then the figure used is the proportion of responses (including multiple responses) rather than the proportion of individuals.
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to Gee,
My take on that is that it depends on how close to the actual on-field players the agency/enabling goes; so it’s more complicated than the single-author=moral agent problem originally posed. I think you could potentially support a team while condemning its management or coaches, without hypocrisy.
(Or to put it another way: as a supporter, you don’t have to subscribe to the philosophy that everything any member of the team does is by definition OK.)
But if you’re placed in the position of admiring the playing skills of someone who has committed (or allowed to be committed) an offence against another person, then that seems to be back in the same place as liking (some of) Card’s fiction. Maybe worse, if it’s a physical offence and you’re interested in physical skills. -
modern-day earls and barons […]: McManagement.
That’d be a modern-day laird.
But, yeah: landed gentry
(mostly also in the sense of “fish out of water”).