Posts by BenWilson
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Iraq and Iran?
Sodom and Gomorrah?
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Any time the players did something he didn't like or argued with him, he's say "100 D lightning bolt! you're dead!". And then two minutes later the conflict would be resolved, the player's character would be un-deaded, and the game would continue for another 10 minutes before it happened again.
<nerd_confession>To be fair, it was suggested in the Dungeon Master's Guide to do that. In the words of Gary Gygax (RIP):
Strong steps short of expulsion can be an extra random monster die, obviously rolled, the attack of an ethereal mummy (which always strikes by surprises, naturally), points of damage from "blue bolts from the heaveans" striking the offender's head, or the permanent loss of a point of charisma (appropriately) from the character belonging to the offender. If these have to be enacted regularly, then they are not effective and stronger measures must be taken. Again, the ultimate answer to such a problem is simply to exclude the disruptive person from further gatherings
-Dungeon Master's Guide P110, "Handling Troublesome Players"
I'm guessing DPF was a long suffering DM. BTW Un-deading? Resurrecting, surely. Although trolls do bear a strong resemblance to the undead.</nerd_confession>
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Yes, it was the time just before PAS came along. But they were still nutty, I recall endless comments to the effect that it was a lamentably failed assassination attempt.
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Craig
I certainly don't hate all politicians, nor am I advocating kicking over the sandcastle for amusement. I tend to agree with your unscientific and anecdotal evidence, but can't see any reason not to put it on a much more formal basis with evidence actually gleaned from the people, after such due process as NZ ever seems to be able to gather for a referendum. But then again, I could quite possibly be satisfied with a simple independent opinion poll, if it was pretty clear that the matter was non-contentious.
I don't see the connection between being small-c conservative (I'm much the same) and not wanting a referendum? Are you saying that conservatives just don't like change and wouldn't want to risk the idea that a majority might disagree?
But I temperamentally prefer an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary approach to such issues -- and we have the means to amend the Electoral Act without Key's referenda.
Don't make me guess! What r u talking about? A reform referendum of minor tweaks seems pretty evolutionary to me. No blood would probably be spilled.
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Cheers Craig, that actually is quite a humorous thread. Gotta love the demerits being liberally handed out as DPF struggles to control the wild lynch mob. It's almost on topic for this thread, Kiwiblog does often resemble District 9.
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I don't think you need paralysis or a crisis of legitimacy to periodically check that people are behind a system, any more than you need it to periodically check that they are behind the politicians. If it's just something you do, then it works to restore confidence in good systems, and gives impetus to move away from bad systems.
I pulled the number 20 out of my arse. I'm sure you saw that. The idea of a 'generation' is very loose. But it does carry in it the concept I'm going for, which is that I think people should buy into the systems that they live under at least once in their life.
Furthermore, I also think that if a large majority of people, in a referendum, wanted to 'throw out our electoral system and start again', then that would indeed be a crisis of legitimacy. Since you think we're not facing anything of the sort, then you would surely feel that there's no particular danger from a referendum?
One of the options posed could be 'minor tweaks to MMP'. That's not throwing out and starting again, but it is still electoral system reform and should require some kind of buy in. A big complaint a lot of people have who voted for MMP is that they didn't get the MMP they thought they were voting for. I certainly didn't forsee a bunch of the things that were implemented, all of them for the benefit of the existing powerful parties. I didn't think they'd have such high thresholds, and I didn't think that flipping from electorate to list was going to be possible, and I never saw the point of the 'win one electorate and get your party vote added'. All of those things promote tactical voting which obscure the actual preferences of the electorates. I mean does Epsom really want Rodney Hide, or do they actually want National, and they figure that coalition is required for it? Should people who want to legalize dope really have to vote for the Green Party if they want their vote to count, thus also having to suck on an environmentalist and socialist agenda for an issue that's mostly about personal liberty? Should a list vote for the Maori party always be a complete waste, forcing Maori to vote Labour when they (particularly recently) feel they have jack in common with Labour? Should the Green party always be on the verge of complete political annihilation, despite a fairly consistent minority that unfortunately waffles around the threshold? Should staunch Christians be forced into bed with the ultra right ACT party, pretty much stifling any serious claims to be a 'liberal' party? Should National and Labour always be the Grand Old Parties at all, for that matter? A massive share of NZers don't feel any affinity at all for Farmers or Trade Unions but are still 'centrist', and left with no other options, because fledgling breakaway parties are doomed to rapid political oblivion unless they have big money behind them (like ACT), or an existing international brand (like the Greens). Only the odd demagogue in an electorate can give them any satiety, and the odds of my agreeing with a breakaway centrist in my own electorate are about 1:120 on average (well actually about 1:1,000,000 because I live in the Mt Albert electorate).
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Talk to me guys, it's sad and lonlely here and I am surrounded by the sick and dying.
