Posts by giovanni tiso
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I could, and if you think someone who was a vocal opponent of the Iraq War from the right - before it was fashionable - is any kind of "neo-con", then I've got to wonder what meaning it has at all except as a poo-label for anyone on the right you don't approve of.
The term neoconservative is at least thirty years old and has shifted in meaning somewhat, but never so much as to encompass Buckley, no question about that - Buckley was a Goldwater republican if we must label him, and nothing could be further from a neo-con on that side of that particular pale.
A fairly workable definition of what neo-con currently means would probably be anybody who espouses the PNAC document we were talking about last week. A bizarre chapter in history whose last pages are even now being written, in other words.
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For what it's worth, the crowd that obligingly supplies "Our Views" to the Herald is unimpressed by talk of National hidden agendas and would rather talk a little more about Helen's crime-friendly, parent-hating nanny state. I can't resist offering the following tidbit:
Life is too easy in NZ. The bourgeois academics are manipulating the simpler people resulting in rampant socialisation.
Rampant socialisation. Now there's something we can all get behind.
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i never knew anyone else who actually made money out of their wedding.
Not that uncommon in other cultures, one of my best friends in fact made a scandalous, deposit-for-a-house-worthy amount.
Before we moved here my mother surprised me very much by suggesting Justine and I get married, until it transpired that her thinking was as follows: you have lots of relations with some money and not a lot of taste; if you got married and remained in Italy, they would give you ghastly ornamental things you'd be forced to look at for the rest of your days; but if you skip the country, they'll have to give you money.
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Same here, but working out anniversaries can be tricky.
Not for us, in fact we'd rather celebrate togetherness than beingmarriedness anyhow. We did do a civil union at some point, but in filling out a form recently we discovered that we couldn't even remember the year in which it had happened, let alone the day. Then at least we worked out the former ("you know, dear, it's when your parents blew an absolute gasket and we didn't speak to them for months.")
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This sort of nonsense would never happen under a Facsist Dictatorship
The thing I hate the most about those dictatorships is the horrible screeching noise you hear when you pick up the phone.
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We wanted to get married but not have the wedding.
I realise I'm the one at fault here, but I find it really hard to divorce (ah ah) the two concepts, the being married and the getting married. If being married means to be committed to another, and the wedding is where you tell the world that you're committed to another, if you subtract the latter you're left with what my partner and I have had for the best part of twenty years. And we're not married.
But, as I say, there's clearly something I am personally unable to grasp, I'm not claiming otherwise.
A dear friend of mine got married a couple of days ago in Nairobi, and they're having a second ceremony in Tuscany in eight days. Not being able to go really sucks.
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I bear Op Shop no will-will
Will will would be a great name for a panda bear.
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The drawback, however, is that a mutual detestation of weddings does not make the nuptial process very easy.
I would have thought the opposite. Surely you could have simply opted not to get married?
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And ain't nothing wrong with that, thinking that the present Government has moved the country in certain wrong directions, and that it's going to take a while to move back from that.
That would be nothing wrong with that indeed, it paints a pretty accurate picture of Labour going into the 1999 election. But National is doing quite the opposite: it's embracing the government's policies that it spent years opposing, because they are simply too temptingly popular. I'd like nothing less than for National to argue that the country has moved into certain wrong directions. Not going to happen. They're going to waltz in thanks to Helen fatigue, and give us a reluctant fourth labour term (if we're lucky).
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All those known results of being a smoker mean that surgery is riskier and lead to longer recovery.
If you can point me to a study that says that butter does similar things, then I'll add it to my list of "sins" for which elective surgery (note elective surgery, not medically-indicated surgery) should be deferred/denied.Good, that's just what we need, a longer list!
But, hey, I'm no doctor. I'm told that butter clogs the arteries, and I could venture the guess that somebody who is a borderline heart patient or suffers in fact from heart disease is going to have more trouble recovering from surgery than somebody who isn't. Could be wrong, though.
And it wasn't my point, you know. I was just highlighting how hard your little plan would be to police. How do you know who's a smoker? People have bad lungs and bad circulation for a variety of reasons; others have a naturally high bad cholesterol that has absolutely nothing to do with their diets.
What about the economic cost of all the tens-of-thousands of lost hours spent on smoking breaks? Or the lost output of smokers who get seriously sick?
Don't be ridicolous now. There is no proof that people who take occasional breaks durinng their working day have a lower productivity, it might very well be the opposite. And I'm sure that the lost output under point two (which isn't the property of society anyhow) couldn't make up for those 750 million that smokers inject into the state coffers in excess of the cost they represent for the health system. Truth is, smokers pay for their own bills and a good chunk of yours. You suggest we ought to withdraw services from them to top it off. I'm still a bit dumbfounded about that.
In lieu of any further contribution of mine to this discussion, you can mentally paste the phrase "what Danielle said upthread".