Posts by linger
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Legal Beagle: A four-year parliamentary term?, in reply to James Caygill,
Governments are elected to govern
It’s not always that simple (and the “winning” group should be wary of simplifying it that far by making claims about the size of their “mandate”, which is something of a fiction in the MMP environment anyway).
Sometimes they’re elected because people have stopped trusting the other lot, or figure it’s time for a change, or time for someone else to have a go. Actual differences in stated policy platforms don’t always seem to be that much of an influence.
Looking at the election results vs. the later protests – and looking at the downward trend in voting participation – I’d have to conclude that much of the policy signalled prior to elections doesn’t directly connect with what many potential voters actually care about; or maybe that a large number of potential voters don’t expect any politicians to actually do what they say they will. -
Legal Beagle: A four-year parliamentary term?, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
All of which is simply the tu quoque fallacy.
It doesn’t constitute a reason against doing something now.
(As I’m sure you know; but I figured it should be made explicit.) -
a-Paul-ing pundits
Holmes as that cheeky dead guy
forming with Henry, Lhaws, and their ilk
the fraternity of uppity nigglers. -
Hard News: Music: In before Christmas,
Not music, but audio links anyway:
Two BBC4 programmes on 21/12/12 (so they’ll be around for at least a week; possibly longer) are connected to A Recent Thread. (I’d have put the links there instead, but, well.)
(i) The Listening Project: parents of an autistic boy
(ii) More or Less: US gun crime statistics -
Hard News: Music: In before Christmas, in reply to FletcherB,
The TV theme is of course that of Futurama.
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Up Front: Whimsy Is an Extra 5 Cents a Word, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Oh yes. The horror!
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Hard News: Media3: Whistleblower Season,
Also note: the conditions that allowed Savile to offend in plain sight have not magically disappeared since the 1970s. If you want a more recent parallel, you need look no further than Penn State University’s coaching scandal last year. In both cases, one individual was regarded as essential to an institution; in both cases the institution protected itself by pretending the offending was not serious or ongoing, and certainly did not draw police attention to it.
(To clarify: in the Penn U case, the head coach, Joe Pasternak, was not accused of any offence himself; but he had turned a blind eye to long-term offending by an assistant who was seen as an important part of the coaching team.)In trying to take social lessons from these cases, I don’t think “moral panic” is really what we should be focussing on.
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Hard News: Media3: Whistleblower Season,
Steve’s point, I hope, was that each culture has its own moral code, which appears “normal” to its members. Deploring historical wrongs from our own, hopefully more enlightened, standpoint is all very well, but the moral code of that era also needs to be considered to understand those actions in context. We can’t automatically take our own moral system for granted.
Which is not to excuse Savile or his enablers in the slightest. 1970s England wasn’t that different to today, and sexual abuse of children certainly wasn’t morally OK in that society (though perhaps easier to ignore).
But one really important reason for not taking our own society’s current moral system for granted is that we constantly need to work to maintain it. If we are not careful, there is always the possibility of a return to a morality in which the powerful can do what they like to the less powerful with this being seen as “normal”.
It can start in such small ways: e.g. prisoners being denied the right to vote, or WINZ clients being treated by default as suspects whose privacy does not matter... -
Hard News: When we had hope and change, in reply to Russell Brown,
We’ve discussed [accent in NZ broadcasts] before here.
Specifically, in the discussion on this thread.
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OnPoint: H4x0rs and You, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
not a breech presentation
just slightly off kilter