:-(That's some seriously bad coffee. The only advice I can give until the expertise of the ex-pats living in the UK arrives is that you might have to be highly specific about what you want in your coffee, so the question is can you find somewhere which has the slightest flexibility about the menu. Then you can possibly train them to make it how you like.
What city are you in, and how do you like it?
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I'll bite your bump :-0~
On "Is it time?":
I think it is. I tend to think it's always time, but for practical reasons questions of such huge impact should probably be decided once per generation...which I guess is something like every 20 years.On "is MMP better than FPP?":
I think it is. Originally, I voted that I wanted a referendum and MMP would be the preferred alternative. But when it came to the actual referendum I was going through a right wing phase, and could clearly see that MMP would help the left, in particular the New Labour/Green group. I voted against change. In time I came to think better of it, that there was a lot more at stake than Right vs Left. Since then I've only been happy with it, thinking of coalition as a very healthy kind of government, most unlikely to throw us another Muldoon. My right/left sympathies waffle around pretty much depending on what they are promising/achieving, but the overriding belief in 'democracy' has lasted. It seems a no-brainer that MMP is more democratic than its predecessor. There were so many cases in which fairly large minorities got no representation at all, despite up to 10% of the popular vote that it just seemed unfair. Furthermore, only quite small differences in the total vote between the major parties translated into huge numbers of seats difference, giving the ruling party near absolute power.On "what would the Maori think?":
You'd have to ask them. In their shoes I know what I'd think - that MMP has done far more for them than FPP ever did. But of course a rejigged FPP could do even better, if the carrot of more Maori seats were dangled. Depends entirely upon what is offered, I feel fairly sure the Maori Party (which is of course not representative of all Maori) would pick the one likely to increase the slice of pie. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that, though, since it's my pie too.On "how should the questions be asked?":
Referenda are the obvious answer, but of course there are people who really dislike them. Mark Bennett suggested the danger of democracy voting itself to pieces by tossing out this or that important institution on the whims of a mob. There's some truth to that, but, as he self-counters, it does presuppose that the institutions are good and proper and the mob is wrong. It's quite possible that the mob could toss out (on a whim) some highly corrupt and rotten institutions too, to the benefit of everyone.Myself, whilst I prefer referenda over expecting a politician to choose for me, I don't much like referenda either. It's a pretty ancient, not to mention expensive, way of gauging popular opinion. It's extremely slow, and can lock in bad questions, as we have just seen. This is the 3rd Millenium, for God's Sake! Surely the collected brilliance of 4 million Kiwis can come up with something more modern than a system invented in the ancient world. Referenda could have far, far higher turnaround, and could build upon each other, in a series of questions, which could settle a great many of the little details that are expected to be summarized into one gigantic day of ticking a piece of paper. There is probably little reason to consult the entire population 99% of the time anyway, since sampling and surveying has become a much more exact art, the number of people who need to be consulted could be settled mathematically. Or selection for political opinion could be done rather like juries, with a group of people selected (probably randomly) who have to serve for, say, a month of their life. This has the advantage of focused concentration and deliberation, but of course the problem that a lot of people would be unable to attend.
Or we could just let our politicians decide. Hell, they're the experts we trust to think for us, aren't they?
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If we're going all Iain Banks, I doubt you'd ever need a weapon. The orbital computer would always perceive any threat before you'd even dreamed of it, and have worked out the best way to deal with it so that both sides got what they wanted. On the rare occasion when they had to actually attack, they'd do it remotely with a nanomachine swarm, which would individual visit each enemy's worst nightmare on them. But yes, in a dystopian society where hidden weapons were allowed, I'm sure they'd be like cellphones, all the better for being smaller and cuter. Some kind of mind control would seem the most elegant, then your enemy becomes your weapon.
I'd still ask for a BFG, though, and play with it in virtual reality.
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My impression is if you chose a Clinical Psychologist at random you'd be unlikely to get on of those.
This kind of thinking seems to be quite prevalent - that a professional society of some kind makes a public announcement of a position means that the majority of people within that society agree with it.
Hence the strange disconnect a lot of people feel when they try to reconcile the position of just about every child welfare body on s59 with their own private experiences of those professionals.
As a simple example of this, is it likely that a large bunch of primary school teachers are going to stand up publicly and say that they want to be able to smack children? Given that it hasn't been allowed for the longest time for teachers, and has recently been made illegal even for parents, such a stance would amount to employment suicide. But nothing about that say that those teachers actually agree with s59. They might just feel unable due to their very employment to say so.
It is quite possible that groupthink on a grand scale went on wrt to s59. No one felt able to publicly say they disagreed with it, but most people actually did in fact disagree with it. The higher the office, the more unable they were to say what they really thought.
Please note I'm only saying this is possible.
I thought the Larry Baldock interview was excellent, btw. It could have gone horribly pear shaped.
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