Posts by Keir Leslie
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Given you don't seem to support compulsory membership of universities why do you (I assume) support compulsory membership of students' associations?
Oh, no, I do support compulsory university membership, although I feel that currently too much power is vested in the administration with not enough democratic accountability. But fundamentally, a university is an association of scholars. You can't remove association from universities, because that's what they are, and if you don't want to associate with the university, the only recourse you can really have is to not go there.
So the Student's Association just seems like a specific case of the general principle.
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3. What other fundamental human rights are you willing to submit to simple majority rule?
So why must I be forced to be a member of the University of Canterbury then? The VC says a bunch of stuff I very much disagree with all the bloody time on behalf of the University; isn't that a fundamental violation of my human rights?
No, of course it isn't, because Universities are more than just degree factories; they're self-governing etc, and to do that they have to involve a degree of compulsion, that being a function of governments. Why the forced membership of the University is legit but forced membership of the UCSA isn't it beyond me*.
(And it's utterly dodge to say that VSM has no connection to the fact the student unions are generally left. It's like saying that Paris I - XIII exist for purely academic reasons.)
* Which, by the way, is an utterly incompetent lapdog of the administration, and currently appears to be so far up the arse of Peter Dunne it isn't funny, so hardly a hotbed of lefty radicalism.
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And after listening to the BBC doucmentaries, it seems utterly predictable that it is sports particularly popular in Europe - athletics and cycling - that are the most utterly compromised ones.
Bollocks. Athletics is big in the US, and football is big in Europe, and yet athletics is druggy but football isn't.
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That's actually kind of debatable; they may have evolved photosynthesis as late as just before we see the transition to an O2 atmosphere in the geological record, rather than having been around for two billion years. Regardless, they're responsible for some ridiculous proportion of photosynthetic production today, besides having several times the mass of our entire species. I'd say they still have that crown.
On the other hand, from memory, in terms of energy usage, we utterly pwn everything else.
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With all due and sincere respect, Russell, perhaps Lomborg has a point when he suggests that there are many many people in the world for whom access to safe water, basic sanitation and health care and three meals a day are more important priorities than climate change, and are at least debatably worth being prioritised by the global community.
Of course, that's a false dichotomy & a rather naive assumption of a particularly zero-sum world. We can do both, believe it or not.
(Further, while i daren't say that Lomborg's a bit of a concern troll, well, yeah, his arguments look suspiciously similar.)
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Hilary is right in that the details of the particular 'test case' (there was no ‘experiment’, Green’s bedside manner was uncommonly good by the standards of the day, the approach taken wasn’t out of step with the rest of the world etc) are hardly important.
No no no. The details are always important. If you give that up you aren't any better than a nutter ranting about irreducible complexity in a backwoods Arkansas town.
(And if you're a historian who gives that up then!)
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Am I right that you've just compared a bunch of celebrities acting like fools for charity to the evils of the Victorian workhouse system? Or have I misunderstood something?
Well, there's something Victorian about this particular Telethon so it was generally in the mind & the Poor Law was better than nothing. Not much, but it was & yet it was still undeniably awful.
Not the same, but the justifying reasoning could be the same.
(I would like to note, however, that the tackiness or otherwise of the whole telethon operation shouldn't really come into the approval/disapproval equation. *Of course* it's tacky. 95% of everything in the world is tacky.)
I think the tackiness is important in terms of legitimising it as part of NZ pop culture though, as well as saying `this is for charity' etc. Semiotics etc, etc.
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If the end result is that poor kids get food and clothes, then who cares how it's done?
But long term, suggesting that Telethons (& charitable giving in general) are an appropriate way to deal with child poverty is just wrong. They aren't at all.
There are some things that charity is suited for. The provision of basic rights is not one of them. The idea of begging for one's rights is just repellent.
(`Who cares how it's done' also applies to the Poor Law, and I'll be damned if I'll like that, even if it was better than nothing.)
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But why not support the people trying to do some good?
Because the idea that child poverty should be a matter for charity is disgusting. The Telethon normalises itself; it makes it seem like there's nothing odd about John Key doing a sausage sizzle for child poverty. It's not the Telethon that gets me exactly; it is the relentless happiness & seeming normality of the whole thing. You're begging that children can have shoes --- in God's own country! --- don't look so damned pleased with yourself. It's the idea that the correct response to children going without food and clothing is for us to choose to help. It isn't. We shouldn't have that choice to help or not, any more than we should have the choice to provide due process or not.
Nothing against the people involved. It isn't their fault & I'm sure they are marvellous people doing the best job they can. But the whole thing is still depressing.
(And of course, if they were to be honestly angry about the whole thing, people would just tune out. Which is another depressing thing.)
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It's not all up to the gummint to make sure we're okay.
Yes, in this case it is. The government is responsible. The fact that children in poverty is seen as an issue for charity is an utter disgrace.
The idea that we have what boils down to children begging on national television shouldn't make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside that we are prepared to give money; it should make us ashamed that that's the sort of society we live in. That's what I don't like about the telethon: the idea that it is an appropriate reaction to child poverty. It's not.
I'd also argue that the telethon isn't about community; it's the illusion of community, the replacement of an actual community with stage managed corporate `community', where the only thing that really joins anyone is the cash nexus.